HEXED

Chapter Six: Hate

The rats, as it turned out, were an ongoing bit.

"Any sign of them?" Alaric asked at breakfast — the *second* breakfast attempt, since the first had ended in feathers — with the exact false solemnity of a man who knew he was tormenting someone and had decided to enjoy it thoroughly.

"Hiding," Wren said, setting down a plate of eggs that had, against all odds, survived intact. "They're cunning. Dog-sized rats generally are."

"Cunning," Alaric repeated. "Yes. I imagine that's exactly the word the royal ratcatcher used this morning, when I asked him about the infestation and he informed me — and I quote — that there has *never*, in the recorded history of this castle, been so much as one unusually large rat."

"Ratcatchers lie," Wren said. "Everyone knows that. Notorious liars, the lot of them. Comes with the profession."

"Does it."

"Ask any reputable source."

Alaric set down his fork with the precise, controlled patience of a man counting to ten in three different languages. "Ashcomb. I would like, at some point before I die of old age, to understand what actually happened in my bedchamber."

"Rats," Wren said. "We've covered this."

"We have *not* covered this. We have covered a story that grows more elaborate every time I ask a single follow-up question, which is, I might add, precisely what a lie does."

"Or," Wren said, pointing her own fork at him with the confidence of a woman who had never once let the truth get in the way of a good bluff, "it's what a *complicated situation* does. Rats are complicated, Your Highness. You wouldn't understand. You've never had to fight one hand-to-hand."

"Neither, apparently, have you, given that not one member of my staff has seen a rat larger than my thumb in this entire castle's history."

"Your staff," Wren said darkly, "is clearly asleep on the job."

He looked at her for a long moment, and something in his expression suggested he had several more follow-up questions, all of them devastating, all of them queued up like soldiers waiting for the signal to charge — and then, infuriatingly, he simply picked his fork back up and resumed eating, as though he'd decided the whole conversation wasn't worth the effort of winning.

Which was, somehow, worse. Wren stood there fuming quietly at the sheer *audacity* of a man who could out-stubborn her simply by getting bored first.

"Fetch my boots," he said, not looking up. "The black ones. And a clean shirt. I have a council session in an hour and I refuse to smell like scorched pillow."

"I am not," Wren said, teeth gritted into something that might, in poor lighting, pass for a smile, "your valet."

"You are, as far as I can tell, my everything at the moment. Maid, cook, personal rat-repellent. Boots seem a small addition."

"I am a highly trained—" she caught herself before *magic user* slipped all the way out, swallowed it, tried again, " — *professional*, with skills far beyond fetching your *boots*, Your Royal Highness, and I would like it noted, for the record, that I did not sign up for this."

"You didn't sign up for any of it," Alaric said mildly, still not looking up from his eggs. "That's rather the nature of a sentence, isn't it. Boots, Ashcomb."

Something in Wren's chest did a slow, dangerous simmer, like a kettle that had been left on a stove far too long and was beginning to reconsider its entire relationship with staying quiet. She thought, briefly and with tremendous longing, of every version of this exact morning where she still had her magic — real magic, the kind that didn't come wrapped in a card and a horrible surprise — and where this particular request would have ended with Prince Alaric Verion's very expensive boots marching themselves directly into the nearest moat.

Instead she said, with the strained cheer of a woman holding a scream behind her teeth by sheer force of will, "Of course. *Your Highness.* Anything for *you.*"

"Was that sarcasm?"

"I would never."

"You are extraordinarily bad at hiding it."

"I am *excellent* at hiding things," Wren snapped, before she could stop herself, and then immediately regretted the sentence with the full force of her entire soul, because Alaric's head came up at that, sharp and curious in a way she did not care for one bit.

"Are you," he said slowly, setting his fork down again, "now?"

"I meant boots," Wren said quickly. "I'm excellent at hiding boots. Finding them. Fetching them. That's — that's the skill I meant."

"Mm."

"It's a very specific and narrow talent."

"I'm sure."

She turned on her heel before he could ask anything else, stalking off toward his chambers with her hands curled into fists at her sides and a truly spectacular string of curses building somewhere behind her clenched jaw, most of which involved the word *bastard* in increasingly creative arrangements, one of which she was almost certain wasn't even a real word yet but felt so satisfying to invent that she decided it should be.

*Insufferable. Smug. Breakfast-obsessed, boot-demanding, infuriatingly perceptive—*

She yanked open his wardrobe with considerably more force than the hinges deserved, and a small avalanche of perfectly folded shirts cascaded onto the floor in protest.

"Oh, *sure*," she told the shirts. "Fall on the floor. Very helpful. Very supportive of the team."

From down the hall, faintly, she heard Alaric call out, in a voice absolutely dripping with amusement, "Everything all right in there, Ashcomb?"

"*Fine,*" Wren shouted back, scooping shirts off the floor with the barely restrained violence of a woman who had genuinely considered, for one full second, setting the entire wardrobe on fire and simply telling him the rats had come back for revenge. "Everything is *fine.*"

It was not fine. Nothing about this was fine. She had gone from cursed con artist with a healthy disrespect for authority to unpaid boot-fetcher for a man who ate his breakfast like a smug painting of himself, and the worst part — the absolute, unforgivable worst part — was that some small, treacherous corner of her brain kept clocking the way his mouth twitched when he was trying not to laugh, and filing it away for reasons she refused, on principle, to examine.

"I hate him," she informed the boots, holding them up like evidence in a trial. "I hate him so much. Truly, deeply, professionally."

The boots, predictably, did not care.