HEXED

Chapter Nine: What the Cards Obeyed

The forest before Kelthorne Pass had a wrongness to it that Wren felt before she saw it — a silence too complete, the kind where even the wind seemed to be holding its breath and waiting to see what happened next.

"Stay close," Alaric said, low, hand already on his sword hilt.

"I'm aware of how proximity works, Your Highness."

"Wren."

"That's twice now with the name. I could get used to it."

"Wren," he said again, sharper, and this time she heard it — the thing underneath his voice, tight and alert, the sound of a man who'd hunted enough to know when the woods had stopped being empty.

They came out of the treeline all at once, a dozen of them at least, small and wiry and wrong in a way that made Wren's stomach drop — too many teeth, skin like cracked leather left too long in the sun, eyes a flat, hungry yellow. Gremlins. She'd heard the stories, the way you hear stories about things that live in other people's nightmares, not your own. She had never once expected to be standing in a clearing while a dozen of them shrieked and swarmed toward her and the prince like the woods themselves had turned predator.

Alaric's sword was out in a heartbeat, meeting the first one with a clean, brutal stroke, but there were too many, coming too fast, and Wren felt the old cold-water panic rise up her spine before some other instinct — sharper, stranger, entirely new — shoved the panic aside and put the deck in her hand instead.

"Oh, hell," she breathed, and drew.

There was no time to hope for a good card, no time for the usual dread of not knowing what she'd get. The gremlins were already on them, teeth and claws and that awful shrieking, and Wren, cornered and furious and out of any other options, did something she had never once tried before.

She *asked* the card for what she needed.

*Something that burns. Something that stops them.* The thought came out of her less like a wish and more like a demand, sharp and instinctive, the same voice she used when she was mid-con and needed the mark to believe her *right now* — and the card in her hand went suddenly, blisteringly hot, and this time, instead of exploding wild and blind, it answered.

Lightning tore out of her palm in a white-hot arc, catching two gremlins mid-leap and throwing them backward in a shower of sparks, and Wren stared at her own hand for exactly one stunned half-second before three more gremlins came screaming out of the underbrush and there wasn't time to stare at anything.

"Again," she snarled at the deck, drawing before she'd even fully processed the first card, "give me *more* of that—"

The second card ignited into a small, furious ball of fire that she flung without thinking, and it caught a gremlin square in the chest and sent it tumbling, shrieking, into three of its companions, taking all four of them down together in a tangle of smoke and singed leather.

"Ashcomb—" Alaric's voice, somewhere behind her, cracked with something that wasn't quite a question.

"Little busy!" She drew again — *blow them up, blow them all up* — and the card detonated in her palm with a force that sent a shockwave rolling outward, gremlins flying in every direction like leaves in a gale, and for the first time since she'd been cursed, Wren Ashcomb felt the deck moving *with* her instead of against her, obeying the shape of her thoughts instead of throwing chaos at her feet and laughing.

It was, she thought distantly, even as she drew a fourth card and sent a crackling bolt of lightning through the last two gremlins standing, the single most satisfying thing she'd felt in months.

The clearing went quiet. Smoke curled up from a dozen scorched patches of earth. The last gremlin's tail flicked once, twitched, and went still.

Wren stood there, chest heaving, deck still warm and faintly smoking in her hand, and slowly became aware of the fact that Prince Alaric Verion was staring at her the way a man stares at a house he's lived in for years, only to discover a door he'd never noticed before.

"You're a magician," he said. It wasn't quite a question. It came out flat, stunned, like his mouth was still catching up to what his eyes had just watched.

"...Yes," Wren said, because there was, at this particular juncture, absolutely no lie large enough to cover a battlefield full of electrocuted gremlins.

"You have been fetching my *boots.*"

"That is, somehow, the detail you've chosen to focus on right now."

"You have been fetching my boots," Alaric said again, louder, gesturing at the smoking clearing like it was Exhibit A in a trial only he was attending, "and lying to me about *rats*, while apparently capable of *this.*"

"In my defense, the rats thing was working beautifully until you started asking follow-up questions."

"You could have leveled my entire castle if you'd wanted to."

"I could have," Wren agreed, sliding the deck back into her sleeve with hands that were only just beginning to stop shaking, "but then who would've taught you to say please?"

He opened his mouth — closed it — looked at the scorched clearing again, then back at her, something working behind his eyes that looked less like anger now and a great deal more like a man frantically rearranging every assumption he'd built about the last week of his life.

"Explain," he said. "All of it. Now. Starting with why a magician was hired to fetch my breakfast."

Wren glanced past him, down the dark, quiet road that still led on toward Kelthorne, toward whatever had swallowed a garrison's worth of signal fires whole, and figured — well. They had a long ride left. Might as well use it.

"It's a long story," she said, "and it starts with a curse."