Page 54 of Wickedly Ever After
Violet soon doth soothe the hearts
Red rose will bring their mending.
Hector gripped his staff tightly as he set off down the muddy main street. He’d always been proud of this place until Ida called it a dive. Now the whole town looked dark, dreary, and miserable. He ought to be proud. It wasn’t every wicked witch who could boast of a whole town full of outlaws—a model city of villainy.
“I am wicked,” he muttered. “I should never be ashamed of it.” But the mantra sounded wrong today, and it felt even more wrong when he reached his favorite poisoner’s shop and was informed by the landlord the man had died of an overdose of amanita mushrooms two days earlier.
“Well, I’d like to purchase his stock,” Hector said.
“Can’t allow it, Your Wickedness,” the landlord whispered through the crack in the door. “Whole thing belongs to the guy who killed him and I don’t want to be next.”
“I’ll give you my protection.”
“You’ll be gone in the morning. What good will that do me?”
It occurred to Hector to hex the man’s nose into a sausage, but his heart wasn’t in it. He turned away and headed down the alleyway connecting the backstreet to a more unsavory shop, dispatching one would-be-murderer with a sleeping spell and his accomplice with a far more painful crack over the head with his staff. While he appreciated the treachery, he didn’t have time for backstabbers today.
It took him the better part of three hours to obtain the right ingredients for heartsickness and swamp fever. By then it was raining hard, he was chilled to the bones, tired, and his back hurt. He wished he hadn’t said he’d sleep on the floor. It seemed more like foolishness than chivalry.
***
“Is this all you could find?” Ida sounded disappointed.
“Yes.” He set the herbs down on the table next to the muddy marshmallow roots that had nearly cost Ida an arm and a leg literally. The flames sputtered unproductively in the room’s fireplace, barely giving off any heat. The salamander had done theirbest, but a smoky, miserably cold fire was standard in the hostile hostel business—building code in fact.
“I needed feverfew.”
“There wasn’t any, but I got willow,” he said in a deliberately calm voice. “Where is Tinbit?”
“In the bathroom watching Hari. He was worried that if Hari fainted, he might drown, and I agreed.” She sighed.
Hector nodded. “He’s a good gnome, a sensible man.”
“Yes, he is,” Ida said, sorting through the roots and pulling out the moonseed. She held the plant up, set it down next to the fumitory. “I almost wish we didn’t have to tell them.”
Hector sighed. “So do I. But it will hurt less if it comes from us.”
Ida conjured a knife and a bowl and cut up the marshmallow root while Hector, freezing but unwilling to let Ida ogle him in his underwear, sat at the table with her in saturated robes. She handed him the licorice leaves and the knife.
“It’s for the best,” he said, mincing carefully. “Tinbit would never leave me, and I don’t think Hari would leave you.”
“He wouldn’t,” Ida said, jaw firming as she smashed roots in a stone bowl she must have borrowed from the kitchen. “It’s for the best,” she repeated.
***
Hector helped Tinbit get Hari out of the bath. The young gnome looked as pale as death’s horse, but he seemed more alert. Also aggravated.
“I’m sick and you drop me into ice water?” he asked, shaking as Tinbit wrapped a towel over his shoulders.
“You had a fever,” Hector said.
“It was cold!”
“Well, at least you can talk sense now,” Tinbit retorted. “You’ve been singing the most damned awful ballads for the last hour and a half.”
“I was not! Was I?” Hari let Hector dress him in a clean shirt of Ida’s, well-worn and soft.
“Off-key,” Tinbit said. “I’m going to go see to the horses.”
