HEXED

Chapter Two: Only Made My Day

Wren went out the next morning with her coin purse considerably heavier than usual and absolutely no intention of behaving herself.

The open market bustled with its usual chaos — stalls piled with fruit and fabric and questionable meat pies, merchants shouting over each other, and an entire crowd of ordinary people simply going about their ordinary business, entirely unaware of what a bored, cheerful cardsharp with too much magic and too little supervision could do to an afternoon.

She bought a meat pie.

She also, with a small flick of two fingers hidden beneath her sleeve, tripped a rather self-important nobleman's manservant directly into a barrel of pickled cabbage.

"Oops," she said, not looking, already three stalls away, savoring her pie with the particular satisfaction of someone who considered pickled cabbage to be excellent comedic timing.

She wandered further, humming, and sent a subtle wave of magic toward two merchants arguing loudly over the price of wool — a gentle nudge that sent them stumbling directly into each other mid-shout, both toppling backward into a display of clay pots that shattered with tremendously satisfying noise.

"Terribly clumsy today, everyone," she observed cheerfully, to nobody in particular.

She had just decided the afternoon needed one final, proper flourish when the crowd's attention shifted entirely, murmurs of excitement rippling through the market like wind through wheat.

"The prince," someone breathed.

Wren turned, and there he was — riding through the market square atop a gleaming carriage, golden-haired and dressed in fine blue and gold, waving to the assembled crowd with the particular effortless confidence of a man who had never once doubted his own magnificence for a single moment in his entire life.

Prince Alaric Verion.

She had heard the name whispered plenty around taverns and card tables — cocky, spoiled, thoroughly convinced the kingdom orbited around him personally.

Looks the part, she thought, watching him wave at a group of swooning young women with a wink that was clearly, thoroughly practiced.

Something about the sheer, unearned confidence of him — the particular smugness of a man who had genuinely never once tumbled off his own high horse, metaphorically or otherwise — proved simply too tempting to properly ignore.

She flexed her fingers lightly at her side, barely a gesture at all.

The carriage wheel gave first — a bolt she'd loosened without so much as looking directly at it, precisely angled to fail at the least dignified moment possible. Then the whole rear axle, groaning ominously beneath the prince's own considerable self-regard, gave way entirely.

The carriage tilted.

The prince, mid-wave, mid-wink, mid-magnificent-smile, pitched backward off his golden seat with a yelp that carried absolutely none of his earlier composure, landing squarely on his backside in the middle of the market square in front of what appeared to be roughly half the city.

The crowd gasped.

Then, gloriously, several people laughed before they could properly stop themselves.

Wren laughed too — openly, delightedly, not bothering in the slightest to disguise her amusement as she watched royal guards scramble to properly assist a prince whose golden dignity now sat considerably lower than it had five seconds earlier.

"Oh, that," she said quietly to herself, already turning to continue her leisurely walk through the market, meat pie still in hand, "only made my day."

She did not look back.

She had absolutely no idea — humming her way toward the next stall, entirely pleased with her own cleverness — that the prince she had just humiliated in front of half his own city was about to become considerably, catastrophically relevant to her future.