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Inej Ghafa had been born on the feast day of Sankt Petyr, which meant that she was born to be an acrobat or a sailor. A child with the blessing of Sankt Petyr was light on her feet, at home in high places, and would never come to grief at sea. Sankt Petyr of the favorable winds who guided ships home. Sankt Petyr, who, when he had been thrown from his lighthouse so that the port could be taken by sea raiders, had not fallen, but turned into a sea eagle and flown.
Inej was fairly sure that when Sankt Petyr had given her his blessing by allowing her to be born on his feast day, this was not what he’d had in mind.
She was crouched on the ridge of a roof three stories up, her shoes and stockings a cold, damp bulge against her back, where she’d tucked them into the waist of her skirt, listening to her target, Bram Kuyper, recovering from a round of enthusiastic drunken sex. Her toes ached from gripping the cold, rough shingles. In her year at the Menagerie, her feet had lost nearly all their calluses, and she could only hope the raw scrapes she was sure her soles were covered with would heal cleanly.
She’d scale a thousand buildings barefoot and walk miles over broken glass before she ever went back there. Inej was not made for that life. She was Suli, and contrary to the erotic myths women like Tante Heleen wove about her people, they were defined not by passion or savagery, but loyalty and stubborn practicality. She owed a debt to Brekker for buying her freedom from that place, and she had at last been given the chance to start paying it. Sankt Petyr had guided her to harbor in this unlikely place, with these unlikely people, and she trusted his guidance. It was not a home, but she would not return home, not yet. Not as this soiled and fractured girl with a debt hanging over her head.
Inej tuned out the noises of the streets and focused on the words being spoken in the small room above. Men said all sorts of things in bed with a woman, but only the ones they said after the act were true. Just as she would once have learned the lyrics of a song or the words of an Istorya Sankt’ya -- a saint’s tale -- she put Bram and his lover’s words to a rhythm and set them down in her head. It was more difficult than remembering things in her native language, and Inej found herself wondering again at how anyone could think entirely in Kerch. It was such a strange language, with so many words and phrases for business dealings and so few for the great mysteries of the world. Bram did his best to convey his tender feelings, considering the limitations he was working within, but to Inej’s Ravkan ears, it still sounded more like he was praising a valued financial asset than a beloved mistress.
Then it began to rain, and Inej’s concerns turned to the more immediate matter of how she was going to get safely off the roof.
**
Kaz Brekker tapped his fingers on the head of his cane as he took in the dripping, barefoot Suli girl whose indenture he had borrowed over a year’s pay from Per Haskell to purchase. Even slipping through his window looking like a half-drowned kitten, she had moved soundlessly and with a grace that put him on edge.
“So you followed him to the Gilded Bower. Then, when you couldn’t slip in the back way or pick the lock to a ground floor window, you scaled the alley wall to the roof three stories up and listened outside of each window until you found the room he was in?” he repeated carefully, wanting to make sure he had understood Inej correctly.
She nodded.
Kaz continued. “There, he met a woman named Lotte, and they drank and fucked. They planned their next meeting in three days. She said her husband, Stijn, will be meeting with his investors then.”
“About the wool shipments from Novyi Zem,” Inej added in a quiet, precise voice. Her hair was straggling wetly around her face. The nondescript Kerch peasant skirt and blouse he’d given her had not been flattering on her to begin with, and was now creased, muddied, and sodden. Kaz took her in from head to toe, thinking. Planning.
Kaz Brekker had looked at the ruins of Fifth Harbor and seen the rich profits that could be reaped from it. Now he looked at Inej Ghafa and knew why his instincts had guided him to take a chance on her. Wheels turned in his mind.
“Your memory’s good. Can you read?” Most people with memories that sharp had developed them to compensate for poor literacy skills, and Tante Heleen wouldn’t have bothered to teach her. She preferred indentures who couldn’t read their contracts.
“In Ravkan. Not so well in Kerch. I’m still learning.”
“Jesper can teach you. I want you to be able to intercept written messages and commit them to memory as well as you can overheard conversations. You’ll learn lockpicking from me. The climbing -- what would you need to get to the window of a higher, steeper building?” Kaz was mentally running through the offices and mansions that this girl might be able to mine of their secrets, given the proper supplies.
“Climbing spikes and trousers with padded knees. Thin-soled shoes with an uneven surface.” Inej raised her chin slightly. “A cot of my own to sleep in. Annika snores.”
She knew her value. Good. In half a year, Kaz suspected she would be the Dregs’ secret weapon. “Done,” he said. “There’s a knife on the desk. Take it.” It was a well-made thing, with a hardwood grip and a stylized ship embossed into the leather of the sheath. He’d taken it from a Razorgull who’d tried to get the drop on him in an alley last week.
Inej picked it up, turning it over in her hands and then holding it, testing its weight.
“Have Roeder teach you to fight with it. I want you to be able to kill a man as cleanly and silently as you can climb a rooftop.” He held up a gloved finger when she opened her mouth to protest. “I’m not going to use you as an assassin, Inej. What you’re going to be is a spider. A spider climbs into secure places, sees and listens and leaves without a trace -- or occasionally, leaves with something very valuable. But even a spider needs to be able to bite. You’ll be a natural with knives. You’re light but steady on your feet, you’re small, and you move fast.” Before he’d broken his leg, knives had been his weapon as well.
“What I heard tonight … was it the information you needed?” Inej asked boldly, pocketing the knife and wringing her hair out over the washbasin.
Tonight, Kaz did not say, had been a test of her abilities. He’d wanted to know she could follow a twitchy target without being seen. If Kuyper had realized that he was being followed, he would have gone to an alehouse instead. He’d had reasonable confidence that Inej could tail him to the Bower without being noticed and report how long he stayed so that Kaz could better plan to break into his home office during his next regular trip there. It had been an ideal first job, straightforward but requiring stealth and attention to detail. What he had not expected was for the girl to climb three stories, balance on a wet rooftop for over an hour, and return with the information that the mistress Bram Kuyper was meeting at the Gilded Bower was the wife of Stijn Van Zandt, a middling player in the Merchant’s Council. And she’d learned when they were next meeting.
“It was information we’ll all profit from. I’ll have a set of lock picks for you tomorrow and teach you to use them, and climbing gear within the next couple days. You may need to custom order the shoes. In two weeks, I expect you to know how to use both the lock picks and that knife.”
“And the cot?” She would accept high demands on her skills but would not budge on the terms she demanded for them. Kaz could work with that.
“I’ll have that for you tomorrow too,” he promised. “Go borrow some dry clothes to change into. There’s food and ale downstairs as well.” He’d briefly considered giving her some of his own spare clothing -- it would be loose in the shoulders and long in the legs, but would probably fit -- but it was better for her to spend time and form connections with the other Dregs. So far, Inej had kept her distance, kept to herself as much as possible. It would do both her and them good to get to know each other, because she was about to become indispensable to them.
“Inej Ghafa,” he said with a twist of his lips and an ironic salute, “welcome to the Dregs.”