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Matthias still didn’t quite know what to think of these people.
He didn’t quite know what to think about most things these days.
Everything he had known, everything he had ever done. In the end it had all boiled down to nothing, to less than nothing. He had created harm. He had harmed countless innocent grisha, their families, their loved ones.
He had harmed Nina.
Even now, the phrase stuck in his mind, and he marvelled over the oddness of it.
Innocent grisha. He had never allowed himself to believe that there might be such a thing. The only way he had ever believed a witch might prove their innocence before was to never use their powers. To lock them away the way the sharpshooter boy had. Jesper. His name was Jesper.
He had spent so long refusing to interact with these people. These heathens. He had refused to let himself think of them by their names, lest they start to become too familiar to him. He had trained his mind to only recall them as descriptive monikers. The Zemeni sharpshooter. The little bronze girl. The redheaded mercher boy. The Demjin. Nina.
Witch.
Even in the throes of his hatred for her, in the lowest moments he spent alone in Hellgate, he had never truly been able to think of her as such. Hadn’t been able to for a long time, since all that time ago inside the whaler’s hut.
But, he dragged his gaze from where it had drifted to Nina and drew it back to the sharpshooter. Jesper.
If everyone else was to be believed, Jesper’s refusal to use his powers had weakened him. Had made him sick, and that was even though he still did use them on occasion. He had watched Nina sicken these last weeks, battling the traces of the parem in her system, and it had broken his heart. The days when she screamed at him, red faced and furious. The days when she’d lay in his arms, shaking and sweating and moaning. The days when she’d cried like her whole world was ending.
In a way, it was.
But worst of all was the way she had simply diminished. She had shrunk, each day cutting away more and more of her until he was left with nothing but a shell.
He would never have wished that upon anyone.
By all rights the powers she had exhibited over the dead should have sickened him. Should have caused him to run for the hills in fear, or at the very least render her unconscious and take her prisoner, bringing her posthaste back to Fjerda where they could experiment on her. Where they could make sure that whatever infernal power she had created would never be reproduced.
But all he had felt was awe.
And later, a relief so intense it was nearly painful. She laughed. She ate, willingly and voraciously. The bits of his Nina were easing back into place, stepping into the light, and each glint of her eyes, each smile she tossed his way filled his heart with an unfettered joy.
His Nina.
His little red bird.
That wasn’t to say he was necessarily comfortable with the way things were going now. The intimacy between the two of them was overwhelming. He loved that he was allowed to hold her. To kiss her. To…
But sometimes he wished he wasn’t. He wanted to treat Nina like a lady, to court her properly. He would have come before her parents, stated his love for her, pleaded his case. He would put forth to them how he would care for her. How he would provide for her. How he would cherish her.
And when he had won her father over, he would take her to a fair, or perhaps a market, or even to ice blading on the lake if it was wintertime. They would be chaperoned, and would enjoy sneaking secret touches and kisses in the rare moments they lost track of their supervision. He would have bought her gifts, would have brought her flowers and honeyed cakes and little carved trinkets of his affection. He would have spent hours whittling them.
He would have seen the way her cheeks turned rosy from the cold, would have witnessed her smile broad with snowflakes dusting her hair, would have danced with her all night under the moonlight, the good old dances that were done in crowds, stomping and whirling and laughing until they couldn’t breathe.
It was a particularly cruel torment to watch Kaz Brekker live out a warped reflection of this fantasy with Inej.
The respect they showed each other, the distance they kept. That was the proper way of doing things. But there was love there, too. It was obvious to any bystander, even one as distracted as Matthias was.
He saw the way Brekker’s eyes followed the little bronze girl, Inej. He had seen the lengths he had gone to in order to retrieve her, the pure unfettered rage in his eyes that she had been taken from him.
In some small way he understood that feeling, had experienced it himself, although he hated to admit any kind of kinship with him.
But if there was one redeeming factor to the demon who wore the name Kaz Brekker, it was the love he bore for Inej. He almost didn’t mind sharing this with him, this purest of things.
It was comforting to know that Brekker wasn’t evil all the way through. Some small part of him was good, even if it was the part of his heart that belonged to another.
He wondered how long they had been together, how long he had courted her. Were they still courting?
As subtly as he could, he twisted in his seat on the sofa, trying to track down Inej.
A difficult task in and of itself.
Finally, he spotted her perched on the windowsill, although he was sure he had scanned by that spot three times already. He should have known, really, because Brekker had positioned himself in a chair only a few feet away from her, positioned so that she was within his line of sight.
Kaz’s hands were covered by his gloves, of course, but Inej’s were bare. One of them was visible, resting on top of her knee, but the other one was tucked away. The visible one bore no ring, but that was no real indicator of anything. It could have been on her other hand, or could have been stolen by Van Eck, or perhaps she wore it on a string around her neck so she wouldn’t lose it. He knew that many tradeswomen back home in Fjerda did the same, worried about damaging or losing their rings while at work.
Did the Kerch even wear wedding rings? Another glance around the room did not elucidate the matter any.
The only person in the room wearing a ring was Mr. Fahey, but he wasn’t Kerch, was he. He was...not Zemeni. Kaelish?
Either way, he was still left wondering.
“Is everything alright, love?” Nina murmured from where she was curled on the sofa beside him, nudging her head into his shoulder as she spoke.
“Of course,” he said, bending his head to press a kiss to her cheek. He may have mourned the loss of the relationship he should have had with Nina, but there were definitely perks to skipping ahead. “I was just wondering, are Brekker and Inej married, or are they just betrothed?”
Such was the way of things that the various conversations in the room reached a natural lull just before he spoke, so that even though his voice was cast in a soft undertone, it carried to the entire room.
There was a moment of shocked silence before Nina, gaping astoundedly at him, giggled.
That seemed to break the room, and she and Jesper broke into absolute peals of laughter. Jesper slammed his fist down into the table, tossing his head back as he laughed, and Nina buried her head into his shoulder, shaking so hard that he was almost concerned. When she drew her face back, it was bright red and tears of mirth were tracking down from the corners of her eyes.
There was a loud scraping as Brekker pushed his chair back and limped from the room, glowering severely.
Matthias had grown unfortunately familiar with the demon’s various glowers over the course of this whole mess, but had not yet seen this one. In it there was an undercurrent of discomfort and...was that fear?
There was a moment while Jesper and Nina tried and failed to contain their mirth, and then Inej spoke from her perch.
“I better go after him,” there was a flush high on her cheeks. “Just so he knows that… Well, just that he knows it’s alright. That it’s not…”
“That’s right!” Jesper shouted. “Go after your husband!”
She floundered with this for a moment, not meeting any of their eyes, and then seemingly gave up, tipping silently backwards out the window.
“I do not understand,” Matthias said, looking around at the mirthful faces surrounding him. And then, all at once, he realized that he may have made a terrible mistake. “Oh! Are they still courting? Has the subject of marriage not yet been raised between them?”
“Well, no,” Nina said slowly, her chest heaving rather distractingly from her laughter. “It hasn’t been raised. And they are certainly not courting.”
“But, I thought that was why Van Eck captured her in the first place. And why Kaz retaliated by taking Alys. An eye for an eye, so to speak.”
This proved too much for Jesper, and he slid out of his chair, slumping on the ground and gasping for breath.
“Oh,” the boy said, wiping at his streaming eyes. “I am never, ever going to let them forget this. They will never live it down, I swear it this day.”
“They are not courting?” Matthias asked, shifting so he could look down into Nina’s face more easily.
“No, they’re not,” she said firmly. “I don’t know if I would really even call them friends. They’re more like...emotionally intimate allies. Bonds formed in the Barrel reach deeper than any others, and Kaz and Inej were forged like twin blades in the smith’s fire. They’re practically a myth here in Ketterdam, you can’t have one without the other. I actually hope there’s no love between them, it would make everything so much worse.”
Matthias didn’t understand that. There was no way that a little love could not have been a good thing, could not have brightened the miserable lives they had carved out for themselves here.
He was opening his mouth to say so, but Nina tucked herself back against his side, speaking over him.
“Believe me, my love,” she said softly. “Kaz and Inej are many things, but lovers is not one of them.”