was actually seven doors, lining the room’s walls in a half-moon.
At first glance, the doors were identical. All seven were carved from dusty white rock and narrowed to arches at the top. But different etchings covered each. They were separate parts of a series of small images ordered for the eye to follow their story.
Rags couldn’t read, but this story he followed over the seven archways of the doors. Each offered another fragment of the tale. Figures knelt before a regal form, taller than the rest, wearing a high crown. It gestured with the length of its spindly arm, and the figures set off. Soon, the figures split into separate directions. One, its geometric tail switching behind it, ventured underground, while one with a wing traveled to a smoky city and one with a fang traveled to a great lake. And so on. Six figures departing to six different locations.
Six: one shy of the number of doors Rags currently faced.
That had to mean something. Seven minus six left one correct door. He needed to use what was in front of him to decide which door he wanted.
He ran his fingers over the delicate figures on the center door, tracing the shapes under his callused skin. Nothing gave. No hidden mechanism, no secret dial camouflaged amid the carvings.
Nothing on this door. Six more to examine.
“Not gonna think about what might be behind the wrong ones.” Rags’s mouth quirked as he glanced over his shoulder.
Of course there was no one there.
Silence in the round chamber as he moved from one door to the next, focused and ready to catch any little difference, his touch hesitant against the stone.
Just then, a voice whispered, “You left him.”
It wasn’t Rags’s voice.
He whipped around.
Didn’t sound like Morien, but the sorcerer had a way of showing up silently and when Rags least expected it.
Still alone. He hadn’t opened the door yet and he hadn’t given Morien the signal.
Rags shook his head like a wet dog, like he could clear his thoughts as easily as drying himself off. Then he went back to his examination of the doors, drew his fingertips over the etched head of the figure who’d wound up in the hilly countryside.
“He buried fae treasure, all silver and blood.” The voice singsonged like wind through a crack. It cut Rags cold. “Deep in the earth, where sleeping things grow.”
Was it coming from beyond this door?
“Time to move on,” Rags told himself, speaking out loud to hear what a real voice sounded like. To drown out the fake stuff. He gave the second door a little push to test it, then stepped sideways to the next.
“Measure by measure comes Oberon’s flood,” the voice started up again, this time before Rags had the chance to put his hand to stone. It seemed to be coming from everywhere, with no single point of origin. It melted from the walls and through the seven doors, slithering into Rags’s ears. “More precious than gold, so final the blow.”
It was his voice, he realized, but a younger version, warped by reflection or recollection. The laugh that burbled after it was softer, fainter. Familiar somehow, though that didn’t matter.
This was more underhanded fae nonsense meant to dissuade and disarm him.
They wanted to get into his head because they didn’t want him to think clearly.
“You’re already buried.” The whispers crackled louder, like fire roaring in a steel drum. “Who will look for you in this place? Dirty little thief in the halls of legends. Dane might have cared. But Dane is gone.”
Dane. It was Dane’s laugh. A memory that throbbed like a bad tooth if Rags probed too near it.
“Shut up,” he said. “You don’t know anything. You’re a door.”
“And you don’t belong here.” The whispers swelled to raucous howls. Rags flinched as they echoed, distorting in his ears. “You don’t belong anywhere. You don’t belong.”
“Enough!”
He couldn’t examine the door like this. Shoulders hunched defensively, Rags rummaged in his pockets, touching the broken beetle before finding Morien’s magicked blindfold. He tied it around his head like a ribbon, covering his ears instead of his eyes.
The effect was immediate, like plunging his head underwater. The world of sound receded, leaving him in total quiet.
Rags gave himself to the count of ten to steady his shaking fingers. Then, using only his eyes and his hands, he set to studying, feeling, the etchings in the seven doors.
One of them was the right one. Those voices had been sent to distract him from discovering the truth, to