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Kaz Brekker was dead.
Inej could hardly believe it when she received the news from a terrified messenger. She didn’t believe it. She refused to accept even the possibility that anything could kill Kaz after all she had seen him do, all she had seen him survive.
She raced across the rooftops, heart hammering as rapidly as the beats of a hummingbird’s wings as she approached the scene. It wasn’t hard to find. All she had to do was follow the smoke.
He was lying on the ground when she arrived, prostrate and motionless. Inej immediately dropped down beside him, turning him so she could see his face, holding him close and hoping that he would awake at any moment so the frantic rhythm of her heart could subside because he was safe.
Inej cradled Kaz’s limp form as gently as she could, looking upon his twisted countenance, desperately wishing for it all to be a dream. She sent a prayer to her Suli saints, begging for absolution, begging for him to survive. But he was already gone.
Before her, a fire raged. But she did not care that she was so close to the scorching heat of the flames. The Wraith’s world had narrowed to herself and the broken boy she held, red blooming across his shirt like a macabre flower. The red encroached upon the edges of her cloak, the dry material greedily soaking up the blood.
How had it all gone so wrong?
Inej didn’t know how long she sat there, praying and trying to avoid the terrible truth of the matter. Reality set in as the fire faded to embers and Kaz’s body began to cool. Inej stood, stumbling slightly from crouching so long and looked back at the corpse. She longed to give him some sort of burial, but knew that was not what he wanted. What he would have wanted. Instead, he would be burned by morning, ashes scattering, forever remaining in the city he had called his own.
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Nina had just arrived in Ravka when she got the letter. A silent gasp, and the paper had fluttered to the ground, where Tamar retrieved it. Tamar frowned as she took in the contents of the message, looking up at Nina’s stunned face when she was finished.
Tamar placed a firm hand on Nina’s shoulder. “Despise your heart.”
“I have no heart,” she replied quietly. But even as she spoke the words, she knew that they were a lie.
Nina did have a heart. And perhaps that was the problem.
Instead of rejoicing as she returned to her former home, Nina could not help but grieve for those who had been lost.
Matthias. Kaz.
The fjerdan witch hunter and barrel bastard who had both held so much sway in her life.
Two that she never thought she would have to part with so soon.
And yet they were gone, and only ashes remained of what once had been.
Nina Zenik knew that she had a long life ahead of her. The more powerful the grisha, the longer they lived. But now she found herself wishing that she could give some of that life to those who had once fought at her side. It was a lost cause.
One day, Nina would see them again, but only in death.
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The silence was broken when Jesper crushed the ill-bearing missive in one of his tightly clenched fists. His shoulders trembled with repressed emotion as he fought to contain his tears.
Kaz Brekker was dead, and nothing made sense.
That one fact stood out boldly in the swirling maelstrom of Jesper’s thoughts as he lost the battle with himself and let his tears fall.
The impossible had happened, and he was left in the aftermath.
Jesper braced himself against the wall, slumping over, drained and suddenly feeling like he had lived enough to see more than one lifetime.
Today he lost a brother.
Today he lost a friend.
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Inej’s parents wasted no time comforting her when she arrived back at her ship. They asked no questions, not after seeing the state she was in.
Some small part of her felt selfish for feeling so hollow. She had her family. She had a purpose. She was free. Wasn’t that enough?
No, Inej thought as she retired to her cabin, it wasn’t.
The heart was like an arrow. It demanded aim to land true. But her target had been taken away. Inej cast a quick glance at the cloak she had been wearing earlier, stained dark with Kaz’s blood. She pulled it down, holding the blood-stiff fabric bunched up over her heart. Kaz Brekker was a thief, a murderer, and one of her many captors. She loved him regardless.
For so long she had struggled to get free of the chains that bound her to Ketterdam. Only now did she realize that she hadn’t wanted to be free of the chains that bound her to Kaz, when it was already too late.
She could still hear words spoken in his rock-rasp voice during one of their many conversations.
“And you?”She had asked.
“I wreak all the havoc I can until my luck runs out,” he had replied, ”I use our haul to build an empire.”
“And after that?”
“Who knows? Maybe I’ll burn it to the ground.”
He never had the chance to build his empire.
Inej chuckled bitterly. Looks like his luck had run out sooner than he thought it would. Just like it would for all of them, all of them who had been tainted with blood, all that had lived lives of scars and regret and had lost what made them human along the way.
She lay back on her bunk in the darkness, at let herself be consumed by the tumult of her mind for a single moment. She let herself imagine how it would have been if Kaz had lived. If she had remained his wraith. If she had the chance to have him.
The world looked so different now that she knew she would never get that chance, even though it had been right in front of her for long enough. Could she truly move on now when she knew that the echo of him would remain with her always like the echoes of all the other deaths she had witnessed during her brief life? Now that she had watched him disappear before her eyes?
Ghosts kill the strongest of men.
Inej knew she would never be truly ready to release him. That he would forever remain, as a memory, as a legend, a constant presence pushing at her mind. But even so, she reached out to the part of herself that clung to him through the shadows that separated them, and caught hold of Kaz for a mere fraction of a second. Then she took a deep breath, gathered all of her grief and all of her regret, and let him go.