HEXED

Chapter Seven: The Snub

By the fourth day of boots, breakfasts, and a truly staggering number of imaginary rats, Wren had reached the particular kind of calm that wasn't calm at all — the kind that sat very still right before it detonated, like a card she hadn't drawn yet.

"Ashcomb." Alaric didn't even look up from the papers on his desk. "My cloak. The blue one. And tell the kitchens I want—"

"No."

That got him to look up.

"I'm sorry?"

"No," Wren said again, and it came out of her clean and final, like a door slamming somewhere she'd been meaning to slam it for days. "I'm not fetching your cloak. I'm not telling the kitchens anything. I am done, Your Highness, being your unpaid, unappreciated, endlessly put-upon errand girl, and I would like, for one single moment in this godforsaken castle, to say what I actually think of you."

Alaric set down his quill with the slow, careful precision of a man bracing for something he suspected he wasn't going to enjoy. "By all means."

"You," Wren said, advancing on the desk like a storm that had finally found the coastline it wanted, "are the single most insufferable, self-satisfied, snobbish little—" she bit back the word that wanted to come next, mostly out of respect for the fact that he was, technically, still royalty, and settled instead on, "—*snub* I have ever had the extraordinary misfortune of being cursed into serving."

"A snub."

"A *snub.* You sit there in your fancy chair with your fancy papers, ordering people around like the world exists specifically to fetch things for you, and you've never once — not *once* — said thank you, or asked how my morning's going, or noticed that maybe, just maybe, the woman bringing your eggs every day might have a life, or feelings, or dreams that don't revolve entirely around your wardrobe."

"I wasn't aware—"

"I'm not finished." She was fully aware she wasn't supposed to interrupt him, and fully aware that she didn't particularly care. "You demand breakfast like the concept of 'please' costs you actual coin. You raise one eyebrow at me like that's a *sentence*, like I'm supposed to translate Royal Eyebrow into 'kindly bring my boots.' You have never, in four days, asked my name — my actual name, not 'Ashcomb,' which you say like it's a chore in itself — and you sit there acting *shocked*, genuinely wounded, when I don't leap at the chance to serve you like you're doing me some enormous favor by existing near me."

Silence, for a moment, filled only by the crackle of the fire and the sound of Wren's own furious breathing.

"So," she finished, folding her arms, chin up, daring him to say something worthy of the speech she'd just delivered. "There it is. You're a snub. A pompous, breakfast-obsessed, thoroughly unbearable snub, and I am *exhausted*, Your Highness, absolutely bone-tired, of pretending otherwise."

Alaric didn't answer right away. That, more than anything, threw her — she'd braced for shouting, for some clipped royal fury, for guards summoned to drag her off to whatever dungeon this castle kept for mouthy servants. Instead he simply sat there, jaw tight, a muscle working near his temple, looking at her the way a man looks at a ledger that doesn't balance no matter how many times he adds it up.

"You may go," he said finally, quietly. Not cruel. Not cold, exactly. Just — quiet, in a way that was somehow worse than shouting would have been.

Wren opened her mouth for one more parting shot, found she didn't actually have one left, and stalked out instead, slamming the door behind her with considerably more force than the poor hinges deserved.

Alaric sat alone at his desk for a long time after that, staring at the closed door, the quill forgotten in his hand.

He thought about breakfast — every breakfast, actually, going back days, and how many times he'd said *thank you*, and came up, with some discomfort, empty.

He thought about the eyebrow.

He thought, with considerably more reluctance, about the fact that he genuinely did not know her first name, and that this fact, once noticed, was very difficult to un-notice.

"Snub," he said aloud, testing the word in the empty room, like it might feel less accurate spoken out loud than it had sounded shouted at him. It didn't.

He picked the quill back up, set it down again, and did something he had not done in a very long time, for anyone: he sat there, turning it over, actually thinking about whether the woman currently fetching his boots had a point.