of his eye. Was this like a hunting trip? He’d never gone hunting with his brothers.
Laisrean caught him looking.
“I warned you, little brother.” His grin was a wince. The sweat coating his dark skin suggested he was feverish. Somhairle could teach him how to weather fever and missing parts. The phantom aches, the night sweats, a body that wouldn’t obey. “Life on the Hill is too exciting.”
Exciting wasn’t powerful enough for what Somhairle had found. A group of strangers who could be friends. A group of friends who might become heroes.
They’d lost the fae girl who could save them from Morien’s mirrorcraft. Without her, it was up to Somhairle to find a way to free Faolan from the shard in his heart.
If the Head of House Ever-Learning still lived.
Who could say how long he’d been Morien’s instrument?
What Somhairle remembered most was the wild light in Faolan’s eyes that night in the Ever-Land Manor before the door had slammed shut on Somhairle’s nose. His curiously cheerful demeanor after Morien’s fit of pique.
His wasn’t a fight anyone should have to soldier alone. Faolan didn’t have a fragment to share his burdens, so it was all the more important to bring him to their side.
Or at least allow him to have a real choice.
Somhairle let Laisrean lean on him, let Three lead them onward; and despite the weariness in his bones, he didn’t stumble.
88
Rags
Rags didn’t know where they were going. He also didn’t know how they kept moving when they were probably already dead.
Then he told himself to quit grousing. How dare he make light of living, no matter how painful it was, when there were some among them who weren’t alive? He’d share a bed with goats and wouldn’t complain, he swore it, if only his hand would stop throbbing.
If only Tal would look at him again.
He’d lost track of the time when he felt lithe fingers against his damaged palm. The cool touch soothed the burning and aching left behind by Sil’s rushed mirrorglass removal. He startled, nearly slapping the hand away.
He looked down instead, met two silver eyes staring up at him from the innocent face of a fae urchin. Another nipped close on his other side, the braver children in the group coming forward to cluster around him.
Rags wrestled with the urge to tell them to get lost. To look to somebody else. But the truth of the matter was, there wasn’t anybody else. The stronger fae had other burdens, and all the stronger people had someone weaker leaning on them. One of the silver animals would’ve made a better nanny than Rags, but he couldn’t bring himself to shake the kids loose after they’d reached for him specifically.
He’d fucked up by watching over them during the fight. They thought he was a brave warrior, a hero.
He couldn’t even figure out the fragment in his pocket. Some hero that made him.
“You all right?” Rags asked the nearest fae kid. Boy or girl, he couldn’t tell. They all had long hair, black streaked with white, and beautiful, blank-slate faces that’d make your eyes swim if you stared at them too long, like gazing directly at an eclipse. The other fae, the fragments, and the children’s desperation explained how they could possibly trust any human to help after everything humans had already done to hurt them.
“The castle walls told me of the sky at night,” the little fae explained, “but I have never seen the stars for myself.”
“Lucky you.” If Rags could spin this into something positive, could make them feel better, then he could spin gold out of shit. “There’s a whole mess of them up there to discover.”
“Of course.” Another little fae, the one holding Rags’s other hand. “Because we could not see them does not mean we did not believe they were real.”
“But they are so much brighter than we had hoped,” the first fae said.
Rags decided he was going to call that one Happy and the other one Smartass. He focused on them instead of on Tal, his broad back and powerful shoulders, his bloody arm and his inability to meet Rags’s eye. Or the way his own right hand kept twitching unbidden, something damaged deep in the muscle tissue.
“I call that one the Big Asshole.” Rags jerked his head toward one of the constellations.
“What is asshole?” Happy asked.
Smartass didn’t have a clever explanation. He stared at Rags expectantly. “Yes. What is the meaning of asshole?”
Rags cleared his throat. What would Dane have said? “Not important. Forget