The memory of the shard in his heart tamed him.
He kept himself company with rhymes, the scraps and phrases he’d overheard at night in Clave lodging. Tenement stuff, pure trash, but catchy. If he lied to himself, he could pretend to be huddled on a rooftop, catching a grimy glimpse of starlight overhead, hearing rough voices bellowing below:
Oberon comes when the moons are high.
Polish your silver, the end is nigh. . . .
7
Rags
At some point—day or night, Rags had given up trying to guess which—the horse stopped moving, knelt to urge Rags off. He steadied himself one-handed on the powerful neck, found his bedroll, and spread it out close to the horse’s side. He leaned his face against its flank without smelling its sweat or feeling its heat.
It must have been Morien who pressed the hunk of bread into his hands.
Rags shaped the food with his palms and fingertips first, running his thumb over the crumbs, the crust. Then he practiced his craft in total, dead sightlessness, soundlessness, breaking the hunk apart shape by shape and lining the pieces in what he hoped was a straight line on his bedroll.
Good exercise for keeping his fingers limber.
He had to stay nimble, on top of his game, for what lay ahead.
He ate after.
Without the stars to watch, he fell into sleep quickly, and Morien, true to his word, didn’t give him any dreams. Rags wasn’t used to that. He made his living sticking his fingers into everyone else’s business, expecting the same courtesy in return. Maybe Morien really couldn’t read minds.
Why bother? He could shred hearts.
The next morning, the blindfold was gone. Rags blinked, staring up into a canopy of silvery leaves dusted with distant sunlight. What had woken him was the hush of life creeping back into his periphery, faintly, a curtain still drawn between him and the world. Only this time the curtain was the thickness of the forest, not a magicked cloth.
Tall black trees flashed an unexpectedly hoary gleam in the corners of his eyes. Thick ropes of spider silk, centuries abandoned by its spinners, cobwebbed their branches. Birds sang somewhere else, but not here.
Not daring to sing here.
Morien held an apple core. The horses were blindfolded, unnaturally still, and the Queensguard’s blindfolds hadn’t been removed. Only Rags had that honor.
“Morning,” Morien said.
The ache of Rags’s bruises came back to him, along with a crick in his neck from sleeping twisted. He rolled his thin shoulders. Dirt in his hair. He smelled of rain. His bedroll, damp.
“Is it morning?” Rags asked.
Morien stood, setting the apple core aside instead of ensorcelling it to disappear. “Come with me.”
Not an answer, but it was go with Morien or stay behind with the Queensguard—spread out, unmoving, like carvings on old graves—and the slow-breathing horses.
Rags knew which wretched choice he preferred.
He rose, stretching his legs, and did his best not to stumble after Morien. He settled for a slow-paced hobble and pretended he didn’t see the trees moving out of Morien’s way, inching ever so slightly aside to give him a wider berth. The last of the familiar brown and gray branches parted to slender black trunks only, varieties of trees Rags had never seen, whose names he’d never want to learn. They stood in tight clusters, growing gnarled and scattered along the path Morien chose. Sparse red leaves blossomed in violent splashes across the bark, clumping into deeper purple like bruises closer to the roots. Though the growth was weak and small and the wood looked dead, the colors themselves were brilliant, a poisonous warning. Rags’s neck prickled. This wasn’t natural.
He’d heard stories about the Lost-Lands. Everyone had. It was one thing to hear a tale 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.