the burden toward himself alone. Then he stopped thinking, stopped asking questions, stopped breathing. Clutched his throat, like that makes a fucking difference, and dropped to the floor.
As quickly as the punishment began, it stopped.
“—will be able to find them both more easily with the assistance of the other fragments.” Shining Talon was talking fast, saving Rags’s ass again. This debt was piling up so big, he’d never be able to repay it. His eyes watered. No sound but rasping wheezes came out of his throat.
Inis remained seated, unharmed. She looked pissed, but also smart enough not to draw Morien’s attention—and with it, his wrath.
They were Morien’s prisoners, his pawns. Whether he’d predicted this would happen or not, the masters the fragments had found had something to live for. Family to protect, or, selfishly, their own futures to preserve. Morien had more leverage than mere mirror shards, could manipulate both with equal skill.
“Without Rags, you will have to wait another of your human lifetimes for a Master of Five to come of age,” Shining Talon continued. “A shameful delay, when we are closer than ever. With Inis Fraoch Ever-Loyal and Two, we have all we need to uncover the location of Three and Three’s master, who will lead us to Four—”
“And so on,” Morien said, voice diamantine.
“—which means we do not currently require Cabhan of Kerry’s-End and One. We will be able to find the others without them, and find them with the others,” Shining Talon concluded.
“There, see?” Rags knew it was a mistake to speak up again, but did it anyway. Didn’t like the way a simmering-with-fury Morien was focused on Shining Talon. “I might be a pain in the ass, but at least you’re not changing my nappies until I’m of Mastering age, yeah?”
“I feel that perhaps I’m not being taken seriously.” Morien raised his left little finger, traced a half circle in the air. Rags screamed, the noise drawn from a part of him he hadn’t met until this moment, never wanted to meet again.
Not just his heart, but traveling through his right arm to his hand. His right fingers spasmed. Pain spread through Rags’s chest to his lungs, his heart.
Shining Talon moved toward him in a golden blur. Rags shouted, stopping him in his path. Was reduced to nothing but an animal, unable to explain to Shining Talon what was happening.
Every one of his ribs felt shattered to splinters. His lungs stretched to the point of splitting. His heart was in tatters. Those were facts.
Rags had seen his first dead body when he was six. A waxy white woman, skin stretched over bone, no muscle or fat to soften her features. She’d taken refuge in one of the sewer pipes that flushed refuse out of the warehouses into the sea, and died there.
Rags had found her because that was where he slept three days of the week.
She’d been stiff as pressboard. Still clothed, so fresh she hadn’t been stripped yet. Rags could find nothing in her pockets but a glass pipe.
Since his first, he’d seen countless more. He knew how bodies worked and had a passing familiarity with their limits, how far flesh and bone could be pushed before they gave up.
His fingers popped at the joints one by one. Worse than a thousand paper cuts, the sensation of blade-thin arrows of honed air tearing apart the muscles in his hand.
Rags neared the point of no return. Dark spots and bright spots flashed in his vision. His heart was beginning to fray, the muscle pulling apart with as little fight as the threads of an old shirt.
In a distant, dark part of him, held separate from the pain, he wondered if he was going to die.
He didn’t want to.
When he came to, his hand was still twitching, not to mention stinging like he’d shoved it into a hornetsuckle bush. Morien’s face loomed in his blurring vision.
Something warm and solid at his back. A steady, broad touch. Shining Talon. Rags glanced up to see murder flashing in the fae prince’s monochrome eyes.
Rags distracted Shining Talon from trying, failing, to kill Morien the Last, by doing the only thing he could think of. His quick hands found the shaft of the arrow in Shining Talon’s back. The one that still worked yanked the arrow free. His fingers twitched but held.
A wet rip of muscle. Rags winced.
“That hurt me more than it hurt you,” he offered hoarsely.
Shining Talon cleared his throat, almost a cough. He sought Rags’s gaze, but