“This is not about me.” Rags slid down, curling against Shining Talon like a starved kitten. He gesticulated with the liquor bottle to distract from the fact that he’d shut his eyes, his face resting perilously close to Shining Talon’s hip. “I wanna know what a family does to get the honor of—whatever it was. The Sleep, staying behind, being the only one . . .”
The question came out less sure of itself than Rags had planned, but out it was. He had to take his victories where he could.
Shining Talon’s hand rested curled on Rags’s shoulder. Not beckoning him closer, not pushing him off. “My father was one of Oberon’s oathsworn warriors,” he said. Openly answering the question asked, without skirting or weaseling. “He was granted a high position in the Bone Court after years of distinguished service. A fae promise is wrought in iron and gold. Without sorrow, beauty would mean nothing. So with the privilege came sacrifice. That is duty.”
Rags’s mind drifted, unwelcome, to Dane—who had parents, rules, chores, and so had imagined Rags’s life to be one filled with wonders and adventures. Rags had given his old friend similar wisdom.
Sure, Rags had been a kid with no bedtime, but he’d also been a kid with no bed.
“See.” Rags poked his index finger into Shining Talon’s ribs, barely felt the frisson of pain that followed. “This is why I work with just me. No rewards to divide, no friends to wall you up in an underground tomb. Never had them, never will.”
It made Rags angry because it should’ve made Shining Talon angry. He should have seen it for what it was—a burden—and didn’t. What kind of value was there in being abandoned?
Never the kind of boy who liked to hit things with his fists, Rags preferred verbal sparring.
He waited for Shining Talon to object to his characterization of fae honor.
“You are lying,” Shining Talon said. Which, all right, Rags had asked for it. Hadn’t quite accounted for how bluntly it might come out. “You told me you had a friend, once. Before we were interrupted.”
“By you getting arrowed in the shoulder.”
Rags remembered every word that had come out of his mouth. He didn’t appreciate that Shining Talon remembered them, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Nor about the flash of memory that conjured up an uncertain smile and sandy hair: a boy Rags’s age, but soft and rounded where Rags had recently shot up from scrawny kid to something taller and made of all elbows.
Dane’s family had owned a butcher’s in the shittiest part of the city before it turned into pure Cheapside chaos, and he could be counted on to reliably slip a beef bone or some chicken necks Rags’s way when called to. On lucky days there was even a liver or a heart. Despite his better instincts, Rags kept coming back for the free food. No other reason.
They’ll be butchering me next, Dane used to joke, prodding his belly, as they lay stretched out side by side on a sunny rooftop.
Rags clenched his bad hand into a fist, didn’t allow himself to flinch when the pain returned. Pain dissolved his focus, which had been exactly what he wanted.
“Dane,” he said finally. “His name was Dane. And if you’re hoping to tell me to think of him for courage, don’t bother, ’cause he’s dead. Like our late pal Cabhan of Kerry’s-End.”
“Cabhan is not dead,” Shining Talon said. “The Lying One’s wicked arts would have told him if the heart ceased to beat, and then his location would be known to us.”
“That’s . . .” Sensing the need for a clear mind, Rags pulled away, though it felt like shit not being pressed against Shiny anymore, and precisely because it did, perching his borrowed bottle on the polished bedside table. He settled with the pillows at his back, brushing black hair out of his eyes with a sweep of his fingers. “Okay. So where do you think he went, then?”
“I do not know,” Shining Talon said. Rags’s heart sank. He’d asked the question he’d been wondering all along. How the fuck is Cab hiding?
But the more important question was whether Rags could do the same.
Frustrated, he ran a hand through his hair, then shook out his fingers. Shoved his hands into his pockets in search of his fragment to toy with and instead recoiled when he remembered what he’d stuffed there days ago.