"I don't know," the man said, blinking.
Another player across from him at the same table said, “Well, if you have eights, you have my ducks beat, so I might as well fold.” There was a beat of confused silence, then laughter.
I glanced at Declan.
He was standing very still near the food table, watching the room with wide eyes and an expression of pure horror.
Sandy was next to him, muffin halfway to his mouth, frozen.
Slowly, Sandy turned to look at the basket. Then at Declan. Then back at the basket. He set the muffin down carefully.
The look on his face told me something was very wrong, so I excused myself and walked over to where the two stood.
"Declan," I said, very quietly. “What’s going on?”
"I’m not sure," Declan said.
"Did you—" Sandy asked.
"Not on purpose."
Sandy stared at him. "The sage."
Declan pressed both hands over his face. “And then the wish.”
“Someone tell me what’s going on.”
“I think I accidentally put a truth spell on the muffins,” he hissed.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah, oh,” he agreed.
I made it back to the table just in time to see Fletcher lose another sizable pot to Donny when a river card flipped the hand completely. Donny looked at Fletcher and said, "That's the thing about poker. You can't bluff your way through everything forever. Eventually, the lie catches up to you."
Fletcher stacked what little remained of his chips without responding.
Donny smiled at the rest of us like he’d just said something profound.
It was two hands later when Nadia took down a big win. She got exactly the card she needed on the river. She grinned as she pulled the chips towards her. “That was lucky.”
“I’d say so. Unless you cheated like Roy,” Ivan said, stunning the whole table into silence.
“Roy wasn’t a cheater,” Nadia insisted, her eyes filling with tears.
Ivan scoffed. “He was, and everyone knows it. He wasn’t good enough to win on his own, so he had to hex his competition.”
Nadia looked down at the stack of chips in front of her and said, "I made the hexes. Roy didn’t have anything to do with them."
Nadia’s face had gone the color of chalk. "I—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together hard. Tried again. "I didn't mean to say that."
"But it’s true?" Avery asked.
"I made the hexes," Nadia said again, and this time her voice cracked on the last word like she didn’t want to speak the word. "I didn’t think it was hurting anyone, just ensuring theoutcome." She laughed, short and awful. "At least that’s what I told myself."
Her hand dropped to her stomach.
"He was so excited," she said, quieter. "About the new ale. About the contract and what it was all going to mean for us. And I wanted… I just wanted things to go right for once." Her eyes were bright. "So I did it. I made them. I planted them. And I told myself it didn't matter because the Ravenswood Red really was the best ale in the competition, and what was the harm in making sure the judges knew that."
