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The Church of Barter’s highest point was on Ghenzen’s pinky finger.
Kaz had always thought the conceit of the building was ridiculous: to worship standing still in the palm of god’s hand and imagine that he would not just close his fist. But still, the view was incredible: it stretched over the lowest, darkest alleyways of Ketterdam and the glittering Merchant’s squares all the same. It equalized them in a way that the world did not usually have the grace to do. In the distant parts of Kerch he could spot, the clouds were touching the hills of the earth: rain, soon, then. Bad for tourists, but good for indoor gambling clubs with roofs that did not leak like the cheap inns they were staying at.
But that was Dirtyhands’ thinking. Kaz Brekker enjoyed the way the grey haze painted itself down the horizon, spreading across the earth. The way the wind carried the clean, wet air through the valleys and hovered just over the city beside him, like it was picking up its foot and deciding whether or not Ketterdam was a safe place to step.
He may be a miserable son-of-a-bitch most of the time, but he enjoyed beauty, truly, and the air was thinner up so high, cooler and quicker to fill his lungs without the thick scent of body heat and too much perfume to attempt to cover it.
It was unfortunate, then, that he hated heights.
He hadn’t always. He used to be quite a spry little thing, climbing up hills on barn rooftops, scaring his father to death, beckoning Jordie to join him. It was Jordie who always complained the whole way up, and who kept a death grip and silent, clenched teeth the whole way down.
But he’d always come. Always ended up pressed keenly into Kaz’s side, fists gripping the tile until his fingertips were pale. But that was then: Jordie had become a lot paler. Kaz had become much less lithe. Heights began to make him grip tightly on to the railings, knuckles bruisingly tight.
Now, he was on the top of Ghenzen’s pinky finger, and Inej was punishing him. It was the only reason he could think that the note had asked him to meet her here: up eight flights of stairs, clinging to the sloping roof of the spire, looking out and down. He clutched his cane to his chest for fear of dropping it and skewering some poor pigeon gawking up at the roof of the Cathedral and the hard-breathing gargoyle that sat with his feet pressed against the railing.
“Inej,” he said, when the soft feeling of the rain-bringing wind shifted and changed around him.
From the shadows, Inej pulled herself from the dark paths of the building. She wore leather pants that wrapped around her calves and her hips, and a long, loose cotton shirt with a hemline that brushed against her thighs and floated gently across in the breeze. Her hair was pinned out of her face, but was otherwise streaming down her shoulders, down to her waist.
For a moment it didn’t matter at all if Kaz was on the top of a mountain or in the caverns beneath the earth, there was nothing else: he existed only as a pair of open eyes, a parted mouth, fingers reaching into empty air. Kerch was gone, shrunk down to a girl-sized planet, inhabited only by himself.
“Kaz,” said Inej. Her voice was deeper, raspier, worn down by the salt, the yelling over sea-wind and to men on the other side of long, thick rope. She had a long sword sheathed on her hip, the hilt a silver-and-bronze tangle of metal, less subtle than the knives but necessary, for a pirate.
Needed, to be drawn against the throats of slavers without the privilege of feeling her breath against their throats. Kaz blinked once, long and slow, trying to shake himself out of imagining all of that—part of him was at the end of the sword, neck against the cool metal, safe and familiar, and part of him was reduced down to the new and fearful feeling of Inej’s breath in the first place.
“Is this a punishment?” he asked.
It was Inej’s turn to blink, uncertain.
“My visit?”
Kaz thought: never.
“Mostly the rendezvous,” he said, instead. “Eight flights of stairs, Inej. So is it punishment? Or did you just miss seeing me hobble?”
Inej gave a half-crooked smile, pressing into the apples of her cheeks pleasantly. She sat down next to him on the peeling roof-tiles, pressing her feet against the railing, inches from his. But she kept her torso and her head and her breath at least a foot away, leaning back hard into the spire instead of leaning away from him.
“You never hobble,” she said.
Kaz made a face. He didn’t know why, but he took it as a challenge.
“I hobble,” he said, petulant. “Sometimes. I’m capable of hobbling. When I don’t have my cane, after a long day—”
Inej turned her head from the view and looked at him, one eyebrow artfully raised. In a moment, he realized his own foolishness, his own eagerness to hold up a piece of information about himself and present it to her on still-gloved palms, as if that would be enough to convince her that he had changed, unbroken more of himself and shoved it into place. As if she had been gone long enough, now, look at him: a man once again in the months she had been at sea.
Isn’t it time to come back, his words had asked, without asking at all.
She did him the grace of not mentioning it, just ducked her head again and looked back at the crooked brokenness of Ketterdam instead, for once, at the crooked brokenness of himself.
“I don’t want to see you hurt enough to hobble,” she said, softly.
Then she closed her eyes and relaxed, resting her head against the cragged stone behind them, as if she understood now her place between them. As if she had given up hope she may be able to move nearer at all. It made Kaz itch. He thought about inching his wrist nearer to hers, but pulled it back anyway. He still didn’t even know why she was back.
“Why here?”
Another smile spread it’s way across her face, although this time it was a cat’s smile, a pirate’s glittering grin, wide enough for the moon to bounce off of her teeth.
“You’re not the only one with a reputation, now, Brekker,” she said. “The Wraith is less conspicuous in the port with every passing day.”
“With every slaver taken down,” he said, softly. When he said this, she flicked her eyes over to him, pride glistening in them in bright, sparks of glory. It made his chest feel full of crackling wood, burning fast and hot.
“And every daughter rescued,” she said. “People fear me like pigeons do you.”
“And hope for you,” Kaz said. “Like an angel. Slaying devils. Freeing the faithful.”
Not long ago, near the port, Kaz sat in the corner of an ale house, listening to the idle chatter of the tourists and the merchants, of the young people gathered around their first taste of freedom in the form of watered-down ale and stale pastry. Aren’t you scared, one will say, ...feel like I should carry a pistol, around here. And then they will start talking, about the conmen,
the swindlers, Dirtyhands himself, and of course, the monster underneath their beds at night: the slavers who come and snatch them from their youth.
And they will be scared, but they will say:
I’m too smart to get swindled.
I don’t even gamble.
But the slavers come for the smart and for the world-weary and for the vigilant all the same. They come armed and in numbers, with a duty and a determination, feeding off of the useful lie of the victim’s folly: the taken were stupid, silly, unobservant, drunk, trusting, naive. Even though the young people bolster themselves with this lie, that their tragedy could be avoided with proper planning, they still talk with fear behind the tremble of their voices. But then, sometimes, a reverence.
Have you heard? There is a pirate. Rescues them, sometimes. She—
A girl?
She’d been taken before, they say.
So she knows.
She treats them gently. Says it’s not their faults.
The slavers?
No. The girls. She kills the slavers.
“Don’t tell me you found religion without me.”
Kaz’s smile was crooked, too. He looked over at her with his head pressed against the same stone, imagining that it were closer, that their noses might nearly touch, that their eyes would be close enough to fill every square inch of vision.
“Only in Sankta Inej,” Kaz said, voice low.
Inej’s eyes were wide in the moonlight. Deep, dark, magical things, like the sea on a clear, still day. Nothing more important above them, nothing completely understandable or known beneath. Still, he wanted to wade into them, sharks be damned.
“Blasphemous,” said Inej.
For a moment Kaz looked at her, wondering, wondering, wondering. He stretched out his hand. It was steady beneath the glove—but he had done this before. He laid it across hers, and did not even shudder. From beneath, and looking away, she entangled her fingers into his. Suddenly, the drop beneath them did not seem so terribly far. The clouds above them did not seem as incredibly near.
Sitting atop the highest point in Ketterdam, Inej’s hands tied him solidly to the ground.
“So we’re just avoiding the crowds?” he said. “Couldn’t we have done that in my office?”
“Is it so terrible I wanted to be completely alone with you, Kaz?”
“No,” said Kaz. He didn’t even have to think about it.
If he had it his way, he and Inej might be alone with each other forever: if forever could exist slowly, with days sprawling out against themselves, with enough time to inch closer towards what needed to be done. If they could be only themselves, and only alone together, for however long it took for them to bury themselves in each other, new and deep, until alone did not exist anymore. Until they were always just the two of them, soul tied to soul, body to body, limb to limb, heart to heart.
“I missed you,” said Inej.
“Inej, I—”
But missed was not the word. He had not existed until she had returned. He had been letters sent from one to the other, stories heard over ale, memories of her laugh and her smile and her neck against his lips. He had been nothing but pieces that he was trying to mold back together before she came to see the wreckage once more.
But how to say it?
Inej, I—
Keep your letters in my breast pocket.
Listen to your legends, sing them to myself later like songs.
Am nothing important without you.
Have loved you since—
Love you now—
Am trying to be someone who deserves—
“Could barely keep myself from buying my own damn ship. I wanted to find you in the middle of the ocean and beg you to spend the day with me again.”
Inej blinked, her mouth parted and her eyes blown wide. Through the slits of his gloves, meant for the smooth paper of cards or the glinting cool weight of jewelry, he could feel Inej’s skin, warm and pulsing, and suddenly he wished he was rid of the damn things. Instead, he threaded his fingers closer, held his hand tighter, as if to make up for the narrow amount of her that he could actually feel.
“I would have swam to you,” said Inej. Her voice was barely above a whisper. “If you’d have come.”
Kaz licked his lips. Had they been that dry all evening? His heart was beating fast, but not too fast. Not yet. His eyes were held open wide, so that he might take in all of her: the fullness of her lips, the deep kohl lining her eyes, the length and curl of their lashes. The smooth taught muscle on her arm, the deep tan curve of her elbow. The slim, prominent bones of her wrist, resting against his.
“I didn’t buy a boat,” he said. “But I’ve trying for this.”
Even from this far, he can hear Inej’s breathing, shallow and slow.
“For what?”
If he thought about it anymore he would doubt himself or implode. So it was with swift, measured and careful motion that he reached over with the hand not entangled in hers, and placed it against her neck. He should have taken the gloves off—stupid, idiot, fool, but he had been afraid: of rejection, either hers or his own. But he felt none of the fear he normally did now, just warmth in his gut and the insistent beat of his own heart, and he wanted to feel hers.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay if you can’t do this, Kaz.”
Slowly, he leaned forward. The first point of skin-contact between them was their foreheads, pressed up against each other, eyebrows furrowed into one another. Up close, the smooth sea of her eyes became a storm, lit up with thought and desire and wit and joy and fear. Kaz wanted to bury himself in them, to learn the currents and the depths.
He could feel her breath against his throat, warm and damp and shaking.
“I am going to try,” he said, and then he lifted her chin and pressed his lips against hers.
For a few moments, it was almost incomprehensible. He could focus only on a few senses at a time, and touch became lower down on the list than he expected. First there was the scent of her: the sweat and the sea and the sweet floral oils she wore behind her ears and on her wrists. Open mouthed, the smell filled his head, and drove him to move even nearer; to take her hand still clasped in his and push it back so that he was leaning over her, their chests rising and falling, touching and then cowering away.
Then there was the sound of her: gasps and shaking breaths, teeth clashed against his own. The delicate chains around her throat twinkled when they moved against each other, when he pushed her back against the wall.
The taste, salt and sugar and steel. He tasted it on her lips, on her jaw, on her hairline.
But there is still touch. It creeps up on him, the monster under his own bed at night. At first there is the soft swell of her lips, the solid weight of her back pressed against his hands, the careful curl of her fingers in his own. But then, after he has pushed her as far in the corner of the balcony as she can fit, she stills for a moment and pushes back, and things fall apart quickly.
Her hands carded in his hair. Her palm stretched flat against his chest and pushed him down, against the ground, and then she was nearly flat against him, and he opened his eyes to see her, to ground himself, but his vision had gone fuzzy and black and narrow around the edges.
He felt carved open, all of the sudden, his insides bleeding out, weak and shaking. He was sinking in an ocean and Jordie was on top of him instead of beneath him, and he could not push him off, could not rescue himself from the water filling his lungs. When he scratches, desperately, at Jordie’s arms, to find purchase, to flip them over, to get his head out from underneath, his skin flakes beneath his fingers. It falls off in patches and strips, floats away in the tide along with his breath.
Then suddenly the weight was off of him again, and he was pulling in gasping, shattering breaths, his chest burning and his palms curled in on themselves. He rested his head against the cool metal filigree of the railing, breathed through his teeth, and tried not to throw up. He kept his eyes screwed tight.
After awhile of panting, of Inej a careful distance away, silent and waiting, Kaz took one final breath and placed his hands over his eyes, falling back against the pillar behind them. He didn’t take his hand off his eyes when he apologized.
“I tried,” he said, and then, unbidden, “Does it mean anything to you if I say I have never tried before?”
“It’s alright,” said Inej. Her voice was steady, but there was something underneath it. Worry, he assumed, but that felt wrong. It was impossible, but it nearly sounded like shame. “I should have known better than to do that without checking if it was alright.”
“You couldn’t,” said Kaz, but it came out too whiny, too desperate and raw. He wished she had. He had been enjoying so much of what had come before it. He swallowed down another gulp of air and tried again. “You couldn’t have known.”
Inej was silent for a moment.
“I should have known, better than anyone,” she said. “When you pushed me back, I felt the same.”
When he had recovered from the shock, guilt settled, filling the spaces that panic had left like thick, dark oil. It coated him the same, anyway. He should have known. Or, indeed, he had known, had always known. He should've been less focused on trying to prove to her that he could best his demons and more focused on which of her own were biting at her heels, too.
“I’m sorry,” he said. It was a wretched sentence from a wretched person, but Inej took it all the same. She placed her palm flat on the balcony, next to his, but not touching.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and it was a blessing. “We were both thinking of ourselves.”
Kaz was quiet for a moment. The truth was he had been thinking entirely of himself, but only in relation to her, only the parts of him that were feeling her had mattered, until he had no choice in what he felt at all. He wanted desperately to go back to the person he existed as when he was kissing her, but he knew that it wasn’t his choice to make. He looked over past the city, to the hills of Kerch where the rain slowly moved towards them.
“How can you stand it?”
Inej parted her lips, stunned in silence for a moment.
“Selfishness?”
“No,” said Kaz, although that was always a part of it. He was selfish, but so was Jesper, sometimes. He had no doubts of her love of him. “Watching it run me like this. You were backed in a corner and you pushed your way out of it and I didn’t even know you were down. So how?”
“Kaz—” said Inej, slowly, and he could barely stand the tenderness in her voice at all.
“You’re so much stronger,” said Kaz. It had always been true, and they had both always known it. They had both always been untouchable people, but the difference had always been in the why. “How can you stand me?”
Inej was untouchable because she was lithe and clever and always found a way back to her feet, because she chose when she wanted to be touched and when she did not. She could hug Jesper and Nina, she could hold the hands of a child whose first time on the sea had been on a slaver’s ship, who was shaking and sick and scared. She could hold her hands to the throat of the man who had taken them. She was untouchable like a hot coal, like a frozen lake, like the edge of a knife. Something you did not touch because it may choose to sting.
Kaz was untouchable because he was fragile. He had put the armour around himself, sent out the warnings, the glares and the beatings, the gloves and the staircases between him and the world, because it was the only protection he had. If you were up close, if you had gotten through the rest of it, he was nothing but a soft-bellied creature who could not rise from his back. He was untouchable like an expensive vase, stained glass. Something you did not touch because it would shatter the moment you did.
“I overcame it because I had to,” said Inej. Kaz looked over to her: her brows were set together, her eyes looking out into the distance, glassy and downcast. “I found out how to take my mind from my body and set it on a shelf. And then...when there was something worth feeling, I found out how to put it back in.”
“I’ve never been without my mind,” said Kaz. “Not for one damned minute.”
“No,” agreed Inej, with a touch of sympathy in her voice. The same voice that had asked was there no one there to protect you? It would have been unbearable coming from anyone else. He held it close to his chest when it came from her. “Do you think that’s the problem? You always feel all of it. What if you gave yourself permission not to?”
Suddenly, Kaz’s lungs felt damp, coated with water. It was a sickly feeling that worked its way into his stomach, causing it to roll unpleasantly. He pressed his back into the wall behind him, praying it would ground him, finding it did not.
“What do you mean?”
“What if there was a way to quiet it?”
To quiet him, thought Kaz. To silence Jordie, once and for all.
He had tried before, hadn’t he?
Suddenly, he was no longer drowning. The water inside of him had sloshed, violently titled, and then evaporated in to nothing, and instead the heels of his feet were pressing in to the ledge of a building. Ketterdam, as he had seen it before, was stretched out in front of him, although it was a smaller section, this time. The bank was not nearly as high as Ghenzen’s finger beds, but he had thought that it was high enough. He had said, before, that he broke his leg during a robbery, that he had fallen to escape stadwatch pursuit. It painted him as the kind of person who would not flinch at his own demise, if it meant getting the last say. As someone who would leap from a roof and assume his own survival, or at least a valiant death.
It was, as all things were with Kaz Brekker, a half-truth.
It had been a bank. He was being chased.
But it was not a fall, it was a graceless, intentional jump. And it was not the stadwatch behind him, nipping at his heels and driving him from the roof, it was a ghost.
It was Jordie.
Jordie’s body had haunted him in the most obvious ways. Had landed him in gloves, a hundred steps away from anyone who may wish they were nearer to him, a beat-down from Teapot and a hurt, cold glare from Imogen. But his voice was more insidious, more subtle. It spoke to him in fits and bursts in the middle of the night, whispering into his ear every time he saw a card trick or a pot of chocolate. He hated Jordie for leaving him, hated himself worse for what he had done to survive, but missed him, with an ache he could not name, with words he could not form.
He could avoid touch, he could avoid the memories and the shop and the harbor. But for all his trying, he could not avoid his brother. And so he followed, a ghost like a shadow behind him, and now he stood next to him, looking down at the wet cobblestone streets.
There had been no way to separate his grief from his shame. After awhile, there had been no way to separate the shame from himself. What future was there, in that? And Jordie called him home, so he let his body lean forward, his feet scrabble at the edge, and then pushed one leg off and fell.
When he had woken up from the fall, he thought for a moment he was home. There was a fire in front of him—didn’t they always have fires, before Ma died? She’d tell them stories. Da would look over books, worry about the crops. Jordie would peg dolls out of fallen branches and hand them to Kaz as soon as he was finished.
But when he asked for Jordie, Per Heskell answered.
What were you running from, boy?
There was a healer, too. He was looking at Kaz’s leg, wrapping it in bandages. It made Kaz’s skin crawl, but when he tried to move away, he found that his body did not respond to him. It took only one jolt of his leg to send him into a fit of nausea powerful enough that it almost overwhelmed Jordie’s memory.
Stadwatch.
An easy, obvious lie. He closed his eyes against Per Heskell’s lecture.
The pain was terrible—a nauseous, visceral pain that trailed up his calf and into the joint of his knee. It was nothing compared to the hands: ghosting over his skin and poking and prodding for swelling or broken cartilage. It felt like he could not come back from either of these feelings: not the sharp blow of the ache, not the slick, terrible heat of the blood, not the sweaty, shaking feeling of their touch. So he asked.
Will it mend?
The healer looked down at Kaz’s leg, half-wrapped in bandages. The bone was back in place, but still he worried at his lip before he answered, shrugging nervously.
You’ll walk.
That’s not the same thing. Kaz had said. Back then, his voice still trembled. Will it mend?
“Kaz,” said Inej. Her voice brought him back into his own body, long since recovered from the break.
“I can’t,” said Kaz. He pushed at his knees with the heels of his palms, feeling the ache in his leg where it had once been so broken, bone sticking out from skin. Will it mend? Did mending mean forgetting Jordie altogether? “I can’t leave him.”
“Your brother,” said Inej. “Jordie, right?”
She was always so smart. She did not find secrets on every single poor sod Kaz had asked her to find secrets on because she simply listened. She listened, to the important and to the not, she looked and she learned and she fit pieces together until she found the truth, and then she brought it back to him, and pretended like it had taken no effort of hers at all.
“You can forget what was done to you,” he said. His voice was low, barely a whisper. “It deserves to be buried. But did he?”
Inej was quiet for a moment. Her hand had not left from beside his, and it still did not, even as she worried her lips and furrowed her brow. Kaz hung his head low, unable to look at her without starting to want again, a treacherous path that would simply lead them back here, a flat circle of desire and horror and shame and fear.
“I don’t forget, Kaz,” she said. “To forget, I’d lose my rage. I would...if I forgot, how horrible it was, I’d be back here the next day. My memories, my grief is what saves them. So no, I don’t forget it. You don’t have to either.”
“Then how?” Kaz meant to demand, but it faltered and failed out of his lips. It turned into a keening, desperate plea. “How do you stand it?”
Inej chewed her lip.
“Do you trust me?” she asked.
The wind blew through Kaz’s chest like kitetails. What kind of question was that? Kaz trusted her as he trusted his own hands. Kaz trusted her like he trusted the sun to rise, the moon to sit in the sky, the wind to blow on his face. He trusted her as his heart beat, as his lungs pulled in air. There was not a conscious thought to direct the emotion: it just was, had been, and always would be.
“You have to ask?”
Inej paused for a moment, but then shook her head, eyes narrow.
“Sometimes I just want to hear it, Brekker.”
Kaz looked at her, locking eyes. Time was a flat circle. He wanted to pull himself into them. He shook himself out of the desire, but did not look away.
“I trust you.”
She nodded to herself and reached in to her satchel, pulling out a small leather bag, twisted shut with red tie. It sat unassuming in her hand, but it may as well have been a bomb to Kaz, for how little he understood it. He leaned away, almost. Not knowing made him uneasy. But she didn’t make him wait long before she opened it, pouring it out in to her palm.
From the bag tumbled a half-dozen small, shriveled green plant-trimmings. They sat in her hand like grit, but her fingers curled around them like rubies. He blinked at her.
“Jurda,” she said. “The roots are a depressant.”
Kaz looked at them with wide eyes and then furrowed his brow. He tilted his head at her, and unbidden, the corners of his mouth twisted just-slightly.
“I find,” he said, slowly, “That I am depressed enough.”
A snort fought its way out of Inej’s throat. It was clear that she didn’t think this was an appropriate time to laugh at him, but he could not imagine a more appropriate time to hear her laughter, deep and wonderful as it was. What time do you send a lifeboat, after all? When do you throw the rope? When a man is swimming laps, or when he is drowning? Inej’s laugh moored him to the shore.
“Very funny,” she said. “They won’t make you more gloomy, that’s not what they’re for.”
She held one out, motioning for him to take it from her.
“Jesper would say there isn’t a version of me that is capable of being gloomier, anyway,” said Kaz, half-rolling his eyes. Then he sobered, taking one of the stems from her hand. Even through his gloves, he could feel the warmth of her skin, and it set his heart pounding. “What are they for, then?”
“To leave you with the memory,” she said. “But take away the pain.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Tell me what happened to Jordie.”
At the mention of his name, Kaz’s heart, which had already been beating fast enough before from Inej’s kiss, began to pound in earnest. His skin grew clammy and sweat, and from there there was only more moisture, building on his palms and his temples, and soon he would be drowning, like he always was.
“I can’t,” he said, sharply.
Inej did not flinch. She held the jurda to her lips, and put it on her tongue. She looked at him, and waited for him to do the same. I trust you, Kaz thought, and so he did.
It was nothing at first except an acidic taste that he thought would burn a hole through his tongue. The best thing he could say about it was that it was a new and uncomfortable distraction from the familiar terror that would normally mow him down.
But, after a moment, he could barely taste it. And his heart had stilled. There was no sick, wet feeling trembling against his limbs. He was fighting no current, and his hand was limp beside him, closer to Inej’s than it had been before.
“Sankta Inej,” he breathed. “And her holy plants.”
Kaz could see Inej’s lips quirk upwards from the side of his eyes, and he wanted to cover them with his own. The thought held no terror, or at least, the terror that it held was distant, placed behind a wave of calm that smoothed out the rough edges of it. He knew that he ought to be nervous, that he ought to feel terrible, but it was distant. It was there, but it was doable, in a way it had never been before.
“You may only blaspheme when it’s about me,” she said, underneath a breath. She held his gaze for a moment before she blinked, pleasantly. “How do you feel?”
Kaz blinked, slow. He stretched out his arms.
“Painless,” he said. “As if...as if it is still there, but I am stronger than all of it.”
“You always have been,” she said. He was tempted not to believe her, but she was Inej. She had never lied to him before. “Tell me about him? Not what hurts you. Tell me something soft. See for yourself how you can keep him.”
He trusted Inej, as his heart beat. Slow, unlabored. Driven by forces he did not always understand, that he had tried, with his own crooked hands, to end. But still it beat. Still he trusted her.
He was unsurprised when the words slipped easily from his lips. She was the only person he had ever imagined telling any of this to.
“I grew up on a farm,” he said. He closed his eyes, and his heart did one, painful twist when he saw his home painted against them, but it settled back down after that all the same. “I had a mother and a father and a brother. And cows and chickens. We liked to climb up on the barn roof.”
After he started, he found it was impossible not to continue. He told her about the fires and the peg dolls. He told her about Ma’s death and Da’s, how he did not take one step after that without Jordie by his side, clutching his hand tightly in his own. How he hadn’t taken a step since without his brother’s ghost clutching at him all the same.
“Will it ever mend?” he asked, again. Unable, still to help himself. His voice trembled again.
“You will mend,” she said. “If I could do it, Kaz, I know that you can.”
“You’re stronger than me,” he said.
“I will lend you some of my strength.”
“You’re too good for me,” he said.
“I thought I was a saint,” she said. “Saints show mercy to all sinners.”
“Inej,” he said. His voice was a torn piece of paper, a coffee-grind mess. He said her name like a prayer. On the top of the church, she touched her fingers to his, and waited for him to open his palm. Like a beggar, he did. She clutched his hand and brought it, slowly, to her chest, so that it rested against her heart. He did not pull away. He could feel her heart beating in time with his own.
Alive, here, alive.
“Thank you,” she said, “For telling me about Jordie. I would’ve loved to have known him.”
“I would have wanted for him to meet you.”
It was the first time he had ever imagined it, but suddenly he was sure of it. He would have wanted Inej to meet him, when he was still at his best: on the farm, carving wood and clutching at Kaz’s shoulders when they scrambled to the highest points. He would have wanted her to meet his Ma and Da, would have wanted to see her on the farm that he still paid for.
It was easier to tell Inej about his family, he realized, because he had already begun to include her in it.
His eyes stung, but his body remained on the rooftop. No part of him was underwater except for his cheeks, where saltwater tears traveled down, splashing against his cheekbones. Slowly, Inej reached out the back of her palm to brush them away.
As she did so, the storm clouds finally put their foot down on the spiney, uneven pathways of Ketterdam. Raindrops fell on them both, and she laughed, reaching out the hand that was not holding hers to feel them on her skin.
“It’s raining,” she said.
It did not matter. He could be in the middle of the ocean, drowning, with his head beneath the waves. All he could hear was her laugh.
“We should go,” she said.
He looked up at her. He was eyes, lips, and wanting hands once again.
“Come with me?”
“My crew will wonder where I’ve gone.”
“If you don’t, I will wonder too,” he said, shaking his head, looking up at her. Her eyes were small, with crinkles of laughter lines around them. Her lips were curled and soft. The rain fell slowly against her ink-black hair, sticking it to her jaw and her chin, all places he wished he were instead. “I will wonder how my heart has left its own body.”
Inej’s laugh bubbled up from her chest again. It danced off of the stone around them, carried through the wind and blew through his own chest, open and wanting and blessedly, gratefully, vulnerable. There was no other way it could travel so cleanly, land so fully. He reached up and wrapped his arms around hers, pulling her near to him as she still laughed, laughed in to his hair, into his neck, into his shoulder. He found himself laughing with her, both of the sounds bouncing off of each other, blending together, the most joyous sounds of praise this damned building had ever heard in its miserable life.
Jordie’s ghost may never lay at rest. He may always whisper in Kaz’s ear. He may always be there, in good moments and in bad, pulling him down to the bottom of the wine-dark sea. But he was certain, from this moment with Inej’s arm entwined in his, that he would never drive him to fall again.