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It’s far quieter here than in Ketterdam.
Kaz isn’t sure why he’s thinking about Ketterdam.
It has been years, after all, since he’s seen that city and the man it made him—which is the only way he’s still alive. He never expected to make it this far. He’s planned a thousand speeches and wry one-liners for when he wipes the blood from his mouth for the last time, for when the final job goes wrong, for when the bullet or blade finds its mark, for when his enemies are too many, for when Jordie finally brings him what he’s been cheating for too long. But it never seemed to happen. Even by a hairsbreadth, he made it out, until every one of those hairs was coarse and white and he’s got a house and it’s quiet.
His mind is still as sharp as one of his wife’s knives, and he can break more bones more quickly than nearly any man his age—though that’s not saying much—but he knows that it takes more than that to survive the city. If anyone knows, it’s him.
So he’s here. Somehow, by nothing short of a miracle, likely wrought by the one beside him whom many would call a Saint, he’s here, listening to the willows and the catydids. Better old here than rich and lazy, he figures. Better dead than lazy, for that matter. Better to be anywhere with her.
Inej stirs beside him and sits up halfway, white hair—that he loves as much as when it was black—falling over her shoulder.
“It’s early,” he murmurs, his voice gravelly and untested. In fact, dawn has barely begun to blush at the night sky’s splendor.
“It’s time,” she replies, suddenly completely alert. She pushes her hair aside and fixes him with her bright black eyes, unchanged. “Get my knife.”
Kaz hates the feeling of slowness that mornings give him now. “What for?”
“I’m lucky that I get to know when,” she says, more to herself, swinging her legs ever so slowly over the side of the bed. “I can keep my vow.”
Vow. That makes something in Kaz’s brain itch, a prickling memory of something Inej had told him—or maybe Nina told him that Inej told her. He forgets too many things now.
He sits up and watches her before taking his cane and standing as she does. His leg is worse these days, a near constant ache, but it’s not as if he’s going to stay sitting now.
“On my feet with a knife in my hand,” says Inej, picking up her first knife, the one he gave her. And Kaz understands, with a slow cold feeling of water lapping at his ankles that he hasn’t felt in a blissfully long time.
“How do you know?” he says shakily.
Her eyes shift from the blade to his face, taking some steel and sharpness with them. “A feeling.”
His brow furrows. “Are you in pain?”
“No.” Her eyes seem to glaze, the first sign of her fading. “Not pain. Peace. That’s what’s different.”
Kaz swallows hard and finds that he needs to lean more heavily on his cane. “You’re sure.” He doesn’t quite ask it, if nothing else because he knows how she is going to answer.
She walks to him, her steps shuffling and soft, the same kind of steps that seemed to carry her between worlds once and may now carry her away forever. She is slow to make it to his arms, but once she does, he encircles her.
It never used to be this easy, Kaz reflects. There was a time when this was the most bizarre kind of impossible. There was a time when to hold her was the hardest thing he could have done. Maybe it’s just the distance between him and the memories as it ever widens as compared to the closeness of Inej.
She slides the hand that isn’t holding a knife into his, and he feels its lines. His own is rougher now; it’s been a long time since he’s worn the gloves that kept them soft and safe. His hands were once best for picking locks, but now their purpose is to hold her.
She lays her head on his shoulder and he feels the cold metal of her single earring on his neck.
“It’s quiet,” she says. “You’re quiet.”
“My voice is no song to carry you to sleep,” Kaz says roughly. “Let the willows do it.”
He knows she means more than this moment, however. They have no children; by the time they could both bear all that was required, it was too late. Their friends have not lived to witness this miracle, that they of all people are still alive. There are no city voices. No crows. Even Kaz’s buzzing thoughts have smoothed over.
“Does this suit your vow?” he murmurs into Inej’s white hair, loose the way he likes it.
“I said I would die on my feet with a knife in my hand,” she replies, and kisses the side of his neck lightly. “I didn’t say in your arms, but I want that, too.” Her words are becoming wispier, her breath thinner, as if even as he clings to her his Wraith is fading. He hasn’t called her Wraith in a long time, either.
“Don’t slip away from me, Wraith,” he says in a half-choked whisper, recalling a night when he’d said these words and had a much better chance of their coming true.
“It’s what I do best,” she breathes, just that, a runaway breath.
“I don’t need your best,” Kaz says. “I need you.”
Inej says, “No you don’t.” And she laughs.
“That’s the laugh,” Kaz murmurs. He can’t remember the last time he cried, maybe not since he was a boy, but his eyes burn.
He’s about to go on, to finally tell her what he means, to say that he fell in love with that laugh and knew fear like he had never known it at the thought, but he hears her knife hit the floor.
It’s almost nothing; her head leans a bit more on his shoulder, her feet drag, she gets heavier in his arms. But heavier for her is almost nothing. Inej’s body is so small.
He lifts her into his arms, bridal style, the way he might have carried the child they never had. The way he carried her on that night that didn’t end this way.
His leg is fully throbbing now with the extra weight, but he almost doesn’t notice it beneath the pain of a different sort that is drowning him like he used to fear, burying him like he threatened to do to Rollins’ son.
How is he still alive when his heart, Inej, has stopped beating?
He lays her down on her side of the bed and sits beside her, memorizing the details of her that he will never see again. A tear, his tear, hits her cheek, and he watches in muted fascination as it rolls down like she is the one crying.
“Haunt me, Wraith,” he begs. He would have done anything to rid himself of Jordie’s voice, but to hear so much as Inej’s voice again, he would do anything. But she deserves better than to haunt him. Doubtless her Saints have taken her with a warm embrace. She has fallen from his arms into theirs.
Kaz, for his part, has no Saints to await him but the one that lays still at his side.
He twines his fingers with hers, amazed that he can do this, but she’s not cold yet. She’s still golden and warm and rose in the dawn. It’s in full blush now, embarrassed maybe by the intimacy it is watching.
But she’s gone.
Time to pay your dues, little brother.
Kaz lays back on the pillows and pulls his hand from hers. His younger self, in this situation, would have wanted to kill. Kaz wants to die.
We never stop fighting, he’d told her. But he’s tired now. What is there to fight? What is there to fight for?
He lets his eyes slide closed. He can keep part of that promise. He will walk to her on aching legs, he’ll crawl when he can’t walk anymore. Another world is not so far for what once lay between them.
The whisper of the wind over supple boughs is the rise and fall of waves and the rhythm of an absent heartbeat. Kaz is nine, because Jordie is here, and ninety, because Inej is here.
The willows and the catydids sing him to sleep.
No mourners, no funerals. There’s no one left to know. Even Dirtyhands keeps his promises.
Well, kept.