HEXED

Chapter Three: Trapped in the Cards

The warnings came steadily over the following weeks, from every corner of the small, secretive network of magic-users Wren occasionally crossed paths with in taverns and back alleys.

"You cannot keep doing this," an old hedge-witch named Corla told her, over cheap ale in a dim corner. "Someone will notice eventually, Wren. Real magic-folk notice these things."

"It's harmless," Wren said, waving the concern away with the same easy dismissal she gave everything. "I've got the magic. I use it. What's the harm in a bit of fun, hm?"

"The harm," Corla said darkly, "comes when you use it against someone who can use it back."

Wren laughed, entirely unbothered, and ordered another round.

The night it finally happened, she hadn't even properly noticed anything was different.

The woman across the card table was older than her usual marks — silver-streaked dark hair, sharp eyes that missed nothing, dressed in clothes that suggested considerably more wealth than she cared to advertise. Wren dealt the cards with her usual easy confidence, winked her particular wink at precisely the right moment, and watched the woman lose three consecutive hands with an ease that should, in hindsight, have raised considerably more suspicion than it did.

"You cheat," the woman said finally, her voice carrying an edge Wren had heard from angry marks a hundred times before and dismissed just as easily now.

"I simply have excellent luck," Wren said sweetly.

"You use magic," the woman said, quieter now, considerably more dangerous. "Poorly disguised, sloppily concealed magic, to cheat honest people out of their coin. And you have just tried to cheat a fellow practitioner of the arts, which is either remarkably brave or remarkably stupid."

Wren's smile faltered, just slightly.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, already gathering her winnings, already turning to leave, the particular instinct of a con artist recognizing precisely when a table had gone sour.

"Walk away, then," the woman said, her voice following Wren toward the door. "See how far it carries you."

Wren walked home in the dark, that particular sentence lingering uncomfortably longer than any mark's threat properly had before, and by the time she reached her small rented room and lit her candles with a lazy flick of her wrist, she had almost entirely convinced herself the whole encounter meant nothing at all.

Then the candlelight flickered.

"I have cursed you," the woman's voice said, materializing in the shadows of Wren's own room with an ease that made her blood run cold immediately. "For your cheating. For your disrespect. For treating this gift as though it were nothing more than a party trick to be wasted on unsuspecting fools."

"That's," Wren said, laughing nervously, "that's rather a joke, isn't it—"

"It is not a joke," the witch said, and Wren felt it then — reached instinctively for her magic, that familiar warmth that had always answered her call without question, and found instead —

Nothing.

Cold, empty nothing, a silence where power had always lived.

"What did you—" she started, panic rising fast.

"Your magic," the witch said, "no longer belongs freely to you. I have bound it instead into a deck of cards. Cards that will never run dry, cards you will draw from for every spell you now require, cards that will decide, with each draw, whether you receive a blessing or a curse. You will never again simply have magic at your disposal. You will have to earn it, one card at a time, with no proper say in what fate hands you."

"You cannot do that," Wren said, her voice shaking now, genuine terror finally breaking through her earlier bravado.

"I already have," the witch said simply.

"Please," Wren said, all pretense of composure gone entirely now. "Please, is there any way to fix this? Any way at all?"

The witch studied her a long moment, something considering behind her sharp eyes.

"There is one way," she said finally.

"Tell me," Wren said immediately. "Whatever it is, I'll do it."

"You will go to the palace," the witch said, "and serve Prince Alaric Verion. As his personal maid. You will learn humility, honesty, and proper respect for the gift you have so carelessly squandered, and only once you have demonstrated genuine change will your magic be returned to you fully."

Wren stared at her, the words landing with the particular devastating weight of a joke that had gone terribly, catastrophically wrong.

"The prince," she said, her voice faint. "THAT prince. The one I—"

She stopped herself before properly finishing the confession.

"Yes," the witch said, something almost knowing entering her expression now, as though she were entirely aware of precisely what Wren had left unsaid. "That prince."

"There has to be another way," Wren said, desperation building now.

"There is not," the witch said. "Serve him faithfully. Learn what your magic properly deserves to be used for. Or remain exactly as you are now — powerless, at the mercy of a bottomless deck of cards that offers no guarantee whatsoever which face they will show you."

She vanished before Wren could properly argue further, leaving her alone in that candlelit room, staring down at her own hands — hands that, for the first time in her entire life, felt entirely, terrifyingly empty.