HEXED

Chapter Eleven: The Witch in the Clearing

It was too early for anything good to happen, the sky still that flat, colorless grey that came before proper morning, when Wren slipped out of camp to relieve herself behind a stand of birch trees, muttering the entire way about prince snores and bedrolls that felt like they'd been stuffed with actual rocks.

She was still mid-mutter, still tucking her cloak back into place, when she looked up and very nearly swallowed her own tongue.

The witch was standing not ten feet away, entirely unbothered, as though she'd been waiting there patiently for however long it took Wren to finish.

And she was—

Wren blinked. Blinked again.

She was *young.* Achingly, infuriatingly young, skin like undisturbed snow, dark hair falling in a heavy sheet down her back, and a face so effortlessly, insultingly beautiful that Wren's first coherent thought was that this had to be some kind of trick, a glamour, a mask over whatever ancient, warty truth actually lived underneath. Because in Wren's memory — the memory she'd been carrying around and cursing under her breath for the better part of a year — the woman who'd ruined her life had been old. Stooped. Lined with a thousand years of judgmental wrinkles, the kind of crone who looked like she'd been carved specifically to deliver bad news to young women in dark alleys.

This woman looked like she'd never had a single bad morning in her entire existence.

"You," Wren said, and the word came out low and shaking, every ounce of exhaustion and fury from the last however-many days rising up her throat all at once. "*You're* the one who cursed me."

"I am," the witch said, pleasant as a woman discussing the weather, "though I notice you're surprised. Did you expect warts?"

"I expected *old.*"

"Everyone does." The witch tilted her head, entirely unbothered by the murder currently brewing behind Wren's eyes. "It's a common misconception, and frankly, an insulting one. Wisdom doesn't require wrinkles, dear. Just years. Which, I promise you, I have plenty of, tucked away somewhere you can't see them."

Wren's hand twitched toward the deck at her hip before she'd consciously decided to move it, some deep, vindictive part of her brain already sketching out exactly how satisfying it would feel to melt this smug, ageless, infuriatingly gorgeous woman into a puddle right there in the birch trees. *One card,* she thought. *Just one. Something with fire in it. Something that would finally, finally—*

"I wouldn't," the witch said, without so much as raising her voice, and something in the flat certainty of it made Wren's hand still. "Not that I doubt you could try. But I didn't come here for a fight, Wren Ashcomb. I came to congratulate you."

"Congratulate me." Wren said it like the words tasted foul in her mouth, which, honestly, they did. "You cursed me. You took my magic, you dumped it into a deck of cards that ruins my life on a near-daily basis, and now you've wandered out here at the crack of dawn to what — offer me a pat on the head?"

"I came," the witch said, patient in a way that made Wren want to scream, "because two nights ago, in a clearing full of gremlins, you did something you haven't been able to do since the day I cursed you. You *asked* the deck for something, instead of simply surviving whatever it decided to give you. And it listened."

Wren went very still.

"That," the witch continued, "is not nothing. That is, in fact, the entire point of this exercise, whether you've realized it yet or not. The magic isn't gone, Wren. It was never gone. It was only ever waiting for you to want the right things badly enough to ask for them properly." Her gaze flicked, briefly, unmistakably, toward the camp behind Wren — toward the shape of a certain sleeping prince, still audibly snoring through the trees. "You're closer than you think. Don't waste it being angry at me when there are far more useful things to be angry about."

"I am *plenty* angry at plenty of things," Wren snapped. "You don't get to stand there looking twenty-three and smug and tell me how to feel about the year of my life you took."

"I never said you should stop being angry," the witch said, and for the first time, something almost gentle crossed her face — not pity, exactly, but close enough to it that Wren didn't know what to do with it. "Anger's useful, in the right hands. It's why the lightning worked. I only came to tell you that you're doing better than you think you are, and that the road ahead of you is going to test that more than a handful of gremlins ever could."

"That's ominous."

"It's honest," the witch said, already stepping backward, the grey morning light seeming to bend and thin around her the way it does just before something disappears entirely. "Kelthorne isn't dark because of gremlins, dear. Gremlins were only ever the doorstep. Be ready."

"Wait—" Wren took a step forward, "—ready for *what*, exactly, you infuriating—"

But the clearing was empty, the birch trees rustling gently in a wind that hadn't been there a moment before, and Wren was left standing alone in the grey half-light with her heart pounding and a deck of cards suddenly feeling a great deal heavier at her hip than it had five minutes ago.

"I hate witches," she informed the empty clearing, with tremendous feeling, and stomped back toward camp to wake the prince before the sun was even fully up, because if something worse than gremlins was waiting for them at Kelthorne, she'd be damned if she let him sleep through the warning.