them.
But it was hardly treasure.
Trying to shake off his growing despair, Rags turned and wobbled toward the spot where the fae had been resting—how long? Rags was no scholar, but he tallied something like a couple hundred years, before Rags showed up and busted the guy loose. Accidentally.
Rags poked his head inside the coffin’s alcove anyway, figuring there had to be a hidden compartment somewhere. Maybe this test was the hardest yet, the most baffling. And maybe the fae would kill him if he failed it. He’d said You who have awakened me have my respect and my loyalty, but legend had it that the fae were known to lie like anyone else, probably the only thing all races had in common. Rags had never met an Ancient One, but he suspected that if they too could talk, they too must have lied plenty.
“What do you seek?” The fae’s voice was closer than it should have been. He’d crept up on Rags in complete silence. Rags jerked back at the realization and slammed into the fae’s extremely solid chest, practically dislocating his elbow in the process.
Rags cursed. The fae closed both hands over Rags’s biceps to steady him, which felt more like a trap than anything else, and Rags thrashed, knowing those hands were too strong and he’d never pry himself free. That didn’t stop him from trying.
The fae let go of him the moment his panic manifested. He took a step away, leaving Rags to sway precariously, caught in the channels of his own wild momentum without anything to steady him.
He was alive. Maybe the fae thought he was too scrawny to bother with, not worth the stains his blood would make.
The fae observed him the entire time with blank eyes and slightly parted lips. His expressions were too foreign, the color of his eyes too unchanging, to translate.
Rags sagged against the nearest wall in order to remain upright. “Don’t just grab someone like that!”
The fae bowed. “I will not just grab someone like that as you have requested.”
It had been half desperate plea, half pathetic command. Rags didn’t believe the easy agreement. He stared at the fae through narrowed eyes, waiting for his nerves to calm so he’d make a better showing. So he’d be slightly less of a screaming, flimsy human in the face of . . .
This.
Shining Talon of . . .
Shit.
“Shining Talon.” Rags poured confidence he didn’t have into his voice, an attempt to bluff a fae, like that’ll work, Rags, into believing he remembered the full name but couldn’t be assed to say the whole thing. The fae—Shining Talon, still a mouthful in shortened form—looked up, his face brightening. Was he glowing? Was the essential radiance of his being what lit these tunnels?
The veins of light in the walls flickered with his movements, his breaths, indicating Yeah, maybe.
“My lord Rags,” Shining Talon replied.
“Right.” Rags had to brush that off, pretend it was normal. He stood straighter, as tall as he could in the small space, remembering Lord Faolan’s posture, as though Rags was the lord who Shining Talon, for whatever ass-brained reason, believed he was. “Where are the goods?”
A tough exterior was one of the vital tools of living Cheapside. It wasn’t difficult if he told himself this was just another job.
Even with all his senses snarling to the contrary.
Shining Talon blinked, still expressionless. Impossible to tell his age. Was he supposed to be smaller? Rags had always pictured the fae smaller.
“The . . . goods . . . ?”
“Treasure chests. Spoils of war. Incredible piles of riches. Jewels. Coins. Precious metals. In there?” Rags stabbed a still-bloody finger at the ruins of the glass coffin. “Secret door? Next challenge?”
“It may be that you hit your head upon your fall, my lord Rags,” Shining Talon said.
“I definitely hit my head upon my fall, Shining Talon, but that’s the least of my problems with a sorcerer out there waiting for me to deliver. The. Goods.”
Shining Talon’s brow furrowed briefly. The tattoos on his chest were visible through the open collar of his shirt, black ribs inked over his flesh, reminding Rags of armor. Gray boots in the shape of sylvan moth wings hugged his calves over black leggings of some impossibly soft weave. He looked out of place and big and unbelievable in the cramped tunnel. Because the ceiling was fractionally too low for him, he had to hunch to keep the top of his head from grazing dirt. The bad posture was all wrong,