return the mirror and the blindfold,” he said, holding out his hand to Rags, “and I will accompany you the rest of the way out.”
15
Rags
Shining Talon led the two of them through the ruins of the fae complex—underground palace, vault, bathroom, whatever it used to be—with veins of light blinking into existence on either side of him as he went. He took a new path, one Rags hadn’t fought his way through. Everywhere Rags looked, massive arches supported the underground tunnels. The more he studied them, the more they reminded him of bones. They really could be the rib cages of the Ancient Ones, for all he knew. They gleamed white and mysterious, threaded with silvered vines.
The lump hung heavy in his pocket. Shining Talon had told him it was a piece of the Great Paragon, but he hadn’t mentioned it to Morien.
Which meant they were keeping it a secret. Rags didn’t know how he felt about that. They couldn’t trust each other, what with Rags being a liar and Shining Talon’s entire people being known for their deceptions.
Their alliance was doomed.
He just wasn’t planning to be the first to tell Morien about the rock.
Rags and Morien followed Shining Talon in silence, Rags not asking where the Queensguard were, Morien not mentioning how he’d recently tried to kill Rags.
Shining Talon was aware of, and capable of commanding, doors that previously hadn’t existed. They weren’t there at all until Shining Talon glanced meaningfully at a bare wall, and a door oblingingly appeared. Rags couldn’t catch the trick, couldn’t figure out how he was doing it. Shining Talon’s light found invisible entrances and opened them, and Rags understood with dawning amazement that they were traveling through the remnants of a structure larger than any human palace, bank, or amphitheater. It was the shape of a tower in reverse, burrowing deeper into the earth rather than rising upward from it.
“Stay close,” Shining Talon warned only once. “It is dangerous here.”
Rags held up his hands, spattered and bloody to the sleeves. “I noticed.”
“Yet more dangerous with a Lying One in tow.”
Rags wished Shining Talon would stop calling the sorcerer that. Morien couldn’t appreciate the name, and anything that made Morien cranky made him more likely to exercise his power over Rags. That wasn’t in Rags’s best interests.
Didn’t mean it wasn’t funny.
Then Rags remembered the way Splints the Obscure, an old street acquaintance, had died: loss of blood from a run-in with the Queensguard had made him giddy, giggly. He’d laughed all the way to his last breath, but he wasn’t laughing when they shoved him into Old Drowner and set his soul drifting.
The memory put a stop to Rags’s good humor.
A moment later, when Shining Talon threw out one solid arm to halt their progress, Rags regretted not having more padding as he collided throat-first with the fae’s elbow.
“Be still,” Shining Talon whispered.
Rags found himself captivated by the hard, unforgiving tension in Shining Talon’s body. He wondered if that was natural for all fae. He hadn’t noticed it before, but now that he had, he couldn’t stop noticing it.
Rags had heard, in a secondhand city dweller’s way, about the beauty of wild things. He’d never understood what was being described until now, though it was still impossible to think of the fae as anything other than a nightmare creature.
As Shining Talon disabled a series of whisper-thin blades descending from above, Rags lingered behind to examine one where it dangled, harmless, against the wall. It had sliced a growing root system into sheets of veggies delicate enough for a queen’s salad. The blade resembled a musician’s instrument string but thinner, spider-silk supple. Nearly invisible, until it was too late.
“Keep up, thief,” Morien said. “We wouldn’t want any accidents to befall you.”
The way he said it made Rags shiver, and he hopped to.
He wanted to thank Shining Talon for preventing them from being cut into flesh ribbons, but when Rags drew closer, the set of the fae’s jaw, the steely glint in his eyes, were enough to make Rags’s insides curdle.
To witness Shining Talon leading a sorcerer through the old fae ruins was like looking into the deadened gaze of one of those newly bridled stallions, freshly broken from the wilds of Ever-Land—which was as close to lost as one could get without venturing into the Lost-Lands and never being heard from again.
Only a matter of time before a horse like that bucked and broke his master’s noble neck. Shining Talon had the same glint in