“You keep your life if you succeed,” Morien replied.
There was no reason to assume that was a joke. Rags regretted opening his mouth.
“But”—Faolan offered a weary smile—“if it makes you feel better about your prospects, Morien’s tests have grown more difficult with each vaultbreaker. You made it through his hardest one yet!”
“Lord Faolan believes in the importance of hope,” Morien said.
“And you?” Rags asked.
“Like any drug, it has its uses,” Morien replied. “And like any drug, too much is fatal.”
Faolan waved his hand again. “No more theatrics, Mor. It’s getting old. Just do the awful thing so we can prepare for the eighth expedition.”
Morien turned away from the window, the sun at his back. His eyes had changed color. They were death-shroud white. He held up one hand and said, “Be still.”
Rags didn’t feel it when he fell to his knees, but he heard the echoes of Morien’s footsteps, each strong enough to shatter his bones, as the sorcerer crossed the room. Darkness drew around them like a pair of raven’s wings folded against rain. Morien touched Rags’s jaw, tilting his face upward. The sorcerer’s fingertips traced the large vein in Rags’s throat until it stilled. The world pitched gray, became shadow. Rags opened his mouth and no sound came out.
“You will obey,” a voice commanded. It sounded like three Moriens speaking at once. A hand on Rags’s chest. Something sharp, cold, slid into it, through the skin, past muscle, between bones, lodging itself in his heart.
Mirrorcraft. The word passed in nervous whispers from eave to gutter through the lower city. Only Queen Catriona Ever-Bright’s sorcerers practiced the mysterious art.
Then Morien’s voice was in Rags’s ear: “If you try to run, the shard of mirrorglass I’ve placed within you will shatter and shred your heart’s muscle into a thousand pieces.”
As he said it, the shard within Rags vibrated, threatening to slice his heart apart then and there. Something inside him, not a part of him. The wrongness of it was like biting down onto a nail in bread, a mean trick some bakers used when cooling loaves on the sill. Ruining their own goods to punish hungry orphans with sticky fingers.
“You understand.” Morien’s voice was quiet, but it flooded Rags’s head like a chorus. “I’ve devised a trap you can’t escape. We own you. You’ll do as I wish, until I decide otherwise. And when you’re no longer of value, I will kill you.”
In reply, Rags vomited, then blacked clean out.
5
Rags
They gave him a horse to ride. Given Rags’s lack of experience with horses, he had told them it would be faster if they tied him to the shitting end of one and let him walk.
But all Morien had had to do was touch the beast’s snorting nose, and it bowed its head, pressed its brow to Morien’s brow. After that, it gave Rags no trouble.
However, its glossy muscles jostled Rags with every step, and by the end of their first day riding, his ass was bruised, his thighs sore, his fingers cramped from clutching the reins for dear life.
He rubbed his hands together over the campfire, not too close to the flames, cracking his knuckles and easing every ache. He thought about the shard of sorcerer’s mirror-magic in his heart and crept closer to the warmth. Nothing could heat his chilled flesh.
Lord Faolan Ever-Learning wasn’t accompanying them on their journey, but he’d sent six of the Queen’s best Queensguard, led by Morien, and one of his dogs, who had refused to be wooed with half of Rags’s sausage at dinner. The hound had eaten it, of course, but didn’t get friendlier for it, and he still slept at Morien’s side.
Fucking waste of a sausage.
The first night under the open sky, far from the city Rags knew from crooked cranny to cunning corridor, found him sleepless, staring at the stars.
He was worrying a hole in one too-long sleeve, biting where it covered his knuckle. If he tried to run, the shard in his chest would shred his heart to scraps. Not a pleasant way to die. The best he could imagine for his future was a full pardon and being turned back to the streets where he belonged—with the shard still in his heart to ensure he never spoke of this mission to anyone.
It wasn’t much hope, but that was for the best, since hope and Rags didn’t get along.