made him, giving him something to do until the first breath of fresh air touched his face. Couldn’t help grinning as he stepped into daylight, shielding his eyes until they readjusted to the sun.
He’d missed sunlight, the freedom of open sky, a lack of centuries-old traps firing poisoned projectiles at him and walls made of bone that seemed to breathe around him . . .
Shining Talon too stared upward, unblinking, stopped in his tracks.
Morien, when he noticed this, doubled back. “I must request you remain close,” he said. “The forest is treacherous. I would not be pleased if I were to lose you. Either of you.” This last for emphasis, with a pointed look in Rags’s direction.
“But the trees . . .” Shining Talon’s voice nearly broke on the last word. “What has happened to the trees?”
Rags tried to follow his gaze, found nothing amiss. The trees grew densely around them, tall and ancient, shimmering at the corners of his vision whenever he switched focus. Other than that, not a stump in sight.
“Don’t see anything wrong with them,” Rags said.
At Shining Talon’s feet, smaller than she’d seemed before, One whipped her tail back and forth, reminding Rags of a wary street dog who’d run into a pack of kids who had once kicked it for sport.
“They are diminished.” Shining Talon swallowed, a bob of the black ink bands encircling his throat. He shook his head, shook something unseen off his shoulders. “I will not lag behind again, Lying One. On this, you have my word.”
Rags caught him staring at the trees as they continued, occasionally reaching out a hand as if he wanted to rest his palm on the bark, then pulling back at the last moment. There was something sad about it. Rags felt like he was interrupting a mourner at a gravesite.
“What are you doing?” Rags hissed at last. “He’s not going to be happy if he has to come back for us again!”
“My apologies, Lo— Rags the Thief,” Shining Talon replied, “but the trees do not speak to me.”
“Yeah, trees don’t speak to anyone.”
“They should,” Shining Talon insisted. “They used to.”
Rags had to bite. “What did they say? ‘Fuck, there’s a worm in my roots, tickles like a sonofawhore?’ ‘Wish that sparrow would stop taking a shit on me?’”
“Yes,” Shining Talon admitted, “those were the most common complaints. But they phrased it so beautifully. Through their language, you could understand a little more of the living world.”
Rags gave up talking to him after that.
20
Rags
Morien took them back through the forest, past where the black trees faded to brown bark laced with silver, then only brown, dull moss and wet dirt that didn’t hum or glow. He had them set up camp close to a stream, where Rags could just barely detect signs of a previous camp, only a few days old. Had they stopped here when Rags was blindfolded and he couldn’t remember?
Would the still-blindfolded Queensguard discuss this trip among themselves when it was over? Rags couldn’t picture them gossiping. Even before the blindfolds, their silence had been eerie, all-consuming.
At least that didn’t matter anymore. They had a lizard to follow, and she had chosen her own path.
The sun dipped below the tree line. Rags sat moodily by the fire. The cuts on his hands, beneath their tenderly wrapped bandages, had begun to itch, the good kind of itching, the kind that signaled skin knitting together and scabbing as it healed.
It was too soon for that to be happening yet.
Rags had the decomposed flesh of Shining Talon’s ancestors to thank for his rapid recovery—and for the fact that he wouldn’t sleep without nightmares for a while.
Think about something else—like how One stared with three unblinking eyes at the campfire. Each leaping flame illuminated the mechanisms underneath its only mostly opaque scales. Rags studied the cogs and gears and perfect hinges shaped into One’s muscles and bone. He thought of the pride in Shining Talon’s voice when he spoke of the Great Paragon, and all the good it hadn’t done him or the other fae.
“Rags the Thief.” Shining Talon’s voice, coming from Rags’s side without warning, made Rags jump. “There is no need for you to maintain watch. I require little sleep and will act as your guard. You may rest safely.”
“You require little sleep, huh?” Rags’s moodiness filtered into his words, making him spit them out more bitterly than he’d planned. “You could be angling to make me let my guard down.”