Master of One

by Jaida Jones

  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.

  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.

  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 ruins—were magic. What else but magic could interfere with a sorcerer’s power?

  Rags regretted his quick decision to hunt Lord Faolan’s treasure.

  Not that he’d had another choice.

  “Not gonna tell me how the others made it through the first two doors, huh?”

  “Figure it out yourself and consider it practice.”

  Something twinged in Rags’s chest. It hurt, but he wouldn’t show how bad. On the streets, any sign of weakness was a signal to others: Easy pickings.

  He shrugged and stepped under the archway. There he found an enormous flagstone, the first in a path. Veins of ore in the marbled rock thinned into age rings.

  There were a lot of rings.

  Surrounding him, like judgmental sentinels, the tall trees’ needle-thin branches twisted in unnatural shapes, embracing nothing but damp, woodsy air. Like an empty frame, its painting stolen.

  There had been something grand here once. The archway he’d stepped under had only been the outer gate of something much, much bigger, the shape of which could still be traced by the way branches bent out of the way of its memory. As Rags followed the path, he tried to imagine the ancient structure, now less than ruin, that had so warped the trees. He stepped lightly, expecting the first trap immediately, but the path carried him forward, footfall by footfall, without trying to kill him.

  Lull him into a false sense of security. Get him to drop his guard.

  Not going to happen.

  A stone missing from the path gave Rags pause, made him look back over his shoulder. Morien waited on the other side of the arch. He hadn’t followed Rags through.

  Back to the break in the pathway. Rags poked it lightly with one toe, testing if it would hold or open up beneath his weight, if the vines and roots would snarl out at him and drag him away.

  Nothing.

  Rags stepped over it onto the next stone.

  The silence in the ruins wasn’t bad compared to the nothingness of Morien’s blindfold. Rags could hear the sounds his boots made when they touched the ground. He was fine.

  Then the earth began to rise around him and he stopped short. He was descending, the ground he stood on a platform, slowly lowering him. The earth was swallowing him, sort of. Flanking him on both sides were walls of dirt veined with silver and slabs of ghost-white rock. Arches like ribs, or teeth. It was like being guided into the warm, open mouth of a beast from legend. And the beams, or bones, whatever they were, glowed in spots, lighting his way forward.

  He wouldn’t have objected to having a sorcerer with him for this.

  Rags licked his lips, prodding the scabbed-over split with his tongue. The old itch to touch, to feel everything around him so he could learn what made it tick had his fingertips twitching, but years of training and better instincts kept his hands at his side. In a place where the vines would kill you for fondling them, he couldn’t be reckless. Not even to see if the ribbed wall arches were as smooth as they looked.

  Fae-work. Definitely. The real deal, not the knockoffs you could buy for cheap in back alleys: Chunk off the base stones of the fabled Lone Tower, prevents colds, wards off the plague, cures back trouble, wear it around your neck and impress your friends!

  Swindlers, preying on the superstitious. Not like Rags, who stole honestly, never pretended to be anything more than a thief.

  Which had led him here, into this dark cavern, glints of blue light drawing him deeper into the ruin. The shapes they formed were like eye sockets in skulls, rows of teeth, long fingers pointing him on.

  A crypt, Rags suspected. Where the dead were buried with their treasures. Legends told of the fae’s last stand at the Lone Tower, and plenty of dead fae warriors meant plenty of unguarded treasure.

  Treasure Rags was here to find, take, and trade for his life.

  Rags didn’t know where in the lost fae lands Morien had led him, but wouldn’t it be a sidesplitter if he was actually exploring the real Lone Tower—a sneaky flea crawling through the stacked pages of ancient history?

  Until the path stopped—was stopped—by a solid silver door. To its left, a few-months-old corpse slumped into itself, knees to chest.

  The first test.

  Rags folded his legs under him and sat. The door had the answers. Somewhere.

  And Rags had to find them, unless he wanted to join Corpse-y over there in lifeless eternity.

  8

  Rags

  Rags knew better than to simply push the door o
pen. After a few proper once-overs, he noticed handprints etched into its silver filigree, a pattern so fine he had to tilt his head to one side, squint hard, to see it. Four pairs of handprints overlapped at the top of the door, while a pair in the center touched fingertip to fingertip, all of them significantly larger than Rags’s hands. None of them revealed a clue—not one Rags could read, at least—to how to open the door and not die. Or how to open the door at all, death included.

  Rags held his hand up to the last of the prints without touching the surface of the door. His thumb pointed downward, like a sign for no luck, you’re fucked.

  Hands. It had something to do with hands. It didn’t take a genius to land on that hope, since there was no visible lock, nothing to pick. Rags gingerly felt his way around the frame without touching the door itself to see whether there were loose parts or a stone he needed to push, like the one he’d stepped on to lower him into the earth.

  Nothing.

  He was going to have to touch the door eventually.

  He glanced, not for the first time, at the corpse. “Wouldn’t mind some help.”

  The corpse, being dead, had no answer. But a worm inched out of its hair, down the fall of black, onto its shoulder.

  The corpse was dressed well. Most corpses of Rags’s acquaintance weren’t. In Cheapside, the dead were covered with whatever cloth scraps their neighbors had to spare. A tattered shirt, a stained old handkerchief, someone’s torn trousers. It was traditional to shroud the dead until they were carted off for burial.

  It gave the corpses some dignity back after being picked clean by thieves.

  The worm approached Rags’s boot, then started back slowly the way it had come, inching up a leg and into the folds of the corpse’s sleeve. Rags told himself he was better than this, better than getting stuck at only the first doorway.