HEXED

Chapter Fifteen: What the Healing Cost

Getting out of the pit had taken the better part of an hour, a great deal of cursing, and one memorably undignified moment where Wren had been forced to stand on Alaric's shoulders while he complained, at length, about the placement of her boots — but they'd found the old drainage tunnel at the pit's base eventually, crawled through it half-blind and coated in mud, and emerged, gasping, into daylight on the far side of the woods with Kelthorne Pass finally, unmistakably visible on the ridge ahead.

Neither of them said it aloud, but they both felt it — the sense that whatever waited up there was close now, close enough that the trap and the viper and the golden meadow had only ever been the opening notes of something much larger.

They weren't wrong.

The ambush came without warning, a handful of armed men dropping from the rocks above the trail with the coordinated efficiency of people who'd been paid, and paid well, to make sure two particular travelers never reached the pass at all. Wren's cards came up fast — a blast of fire here, a crackling arc of lightning there — but there were more of them than the gremlins had been, and better trained, and in the chaos of blades and smoke Wren lost track, for one critical half-second, of exactly where Alaric was standing.

She heard him before she saw him — a sharp, cut-off sound of pain that turned her blood to ice faster than anything the ambush itself had managed — and turned to find him staggering back from a blade that had caught him along the ribs, hand pressed hard against a wound that was already soaking dark through his shirt.

"Alaric—"

"I'm fine," he said, in the exact tone of a man who was very much not fine, and then his knees buckled, and he wasn't fine at all.

Wren got the last attacker down with a card she barely aimed, pure reflex and fury, and then she was on her knees in the dirt beside him, hands hovering uselessly over the wound because she didn't know how to fix this, had never once in her life needed to know how to fix this, and the blood was dark and steady between her fingers when she finally pressed down, and he was pale, too pale, eyes struggling to stay focused on her face.

"Stay with me," she said, and her voice cracked right down the middle of it. "Don't you dare — don't you *dare* go anywhere, I did not drag you out of a pit an hour ago just so you could die on me now—"

"Bossy," Alaric managed, the ghost of a smile flickering and failing, "even now."

"Shut up. *Shut up*, save it, don't waste breath on jokes—"

Her hand was already moving to the deck at her hip before her mind had fully caught up to the decision, some desperate, wordless part of her simply refusing to sit there and watch. She didn't have a plan. She didn't have anything close to a plan. She just drew, and for the first time since the gremlins, she didn't ask the deck for anything specific at all — she couldn't, she didn't know what she needed, didn't know if there even was a card for this — she just held it against his wound and thought, with everything she had, *please. Please, just fix this. Take whatever you need. Just fix him.*

The card went white-hot in her palm.

For one terrible second nothing happened at all, and Wren's chest seized with the particular, specific horror of a gamble about to fail — and then the wound beneath her hand began to close, the torn flesh knitting itself back together in threads of pale, shimmering light, the blood slowing, stopping, the color returning to Alaric's face in a rush that should have been the single best thing Wren had ever witnessed.

It was, right up until the pain arrived.

It came into her like something being poured, fast and total, starting in her hand where it touched his wound and tearing up her arm and through her chest in a single unbroken wave, and Wren heard herself make a sound she didn't recognize as her own voice, something raw and shocked and utterly involuntary, because nothing — nothing in a decade of cons gone wrong, nothing in a year of cursed cards exploding in her face — had ever hurt like this. It wasn't her wound. It was his, transplanted whole and entire into a body that had never carried it, every nerve suddenly convinced it had just been run through with a blade it had never actually met.

"Wren—" Alaric's voice, alarmed now, fully healed and struggling upright, "Wren, what's happening, what did you—"

She couldn't answer him. She was on her hands and knees in the dirt, breath coming in short, ragged gasps, one arm curled protectively around her own ribs where the phantom wound burned like it was still bleeding, still open, even though she knew, distantly, through the haze of it, that there was nothing there at all.

"The card," she managed finally, voice thin and shaking in a way she hated, "it — it heals. But it doesn't *undo* the wound. It just — moves it. Takes the pain out of you and puts it—" she gasped again as another wave of it rolled through her, " — puts it *somewhere*. And apparently that somewhere is *me.*"

"That's not — Wren, that's not a fair trade, that's not—" Alaric was on his knees in front of her now, hands hovering the same uselessly desperate way hers had been a minute ago, panic naked on his face in a way she'd never once seen from him. "Undo it. Take it back. I'll take the wound back, I don't care, I don't want—"

"It doesn't work that way," Wren gritted out, forcing herself upright through sheer stubbornness alone, sweat cold on her skin despite the pain still radiating hot through every inch of her side. "Believe me, if I could hand it back to you right now out of pure spite, I would. It's mine now. It'll fade. Eventually. Probably."

"*Probably.*"

"I've never done this before! Forgive me for not having a detailed manual on the exact healing time for magically transplanted stab wounds!"

Alaric stared at her, something in his face cracking open in a way she didn't fully have the strength, right now, to examine — somewhere between horror and awe and something else entirely, something that looked, if she squinted through the pain, uncomfortably close to the exact thing she'd been trying very hard not to name in herself for days now.

"You took my wound," he said quietly, like he was only now fully understanding the shape of what she'd done. "You had a card that could have healed me clean, and instead it made you bleed for me."

"Don't make it sound noble," Wren snapped, though there wasn't much heat left in it, exhaustion pulling hard at the edges of her voice. "It was an accident. I asked for a fix. This is just what the deck decided a fix costs."

"It's still—"

"Don't," she said again, softer this time, and reached out despite the pain still living in her side to grip his arm, steady herself, steady them both. "Don't you dare go soft on me right now, Your Highness. We're not finished. Kelthorne's still up there, whatever's waiting for us is still waiting, and I would very much like to get through the rest of this trip without either of us bleeding again, mine or yours."

Alaric helped her to her feet without a word, one arm firm around her waist longer than was strictly necessary for balance, and neither of them commented on it, and neither of them let go.