But Morien had more efficient ways of killing Rags, if he wanted Rags dead.
“You’d better go back for the Queensguard,” Rags said around a mouthful of apple. “Unless your boys in black have some immunity to hawkshade us commoners don’t know about?”
Morien’s reaction to that statement was a blank expression, not even a rippling of the cloth around his nose and mouth. It told Rags all he needed to know about the sort of person he was dealing with. It didn’t matter to Morien who stepped on a poisoned arrow as long as he got to where he was going.
Still, when Morien disappeared and Rags was alone again, he felt a strange sense of loss.
It wasn’t loneliness. Easier to account for only one set of hands, one mind with a purpose. Getting other people involved was, without fail, where Rags’s plans always went sideways.
He whistled roughly, pressing back against the weight of the walls closing in on him. Straightened his shoulders in a display of fake defiance. He didn’t have a fear of tight spaces, but he did have the sense that this place really didn’t want him around.
Rather than swallowing him up, the walls wanted to spit him out.
It was the rejection that ruffled his feathers.
11
Rags
It wasn’t long into his search for the fourth door, along underground paths illuminated only by the dimly glowing fae carvings in the walls, that he found the next corpse.
Impossible to guess the age on this one, because its face and chest had been chewed open and hollowed out like a Lastday turkey.
Decidedly not a fae this time. The air around the body stank of dead meat. Rags had smelled worse, but not much. He swallowed back a gulp and marched forward, determined not to meet the same fate, showing the dead thief the same respect they would have showed him.
None.
He rounded a corner—and nearly ran into himself.
He stopped short, breath catching, to avoid breaking his beak on the iridescent surface in front of him. Fae glass. Thicker yet more brittle than human glass. As multicolored as opal, as tricky as an oil slick.
The Rags in the glass wavered, looking startled as he swayed from side to side. When Rags turned away from his reflection, it was to find another wall of glass sliding into place behind him.
“No going back.” Rags watched his reflection’s mouth move. No sound echoed outward.
Creepy. He turned his back on it to continue down the glass-walled path.
At the end of the mirrored corridor he turned another corner. Just ahead, the path split right and left. He paused. Risked a glance at his reflection.
“Don’t suppose you know the way?”
The Rags in the polished glass shook his head. Slowly at first, his pupils expanded, then all at once devoured his eyes, filling them with blank, eerie black.
“Yeah. Never mind. Never doing that again.” Rags returned his gaze to the floor, fending off a shudder. “I’ll figure it out myself.”
He took a step to the right but sprang back immediately as the heavy stone tile beneath his boots started to sink, then fell away like a broken trapdoor. Only blackness, like his reflection’s eyes, stared up at him.
The chasm was too wide to jump. Rags had no choice but to go left.
“In case anyone’s listening, I hate this.” He reached into his pocket and felt the slippery surface of the mirror there. If he held it up, had Morien face the fae glass, what would the sorcerer see?
Cheering himself by imagining something that could give Morien the same heebies he gave everybody else, Rags slid his booted foot forward along the floor, paying closer attention to the seams between the tiles. The silence was starting to make his skin crawl when a warped laugh cackled its way across glass and stone. “Hate this, hate this.”
That was his voice. His laugh, though he hadn’t laughed like that, open and full-bellied, since— Had he ever laughed like that? Rags squeezed his eyes shut, then forced himself to open them. He needed to keep watch on that shifty floor. Literally shifty. It had already opened up right under him.
When he came to the next fork in the path, he was presented with three choices. Straight ahead, left, or right.
It was a maze. A fucking fae maze, made of fucking fae glass, with a fucking fae reflection giggling like a madman at him from the darkness.
Rags was going to compose a new lullaby poem inspired by the fae. It started like: