“You understand.” Morien’s voice was quiet, but it flooded Rags’s head like a chorus. “I’ve devised a trap you can’t escape. We own you. You’ll do as I wish, until I decide otherwise. And when you’re no longer of value, I will kill you.”
In reply, Rags vomited, then blacked clean out.
5
Rags
They gave him a horse to ride. Given Rags’s lack of experience with horses, he had told them it would be faster if they tied him to the shitting end of one and let him walk.
But all Morien had had to do was touch the beast’s snorting nose, and it bowed its head, pressed its brow to Morien’s brow. After that, it gave Rags no trouble.
However, its glossy muscles jostled Rags with every step, and by the end of their first day riding, his ass was bruised, his thighs sore, his fingers cramped from clutching the reins for dear life.
He rubbed his hands together over the campfire, not too close to the flames, cracking his knuckles and easing every ache. He thought about the shard of sorcerer’s mirror-magic in his heart and crept closer to the warmth. Nothing could heat his chilled flesh.
Lord Faolan Ever-Learning wasn’t accompanying them on their journey, but he’d sent six of the Queen’s best Queensguard, led by Morien, and one of his dogs, who had refused to be wooed with half of Rags’s sausage at dinner. The hound had eaten it, of course, but didn’t get friendlier for it, and he still slept at Morien’s side.
Fucking waste of a sausage.
The first night under the open sky, far from the city Rags knew from crooked cranny to cunning corridor, found him sleepless, staring at the stars.
He was worrying a hole in one too-long sleeve, biting where it covered his knuckle. If he tried to run, the shard in his chest would shred his heart to scraps. Not a pleasant way to die. The best he could imagine for his future was a full pardon and being turned back to the streets where he belonged—with the shard still in his heart to ensure he never spoke of this mission to anyone.
It wasn’t much hope, but that was for the best, since hope and Rags didn’t get along.
He touched his chest, imagined he could feel the shard through his rib cage, and withdrew his hand. Above, a canopy of stars shimmered, marking shapes he knew from bastardized street versions: the Swan-Slayer, the Sheep-Fucker, the Shitting Lad.
“Those aren’t the names I learned,” Dane had said once, wide-eyed at Rags’s filthy mouth, his filthier fingernails, and the impression he immediately gave of being a bad influence. Rags, age twelve at the time, had informed Dane he was simpler than a headless chicken if he didn’t think that mess of stars looked exactly like a man bending over and pulling his trousers down.
“And that’s where his—”
“I see it now,” Dane had said, eager to end the conversation. Sorry he’d started it. Laughing despite himself.
Like always.
Rags blinked, thought he saw one star shake free from the swan’s beak and arc downward, brightly burning. Another blink revealed it was a trick of tired eyes. Rags closed them, threw his elbow over his forehead to block out the world, and forced himself to rest.
6
Rags
Another day of tireless riding through homely farmland, now under ceaseless drizzle. The Queensguard remained eerily silent. Old bruises got banged around, joined by new ones. Farmhouses dotted the fields, smoke rising from chimneys. They passed field laborers—whose lot in life was a fate that made Rags shudder as much as the shard in his heart—farm animals, piles of dung, rotting vegetables for fertilizer.
It was horrible. If he lived through this, he’d never leave the city again. A steamy cluster of stone buildings and too many crowded bodies, with the Queen on her Hill watching them scuttle about like ants: that was his turf.
He missed it fiercely.
Would he ever return to his Cheapside? Now, in the daylight, Rags tried again to envision a way this ended well. Morien the Last was a name that stuck to the darkest parts of the city, whispered in alleyways, swirling on the dockside breeze. It was rumored he’d fought in the Fair Wars, or his master had, yet he looked no older than a man in his early twenties. No one had seen his full face in years, but the straightness of his back and the lack of wrinkles around his fathomless eyes gave everyone pause.
The Queen’s sorcerers were technically on the side of the people, but no one liked how they hid their faces, how they used mirrorcraft.
Generations of bred-in-bone fear of the fae didn’t disappear. It was slowly transferring to the next obvious target. Morien the Last was just another bogey snatching innocents from the street.
And Rags wasn’t above superstition. The stories he’d heard about Morien curled hair, and now here they both were.
Allies?
No, closer to hunting dog and master, the former kept on a short leash. Nothing good would come of pretending he was anything like a partner to Morien.
At least Lord Faolan’s hounds got a nip of meat and a warm place to sleep every night, scritches on the head, fond words. Rags was in less cozy a position.
The morning of the third day, Morien woke Rags before dawn. He held a blindfold, a swatch of black-threaded red, the same fabric as the sorcerer’s robes. A quick glance around revealed that the six Queensguard already wore them. The fabric didn’t look thick enough to keep anyone from seeing the ugly farmland they were bound to pass, but the moment it was tied around Rags’s head, sunlight disappeared.
Rags couldn’t see or hear or smell. He couldn’t open his mouth and assumed that meant he couldn’t speak. Panic swelled within him. He fought it down. Panic was the death knell of rational thought, and he needed to be able to think clearly in the face of this magic.
Don’t pay attention to what you can’t do. Remember what you can.
He could still breathe, wanted to keep breathing.
Trapped alone with his heartbeat, his grip on the reins, the queasy rocking of the cantering horse between his legs. The aches and bruises faded from his senses, as though those too were dulled by the sorcerous blindfold. He tried to keep track of time, but without the shifting of the sun’s warmth over his skin, he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t lost count of the hours somewhere along the ride. He began to miss the fertilizer smell. Anything would have been better than the loneliness, than worrying he was the only person left alive in the world, a nasty horse his sole companion.
Time unspooled, lost its structure. All day and into the night—then the next night, then the next. What felt like an hour might’ve been an hour, but it might’ve been a minute. Rags had no notion of how long they’d traveled. He lost count of the rhythmic beat of his horse’s hooves. Every time he tried to concentrate on them, the blindfold blearied his brain.
The one thing he did know for sure was that the Queen’s sorcerers weren’t supposed to be able to touch people’s minds like this. This was old fae magic, the kind no one living had witnessed.
Except for Morien the Last, if the rumors were true and he had been alive during the Fair Wars.
What had Rags gotten himself mixed up in?
Nah. Don’t sweat it.
Wherever it was they were going, Morien really didn’t want him to know anything about it. That made Rags want to know more, contrary as a pissed-off cat facing down a closed door.