HEXED

Chapter Five: Rat-Dogs

The knock on Wren's door was not a knock so much as a demand wearing the shape of one.

"Ashcomb." Prince Alaric Verion's voice carried through the wood like he expected the door itself to snap to attention. "Breakfast. Now. Something with eggs. I don't care how."

Wren stared at the ceiling of her small, borrowed room, arms crossed over her chest like a corpse arranging itself for viewing. "I am not a chambermaid," she said, to no one, since he'd already stalked off, boots clapping smugly against the stone floor.

"I am a con artist," she informed the ceiling. "A *cursed* con artist. There is a difference. A con artist has *standards*."

The ceiling did not care. Ceilings never did.

She sat up, and the deck was already in her hand before she'd decided to reach for it — it had a way of doing that, of finding her fingers like it had been waiting there the whole time, patient as a debt collector. Nobody in this godsforsaken castle knew what the deck was. Nobody knew what *she* was, not really — not the prince, not his guards, not the sour-faced steward who eyed her like she'd track mud through his soul. As far as this castle was concerned, Wren Ashcomb was simply an unusually mouthy new servant with terrible references and worse punctuality. That was the arrangement. That was, in fact, the *entire point* — you couldn't work off a curse the prince didn't know existed if he spent his afternoons demanding explanations instead of eggs.

"Fine," she muttered. "Fine. If I have to fetch eggs like some kind of — " she waved a hand, searching for an insult with enough venom in it, " — *domestic* — I might as well see what you've got for me first."

She drew a card.

For one full second, nothing happened, and Wren allowed herself the small, treacherous hope that maybe today the curse had decided to take a day off. Maybe today it would just be a card that turned her hair blue, or made every man in the castle fall instantly in love with a duck. She could work with a duck.

The card was warm in her hand.

Then it was very warm.

Then it was, unmistakably, on fire.

"Oh, *no* — no, no, absolutely not — " Wren flung it away from her on pure animal instinct, the way you'd fling a spider that had made the grave error of touching your neck, and the card hit the wall and detonated with a sound like the world's angriest teakettle.

The blast wasn't large. It was, in fact, almost polite, as far as magical explosions went — but it was enough. It was enough to send a spray of feathers erupting from what had, until three seconds ago, been an extremely expensive goose-down pillow, sitting innocently on a chair where Wren had tossed her cloak the night before, in what she was only now realizing had been *his* room, not hers, because apparently in her half-asleep fury she'd stormed into the wrong wing entirely.

Feathers. Everywhere. Drifting down like the world's least dignified snowfall.

The tapestry over the bed — something ancient and probably priceless, depicting what looked like a very serious stag doing something heroic — was now smoking faintly at one corner, a neat black scorch mark blooming across the stag's noble face like it, too, could not believe this was happening to it.

A vase lay in glittering pieces across the floor, its flowers scattered and singed, one lone daisy still valiantly upright in the wreckage like the last soldier who hadn't gotten the memo.

Wren stood very still in the doorway, coughing gently through a haze of feather-dust, mind already sprinting three steps ahead of her mouth the way it always did right before a lie was born. *Think, Ashcomb. Think fast, think good, think anything that isn't "I have a cursed deck of exploding cards and I set your bed on fire trying to avoid making you breakfast."*

That was, of course, the exact moment the door behind her opened fully, and Prince Alaric Verion stepped into the doorway of his own bedchamber to find it looking like the aftermath of a very small, very localized war.

He did not say anything at first. He simply looked — at the feathers still settling in his hair, at the scorched stag, at the shards of vase, at Wren, standing in the middle of it all with a stray feather stuck rather magnificently to her cheek.

"What," he said, with the terrible calm of a man who has learned, through long practice, not to shout before he understands the scale of the problem, "happened to my *room*?"

"Rats," Wren said instantly.

A beat of silence in which even the feathers seemed to pause mid-air, judging her.

"Rats," Alaric repeated.

"Enormous ones. Practically the size of dogs. You have a *terrible* infestation, Your Highness, truly appalling, I walked in to bring your — your breakfast — " she gestured vaguely at her empty hands, as though the eggs were simply invisible, or possibly still deciding whether to exist, " — and there was this absolute *horde* of them, gnawing at your pillow like it owed them money, and I was forced to defend myself."

"With *fire*."

"With whatever was available!" She spread her arms, encompassing the wreckage as though it were self-evidently reasonable. "You want me fighting off rat-dogs with my bare hands? I'm a servant, not a soldier. I improvised. Improvisation is a *survival skill.*"

Alaric's eyes moved, slowly, deliberately, to the scorched stag. "The rats," he said, "set fire to my *tapestry.*"

"They were *nesting* in it. Rats do that. Nesting behavior. Very common." Wren nodded with the grave confidence of someone who had never in her life read a single fact about rodents. "The moment I disturbed the nest, chaos. You should be thanking me, really. I saved you from a much larger infestation. This," she gestured at the smoking corner, the shattered vase, the sad triumphant daisy, "is merely the cost of victory."

"There is no such thing as a rat the size of a dog."

"There is in *this* castle, apparently, which frankly says more about your kitchens than it does about me."

He stared at her. She stared back with the wide, guileless eyes of a woman who had told so many lies in her life that this one barely registered as effort.

"You expect me," Alaric said slowly, "to believe that dog-sized rats infiltrated my private chambers, built a nest in a five-hundred-year-old tapestry, and were repelled only through the heroic use of *fire*, which you produced from — where, exactly? Your sleeve?"

"A lady doesn't reveal her methods."

"A lady," Alaric said, "generally doesn't need methods for setting my bedroom ablaze."

"I contain multitudes."

He opened his mouth — closed it — opened it again, visibly recalculating, the way a man does when he suspects he's being lied to but cannot, for the life of him, construct a more plausible theory on short notice. Feathers drifted between them like a very awkward blizzard.

"There," he said finally, pointing at the daisy, the sole survivor propped up in the ash, "is a *flower.* Did the rats bring a *flower*?"

"They're surprisingly sentimental creatures," Wren said without missing a beat. "I read that somewhere."

"You did not."

"I absolutely did. In a book. A very reputable book."

"Ashcomb."

"Your Highness."

He pinched the bridge of his nose, the exact gesture of a man doing complicated math and arriving, every time, at an answer he didn't like. "I do not believe one word of what just came out of your mouth."

"Good," Wren said cheerfully, already turning to go, feathers trailing off her shoulders like she was some tragic, half-plucked angel, "because I don't believe it either, and yet here we both are, *thoroughly* unconvinced and no closer to breakfast."

"Get out of my room," Alaric said, though something in his voice had gone strange — not quite fond, not yet, but no longer entirely furious either, caught somewhere in the no-man's-land between exasperation and reluctant amusement. "And Ashcomb."

She paused in the doorway.

"If I find so much as one actual rat in this castle," he said, "dog-sized or otherwise, I am holding you personally responsible for this conversation."

"Noted," Wren said, and fled down the hall before he could ask a single follow-up question she had absolutely no intention of answering.