HEXED

Chapter Ten: The Weight of It

They made camp before the road forced them any closer to Kelthorne in the dark, a small fire crackling between them, and Wren discovered that confessing to being a magician was, apparently, only the first and easiest layer of the thing she now had to explain.

"Start wherever you need to," Alaric said, sitting across the fire with his sword still within reach, though his hand had long since stopped resting on it. "I'm not going anywhere."

Wren stared into the flames for a long moment, turning the deck over once in her hands before she finally set it down beside her, like it deserved to hear this too.

"I was a con artist," she said. "A good one. The kind of good where you don't get caught, not because you're lucky, but because you're careful, and clever, and you know exactly which lie a person wants to believe before they even know they want it." She said it plainly, without apology, the way you'd state a fact about the weather. "I ran the long game, mostly. Wealthy marks. Merchants who'd cheated their way up, lords who thought their titles made them untouchable. I told myself that was the rule — steal from people who could afford it, people who deserved a little humbling."

"That sounds almost noble," Alaric said carefully.

"It was, for a while." Wren's mouth twisted, something bitter and old surfacing behind her eyes. "And then the jobs got harder to find, and the money got tighter, and I told myself just this once, just this one time, it wouldn't hurt to run the same con on people who had less to spare. A miller's family. A widow who'd saved for years to buy back her husband's old land." She swallowed. "I told myself they'd never even notice what they were missing. That's the lie you tell yourself, when you're the kind of person who needs there to be a good reason for what you're about to do."

The fire popped between them. Alaric didn't say anything, didn't rush her, just watched her with an attention that felt, for once, entirely without judgment.

"The widow gave me her last coin thinking I was going to help her get her land back," Wren said, quieter now. "I still remember her face when she handed it over. Grateful. Relieved. Like I was the answer to something she'd been praying for." She laughed, short and humorless. "I took it and I left town that night and I told myself I'd feel fine about it in the morning."

"Did you?"

"No." The word came out rough, honest in a way she hadn't let herself be in a long time. "I've never felt fine about it. Not that night, not the next hundred nights after. I kept running the same cons, kept telling myself the same lies, and it kept feeling worse instead of better, like the guilt was compounding interest on a debt I couldn't figure out how to pay back." She looked up at him then, something raw and unguarded in her expression that she usually kept locked well out of sight. "That's when the curse found me. Or — I don't fully understand how it works, even now, but the old woman who cursed me put it plainly enough. She said my magic had gotten too comfortable serving my worst instincts. That I'd used it to take and take and never once to give anything back. So she bound it. Took away the parts of it I could control, gave me the deck instead — magic with no loyalty to my intentions, nothing I could aim or plan or use to hurt anyone on purpose ever again. Random. Chaotic. Completely outside my hands."

"Until tonight," Alaric said slowly.

"Until tonight," Wren agreed, and there was something almost frightened in the way she said it. "I don't know why it listened to me back there. I don't know if that's good news or very, very bad news."

Alaric was quiet for a long moment, staring into the fire like he was turning the whole story over, looking for the angle, the way she imagined a prince had been trained to look for angles his entire life. "And working off the curse," he said finally. "That's why you were sent to me."

"The old woman said the only way to break it was to serve someone who'd teach me what I clearly hadn't learned on my own. Someone who could show me the difference between taking from people and actually being worth something to them." She huffed a small, disbelieving laugh. "I'll admit, when they told me it'd be a prince, I assumed I'd drawn the worst possible card in that particular deck too. Pampered. Useless. The kind of man who's never once had to consider anyone else's feelings in his entire spoiled life."

"And now?"

Wren looked at him properly then — really looked, the firelight catching the tired, honest lines of his face, a man who'd spent the last several days learning to say *please* and *thank you* like they were foreign words he was determined to master anyway. "Now I think," she said slowly, "that maybe we were both sent out here to learn the same lesson, just from opposite ends of it."

Something shifted in Alaric's expression — not pity, which she'd braced for and would have hated, but something steadier. Understanding, maybe. Or the beginning of it.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I don't think you're the person that widow met, anymore. Not fully. Whatever you were then—" he gestured vaguely at her, at the space where the deck sat between them, "—I don't see her card-throwing, curse-ridden ghost. I see someone who still feels sick about it years later. That has to count for something."

Wren didn't answer right away. She looked at the fire instead, blinking hard, furious with herself for the sudden hot sting behind her eyes that she absolutely refused to acknowledge in front of him.

"Don't go soft on me now, Your Highness," she said eventually, voice rougher than she meant it to sound. "I've only just gotten used to hating you properly."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Alaric said, and for the first time since the clearing, something like a real smile passed between them — small, uncertain, but real — before the dark road ahead reminded them both, quietly, that Kelthorne Pass was still waiting, and whatever had swallowed it whole hadn't gone anywhere at all.