Page 8 of Wickedly Ever After
***
Hector left Castle Grim immediately after breakfast. A trip into the mountains, even in a basket perched high on a giant’s shoulders, took most of a day. He’d packed a good book to read as well as his personal correspondence. He spotted Ida’s thin script on one of the envelopes and smiled grimly. She never wrote back so quickly unless she was furious. He imagined ravenous moths descending on her pumpkin patch and swelled with professional pride.
“Are we there yet?” he asked, taking her letter from the pile on his lap desk and settling back in the comfortable nest of blankets to enjoy it.
Pocket’s voice rumbled up to him. “I can see the Flamelord’s lair now, master.”
“Pocket, I’m nobody’s master.”
“As you say, master.”
Hector growled under his breath. In the past thousand years,significant social changes had happened. With his reforms, all giants were paid appropriately, and given pensions and paid time off from pillaging, carrying off fair maidens, and building castles in the sky. Your Wickedness or plain Wickedness was the appropriate address for him, but he’d found it impossible to get them to drop an honorific carryover from the time when giants were pawns, used in war to cause as much destruction as possible and then discarded like the rubbish they left behind. Giants could be set in their ways. It had taken him six centuries to convince them they could eat something other than magic beans, at what point the air quality in the Dread Mountains became much better. Now one only needed a mask on the cloudiest days when the dragon smoke mixed with the fetid mist that settled in the mountain valleys.
He slit the envelope open with his obsidian penknife. Ida’s charms were potent, and he’d found them unpleasant on every occasion when he didn’t neutralize them, but obsidian usually did the trick. He pulled the letter—ivory stationery strongly smelling of roses—and read the contents.
He burst out laughing.
The giggles shook him to tears. “Pock…Pocke…Pocket…” but he couldn’t stop chortling. He gasped, he cried, he snorted until he hiccupped. Nothing was funny. He stared at the letter, eyes wet, furious. And burst out laughing again. A mirth charm, laughing gas, the shits and giggles, and he couldn’t stop. Quickly, he zipped his mouth shut, all but the very center, and spoke through the hole, “Poookett, hume.” He couldn’t possibly be diplomatic with dragons while laughing his fool head off.
“We’re here, master.”
“Cwap.”
A sudden drop told him that Pocket had set his basket on the ground. Hector rummaged in his satchel for a mirror. Below his angry green eyes and beetling brows, his mouth turned up at the corners in the worst kind of smirk. Frothy giggles trickled out of his lips. Crap indeed! He couldn’t even go in to make an apology looking like this. The worst thing a person could do was laugh at a dragon.
His gaze fell on his mask.
Thoughtful, thoughtful Tinbit! Hastily, he tied it on, pulling it well up over his nose, mouth and beard, and tightened it around his ears. He’d go in, find out why the Flamelord had asked for him, and leave before his muffled snorts and chuffs would be taken for anything other than a bad case of dragon-flu.
He feigned a particularly loud sneeze followed by several collapsed giggles and approached the Flamelord waiting at the entrance to the cave.
4
Hector
The only thing more offensive than laughing at a dragon is refusing to have tea with one.
A Thousand Years of Wickedness: A Memoir
Hector West
The Flamelord Adair was a beautiful dragon, more than ten feet tall, with blue eyes the shade of a summer sky and shiny red hair trailing well past his shoulders. When he smiled, rows of fabulously sharp, serrated teeth sparkled like rubies in the sunlight. He used this human form for visitors, but Hector had seen him in his true shape, soaring over the mountains as a twenty-foot dragon-king, all smoke, fire, and roar. He was red then too, with massive, webbed wings and a heavy, armored tail complete with razor-sharp spikes.
“Hector!” The dragon grabbed Hector’s hand in both of his. “What’s with your mask? We specifically had a no-smoking order for the last week in anticipation of your visit.”
“Dwagon foo,” he spluttered through the tiny hole he’d left between his lips, turning another giggle into a cough.
Adair grinned. “Got my vaccination earlier this year. Hector,Hector, Hector. When will you ever learn you’re not completely indestructible?” He clapped Hector on the back.
“Can’t shay long. What’s wong?”
Adair still smiled, but it looked forced now. “I need you to talk to Alistair. Come in and I’ll explain. Morga has made your favorite, toffee cakes and chamomile tea.”
A laugh shuddered through him so suddenly, he almost didn’t suppress it in time. He patted his throat. “No fanks.”
“Just the tea, then.” The Flamelord put his arm around Hector and propelled him into the cave.
Once upon a time, Hector believed dragon caves were just caves—uncomfortably large spaces underground, featuring ridiculous faux dwarf interior design, straight out of the overactive imaginations of second-rate writers. He also believed they should be filled with treasure, mostly of the shiny variety, equating dragons to oversized magpies with an unfortunate craving for fresh princesses with a side of butter and a hot roll. He was sixteen. By seventeen, he’d met his first Flamelord and been reeducated.
