once-overs, he noticed handprints etched into its silver filigree, a pattern so fine he had to tilt his head to one side, squint hard, to see it. Four pairs of handprints overlapped at the top of the door, while a pair in the center touched fingertip to fingertip, all of them significantly larger than Rags’s hands. None of them revealed a clue—not one Rags could read, at least—to how to open the door and not die. Or how to open the door at all, death included.
Rags held his hand up to the last of the prints without touching the surface of the door. His thumb pointed downward, like a sign for no luck, you’re fucked.
Hands. It had something to do with hands. It didn’t take a genius to land on that hope, since there was no visible lock, nothing to pick. Rags gingerly felt his way around the frame without touching the door itself to see whether there were loose parts or a stone he needed to push, like the one he’d stepped on to lower him into the earth.
Nothing.
He was going to have to touch the door eventually.
He glanced, not for the first time, at the corpse. “Wouldn’t mind some help.”
The corpse, being dead, had no answer. But a worm inched out of its hair, down the fall of black, onto its shoulder.
The corpse was dressed well. Most corpses of Rags’s acquaintance weren’t. In Cheapside, the dead were covered with whatever cloth scraps their neighbors had to spare. A tattered shirt, a stained old handkerchief, someone’s torn trousers. It was traditional to shroud the dead until they were carted off for burial.
It gave the corpses some dignity back after being picked clean by thieves.
The worm approached Rags’s boot, then started back slowly the way it had come, inching up a leg and into the folds of the corpse’s sleeve. Rags told himself he was better than this, better than getting stuck at only the first doorway.
For the moment, Rags gave up on the door and knelt nearer to the corpse instead, drawn by the movement of fabric that the worm managed to stir. Barely perceptible, but there.
The corpse’s pale, silken sheet of long hair spilled like a waterfall over its face, its knees. A bit much for a common thief. All flash and no substance. No wonder they hadn’t made it far.
Rags brushed the hair out of the way, then recoiled as he met empty eye sockets and black—black?—bone.
He gasped and fell backward onto his ass.
Black-boned.
It couldn’t be Oberon himself, but did that make Rags feel better?
He was staring at a dead fae.
The corpse wasn’t mere months old. Its clothing only appeared to be. There was nothing but more black bone under its sleeves, while its silver gloves, which glistened like wet flesh at the right angle, in this lighting, had deceived Rags for not yet completely rotted hands. They perched and met, fingertip to fingertip, on top of the corpse’s bony knees.
Hands.
He didn’t have to touch the door. Not risking his own fingers.
Rags grinned, calming the racing of his heart after the shock of meeting a fae skeleton. Without flinching—he knew his share of corpses and they didn’t spook him, since the dead wouldn’t fight you for a day’s earnings—he pinched the sleeve between his fingertips. The fabric was cool and sleek, light as gossamer. Some kind of Lost-Lands fae bullshit.
This place was the real deal.
No wonder a sorcerer and an Ever-Noble were so obsessed with it, needed a master thief to break them into the place.
Rags stomped on the urge to shiver. Fae stories were hundreds of years old. No living fae, no new tales to tell.
Plundering a fae tomb should be simple enough. But being in this place gnawed on him like teeth on a bone.
In a setting best suited for myths and legends, Rags was an ant scuttling through a palace.
Keep moving.
He rolled the corpse’s sleeves up to its black elbows and noticed neat silver hinges attaching them to the next bones. The metal was warm, as if it had recently been touched. Rags ran his thumb around the circumference, finding and flattening a silver disc. The forearm slid free with a sigh. Flopped into Rags’s lap soft as a kiss. Rags set it aside, freed the second forearm, then held both by the wrists as he approached the door.
The gloved hands were unusually large, the perfect size to match the etchings. Rags held them up to the handprints, took a steadying breath, and pressed