about a distant place, one lost to human eyes forever. Another to see it unfurling right in front of his nose.
This place was impossible.
Rags standing here was impossible.
His eyes rejected what they saw. If he shut them, would the landscape disappear? Or would Morien simply assume he wasn’t ready for this task and kill him where he stood?
Too much of a risk to take.
“Forest at the edge of the Lost-Lands?” Rags’s mouth moved of its own volition.
This, Rags understood, was why he’d been blindfolded. Morien couldn’t let him know how to get here on his own.
Morien didn’t grace Rags with a reply, the answer so obvious, it didn’t require confirmation. Rags would have rolled his eyes, only every time he looked somewhere new, the air shimmered, the shadows shifted, and the glowing of the mist-draped bark intensified, all to dizzying effect. Looking at his feet didn’t help, since light dappled the moss and roots so it seemed like the ground rippled with constant, liquid movement.
Rags wondered how much he’d get for a handful of those red leaves, if it would be possible to steal a cutting to bring back to the city.
Nah. Bad idea to start plucking magical plants without knowing if they’d curse him for trying.
Rags focused on his hands instead, imagining rolling a coin between his knuckles, distracting himself from the crazy stew he’d landed in.
There were too many legends about the Lost-Lands. Mostly, they concerned what those lands were before they were lost. Home to the fae: heartless kidnappers and baby eaters who’d slice open your pet dog to keep jewels in, quick as they’d give you a second look.
They’d slice you open and use your skin next.
With every step, Rags couldn’t shake the conviction that he was intruding on something best left sleeping.
Though Rags didn’t have a mother to remember, there’d been plenty of those older and wiser in the dregs of Cheapside offering free advice—most of it bad. He’d grown up knowing what anyone with a bit of common sense knew: there were no fae to be frightened of anymore.
The Queensguard had made crossroads and countryside safe for simple folk. It’d been hundreds of years since anyone had caught a glimpse of one of Oberon’s wicked children. Only the Queen’s sorcerers used magic these days.
But here Rags was.
Morien watched him as if he could read Rags’s thoughts as quickly as Rags could think them.
Rags shifted his focus.
Think about the coin, not the politics behind it. Thieves before him had come this way. Maybe not all of them had disappeared due to the dangerous terrain. Maybe they’d spoken their minds at the wrong moment to an unsympathetic ear.
Under his red scarves, Morien’s ears looked very unsympathetic. They also looked slightly too small for his head.
“I can’t wait to die in this place,” Rags said.
“Remain silent,” Morien ordered.
The first sign of ruins resembled a tree stump—it might have been one once—ringed with moss and petrified with age. Then there was a set of steps, a barely noticeable thinning of the trees, an archway, broken at the top and smothered in vines. Rags nudged one leafy branch aside with his elbow to find stone beneath, misty white, and realized as he let the vine fall back that its leaves were part silver. Real silver. Half greenery, half precious metal. Break off enough of those gilded things and he’d be rich—
“Can I take things?” Rags blurted out. “Not the treasure you lot are after, but littler stuff? If I see it?”
Morien turned, taking notice of what had caught Rags’s attention. “They’ll attack you if you try that,” he said.
As if in response, the vines stirred, despite the still air. Rags shoved his hands into his pockets. “If that’s true, this place won’t be easy to rob.”
“This isn’t the place. It’s the first doorway.”
Rags peered through the archway. “Aren’t the rest of the gang coming?”
“They’ll follow when it’s safe.”
“Any advice from past failures?”
Morien shrugged lightly beneath the bower. “There are doorways, and we aren’t sure how many. Your predecessors have made it past the first five. When one is opened”—Morien handed him a polished pocket mirror—“let me know.”
“What’s this for?” Rags took the slender compact between two fingers. “Can’t you wiggle your fingers and make me dance?”
The second he said it, Rags wished he hadn’t.
Morien’s eyes betrayed nothing but boredom. “This connection will prove most reliable once you are in the depths of the ruins” was all he said.
So it was true. Not only the fae themselves, but their buildings—their