It would have been easy enough to make peace. Kaz could have told Jesper that he knew he wasn’t dirty, reminded him that he’d trusted him enough to make him his only real second in a fight that could have gone badly wrong tonight. Instead, he said, “Go on, Jesper. There’s a line of credit waiting for you at the Crow Club. Play till morning or your luck runs out, whichever comes first.”
“When everyone knows you’re a monster, you needn’t waste time doing every monstrous thing.”
“The Barrel is a den of filth, vice, violence—”
“How many of the ships you send sailing out of the Ketterdam harbor never return?”
“That doesn’t—”
“One out of five, Van Eck. One out of every five vessels you send seeking coffee and jurda and bolts of silk sinks to the bottom of the sea, crashes on the rocks, falls prey to pirates. One out of five crews dead, their bodies lost to foreign waters, food for deep sea fishes. Let’s not speak of violence.”
“Do you want to know the best way to find Grisha who don’t want to be found?”
Jesper scrubbed the back of his neck, touched his hands to his guns, returned to his neck. He always seemed to be in motion. “Never gave it much thought,” he said.
“Look for miracles and listen to bedtime stories.” Follow the tales of witches and goblins, and unexplained happenings. Sometimes they were just superstition. But often there was truth at the heart of local legends—people who had been born with gifts that their countries didn’t understand.
Matthias said nothing, but she saw a glimmer of shame move over his face. Matthias had always fought his own decency. To become a drüskelle, he’d had to kill the good things inside him. But the boy he should have been was always there, and she’d begun to see the truth of him in the days they’d spent together after the shipwreck. She wanted to believe that boy was still there, locked away, despite her betrayal and whatever he’d endured at Hellgate.
“I’ll go back in a minute. I just needed some air. And don’t feign concern for Inej when you’re planning to send her climbing up six stories of chimney with only a rope and a prayer.”
“The Wraith can manage it.”
“The Wraith is a sixteen-year-old girl currently lying unconscious on a table. She may not even survive the night.”
“When Kaz got Per Haskell to pay off my indenture with the Menagerie, the first thing I did was have the peacock feather tattoo removed.”
“Whoever took care of it did a pretty rough job.”
“He wasn’t a Corporalnik or even a medik.” Just one of the half-knowledgeable butchers who plied their trade among the desperate of the Barrel. He’d offered her a slug of whiskey, then simply hacked away at the skin, leaving a puckered spill of wounds down her forearm. She hadn’t cared. The pain was liberation. They had loved to talk about her skin at the House of Exotics. It was like coffee with sweet milk. It was like burnished caramel. It was like satin. She welcomed every cut of the knife and the scars it left behind.
“That seems like cheating,” Kaz had whispered to Jordie.
“It isn’t cheating,” Jordie had snorted. “It’s just good business. And how are ordinary people supposed to move up in the world without a little extra help?”
“Why did you save me?” he asked finally.
“Stop wasting energy. Don’t talk.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because you’re a human being,” she said angrily.
Lies. If they did make land, she’d need a Fjerdan to help her survive, someone who knew the land, though clearly she knew the language. Of course she did. They were all deceivers and spies, trained to prey on people like him, people without their unnatural gifts. They were predators.
In his bones, he knew that she would never speak of it to anyone, that she would never use this knowledge against him. She relied on his reputation. She wouldn’t want him to look weak. But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? Inej would never betray him. He knew it. Kaz felt ill. Though he’d trusted her with his life countless times, it felt much more frightening to trust her with this shame.
What would Jordie say if his little brother lost their chance at justice because he couldn’t conquer some stupid sickness inside him? But it only brought back the memory of Jordie’s cold flesh, the way it had grown loose in the salt water, the bodies crowding around him in the flatboat. His vision started to blur.
Get it together, Brekker, he scolded himself harshly. It didn’t help. He was going to faint again, and this would be all over. Inej had once offered to teach him how to fall. “The trick is not getting knocked down,” he’d told her with a laugh. “No, Kaz,” she’d said, “the trick is in getting back up.” More Suli platitudes, but somehow even the memory of her voice helped. He was better than this. He had to be. Not just for Jordie, but for his crew.
She would hunt the slavers and their buyers. They would learn to fear her, and they would know her by her name. The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true. She clung to the wall, but it was purpose she grasped at long last, and that carried her upward.
She was not a lynx or a spider or even the Wraith. She was Inej Ghafa, and her future was waiting above.
What bound them together? Greed? Desperation? Was it just the knowledge that if one or all of them disappeared tonight, no one would come looking? Inej’s mother and father might still shed tears for the daughter they’d lost, but if Inej died tonight, there would be no one to grieve for the girl she was now. She had no family, no parents or siblings, only people to fight beside. Maybe that was something to be grateful for, too.
Matthias had a gun in his hands, and Kaz Brekker was unarmed. They were standing over the bodies of two unconscious drüskelle, men who were supposed to be Matthias’ brothers. I can shoot him, Matthias thought. Doom Nina and the rest of them with a single act. Again, Matthias had the strange sense of his life viewed the wrong way up. He was dressed in prison clothes, an intruder in the place he’d once called home. Who am I now?
“Red for Corporalki. Blue for Etherealki. Purple for Materialki. Those are pieces of the kefta that Grisha wear in battle. They’re trophies.”
“There are so many.”
Hundreds. Thousands. I would have worn purple, Jesper thought, if I’d joined the Second Army. He reached for the fizzy elation that had been bubbling through him moments before. He’d been willing, even eager to risk capture and execution as a thief and hired gun. Why was it worse to think about being hunted as a Grisha?
Inej looked down at the fingers digging into her flesh. For a brief second, every horror came back to her, and she truly was a wraith, a ghost taking flight from a body that had given her only pain. No. A body that had given her strength. A body that had carried her over the rooftops of Ketterdam, that had served her in battle, that had brought her up six stories in the dark of a soot-stained chimney.
Looking at Brum, she knew she didn’t just blame him for the things he’d done to her people; it was what he’d done to Matthias as well. He’d taken a brave, miserable boy and fed him on hate. He’d silenced Matthias’ conscience with prejudice and the promise of a divine calling that was probably nothing more than the wind moving through the branches of an ancient tree.
Nina had wronged him, but she’d done it to protect her people. She’d hurt him, but she’d attempted everything in her power to make things right. She’d shown him in a thousand ways that she was honorable and strong and generous and very human, maybe more vividly human than anyone he’d ever known. And if she was, then Grisha weren’t inherently evil. They were like anyone else—full of the potential to do great good, and also great harm. To ignore that would make Matthias the monster.
If you wanted to kill a vine, you didn’t just keep cutting it back. You tore it from the ground by the roots. And yet her hands were shaking. Wasn’t this the way drüskelle thought? Destroy the threat, wipe it out, no matter that the person in front of you was innocent.
“Nina,” Matthias said softly, “he’s just a kid. He’s one of us.”
One of us. A boy not much younger than she was, caught up in a war he hadn’t chosen for himself. A survivor.
The voice of God. There was always truth in legend. Kaz had spent enough time building his own myth to know. He’d wondered where the water that fed the Ice Court’s moat and fountains came from, why the river gorge was so very deep and wide. As soon as Nina had described the drüskelle initiation ritual, he’d known: the Fjerdan stronghold hadn’t been built around a great tree but around a spring. Djel, the wellspring, who fed the seas and rains, and the roots of the sacred ash.
There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong, and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken. The cane became a part of the myth he built. No one knew who he was. No one knew where he came from. He’d become Kaz Brekker, cripple and confidence man, bastard of the Barrel.
The gloves were his one concession to weakness. Since that night among the bodies and the swim from the Reaper’s Barge, he had not been able to bear the feeling of skin against skin. It was excruciating to him, revolting. It was the only piece of his past that he could not forge into something dangerous.
“Let’s buy the Menagerie.”
Inej grinned, thinking of the future and her little ship. “Let’s buy it and burn it down.”
They watched the waves for a while. “Ready?” Nina said.
Inej was glad she hadn’t had to ask. She pushed up her sleeve, baring the peacock feather and mottled skin beneath it.
It took the barest second, the softest brush of Nina’s fingertips. The itch was acute but passed quickly. When the prickling faded, the skin of Inej’s forearm was perfect—almost too smooth and flawless, like it was the one new part of her.
“How will you have me?” she repeated. “Fully clothed, gloves on, your head turned away so our lips can never touch?”
He released her hand, his shoulders bunching, his gaze angry and ashamed as he turned his face to the sea.
Maybe it was because his back was to her that she could finally speak the words. “I will have you without armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.”
“Chaos will come, and I will be its master. Its very wealthy master.”
“You will be ensuring slavery and death for Grisha everywhere,” Inej said.
Van Eck raised a brow. “How old are you, girl? Sixteen? Seventeen? Nations rise and fall. Markets are made and unmade. When power shifts, someone always suffers.”
“When profit shifts,” Jesper shot back.
Van Eck’s expression was bemused. “Aren’t they one and the same?”
After the battle in the Djerholm harbor, the merchling had come to Kaz to warn him that he couldn’t be used as leverage against his father. Wylan had been red-faced, barely able to speak the words of his supposed “affliction.” Kaz had only shrugged. Some men were poets. Some were farmers. Some were rich merchers. Wylan could draw a perfect elevation. He’d made a drill that could cut through Grisha glass from parts of a gate and scavenged bits of jewelry. So what if he couldn’t read?
Nina had disguised Kaz’s crow-and-cup tattoo before they’d entered the Ice Court, but he hadn’t let her near the R on his bicep. Now he touched his gloved fingers to where the sleeve of his coat covered the mark. Without meaning to, he’d let Kaz Rietveld return. He didn’t know if it had begun with Inej’s injury or that hideous ride in the prison wagon, but somehow he’d let it happen and it had cost him dearly.
