nothing, while your heart is shrouded. But we must take care. Too long a silence, and the Lying One will notice.”
“I feel a little”—Rags gestured to his chest, unsure of how to convey the situation—“like my heart’s not beating?”
Shining Talon rested his palm on Rags’s chest. His heart reared like a horse gone mad after years of being yoked to a cart. “I assure you that it is.”
“Ah,” Rags croaked weakly.
“There are ways to break the Lying One’s control,” Shining Talon continued, “and I intend to find them.”
Rags meant to roll over and close his eyes, return to the pretension of sleep. Instead he paused halfway and rolled back, reached his thumb up to brush the crossed bones at the corner of Shining Talon’s wide mouth.
The Clave had all kinds of rituals for luck, most of which had neither explanation nor provenance. It was the symbol that mattered: the touching of the lintel over a doorway or the brow of a statue, till one honored spot was shining wood or burnished bronze. Rags wanted to return to this touch over and over, with the same reverence.
He let the question burning his throat die. Shining Talon is gonna stick around.
He closed his eyes and feigned sleep as Shining Talon untied the strips of red cloth, returned them to Rags’s pockets. Slowly, skittering like prey, his heartbeat returned to normal. Shining Talon’s weight shifted, settling to sit against the bed frame beside him. Rags reached for his lump, that fae puzzle, to keep from reaching out to Shining Talon instead. To keep from closing his palm around golden skin.
He might not have to solve that puzzle for Morien.
Might get to solve it for himself.
Rags should have been grinning. Instead he squeezed his eyes shut tight and willed himself to fall asleep before his hand started up with the stabbing pain again.
After everything they’d been through, he figured he deserved a break.
51
Inis
When Morien announced that he would not accompany them on their journey, Inis nearly believed that, after a long absence, fortune had shown her face at last.
“Although I am most eager to join you once again in the saddle, I must meet with the Queen, and will accompany Lord Faolan to the palace without delay.”
“Our fondest regrets.” Inis curtsied, only preserving the peace because she’d seen firsthand what happened when Rags’s mouth ran wild. “We will keep you similarly informed, of course.”
“Never forget that I see all,” Morien intoned.
Then he was gone.
“You know a guy’s the worst when he takes all the fun out of insulting him behind his back,” Rags fired off.
Inis found herself seized with the sudden urge to laugh. She gnawed it down. There was no way Rags was taunting Morien on purpose. He couldn’t possibly be that thoughtful, could he?
Thankfully, no retaliation from Morien followed, though Inis could swear Rags looked over his shoulder for it more than once.
The ride to Ever-Land took them little more than a day. Lord Faolan Ever-Learning owned preferential property, his country estate sitting as close to the royal vacationing grounds as possible without encroaching on them.
Whatever task he’d undertaken for the Queen, she was happy enough with the results that she had granted him this lovely place.
And who, Inis wondered darkly, had she stolen it from, in order to make a gift of it?
“Where’d an Ever-Lady learn to pack a wallop like the one you laid on Cabhan of Kerry’s-Back-End?” Rags sat straighter in the saddle, his grip on the reins ice white.
“Stop talking. I have to concentrate in order to lead us the right way,” Inis told him. Which wasn’t fair, but it was true.
One could only reach Ever-Land by picturing it in their mind. An impossible task, unless one had already been there, exactly the sort of fae paradox the gentry loved to imitate.
Inis closed her eyes and let the undertow of her memories drag her down. It wasn’t as difficult as she’d feared. For the past year, she’d been fighting to forget, so that it felt like the simplest thing in the world now to surrender that fight. To remember everything, how perfect it all was, and how all had been taken from her without a single breath of warning.
The charges levied against her brother Tomman were that he had allied with the Resistance and conspired to overthrow the Queen. That was so nonsensical that Inis had been forced to believe her family was banished for nothing. Some political slight, some envy simmering to the point of boiling bloodlust.