might’ve been an hour, but it might’ve been a minute. Rags had no notion of how long they’d traveled. He lost count of the rhythmic beat of his horse’s hooves. Every time he tried to concentrate on them, the blindfold blearied his brain.
The one thing he did know for sure was that the Queen’s sorcerers weren’t supposed to be able to touch people’s minds like this. This was old fae magic, the kind no one living had witnessed.
Except for Morien the Last, if the rumors were true and he had been alive during the Fair Wars.
What had Rags gotten himself mixed up in?
Nah. Don’t sweat it.
Wherever it was they were going, Morien really didn’t want him to know anything about it. That made Rags want to know more, contrary as a pissed-off cat facing down a closed door.
The memory of the shard in his heart tamed him.
He kept himself company with rhymes, the scraps and phrases he’d overheard at night in Clave lodging. Tenement stuff, pure trash, but catchy. If he lied to himself, he could pretend to be huddled on a rooftop, catching a grimy glimpse of starlight overhead, hearing rough voices bellowing below:
Oberon comes when the moons are high.
Polish your silver, the end is nigh. . . .
7
Rags
At some point—day or night, Rags had given up trying to guess which—the horse stopped moving, knelt to urge Rags off. He steadied himself one-handed on the powerful neck, found his bedroll, and spread it out close to the horse’s side. He leaned his face against its flank without smelling its sweat or feeling its heat.
It must have been Morien who pressed the hunk of bread into his hands.
Rags shaped the food with his palms and fingertips first, running his thumb over the crumbs, the crust. Then he practiced his craft in total, dead sightlessness, soundlessness, breaking the hunk apart shape by shape and lining the pieces in what he hoped was a straight line on his bedroll.
Good exercise for keeping his fingers limber.
He had to stay nimble, on top of his game, for what lay ahead.
He ate after.
Without the stars to watch, he fell into sleep quickly, and Morien, true to his word, didn’t give him any dreams. Rags wasn’t used to that. He made his living sticking his fingers into everyone else’s business, expecting the same courtesy in return. Maybe Morien really couldn’t read minds.
Why bother? He could shred hearts.
The next morning, the blindfold was gone. Rags blinked, staring up into a canopy of silvery leaves dusted with distant sunlight. What had woken him was the hush of life creeping back into his periphery, faintly, a curtain still drawn between him and the world. Only this time the curtain was the thickness of the forest, not a magicked cloth.
Tall black trees flashed an unexpectedly hoary gleam in the corners of his eyes. Thick ropes of spider silk, centuries abandoned by its spinners, cobwebbed their branches. Birds sang somewhere else, but not here.
Not daring to sing here.
Morien held an apple core. The horses were blindfolded, unnaturally still, and the Queensguard’s blindfolds hadn’t been removed. Only Rags had that honor.
“Morning,” Morien said.
The ache of Rags’s bruises came back to him, along with a crick in his neck from sleeping twisted. He rolled his thin shoulders. Dirt in his hair. He smelled of rain. His bedroll, damp.
“Is it morning?” Rags asked.
Morien stood, setting the apple core aside instead of ensorcelling it to disappear. “Come with me.”
Not an answer, but it was go with Morien or stay behind with the Queensguard—spread out, unmoving, like carvings on old graves—and the slow-breathing horses.
Rags knew which wretched choice he preferred.
He rose, stretching his legs, and did his best not to stumble after Morien. He settled for a slow-paced hobble and pretended he didn’t see the trees moving out of Morien’s way, inching ever so slightly aside to give him a wider berth. The last of the familiar brown and gray branches parted to slender black trunks only, varieties of trees Rags had never seen, whose names he’d never want to learn. They stood in tight clusters, growing gnarled and scattered along the path Morien chose. Sparse red leaves blossomed in violent splashes across the bark, clumping into deeper purple like bruises closer to the roots. Though the growth was weak and small and the wood looked dead, the colors themselves were brilliant, a poisonous warning. Rags’s neck prickled. This wasn’t natural.
He’d heard stories about the Lost-Lands. Everyone had. It was one thing to hear a tale