Page 79 of Wickedly Ever After
She didn’t know what she’d said. But whatever it was, it had shut Hector up. What was it about men and their mouths? When you wanted them to talk, you couldn’t get a word out of them. When there was nothing to be said, you couldn’t shut them up. He had nothing to say that would erase what he’d said last night, and it had better stay that way, because she’d been up all night thinkingabout it, crying, and then kicking herself for caring. He was a wicked witch. Of course he was going to do the wrong thing. She just hadn’t expected it to hurt quite so much.
She took the bowl of stew Tinbit handed her, keeping one eye on Hector, wearing that ridiculous black wool robe, pacing just beyond the shadows at the fire’s edge. And here she’d thought she could trust him to listen, that he would pay attention to her concerns because hecared. That was the foolishness that came with having a heart, she supposed. Or maybe it was just the lack of sleep making her morose.
“I thought we were staying at the hostel,” she said. “Why aren’t we pressing on?”
Tinbit stirred the pot. “We are staying there. But you don’t want to eat anything in that place. Sebastian is famous for disguising three-day old dead man as pot roast.”
“How long has Hector employed Sebastian?” she asked, picking dubiously at the rabbit now that Tinbit had brought up cooked corpse.
Tinbit blew on the ladle before he refilled Hari’s bowl. “It’s been three hundred years or so now, I guess. He used to own the inn in Thieves’ Town. Some guy came through bragging about never knowing fear, and he was told to stay there so he’d learn. Anyway, Sebastian scared the piss out of him, so he decided to burn the place down rather than show his dirty underwear. Hector needed an innkeeper for this hostel, and he gave Sebastian the job. He’s a soft touch for ghosts who pop their eyeballs and their teeth out at him.”
“You don’t like him.” Hari took a biscuit and sopped up the broth with it.
“I think he’s a perfectly fine ghoul.” Tinbit jabbed the ladlein the stew pot. “He’s just the kind of person who always speaks his mind. If he had a mind to speak with, I wouldn’t object. But his brains are mush—and he likes to demonstrate—so everyone better digest that stew or it will be coming up later.” He got up, grimacing, and left the fireside where the salamander roasted in the coals, devouring dry sweetgrass and a few oak leaves Hector had gathered on the way as a change of diet.
Hari blew out his cheeks. “Well, I don’t understand everything the ghoul said to Tinbit, but it messed him up,” he said to Ida. “What do I care if Tinbit has been with people before me? It doesn’t matter.” He wrapped a green velvet jacket Tinbit had given him tighter around his shoulders.
“You shouldn’t have come with me. You should have gone home like I told you to.”
“I told you, I’m not letting you go anywhere without me. And the back of a pony beats the back of a coach. At least it’s dry.”
Perhaps too dry. Hector was worried about the climate change. Well, so was she. She’d seen everything he had—the scarecrows, the browning trees, the grain ripening before it was ready. Did he think she didn’t care too? But what was that compared to the use of Happily-Ever-After to marry off a prince to a princess with no considerations for their desires, their needs? And without the magic, things would go back to normal in time. Normal hadn’t been bad—well, except for the famines.
“So how was dinner?” Hari asked.
“Delicious, I’m sure.” She picked a bone out of the stew. “I’m just not very hungry.”
“No, the dinner with Hector. Tinbit said you were there for hours.”
“We were discussing the situation with Happily-Ever-After. What is wrong with that?”
Hari’s eyebrows went up. “You fought with him, didn’t you? I thought something seemed off today.”
“We didn’t fight. We argued, Hari, like we always do. I don’t want to talk about it. Why don’t you go help Tinbit with the pony?”
“Okay, but remember I’m here for you when you want to talk.” Hari shrugged and took her bowl.
Ida settled down beside the fire with a pained sigh. Even after custom fitting Hector’s boots for her feet, her socks weren’t up to the task of protecting her toes and heels from discomfort. She hoped that however horrible the hostel might be, there might at least be some reasonably clean water for a soak in lavender salts, if Hari had remembered to pack them. They’d been in something of a hurry that morning; she wasn’t sure if bath salts survived the cull when he’d gone through her luggage to select only the essentials to pack on the pony.
Cear stretched out, salamander style, on the nearest log. “Hector is not a bad man. He’s only a wicked witch. He does not enslave his creatures.”
“That isnotwhat I said.” Ida grabbed a handful of sweetgrass and placed it near the salamander for their consumption.
“Nevertheless, you thought he had. Do you really believe he never had the best interests of these people in mind when he became a Cardinal Witch?”
“Of course, I don’t. I’m sure he had their best interests in mind,” Ida said. “They’re his monsters. So naturally, he would improve the lives and health of everything under his care.”
“As have you, Ida North,” Cear said. “And yet, have you neverquestioned your own wisdom the way you questioned his?” Their fathomless eyes were piercing in their intensity.
She fell silent. Nearly every witch went through a midlife crisis at some point in their long lives, and she’d been no exception. The unicorns died out, despite her best attempts to facilitate the breeding program. And she’d had to order the removal of the last unicorn’s horn to keep it from killing itself. She’d brokered a peace treaty to resolve a centuries-old conflict between the pixies and the fairies, and watched it fall apart ten years later when one pixie insulted a fairy and the war began again. She’d discovered the oak dryads were quietly murdering pine dryads who infringed on their territory, and yes, it had occurred to her then to wonder if she could change behaviors to protect creatures with their own ways of doing things. And what about the commoners? She gave them their committee with the best of intentions, and they’d turned around and used it to elect princesses whose daddies would buy them a tiara. Left to their own devices, people didn’t always do the right things.
Suddenly she had a very great desire to go pack the pony with Tinbit. “Someone has to be in charge, I suppose. Whether that was wise or not, it was done. I’ll go get your firepot. We should be getting on before it gets dark.”
She rose and walked away from the fire, leaving Cear curled up in the coals. She wasn’t about to sit here questioning every last one of her decisions. And she damned well wouldn’t even entertain the idea of trying to fix a system that had been broken from the beginning, no matter how much it mattered to one Hector West, formerly Hector Prim, stuck irrevocably in the past, and no matter how much he might, after all, have a point.
***
The hostel lay at the end of a particularly steep section of trail. A narrow path dropped off on one side into a dark ravine with water running far below. On the mountain side, the rock outcrops grew strange, angular cactuses with particularly sharp spines. They stuck out everywhere. Hari got one in his hand, which immediately swelled to three times its usual size.
