Of course, the Queensguard was watching, so Rags couldn’t make off with the lot stuffed down his pants.
He dressed in clothes that had been left for him: trousers without holes and a belt with pouches. The belt was magnificently useful. Everything else was too much, especially the cowl-necked tunic, fluttering hem so crooked it had to be on purpose. All in black, with a pair of soft leather boots he’d hawk if he made it out of this in one piece.
No harm in wearing them for this job, learning what life without foot blisters was like.
Rags whistled at the picture he made. Tugged the draped fabric up and around to hide his nose and mouth. Looked like a child playing in an older sibling’s clothes.
Save for the boots, which were a perfect fit, every item of clothing was at least a size too big. Rags wasn’t troubled. Most of the clothes he owned had been purchased for someone else to wear.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so clean. His skin was pink, tingling from the rough scrubbing. His hair clung wet to his forehead and the back of his neck. His hands were dry and peeling around the nails, but otherwise unharmed.
One of the Queensguard caught him flexing his fingers and examining his knuckles, and cleared her throat. Rags tried to stop looking so suspicious after that. It was dawn when Morien and Faolan returned. Rags watched through the window as the sun began to climb, turning Cheapside’s seemingly endless line of tin shanties briefly gold. From the Hill sprawled Westside, where folks were nearly as rich, but their houses weren’t as well guarded; and Northside, which was merchant and shop territory, the newly rich, who were about as trustworthy as Cheapsiders and Clave thieves. Sinkholes, a hazard from all the collapsed mining tunnels, pocked the fallen Eastside district.
Didn’t stop desperate orphans from trying to take shelter in the rubble. Every month, their corpses were discovered in the shifting dust and cracked stone.
Loss of an entire neighborhood led to more overcrowding in Cheapside—the city’s poorest district, and Rags’s home. The view from on high transformed his old sneaking grounds into something beautiful, angular, like lines on a map, instead of the familiar, stink-soaked back alleys Rags was so fond of disappearing into.
Then the door opened, the lord and his sorcerer entered, and the Queensguard left. Only the dogs stood between Rags and Faolan.
They cowered aside, made way for Morien the Last.
“My favorite part of the test you designed was the bit with the barbed arrows that came at me from every direction,” Rags told Morien. “That was fun.”
Had the Gutter King’s vault ever lain in wait for him, or had it been a ruse from the start? Was there a Gutter King anymore? Rags didn’t know what to believe and, as always, decided not to believe in anything, except his quick fingers.
“There’s worse where you’re going.” Morien stood by the window. The sunlight revealed black threads veining the red cloth he wore, like branches against a burning sky. No—like the creep of deadly poison through blood.
“That was my favorite part, too.” Faolan patted the head of the dog nearest him affectionately. “What do you know of the Lost-Lands, little thief?”
What did one trash-raised, trash-named thief know about the Lost-Lands? The same stories every guttersnitch knew: extravagant lies, elaborate inventions. Once upon a lost-time, Oberon Black-Boned ruled a glittering court, as beautiful as it was treacherous. His fae Folk were handsome, strong, and brilliant, but inhuman and terribly cruel. Their beauty was the lure, their nails and teeth sharp.
Through subterfuge or sheer luck, armed with sorcery and shadowy pacts, humanity had managed to destroy them all. Even after their annihilation, the mere thought of them or their Lost-Lands still traced its fangs along the back of Rags’s neck, raised the hairs there. As though echoes of fearsome fae remained, ready to enact ghostly vengeance despite being buried long ago.
Instead of letting on how the thought chilled him raw, Rags snorted. “That if I don’t finish my vegetables every night, I’ll be taken away, replaced in my bed by a changeling, and fed to Oberon’s children finger by finger.”
Faolan waved a hand. His dogs watched it move, accustomed to treats. “Regardless of what you believe in, we’ve discovered an intriguing ruin. You’ll be brought there—you’ll have to be blindfolded much of the way—then charged with leading my explorers through its pitfalls successfully.”
“And if I’m not successful?”
“You aren’t our first choice,” Morien said.
“Or our fifth,” Faolan added.
“Seven have already tried and failed.”
Faolan sighed deeply. “Poor number six.”
So the whispers of the Gutter King’s vault had lured more than Rags and his clever hands. Made sense. A big score bred big competition. He should’ve suspected something sideways right from the start.
Wherever Blind Kit was, Rags couldn’t decide whether to curse her or hope she was still breathing.
He settled on both.
“What’s the pay?” he demanded.
“You keep your life if you succeed,” Morien replied.
There was no reason to assume that was a joke. Rags regretted opening his mouth.
“But”—Faolan offered a weary smile—“if it makes you feel better about your prospects, Morien’s tests have grown more difficult with each vaultbreaker. You made it through his hardest one yet!”
“Lord Faolan believes in the importance of hope,” Morien said.
“And you?” Rags asked.
“Like any drug, it has its uses,” Morien replied. “And like any drug, too much is fatal.”
Faolan waved his hand again. “No more theatrics, Mor. It’s getting old. Just do the awful thing so we can prepare for the eighth expedition.”
Morien turned away from the window, the sun at his back. His eyes had changed color. They were death-shroud white. He held up one hand and said, “Be still.”
Rags didn’t feel it when he fell to his knees, but he heard the echoes of Morien’s footsteps, each strong enough to shatter his bones, as the sorcerer crossed the room. Darkness drew around them like a pair of raven’s wings folded against rain. Morien touched Rags’s jaw, tilting his face upward. The sorcerer’s fingertips traced the large vein in Rags’s throat until it stilled. The world pitched gray, became shadow. Rags opened his mouth and no sound came out.
“You will obey,” a voice commanded. It sounded like three Moriens speaking at once. A hand on Rags’s chest. Something sharp, cold, slid into it, through the skin, past muscle, between bones, lodging itself in his heart.
Mirrorcraft. The word passed in nervous whispers from eave to gutter through the lower city. Only Queen Catriona Ever-Bright’s sorcerers practiced the mysterious art.
Then Morien’s voice was in Rags’s ear: “If you try to run, the shard of mirrorglass I’ve placed within you will shatter and shred your heart’s muscle into a thousand pieces.”
As he said it, the shard within Rags vibrated, threatening to slice his heart apart then and there. Something inside him, not a part of him. The wrongness of it was like biting down onto a nail in bread, a mean trick some bakers used when cooling loaves on the sill. Ruining their own goods to punish hungry orphans with sticky fingers.