Chapter Text
A tap of the tin and the little orange flowers of jurda tipped onto Shiro's hand.
He chewed slowly and waited, let the taste smear over his tongue and teeth. It burned at the back of his nose. It was another cold night in the harbour but at least the winter's ice hadn't set in yet. He could pull up the gondel’'s oars and not worry about getting stuck against the canal walls.
He pulled his cloak about him and, as was required, waited. Over his head, acrobats in jewel-coloured silk and belled slippers twisted and turned and leapt across the canal, swinging on bars, contorting on wires, and skipping so lightly over the slimmest of ropes that they seemed to be dancing in the air. Braziers lining the canal-sides did little to keep them warm and Shiro marveled that they didn't slip.
The doors of the gambling dens, clubs and houses of particular tastes and reputations opened and closed, spilling clouds of spiced warmth and fragrances down to the water. Shiro wrinkled his nose. Van Gal had once said to Shiro that, with time, he would come to learn that Ketterdam only had three smells on the air worth discerning: Money spent, money stolen and money free for taking.
Boots with hard heels tapped their toes on the bank. "Dozing on duty, Grisha?"
"I should hope not, young master." He would hardly call escorting Van Gal's nephew into Fifth Harbour a duty, but Shiro kept that opinion to himself. The gondel swayed as Lotor climbed down from the street and settled heavily into its cushioned seats. "Did you enjoy yourself?"
"Whether I enjoyed myself or not is none of your concern and certainly none of my uncle's," said Lotor with a sniff, but he glanced back to the House of White Roses, where a severe face, tailored to a shade of blue, had just turned away from a window. "She plays drez excellently. It frustrates me that I've yet to beat her."
Unmooring from the bank, Shiro rowed them out into the canal. Boatloads of tourists and revellers in garish carnival masks slid past them. It didn't matter if the masks were cheap and paper-thin. All they had to do was last one night then they could be crumpled and thrown like a night's memories into the canal's dark waters.
"Shiro?"
"Young master?"
"What were my uncle's exact words to you tonight?"
An acrobat decked in streaming satin ribbons soared overhead. She looked like a comet, silver and distant, made of a different magic.
"'Take him wherever he wants’," said Shiro, finding his breath again when the acrobat had landed. “See that he picks his indulgences tastefully. Wait for his return. Make sure any property damage is immediately paid for. Collect all receipts as necessary.' Nothing out of the ordinary, young master."
"I'll be the judge of that.” The oar dipped in and out of the water, catching on a trailing weed, a floating clod of silt. “You are his favourite guard. Why would he send you out on a trivial escort errand with me?"
The same question had been on Shiro's mind all evening but a break from guarding Master Van was not unwelcome. Perhaps, tonight there was simply no business to be had.
"The young master’s safety isn't trivial to the Van Gal family,” he said carefully.
Lotor pulled a face. "So you say."
There was a soft boom - a swollen noise Shiro felt rather than heard in his chest, hushed by distance, and the clouds over the warehouse district lit up furnace red.
A small wave rolling along the canal slapped against their hull and the gondel rocked. Shiro pulled the oars from the water with a curse, balancing them across his knees, and Lotor, lifting his eyes to the patch of glowing sky, braced himself in the back.
"It’s a little early in the year for fireworks."
Lotor was Van Gal. He knew perfectly well that had not been a firework. The white-crested ripples from the explosion were still dragging along the gondel’s sides. Bells were pealing on the wind. If Shiro was a gambling man – which, he was not - he might have wagered on a frigate's worth of gunpowder, holy smoke or potaschen. In any case, somebody had just lost something of no small value and, come the morning, somebody else would be paying for it.
Red burned cold and angry along the bellies of clouds fattened with snow, the colour of the Corporalki, the colour of blood on frostbitten earth and glowing ash, and the bloom of a spark at the tips of Keith’s fingers bursting into raging fire –
"Take us home, Shiro."
"Yes, sir."
"There's a good, dutiful, grateful Grisha," Lotor mimicked his uncle. His lips twisted. "I do not understand how you put up with that."
Grisha had no choice but be dutiful. All but pickpocketted of their rights as soon as they set foot in the harbour, they had been conned into selling themselves in indenture contracts most hadn't been able to read. Desperation had made them grateful to be bought.
Stop it, Shiro. Don’t think of Ravka. Don’t think of the war. What was done was done.
Now, only the consequences.
The blades of the oars dipped down into water. The gondel glided along the canal, propelling them away from the lights of Fifth Harbour and into the wider waterways of the main thoroughfare, until soon they were winding their way between the white-walled private boathouses behind the Geldenstraat.
Of the distant warehouse fire, Shiro thought nothing more of it. Perhaps there would be a brief surge in business at the bathhouse in the morning, of customers keen to scrub the smell of smoke from their skin and hair, but, for the most part, he put all his thought into rowing the gondel as smoothly and unhurried as possible - because either the warehouse fire was none of his business or he was enjoying his last few moments of blissful ignorance.
Once Lotor was delivered to his valet, Shiro returned to Van Gal’s Grisha workshop. The bells in the warehouse district were still ringing. Thinking that he might see Keith sitting on the rooftop, drawn out by the lights and the noise, he raised his eyes to the roof of the converted dairy barn (Grisha indentures were, it turned out, better investments than cattle, despite having more expensive upkeep) with a smile.
But there was no sign of Keith, no thin silhouette looking to the sky or down to the path, waiting for Shiro, no window on a latch left for him to climb back in. His window was dark, the candle snuffed.
Shiro had told him not to wait up but it was a rare thing for Keith to obey.
Footsteps crunched on gravel and a shadow carrying a lantern rounded the side of the workshop. "Shiro!"
"Matt?"
Matt pulled down the scarf covering his face and sniffed. His nose was red from the harbour chill. He was breathing fast and shallow as if he had been running. "Keith isn't with you?"
"Not tonight. Why?” Dread wrapped one cold finger around Shiro’s throat and another. “Isn't he asleep?"
"Pidge went to wake him half an hour ago to see the fire from the roof. You know what they're like. His bed was empty.” The thin light of the lantern turned Matt’s pale face into something ghostly, a messenger, a spirit. “We've been looking for him on the estate but Dad thought maybe you took him with you on Van Gal’s business."
"Van Gal said he didn’t need me. I was attached to Lotor tonight."
"Ah. Chaperoning the merchling. A noble cause," said Matt loftily, and they both laughed but it was too brittle, too forced, and the laughter fell apart in moments into wisps of greasy yellow fog. "Van Gal went out tonight.”
“He did?”
“Dad saw the black gondel go out. Maybe he took Keith with him instead of you. Somebody was rowing and I’d bet my boots it wasn’t old Councilman Sendak Van Gal."
"Maybe."
The wind smelled of brine and oil but there was smoke now too, an aftertaste of charred bitterness. The bells were still ringing.
They both waited for the other to say it first, to voice the possibility, to deny it, because there was an Inferni - Etherealki, fire Grisha - missing and there was smoke over Ketterdam and red in the sky.
"Okay," Matt raked his hand through his hair, the shrapnel scar on his cheek from Ravka glistened, "okay. I'm sure there is a perfectly good, logical, ordinary reason behind this, just like there always is. I am not worried. At all. I am as chilled, serene and at peace as a nun who fell into the canal in winter - "
"Maybe he ran."
Matt stared at Shiro through the fog of their breaths. “You know he wouldn’t.”
But Shiro didn’t hear him, lost in the exhilaration of possibility.
Maybe Keith was gone.
Maybe he had done it, what they had both dreamed, sometimes threatened, sometimes pleaded, sometimes wept and joked that they'd do someday, today, tonight, tomorrow, some days all in a single breath, always followed by the silent winding canal of a question between them of where they could possibly go, often replaced by the joke of a question, "How far do you reckon we'd get?"
(The punchline was that they wouldn’t get anywhere at all)
"Shiro." Matt's hand landed firmly on his shoulder. "Keith would never leave us behind like this. He wouldn’t leave Pidge like this. He wouldn’t leave you. That's not our Keith."
“Saints, I wish it was.” Let Keith have, for once, been selfish. Let the bells be ringing because Keith was free.
But Matt was shaking his head. “His knife is still where he hides it.”
The dream shattered. If Keith had left he would never have done it without that knife at his back.
Shiro took a deep breath, then a second, and a third, sharp and shocking and tasting of frostbitten earth, the honey of the jurda flower on his teeth. Cold brine, dead fish and lamp oil filled his nose. "Has Sam talked to the house guards?"
"Saints, no." Matt shuddered and rubbed his arms. "We Grisha aren’t much more than walking and talking expensive rugs to them. We don't have their respect like you do. Not that you ever asked for their respect. Or that kind of respect."
"I'll do that then."
A little voice told him it would be useless, but Shiro needed to do something, needed to move. He couldn't go to his room only to lie awake with the bells, lights and smoke outside and the emptiness of Keith’s room above. "Keep an eye out for a Stadwatch patrol. Maybe we can ask what's going on out there."
Matt sighed and gave him a deft two-finger salute. "Yes, sir."
"Keith will probably be back in the morning."
"Of course, he will be. Bet he'll be laughing at all the fuss we made too."
They laughed too loudly and separated much too quietly. Shiro went to smile and loom at the house guards. Playing Van Gal's Champion numbed the wire of panic stretched taut and cutting at his insides.
Keith would be back in the morning, he assured himself as the night wore on and the glow of the fire disappeared from the sky. Keith was out on an errand for Councilman Van Gal. Van Gal would return with Keith in the black gondel.
There would be a perfectly good, logical, ordinary explanation for all of this, just as Matt had said there would be.
But what came back on the gondel of the Stadwatch was not a thing of any good, logical, ordinary world: A charred body, skin cracked to the bone and shiny with leaked oils, hair crimped and blackened by heat, face eaten by fire and forehead shattered by a rifle shot.
It wore Keith's gloves and Keith's prized half-chaps, red and white leather burned and fused to the skin, but there was no mistaking them and no way to hold back Matt’s sharp breath or Pidge’s wide-eyed dismay when the Stadwatch uncovered the body.
Shiro had tried to keep his face straight. He hadn’t wanted to confirm the thing on the ground as Keith. He hadn’t wanted to confirm the Stadwatch’s witnesses’ story.
A patrol had caught him setting fire to Van Gal's wares and chased him down until somebody had got in a lucky shot and dropped into the very fire he had caused.
He reaped what he sowed, said the witnesses from the warehouse, nodding with self-important profundity. Not just the boy, but Van Gal! Everybody had always warned him about keeping an Inferni as an indenture.
“Dangerous and volatile,” said the Stadwatch captain, shaking his head. “It was only a matter of time.”
"But why was Keith at the warehouse?" Shiro asked the Stadwatch, when they looked to be congratulating themselves on a job done and finished. "What was he doing there?"
They had looked at each other, then at Shiro, as though Shiro was the one who was out of his mind.
He was an ungrateful Grisha. Why look for a reason any more than obvious spite?
He was a dangerous Grisha, they then said, when the reports in the papers were pecked and shredded down to gossip. Who knew what he was thinking?
He is a dead Grisha, they said at last, when the body was sent to the Reaper's Barge. Who cares anymore?
Van Gal had lost a great deal of stock and a valuable indenture. That was the real tragedy in Ketterdam.
That was what everybody wanted to know. That was what mattered in the course of their lives. How much jurda had gone up in the flames? How much had the Grisha boy been worth to the business before the ungrateful freak had spat upon Van Gal's kindness?
"I am sorry, sir." Why was Shiro was apologising? What was he apologising for? That Keith had failed to get away? That he and the Holts, had all missed the signs that Keith was dangerous, Keith was volatile, that the rest of Van Gal's household and the bathhouse workers now insisted in hindsight had been there all along? "Whatever the value of stock lost, I swear it will be repaid."
Councilman Sendak Van Gal peered at Shiro over the walnut gleam of his desk, the red of his Fabrikator-made eye a hot coal in its sunken socket.
"That’s my good, dutiful Grisha,” he said.
Van Gal was smiling.