Despite everything he knew, because of everything he knew, he didn’t crack. He tried to goad the Queensguard into killing him before a sorcerer could arrive and begin the true torture.
He wasn’t dead yet. Unfortunately.
He sat, pinned again to the wall between two broken windows, Baeth’s blade neatly lodged between his heart and his liver. Steel sheathed first in muscle, then plaster. The Queen’s crest upon the hilt: a golden two-faced sun stained with Tomman’s blood.
At last the sorcerer Morien appeared before him.
“I keep you alive because you have something I want,” he said. “You will tell me where it is.”
The sun peered over the horizon. The sorcerer was gathering fragments of silver-polished glass toward him simply by curving his fingers and beckoning them closer. They shivered and shuddered across the tile. Instead of reflecting the pale light, they absorbed it. They showed Tomman a thousand secrets he shouldn’t have known, from the eyes of the men and women and children, his family, who had died that night. Their wishes, their bargains, their silenced dreams.
Each let him know that he would risk this tragedy again, if he were given the chance.
Tomman could barely move, but he rolled his face away. The sorcerer wouldn’t be the last thing he saw in this life. Cool, damp wind touched his cheek, kissed by the jagged lip of the windowsill. It stirred the hair on Ainle’s head—he lay by Tomman’s side, otherwise unmoving—where it wasn’t plastered to his scalp with blood. Tomman remembered his laugh, how the silly lad had begged to hold Father’s Queensguard broadsword, though he didn’t have the strength yet to lift it.
Outside the window, in the trammeled grass of Mother’s garden, Tomman thought he saw a Queensguard running. Not toward the house—away from it. Flinging his blade into one of Mother’s rosebushes. Peeling off layers of his uniform as if they burned his skin. Driven from the Queen’s service by the horror of the Queen’s service.
Real or hallucinated, it was a sign. No matter who the Queen controlled, no matter what she stole, no matter how she armored herself, there would always be cracks through which the truth would shine.
“No,” Tomman finally answered the sorcerer, “I don’t think I will.”
Holding Ainle’s little hand with his broken one, Tomman shifted to the right. Sliced his heart cleanly in two—and smiled.
Nothing left for the sorcerer to use.
1
Rags
ONE YEAR LATER
Sixteen days. Rags had been in a cell in the dungeon known as Coward’s Silence for sixteen days. They felt as long as his sixteen years.
He wasn’t planning to stick around for much longer.
But trying to escape blind, without a plan, would double his guard. So he’d taken his time. Thought it through and decided. The next time the Queensguard tried to transport him would be his best chance to make it out.
Rags was no stranger to this business. He’d been in and out of cells since he could flex his fingers to steal. He’d even developed a system of ranking each of the city’s seven jails from best to worst on a scale of one to five points.
One: Cell condition. (Down by the docks, after a rainfall, he’d once slept in two inches of water, and nursed a lingering cough for the next two years and seven days.)
Two: Meals. (Depending on where a thief got snatched, he could count on three square a day and cheese with only a little mold on it. Some got caught on purpose, when pickings were lean.)
Three: Bed. (As in, was there one?)
Four: The company. (Local drunks and fellow thieves, or split-knuckles and murderers? Barely ten, Rags had wound up locked in a cell with a rapist who wouldn’t shut up about pretty girls and their pretty curls, until one of the guards knifed him during change-of-duty.)
Five: The quality of the guards.
Rags was holding off on giving Coward’s Silence a score. He hadn’t heard a peep since his arrival, though the quiet didn’t mean he was sleeping easy.
He kept track of the passing days by scratching marks onto the stone wall with a fingernail. Dust and dirt and damp grime packed the space beneath his nails so densely that they split, but Rags kept up the practice diligently. Dutifully. Dug deep so there’d be no uncertainty.
For a bastard thief with no faith, this was the god he prayed to.
“You’ll give up eventually,” the man in the next cell over said, voice muffled through stone and nasty with loneliness and despair. Rags imagined him as more skeleton than