drive him mad before he looked closely enough to solve the puzzle. They hadn’t counted on Morien and his sorcerous cloths.
Rags searched in silence until he found one inconsistency, barely the size of an eyelash, the slightest crescent at the base of the sixth door counting from Rags’s left. It sat tucked into the door’s keystone, like a falling star.
None of the other doors had one. All had identical, unblemished arches, smooth as clean sheets.
“You,” Rags said.
He held his breath, stuck his nail into the crescent, and turned.
Nothing but an open hall awaited him. It was almost a letdown.
The nineteenth door was peaceful, or deceptively so. Plain black wood, with bark that flaked and glinted the way the trees in the forest had, as though the chamber had a beam of sunlight trapped inside its stuffy darkness. Rags checked the walls, crawled on his hands and knees over the floor searching for secret traps that would set off explosions, swinging blades, a host of treasure defenders that were just mouths with claws dropping from the ceiling.
But there was nothing.
“Safe,” Rags called into his Morien-summoning mirror after removing his Morien-summoned blindfold. This was only a room. The door ahead had a proper knob, shaped like a sun crowned by its beams.
Rags squinted at it.
“I don’t trust you,” he muttered.
Morien coalesced out of the surprisingly fresh air. “Your mistrust of everything may have been the key to your survival to this point.”
Rags grinned despite himself. It wasn’t flattery. It was the truth. Morien had told him the rooms in this place didn’t exist until the doors opened. Rags would be a fool to trust something that well hidden.
His only consolation was that it had to be getting on Morien’s nerves worse than his. An all-powerful sorcerer depending on a Cheapside prowler to escort him to the ribbon at the end of the race. It would’ve been a great story, if that Cheapside prowler had been anyone other than Rags himself.
He ate another magic apple as he cased the door, flattening his ear against it, listening for noise on the other side. Hearing deathly silence.
The start of a feeling in his heart—around the shard, which he’d come to accept he’d always sense, a pinprick with every breath—thrilling bolts of excitement through his arms, down his legs, to his toes. One of his hands was shaking. Not with fear, but with excitement.
That was unusual.
Feelings meant nothing. Instinct, experience, and wariness were his only true friends.
Rags couldn’t shake the shiver that jittered down the length of his spine, jerky motions like a spider’s weight vibrating a cast thread. It filled him with breathless fire that honestly scared him. He didn’t have the right name to call it, although it felt dangerously close to hope.
“Whatever.” For himself, not for the sorcerer. Louder, he added, “Stand back. I have a good feeling about this one.”
Could the fae leave a spell behind that would inspire false optimism in whoever entered this room? Again: It was just their twisted style.
Rags grabbed the doorknob and turned, fully expecting the mechanism to catch and hold, the doorknob to sprout rows of teeth and gnaw his hand off, anything to stanch the flow of excitement echoing outward from the center of his chest.
It didn’t. The knob turned. The door sighed, a wise, old sound, and creaked slowly but inward.
“We’ll await your signal,” Morien said.
Rags made a rude hand gesture where Morien couldn’t see it.
He stepped into the waiting chamber, and the door swung shut behind him with a whoosh that stirred the grime on the floor. The click of a lock.
What came next was bound to be bad.
12
Rags
Only it wasn’t.
Rags’s eyes adjusted to the dark. There was a light somewhere close. He was in another tunnel, not a room—and he wasn’t in full control of his legs. His steps quickened without his permission until he was practically running, stumbling as he went. Something drew him forward with the same magnetic insistence as the first corpse’s bony arms snapping back where they belonged, re-forming the whole out of its forcibly separated parts. Though his feet dragged leaden and sluggish, he couldn’t feel the impact when they hit the ground.
The light in front of him grew, resolving itself into a shape like the lid of a coffin. As he drew closer, he realized it was a coffin, made of glass.
Rags stopped in front of it, feet scraping to a halt. He was staring down at another murky reflection of himself.