of Rags’s hand. The sharp pain in his joints lifted, reverting to a numb sort of pressure. The relief was sudden, brief, and exquisite.
Rags almost melted, only somehow avoiding giving everything away. He was aware of Shining Talon’s gleaming silver gaze on him, how he seemed to want a response. Rags cast about for something. Or pretended to, until Shining Talon spoke again.
“I did not know if that would work, but I see from your expression that you are no longer in intense pain.”
So much for Rags having to thank him.
“What do you mean, you ‘did not know’?” Rags withdrew his hand, flexed his fingers experimentally, and nearly cried with relief when they obeyed without blinding pain. A stiffness remained, his joint movement hindered by the mirrorglass shards, but the agony had ebbed. “My hands are my livelihood, Your Majesty. I trusted you with custody of my favorite one, and you’re telling me you treated it like an experiment?”
Shining Talon’s eyebrows quirked. He bowed chin toward chest, again taking Rags’s hand in both his own. The touch was oddly cool, making Rags wonder whether the fever in his blood was real or imagined.
A fae prince was holding his hand. Did the fae know what hand holding meant, or did it mean something else to them, like Kiss my ass or Want to talk to some trees together?
Another swallow of liquor. If Rags was sick, this would kill his fever, right? Logical.
“This generation knows so little of our kind,” Shining Talon said. Hardly fair. Rags couldn’t read the histories even if he wanted to. “You would no doubt have encountered fae glass in the ruins of the Lone Tower where I was awakened. Reflections, distorted by enchantments.”
Rags remembered Mirror-Rags’s yawning mouth, the swivel of his scrawny neck, and barely contained a shudder. “Not my favorite of your accomplishments.”
It felt small to complain to Shining Talon about fae cruelties. Humans, despite more limited means, had beaten them at that game, and how.
“They are unsettling by nature,” Shining Talon acknowledged. “They are the most powerful of our magic, and the most dangerous. Indeed, the Lying Ones based their mirrorcraft upon a perversion of fae glass. I performed what presented the most immediate solution—the same offered by the royal Enchantrisks when our warriors began to fall.”
Rags’s heart thrust itself against the shard slicing its red muscle, a pounding ache in his chest when he thought of the beautiful fae pierced by mirror shards. It was one thing when Morien the Worst tortured a parentless thief, but his kind had done this to Shining Talon’s family, friends, brothers in arms.
Rags didn’t want to think about any of it. He didn’t want to learn about the ways the fae had tried to fight a war they ultimately lost. How everything and everyone Shining Talon once knew was gone, the centuries passing over their black bones.
How could one scrawny thief begin to cover the debt that was owed?
Rags did what he did best and changed the subject. “So it’s temporary, then.”
Shining Talon’s strong fingers found a tender place between the roots of Rags’s first and second fingers. He pushed in hard, the pressure furrowing to the center of Rags’s palm before it moved to the outer edge.
Rags watched the motion carefully, intent on replicating it for himself later. He wouldn’t be beholden. Though in this precise moment, he appreciated the free hand for drinking and saw no reason not to take full advantage of his situation. He meant only to lean forward enough to meet the bottle, but instead found himself with his forehead pressed to Shining Talon’s broad, sturdy shoulder.
For a moment, the world was steady.
“Your ear has been damaged.” Shining Talon’s formerly merciless fingers brushed Rags’s torn earlobe with the same fluid ease with which he’d touched the stream in the Lost-Lands. Shining Talon, fae prince, talking to water. Asking it the time of day.
Rags’s whole body turned liquid and slow. Shining Talon’s skin smelled of gold and blastpowder, like one of Blind Kit’s explosions taking out the wall of a vault. His heart mule-kicked at the thought of treasure.
Was he sure that was all it was?
Deflection time. “You said your brother was that—uh, suit of armor. Body. Corpse I passed, in the tunnels. By the first door.”
Shining Talon nodded slowly. “You speak of the Lo— the ruins. Where you woke me. Your livelihood was injured then, too, as I recall.”
His strangely cool fae touch moved away from the damaged earlobe, ghosted the very corner