for leaping into a fae-made precipice toward your apparent doom. Rags closed his eyes before realizing that didn’t help, either, and finally eased himself backward off the silvery edge of the half bridge into the darkness below.
For one terrible moment he hung there, gently swaying back and forth. Then he kicked out once, twice, finding the wall with the balls of his feet.
Hand over hand, like he’d practiced in the Clave, Rags lowered himself down the vine.
It was like being swallowed, traveling down the gullet of an enormous beast. Folklore said the fae had lived alongside the Ancient Ones, made dwellings from their bones. Those massive creatures who had roamed the world in its infancy and left their remains to fortify mountains, channel streams, cup the oceans, seed the forests.
Rags wasn’t superstitious about the dead, but a bad feeling followed him in this place like eyes on the back of his neck.
He’d only wriggled down the height of two men before the dark gobbled him whole, abruptly shutting out the sight of Morien and the Queensguard. A lesser thief might’ve yelped in surprise. Rags held his tongue by biting its tip, sharpening his focus with a touch of pain. Cold, clammy under the collar, like a first-year pickpocket. It followed that he’d revert to one of their tricks, distracting himself from his nerves with a bit of verse.
Oberon comes when the moons are high—
No, that wasn’t the kind of rhyme that brought comfort in the bowels of a fae ruin. His bootsoles scraped the pit wall as he rappelled down. Grit fell and vanished into the darkness. The vine flexed, metal supple under his fingers. What would a single polished leaf be worth?
Time for another rhyme, one about shiny secrets, not a litany of terrible things Oberon could do to lesser creatures.
Rags hummed to hear the sound echoing downward into silence. Not every bit of doggerel about the fae was a warning. Some were promise.
He buried fae treasure, all silver and blood,
Deep in the earth, where sleeping things grow.
Measure by measure comes Oberon’s flood,
More precious than gold, so final the blow.
A hidden fortune sleeping beneath the earth was something Rags could get behind.
Pleased with himself and unused to the sensation, he nearly missed the hairline fracture in the wall. He stopped sharp, already past it, running the sensitive pads of his fingers back over the space. The seam traveled in a perfect line.
Cut, not cracked.
Few others would have noticed it, but Rags’s fingers were smarter, more sensitive. He’d trained them to pick out intricate but minute differences in any surface. He’d found an important one here, a groove in the stone. A thin, thin break, traveling down.
Rags chased it down to where it stopped at a pointed tip, drawn upward again on either side in a sharp V.
Didn’t need to be a genius thief and expert lockpick to recognize the shape.
An arrow.
Rags lowered himself down the vine after it, found a circle of slippery-smooth stone below its point. When he settled his thumb against it, it depressed. Lights flooded on around him.
A lot of them.
His eyes adjusted to the shape the lights made: more arrows. Everywhere. Glowing seams in the stone walls. They filled the pit, flowing together and apart, a flock of identical geometries carved into the rock. Each of them pointed down.
The vine that was Rags’s lifeline shifted, stretched, a breathing thing. He yelped as it slithered around his arm and away, spooling out beneath him in clockwork circles around the pit’s walls. Rags dropped, scrambling for purchase, before landing on a jutting ledge of stone barely wide enough to hold him.
A narrow crack in the rocky wall to squeeze through.
An obvious pathway. How hospitable.
His time on the streets had taught him to be wary of too much help.
“Little eager for me to head that way, aren’t you?” Rags said aloud.
In response, a real arrow shot through the air. Made entirely of silver, it narrowly missed taking off the end of his crooked nose.
“Shit,” Rags said.
All he had breath for.
The arrows came in volleys of three, fired from every direction. Rags had scarcely ducked one before the next whisked past him, nicking his sleeve, lodging in stone.
The metal barbs left behind something black and sticky on his shirt. Poison? Rags sniffed it, then flared his nostrils at the acrid scent. Hawkshade.
If it got into his blood, he’d rot from the inside out.
Rags knew a man in the Clave who dabbled in toxins. The stuff messed with his head