grew cold enough that Rags’s teeth would have chattered if he’d been alone. With company, better not to show that kind of weakness. He had to fight to keep from stumbling.
Rags knew exactly how big Coward’s Silence was, and it wasn’t this big.
Still the Queensguard continued upward, not a direction Rags had on the map in his head. As they kept ascending, the stink of death faded, and the walls started looking pretty. Wafts of perfume, snippets of song, the distant clink of silver and glass. Coward’s Silence was accessible from Queen Catriona Ever-Bright’s castle on the Hill, but Rags couldn’t be headed for a royal audience. The thought was enough to make him laugh. Or vomit.
He managed to hold both in.
A door opened to reveal windows and chandeliers and beautiful bright moonlight. Rags’s muscles strained toward the exit instinctively and the grip on his wrists tightened, held him back, not even a grunt of effort from the Queensguard holding him.
“You’d best not,” the one nearest him said. Simple, emotionless, without threats.
It did the trick.
Queensguard had a reputation for being off. The stories only got worse each year. Troops would turn up in the dead of night to evict entire rows of tenants for the Queen’s mining expeditions. Whole neighborhoods went down so she could build her silver Hill higher. The displaced wound up beggars, or employed in the same mines being dug under their stolen homes.
Now Rags was in Queensguard custody, a gang of them to take care of one small thief, dragging him through what seemed to be the Queen’s own white palace.
It didn’t get stranger than this.
They hadn’t been so quiet during Rags’s last encounter with them. So stiff. In the lineup of a dozen men and women, not one coughed, jiggled, or hummed to make the walk go faster. No one so much as pretended to bait Rags with an insult about his height, which didn’t sit right.
Their stark black uniforms, detailed with silver, turned them into shadows. They were all business, as though their mistress, the Queen, could see them everywhere, every heartbeat of every day, so they always had to be on their best behavior.
That thought gave Rags shivers, and he stepped down hard on it. Had to quit daydreaming. If he planned to see this bewildering trip through, figure out how to escape it, he had to pay attention.
A few more halls. The architecture was late Radiance period; this could only be home to a member of the Silver Court, a theory confirmed by the masterpieces—not forgeries—hung in lily-shaped frames between the windows. Then a brightly lit chamber, a chair at the far end flanked by two massive, wire-furred hounds. A lean young man sat dead center, his long black hair seeded with jeweled beads. At his back, another man, stockier, dressed entirely in red. Like a sorcerer.
Like a fucking sorcerer.
Shit, shit, shit.
The Queensguard didn’t let Rags go, didn’t give him the chance to bolt. One put his hand on the back of Rags’s head and said, “Bow.”
No choice. Down on his knees in front of some Ever-Noble, staring at his own filth-caked hands, fingers splayed on marble tile veined with silver.
“You need a bath,” the young man in the chair said.
And a knife, and a way to turn back time, to be a good boy and ignore the rumors about jewels buried beneath an abandoned bank.
“’Snot all I need,” Rags said. “. . . Your Importantness.” That last bit earned him a boot to the side of the face—a boot with its toe cased in iron.
“Rise,” the sorcerer commanded.
The Queensguard assisted Rags, shoving him forward. They let go of his wrists because they didn’t need security, not now that the sorcerer had stepped forward, his eyes just visible between swaths of bloodred fabric.
The sorcerer continued, “We’ll kill you if you don’t agree to our proposal.”
“I agree to your proposal,” Rags said.
The sorcerer shook his head. The cloth around his mouth and nose didn’t stir with his breath, sending a shiver through Rags’s body. The rumors that sorcerers didn’t have to breathe couldn’t be true.
Was he the last thing the Queen’s most recent enemies, the Ever-Loyals, had seen before their eyes had glazed over for good? Someone should’ve noticed that Rags didn’t belong in their noble, deceased company.
“Let’s eat first,” the sorcerer said. “Shall we?”
3
Rags
No names were offered, but they were generous with their food. Rags’s manners had the wiry hounds looking away in shame, but no one corrected him or was stupid