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Gerrit Truijn scratches his ear, and – for the fourth time that evening – painstakingly erases and then redraws the blue pencil border of Razorgull territory on the map pinned to his office wall.
Wrong again, Inej thinks. The Liddies took the Anvil last month, and any idiot should know the quay near Fifth Harbour is Dregs territory.
Nonetheless, despite the tedium and discomfort of spending almost two hours lying on the steep slant of the Stadwatch roof and craning her neck to look through the window from above, Inej has to afford the man of a measure of respect. Grievously wrong he may be, but none of his predecessors had even thought such things worth tracking.
No wonder Kaz had been irritated by the appointment.
But now, at long last, Truijn seems satisfied with his work. He carefully sharpens the pencils and replaces them in a mug by the door, excusing himself to the empty air when the movement triggers a belch. Coat buttoned, hat straight, keys counted on his belt. Lamp extinguished, door locked. Following all the proper protocol – although when he leaves the building, Inej notes that he heads for the bar across the street rather than his townhouse in the Geldin district.
She waits another few minutes just in case before easing the window bars out of their setting and propping them behind a chimney pot for safekeeping. Kaz had dissolved the mortar with one of Wylan’s solvents more than a year prior for easy access, and so far it seems the modification has gone unnoticed. The latch window beyond must be a tight squeeze for Roeder, but Inej slips through with ease and drops silently to the floor below.
She rifles through several cabinets before finding what she’s looking for – a slim folio with ‘KNOWN GANG LEADERS OF KETTERDAM’ printed on the front in Truijn’s neat hand. Like the map, its accuracy leaves something to be desired, although she is amused to learn that a Black Tips lieutenant she knows by sight apparently has a tattoo of a Kaelish primrose covering the scar where his left nipple used to be. It’s a common interrogation technique, she knows, although Kaz finds it inefficient – it yields too much blood and not enough information for his taste.
Kaz’s own profile is towards the middle. He’s been keen to get his hands on it since Roeder reported glimpsing the folio earlier that week, but Inej means to make a gift of it before the spider can be sent back.
The information listed is mostly correct – a dry recounting of aliases, associates and business ventures, though only the Crow Club and Silver Six are mentioned in the latter category. And she can’t help but snort at the line; Known weaknesses: Crippled left leg. Clearly the Stadwatch have been doing their reconnaissance from afar, if they still labour under that delusion. But the likeness accompanying the profile, by contrast, suggests surprisingly close observation. It captures Kaz’s glower at its most murderous; the moment his usual cunning and focus give way to the dead-eyed cruelty of Dirtyhands. It’s a look most often levelled at card sharps and traitors, and Inej wonders that the artist lived long enough – and with enough fingers – to draw it.
But speculation can come later. She rolls the page tightly and stows it in a waterproof pouch at her belt. She returns the folio to its shelf then swings up to the window and out, slotting the bars back into place behind her. And as she loops back towards the Slat over the rooftops, she is already smiling in anticipation of Kaz’s reaction.
When she slips through the attic window, however, she finds him waiting for her.
“I can’t stay,” he says without preamble. “There’s trouble at Sweet Reef. I’m needed for damage control before it gets any worse, but –“ he hesitates, gaze troubled. “- I don’t know if I’ll be back.”
“It’s alright.” She steps into his space, not quite touching. “I need to leave before dawn in any case, if we’re to intercept the Spinner.” She plucks a hair from the sleeve of his coat. “We’ve had three weeks, this time. It will have to be enough.”
“It’s never enough,” he growls, but he catches her fingers in his own and twists them together. “How long?”
“Two months at least,” she admits, and the words tug painfully as she speaks them.
“Two months,” he echoes, trying for sarcasm. “The deal is the deal.”
She snorts, but spreads her arms slightly, a question. He envelopes her unhesitating, strong arms folding her to his chest, but he is rigid – tense. Once, she would have taken it for discomfort, but she knows his currents better now.
“You needn’t hold me like I’m made of glass, Kaz,” she tells the wool of his coat. “I trust you.”
She feels rather than hears him swallow above her. “I don’t want you to feel trapped.”
“You’ll know if I do.”
He hesitates a moment longer, but when she squeezes her own arms around his waist it’s like a dam breaking – suddenly he is crushing her to him, so fierce she can barely breathe. Once, this would have panicked her, but now she simply inhales his familiar soap-and-leather smell and clings tighter, willing the moment to engrave itself in her memory. She feels safe like this, even after everything she has endured. Safe, precious, loved. She squeezes her eyes shut against the lump threatening in her throat.
“Come back to me,” he says quietly, voice rumbling under her ear.
“Always,” she whispers.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Wraith.”
“Fine,” she amends. “While there’s breath in my body, I will always try to come back to you. And –“ she anticipates him, “ – I will do my best to keep the breath in my body, too.”
He snorts, but doesn’t argue.
How long they stay like that, a tableau frozen in time, Inej doesn’t know. She only knows that Kaz reacts the moment she shifts her weight, immediately stepping back to give her space. He straightens his hat, stern mask dropping into place.
“No mourners,” he says.
“No funerals,” she answers.
He does not stay to watch her leave.
It’s almost four weeks before Inej remembers the Stadwatch profile in her belt. They had brought down the Spinner with relative ease, taking advantage of the curdling smog that rolls out from Ketterdam in winter, but its log revealed a buyer near the Fjerdan border whose name was new to her.
They see the captives to Os Kervo and arrange passage to their hometowns, then slip North along the coast – keeping just over the horizon, out of range of military long-glasses. When they dock in Arkesk, Inej leaves Specht to negotiate a good price for the canned herring they brought from Kerch while the Wraith pays the buyer a visit.
She may not know him, but it is immediately clear that he knows her. As such, the evening is a resounding success – he is so terrified that he offers up the contents of his ledgers and safes alike before she even draws a blade.
For that, she grants him the mercy of a quick death.
She finds the pouch with the profile once she’s back in her cabin, returning the uniform of the Wraith to the trunk at the foot of her bed. She is careful to wrap it in oilcloth first, so it doesn’t pick up the scent of the dried rosemary and thyme she has pinned inside the lid – just as her mama used to do to keep their caravan sweet-smelling.
It is one of several personal touches she has introduced into this space. The saffron-yellow bedspread embroidered with blue and scarlet flowers is another, as is the gilded icon of Sankta Myra, patron of mariners, above her bed. Each one was an effort – a conscious rejection of habits left over from the Menagerie and the Slat alike. Leave no trace.
The profile becomes another one. At first, she thinks to simply send it with her next letter, but when she passes a market stall selling sweetheart frames to sailors the next morning the choice almost makes itself.
She chooses a simple one – an oval of Fabrikator-reinforced glass, surrounded by a border of red knotwork – and hangs Kaz’s likeness above her desk. It doesn’t seem right to place him in the same pantheon as Sankta Myra, and besides – her desk is where she thinks of him most often, especially since she threw its key overboard in favour of her picks. Only a pigeon trusts his secrets to a key, Inej.
Once touch at a time, she has found. That is how you make a place a home.
It holds as true for her cabin as it did for the circle of Kaz’s arms.
It is six weeks later and the moon is just rising when Specht joins her at the wheel.
“You’re looking melancholy tonight, Captain.”
“Am I?”
“Aye.” He lets the silence sit a minute, watching the horizon with her. The sea is still tonight, though they are several days from land in any direction. Inej can feel the depths beneath them like a tangible weight, dark and heavy. She is thankful for the stillness, but she does not let her awareness waver. The sea and the streets of the Barrel have that much in common, she has learned. All peace is temporary.
“How long has it been since we last docked in Ketterdam?” Specht muses, as if he can hear her thoughts. “Must be near to three months now, by my count.”
“Subtlety is not your strong suit, Specht.”
“Just thinking aloud.”
Inej grimaces, but doesn’t answer. Specht remains where he is. Despite herself, Inej is comforted by his presence. She’s close to all her crew – fighting for your lives together on a weekly basis tends to have that effect – but it’s only with Specht that she can truly let her guard down. That she can afford to be just Inej, rather than Captain Ghafa.
At first, she had tried to resist their efforts to put her on a pedestal. Tried to be one of them, an equal rather than a commander. And at first it had seemed to work, but the cracks in morale began to show with time. It was Specht who had pointed it out to her, kind but firm. They’re here to risk their lives for the legend, not the girl, he’d said. If they see the girl too often, sooner or later they’ll start to wonder if the legend really exists.
It had hurt, but she’d recognised the truth of it – from her experience of the Dregs under Kaz, if nothing else. Leadership, she knows, is a lonely station.
“When I was in the navy,” Specht says at last, “I had a sweetheart. Liadan. A Kaelish girl, worked as a chambermaid in the Kwartsiet Hotel. She was pretty as anything, with golden hair and freckled cheeks and curves like you’d see on the prow of a Ravkan warship. Smart, too. Good with languages, good with people. Ghezen only knows what she saw in me, but we were happy for a time.”
He falls silent again, smiling at some distant memory. Inej waits, but curiosity gets the better of her in the end. Once a spider, always a spider. “What happened?”
“I was saving up to marry her.” Specht shrugs. “And I wanted only the best, of course. The best carriage, the best inn for the night. And the best little townhouse I could find, for after. But dreams cost money, so I started taking longer and longer commissions. The pay is better, you know. A premium, even, if you’re willing to brave enemy waters. I was young, and I was willing. Stupid, too. Determined to round out my savings before starting the rest of my life.”
“But we ran into one storm too many – ended up stranded in the Southern Colonies for the best part of a year. And by the time I got back to Ketterdam, my Liadan had married someone else.”
Inej inhales sharply, but Specht only gives a rueful chuckle. “It’s not what you’re thinking. It was no love match. But her mother was poorly, and there was a bright young steel merchant willing to open his purse in the good apothecaries. She always was a practical sort, and I left her no choice in the end. Whatever happiness she found with him, I don’t begrudge it.”
“Is she still in Ketterdam?”
“I believe so,” he says easily. “But I don’t exactly go searching for news, as you can imagine.”
“I’m sorry, Specht.”
He shrugs again. “So am I, but I didn’t tell the story for your sympathy, well-intentioned as it is.”
“Why did you tell it, then? You know as well as I do this route wasn’t what I had planned, but we need to see them home – no matter where that is.”
“Aye, I know. But no one said it needs must be right away.” He turns his head to look at her for the first time, but she keeps her gaze forward rather than meet his eye. “Inej, you and Brekker may think you’re discreet, but anyone with eyes can see what you are to one another. And I won’t claim to understand it, because he’s a vicious little git, but I do know that you’ve had too much sorrow in your young life to be pinching your moments of happiness like a miser.” He claps a fatherly hand on her shoulder and turns to leave. “Just think on it, that’s all I ask. Not all heroes need be martyrs too.”
Inej does think on it.
She stares at the glowering likeness above her desk and thinks about the Kaz-shaped ache in her heart, an ache so familiar she’s almost forgotten what it was not to feel it. She thinks of how far they have come, of everything they have achieved together and become to one another.
She thinks of how Kaz says Come back to me in place of I love you, and the dark weight of fear waiting beneath those hard-won words like leviathans in the deep.
She thinks of the nightmares that visit her almost as often as the shades of the Menagerie, of coming back to the Slat only to find that this time she is too late – his enemies have caught up to him, and he is gone, gone, gone, never to return. She wakes screaming every time, spittle on her lips and knives in her hands, full of rage and terror.
And she thinks of the prayers she whispers to Sankta Myra’s gilded face, when the seas storm and tower high as buildings or the slavers’ blades cut a little too close, and she prays keep me safe, if you can – but if you cannot, or will not, then at least keep us together. Inej does not know how the Saints will weigh her crimes, in the end, but whether the next life is good or bad she wants to face it side-by-side with Kaz, just as she has faced this one. He may not believe in souls, but she knows the shape of his like a knife hilt in her hand. And like her knives, she means to keep it with her by any means at her disposal.
When she sets a course for Ketterdam a few days later, Specht does not comment, or even smile knowingly at her, and she is grateful for it. And if she hums along under her breath when she hears him whistling a Crow Club drinking song at the wheel, well. No one needs to know.
Kaz is hovering on the quay like a thunderhead when she steps on deck, much to her surprise. She hasn’t seen him here since the day he gifted her the Wraith – he prefers to keep the precise nature of their acquaintance out of the public eye wherever possible. Her crewmembers are giving him a wide berth as they unload, despite the fact that he is standing directly in their way – the Kerch among their number have clearly spread the word that this is someone best avoided.
She foregoes the gangplank in favour of dropping directly over the side and Kaz tenses noticeably when she straightens in front of him. Up close, there is a wildness fraying at his edges, barely contained. She can see the whites around his irises as they sweep rapidly over her – once, twice, three times – and his hands are twitching in his gloves like he wants to touch her, but doesn’t dare.
“What happened?” he demands. “You weren’t expected.”
Ah. Of course. Since her first voyage, Inej has always written to Kaz and told him when to expect her. There had been no opportunity, this time – and added to that, she is two months later than she’d said she’d be when last they spoke. She’d written to tell him of the initial delay, yes, but she has sent no updates since. Her heart twists painfully in her chest.
“Everything’s fine.” She smiles up at him. “It was a last-minute decision.”
He grunts, relaxing fractionally, but she can still read the need for reassurance in him – the need to make certain, to take the edge off. She understands – and she is quite desperate to touch him, too. “Come on, I’ll explain in my cabin.”
Kaz spots the likeness as soon as he crosses the threshold, of course, but it’s testament to his preoccupation that he does not comment – just raises an eyebrow before immediately refocusing on her, his eyes heavy. His fingers flex, just once, before he forces them still.
She shifts slightly, opening her stance. It’s a subtle change, but they know each other without words by now – he understands the invitation. He crosses to her in two steps and his embrace nearly lifts her from her feet. She clings to him, mapping the coarse wool of his coat and familiar line of his shoulders over and over again. Eyes tight shut and foreheads tipped together.
“Can I –“ she begins.
“Please.”
She kisses him hard, and his answer is a storm, tasting on his lips all the fear and desperation he cannot speak aloud. He must have known as soon as they crossed the horizon, she thinks, for his usual calm to be so disturbed. Kaz is cool in a crisis, but hours of inaction – of not knowing – have always been torture to him.
“I’m sorry I worried you,” she gasps, breathless against his lips. “I should have realised how it would look.”
He shakes his head fractionally. “No. This was bound to happen sooner or later. Better we realise it now before someone can use it against us.”
She almost laughs. Here he is, indeed. Her Kaz, in all his paranoid glory. “In any case, I’m glad you came to the docks,” she says instead, “since you were the reason for the change of plan.”
“Oh?” He releases her, but doesn’t step back. The ghost of a smirk hovers on his lips. “Would you like me to sit for a real portrait this time?”
She swats him. “Why should I, when this one captures your sweet nature oh so beautifully?”
He snorts, but doesn’t answer directly, and in the quiet that follows she feels the nerves rise in her belly. Focus, Inej. She squares her shoulders and imagines her task settling on them like a mantle. Kaz sees her tell of course, cocking his head in query, but she doesn’t give him time to comment. She crosses to her bed instead and hops up, patting the space beside her. “Sit with me?”
He follows, leaving a few inches between them and holding his cane upright between his knees. He looks at her, expectant. There is no point prevaricating further. Deep breath.
“I think we should get married,” she announces.
Kaz blinks. His expression gives nothing away, but Inej knows him well enough to recognise his shock – and his lack of immediate response confirms it. She stares him down, stomach roiling, but does not look away. She is the Wraith, and the Wraith does not cower.
“Why?” he asks at last, and his tone is harsh. She tries not to flinch. “For your Saints? Your family?” He laughs, bitter and sarcastic. “One last attempt to make a decent man of me?”
“No.” It comes out sharp. “This is my own choice. And you are already a good man, better than you admit.”
He snorts. “You always were determined to see things in me that aren’t there.”
“You’re good to me. I ask nothing more.”
“Why, then?” He throws up his hands, runs them through his hair. Agitated. “What do you need? Name your price, Inej, and I will match it if I can – but state it clearly, at least. Don’t hide behind talk of marriage, when I don’t know what that means for you.”
“It’s a promise, Kaz. No price.”
He narrows his eyes. “What promise, then?”
“A promise to come back to you.” She holds up a hand to forestall him. “Don’t say it. This is different. You are already my anchor, Kaz, but an anchor needs weight. I need more than just words, I want something to hold on to. Something to bring me home.”
“And marriage would give you that?”
“Yes.” She runs a hand over her eyes. “It needn’t be anything fancy. Just a promise between you, me, and whatever Saints are listening.”
He is quiet for a long moment, considering. “And what’s my promise to you, then?”
“What?”
“My promise to you. If you promise to come back, what do I promise you in return?” A smirk flits across his features, there and gone in an instant. “You’re already sole inheritor of my estate, I’m afraid, so that chip is out of play.”
“I – what?” Inej goggles at him. “When were you planning to share this information?”
Kaz waves an infuriating hand. “For as long as I’m alive, it hardly seemed necessary. You can’t possibly be surprised?”
“That I’m heir to a criminal empire? It’s a little unexpected, yes! But – “ she stops, forcibly sets the subject aside, “that is not the current topic of discussion. You asked what promise I want from you? It’s easy, Kaz.” She meets his eye. “The same promise as always. I want you, no armour. Your truest self, today and always.”
He nods, solemn. “It’s yours. My best impression of a human being, for as long as you will have me. More than that, I cannot promise.”
“I don’t need anything more.”
“And the Saints?”
“What about them?”
“Between you, me, and whatever Saints are listening, you said. I know you, Inej. I doubt their role is merely to witness. What promise will you make to them?”
She sighs, glancing away to meet Sankta Myra’s painted gaze for an instant. She’d hoped to avoid this part, knowing Kaz’s cynicism. He respects her faith, she knows, but this is the first time she has implicated him directly. And if he reacts badly to the idea… Will the Saints still look favourably on her – on them – if Kaz voices his disbelief aloud?
But she will not lie to him, either.
“I won’t make them any promise,” she says, meeting his eye again. “I plan to ask them for one. A promise to bind us, two souls joined as one. In this life and the next.”
She watches him digest her answer, though she can’t guess what he is thinking. At last he shrugs. “Be careful what you wish for,” he says, and her heart aches.
“Is that a yes, then?”
He nods. “You’ll never make a good man of me, Inej, but whatever heart or soul I may possess is yours to do with as you please. And I will gladly tell your Saints the same thing.”
She throws her arms around him, sending them sprawling on the quilt, and peppers his face with kisses. And later, much later, when she arches off the bed in pleasure and her eyes catch on the gilded frame above, she finds her lips moving in soundless prayer.
Sankta Myra, patron of mariners, she thinks wildly, breath hitching, though the seas are deep and the leagues are long, see us through this storm and all the storms to come. See us safely through, together.