Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When he told the neighbors he was selling the farm and taking Kaz to Ketterdam, to look for work there, they’d all been shocked. Scandalized, really, at the suggestion. People from Lij didn’t go to Ketterdam. People from Lij stuck to their corner of the world, concerned themselves with the harvest and their neighbor’s business and read about Ketterdam in the newspapers that came twice a week and shook their heads at the state of the country.

Jordie couldn’t wait to get out of there.

“Jordan,” Mr. Van Rijn, their next door neighbor, shook his head, sitting across from Jordie at the wooden table as solid and thick as he was. Kaz was outside, playing with his two daughters—or they were playing and Kaz was sitting on the step, drawing with a stick in the dirt, last Jordie had checked on him. He’d been frighteningly quiet since Da—Jordie had tried to keep him from seeing, but there was just too much blood. “Be sensible now, lad. What are two young boys like you and Kasper going to do in Ketterdam?”

“Look for work, like I said.” Jordie was getting impatient with the whole situation. He was thirteen, not a child. And Mr. Van Rijn was the nosy next-door neighbor, not his father. Da was dead, buried under the apple tree in the backyard next to Ma. All the more reason to leave Lij. There was nothing here for them now, nothing but sad memories. “There’s more work there than there is here, that’s what all the papers say. Besides, Kaz and I can’t manage the farm on our own.”

“I’m not saying selling the farm isn’t a good idea.” Mr. Van Rijn crossed his arms across his solid barrel chest and leaned back in his chair. Jordie tapped his fingers on the table, glancing out the window from the corner of his eye. Kaz was still sitting on the kitchen steps, resting his chin in his hands and staring off into the distance, familiar worried crease between his eyebrows. “You are too young to manage it, and it’s a valuable piece of land. You’ll be glad you did. But take the money and put it in the bank here. Get yourself a job as a hired hand and save up to buy a smaller place, one two boys can manage. If you need it, Clara and I will be happy to take Kasper in while you do—he’s a smart, hard-working boy and the girls like him well enough. There’s a life for you here, Jordan. You don’t need to leave.”

Jordie shook his head. “No.” He knew what that life would be—separated from Kaz, the last member of his family, working on a piece of land that wasn’t even his, doing all the chores he hated for someone else’s profit. “No, I’m going to Ketterdam.” Ketterdam. Even the name sounded like a dream. His Da had only been there once, when he was young, but he told stories about it to Jordie—it was a magic city, a place where a man could start from nothing and become as respected as a bishop, as rich as a king. When country boys from Lij could come and one day have a family that ruled Kerch.

“Then you need to be careful,” Mr. Van Rijn said, seeming resigned. He probably was. They’d been having this argument all morning. “Keep an eye out. Ketterdam’s full of gang members, snatching children off the streets and forcing them to sign indentures with guns at their heads, violating every principle sacred to Ghezen—” his mustache bristled with pious indignation and Jordie fought back an eyeroll. He’d been thrilled when he aged out of Mr. Van Rijn’s Sunday school class for a reason. “Forcing them to work in factories and sweatshops and pick pockets—” he lowered his voice, glancing out the kitchen window to make sure Kaz and his daughters weren’t listening. “Even pleasure houses. Keep an eye out and be safe, understand me? When you get to Ketterdam, find a church. They’ll put you on the right path.”

Jordie had only a vague idea of what a pleasure house was from older boys at school, who would whisper about things like that with knowing smirks. He didn’t really care, either, and he certainly wasn’t going to church without his da and the whole town to force him. Mr. Van Rijn was always finding something wrong with whatever Jordie was about to do, whether it was going swimming on a hot summer day when there were apparently chores he could be doing, even though Da had said it was alright, or skipping Sunday school lessons. He was hardly going to take his advice now. “Alright, Mr. Van Rijn,” he said placatingly.

“You’re a good boy, you and Kasper both.” Mr. Van Rijn put a hand on his shoulder, only smiling sadly when Jordie shrugged it off with a frown. “Such a shame about your mother. Both your parents. They were good people too, and I know they'd want you boys to be raised right.”

It was the same thing he’d heard a thousand times since the accident, a hundred thousand times since Kaz was born and he’d had to trade his ma in for a squalling baby that wasn’t even old enough to be interesting. Jordie bore the stale condolences with as much grace as he could, which wasn’t very much. He knew his eye was starting to twitch. Everyone knew everyone and everyone’s business in Lij, but they didn’t seem to be able to pick up on when someone wanted a topic to be left alone. “Thank you,” he said, pressing his hands flat against his thigh to keep them from forming into fists. “I should go check on Kaz, see if he wants some lunch.”

Kaz was outside with Anneliese and Janna—Jordie could never remember which was which. They were barely a year apart, with identical hazel eyes and light brown ringlets, held back with hair ribbons that matched their dresses. One of them wore green and the other one pink—maybe that was how their parents told them apart. They were playing in the corner of the yard—a cracked teacup and a rag doll were lying abandoned in the dirt as they turned to stare at Jordie emerging from the house.

Kaz was sitting on the kitchen stoop, chin resting on his hand as he stared out into the distance. His dark black hair, a few shades darker than Jordie’s own, was a mess—it hadn’t been worth the fight this morning to get him to brush it before they went next door, even though Mrs. Van Rijn had sighed when she saw him and given Jordie a disappointed look. He had dark circles under his eyes too, circles Jordie was sure he shared—he’d been up half the night, rocking Kaz back and forth in his arms like he was a much younger child after he’d woken up from a nightmare. Jordie didn’t think either of them had slept through the night since the accident. He sat next to him, bumping his thin shoulder with one of his own. “Hey.”

Kaz looked up at him, eyebrows drawn together in a familiar worried look, one that made him seem much older than he was. “Did you fight?”

“I’m an adult.” He wasn’t technically, but he was the oldest Rietveld left, except for some of Da’s cousins out in Girecht. They visited them once, when Jordie was small and Kaz just a babe in arms, but Da and Cousin Pieter had gotten into a fight about something or other and they hadn’t gone back since. For all intents and purposes, he was all Kaz had. “So’s Mr. Van Rijn. Adults don’t fight, they discuss.”

Kaz gave him a skeptical look. He was far too good at that for a nine year old. “Did you discuss?”

“We did.” Jordie lowered his voice, feeling Annaliese and Janna’s eyes on them. “He said he’d help us sell the farm.” He hadn’t, not in so many words, but Jordie had seen the way he was eyeing the fences that divided the Van Rijn and Rietveld properties, the extra seed piled up in his neighbor’s barn. For all his neighborly grief and concern, Mr. Van Rijn knew the Rietveld farm was a valuable piece of land. Well, he could have it. There was nothing there, nothing but their parent’s graves, and Jordie wasn’t going to tie himself to a small town in the middle of nowhere just for that. Kaz deserved more. He deserved more.

Ketterdam. He didn’t say it, not yet.

“Are you hungry?” he asked instead, squeezing Kaz to his side. His thin bony shoulder dug against Jordie’s ribs uncomfortably. He didn’t eat any breakfast this morning—whenever he got caught up in his head, it was difficult to get Kaz to eat. He’d almost fainted in the middle of math test because he was so stressed studying he’d missed lunch. Seeing Da after the accident, Jordie had struggled go get him to eat one meal a day.

“No,” Kaz said, shaking his head, dark eyes focused on some point off in the distance. The girls had gotten bored of them and returned to their game, whatever it was.

“Come on, Kazzie, you’ve got to eat. I asked Mrs. Van Rijn, and she even made cookies for you.” Their next door neighbor’s wife was a busybody just like her husband, but her cookies were fantastic, and Jordie had never seen Kaz turn them down before.

“Cookies aren’t a meal,” Kaz said, voice dubious, but Jordie could see a hint of a spark returning to his eyes. Nine year olds were pretty simple, even ones who’d seen the only parents they’d ever known torn to pieces a week before. A hint of sugar could do quite a lot.

“Who said that?” Jordie asked, teasingly bumping their shoulders together again. “Did I say that? Doesn’t really sound like something I’d say, but if you insist I guess I’ll just have to eat them all myself.”

Kaz was giggling, ducking his head and hiding his smile behind his hand. “Jordie!”

“What?” Jordie pushed himself up to his feet and ruffled Kaz’s hair. “I’m going to go have cookies for lunch, since apparently I’m the only one who wants them.”

He physically stumbled back a step as Kaz launched himself at him, all of his sold nine year old weight slamming right into Jordie’s stomach as he wrapped his arms around his waist. “Don’t leave!”

“Ghezen, Kazzie, I’m just going inside for lunch—”

“My papa will thrash you if he hears you swearing,” one of the Van Rijn girls—he thought it might be Janna—said.

“Your papa’s not in charge of me.” Jordie snapped back, feeling an angry flush on his cheeks. “I’m a grown-up.”

“You’re thirteen.” Janna wrinkled her nose.

“What do you know?” Jordie’s hands were wrapped around Kaz, who was still clinging to his waist, so he didn’t clench his fists or flip her off like he wanted. “You’re only eleven.” They both turned on their heels, pointedly storming off in opposite directions—Janna back off to her sister, who had been watching the whole fight with wide eyes, and Jordie into the kitchen where, as promised, a tray of cookies was waiting.

That afternoon after Kaz had perked up a little, Mr. Van Rijn took him down to the bank. Lij wasn’t big enough for a bank of its own so they had an offshoot of a branch from Belendt, staffed two days a week, Wednesday and Saturday. “We’re here to arrange an auction,” he told the teller, hand on Jordie’s shoulder.

“Indenture?” the teller peered over his half-moon glasses at Jordie, giving him an evaluative look.

“Land,” Jordie said, shrugging Mr. Van Rijn’s hand off. He could do this himself, it was his land. His decision. “I want to auction my family farm.”

“Are you old enough to arrange such a complex sale?” The teller asked, leaning further over the desk to study Jordie more closely, lips pursing with skepticism. “Is the land in your name?”

“I’ll act as his guardian for the transaction,” Mr. Van Rijn said, clearing his throat. “He’s Tomas Rietveld’s oldest, the farmer who died in the plow accident last week. The land is an apple orchard and barley farm, on the east road.”

“Rietveld—” the teller leaned back, pulling a thick ledger from under the desk and flipping through the pages. Jordie stood on his toes to try and catch a glimpse of what he was looking at but the ink was light and faded, and it was almost impossible to decipher the spider-like handwriting upside-down. “Yes, I see, I have it here. 35 hectares, good fertile land. Drew a good crop last year.” The few people in the bank were listening intently—news that the Rietveld farm was up for sale would be all around Lij by supper.

It only took a few days to arrange the sale. Like Jordie suspected, Mr. Van Rijn was the winner at auction. They got a decent amount of kruge for it, more money than Jordie had ever seen in his life. He held the bills in his hand when the auction came to a close, pressing them to his nose and smelling them subtly. Kaz still saw him and laughed. Jordie pinched him on the arm, when the adults’ backs were turned and dodged the kick he aimed at his ankles.

“I’m going to ask you to reconsider one more time,” Mr. Van Rijn said that night, once Kaz and the girls were asleep. They’d signed the transfer on the Rietveld property at auction that afternoon, and Mrs. Van Rijn had suggested Kaz and Jordie spend the night at her house before beginning their journey to Ketterdam the next morning. “I know I purchased your home, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t welcome in Lij, Jordan. This entire town is your home.”

That’s half the problem with Lij, Jordie almost said, but kept his mouth shut. Instead he stared down at the table, tracing the grain of the wood with his eyes. It reminded him of the one in his own kitchen, sold along with the property and all of the other furniture. They were likely made from the same grove of trees. The same, just like everything in Lij. Was home supposed to suffocate you, draw tighter around you with every breath? “I’ve already made my decision,” he said instead.

Mr. Van Rijn let out a long breath. “I suppose I can’t stop you,” he said, running a hand over his moustache in what might have been a nervous gesture.

That’s right, Jordie thought with an almost vicious satisfaction. You can’t.

They woke early the next morning, just as the sun was coming up. The walk to Ketterdam would take days—they could try to catch the boat line in Belendt, which would cut a little time off their journey. Jordie touched the bundle of bills in his pocket, debating whether it would be worth the cost. He’d taken some of Mr. Van Rijn’s advice, though he would never let the man know that—the kruge he’d earned from the sale of the farm was tucked in various places on his and Kaz’s persons, no more than a few bills in any one place. If the paranoid old man was right, he didn’t want to risk losing all his cash being pickpocketed on the streets.

Kaz clung to his hand the entire way, looking around at everything with wide dark eyes. His nightmares had stopped, mostly, when they left Lij. Jordie didn’t know if it was the exhaustion of the journey—walking miles every day was hard even for two active young boys who were in shape from years of chores around the farm—or the change of scenery, but either way he was grateful. Dealing with an exhausted, cranky Kaz on top of everything else might actually have driven him over the edge.

“What’ll we do in Ketterdam?” He asked as they approached the outskirts of the city, joining a crowd of people heading in. Most of them seemed to have come from farms, carrying livestock and crops to sell. Jordie had done the same thing a few times with Da, bringing their harvest up to Elburg. But Elburg was only a little larger than Lij, almost a mirror of the town he’d grown up in. Ketterdam though, Ketterdam was another beast altogether. Jordie almost stopped at the city gates, staring up at the towering steeples of the Church of Barter, barely visible through the thick grey clouds. He could feel a fine, drizzling rain falling, soaking into his hair and coat. Maybe this is a bad idea.

“I’ll get a job as a runner at the Exchange,” he said. He didn’t know exactly where the building was, or what it looked like, but it was the beating financial heart of the nation. It had to be easy enough to find. “Get the notice of a mercher, work my way up. Invest the money from the farm.” He could feel a grin creeping across his face, explaining all his unspoken plans. Why would Ketterdam be a bad idea? This was what he’d wanted for half his life. “We’ll be rich, Kazzie, rich as kings!”

The familiar worried crease had made its way back between Kaz’s eyebrows and he was chewing at his lower lip. Rain made his black hair stick to his forehead, and he was starting to shiver—Jordie hoped they could get inside the city soon. He needed to get Kaz someplace warm and dry. “That’s what you’re going to do,” he said slowly, like he was trying to figure out what he was missing. “What about me?”

“You’ll go to school,” Jordie dismissed his worries with a shrug. Of course Kaz would go to school—he was nine. That was what nine year olds did, even in Lij. The same had to be true in Ketterdam.

“Aren’t you going to go to school?” Kaz looked even more confused at that, like he was trying to force together puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit.

“I’m too smart for that.” Jordie dismissed his concerns airily. Besides, he was almost done with school anyways—most people in Lij didn’t go beyond 13 or 14, except for the few true geniuses who had the time and inclination to study for the university entrance exams. Kaz might have been one of them—Da always thought so. He’d probably have a better chance here, in Ketterdam, with Jordie working in the Exchange and rising as a mercher, rather than having to hope that a farmer from Lij could scrape together the funds to send him.

This was good for Kaz. He was making the right decision.

They found a boarding house a few streets down from the Exchange, and Jordie parted with a bit of their hard-earned kruge to purchase a room for himself and Kaz for a week, which should be plenty of time for him to find a job and start bringing in a wage. He was young, enthusiastic, eager to work. He was clever, too, he knew that. Miss Lauwers at school had always told him so, even if it was usually accompanied by a sigh and something like just apply yourself, Jordan, that’s all I ask. He’d find whoever was in charge there and present himself, and they’d assign him somewhere. He’d find a mercher or their clerk and impress them, and in 5 years, when he was 18, he’d be ready to start business fully on his own. That was when he’d be old enough to sign contracts in his own name, rather than needing a sponsor like Mr. Van Rijn. He’d be a stockholder then, and someday a mercher on his own, and the Rietvelds would be just as big a family as the Van Ecks or the Schenks or the Drydens.

“You need to stay here,” he told Kaz on their first full day in the city, washing his face until he was red and shiny with the hot water he’d paid a little more for. Kaz was sitting on the double bed they’d shared the night before, head tilted to the side like a curious owl.

“I want to come with you,” he said, lip starting to stick out like he was thinking about beginning to start a tantrum. Jordie resisted the urge to throw his head back and groan—he did not need to start a fight with Kaz, not when he needed to be at his best to impress everyone at the Exchange.

“You can’t,” he said instead, knowing his tone was a little snappy. “Go downstairs, I paid for breakfast, but then come back up and stay here.”

“Why?” Kaz said, and yeah, that was definitely a whine. Jordie pinched his nose. “Jordie-“

“Because I said so, that’s why!” He snapped. Mr. Van Rijn’s warnings were ringing in his ears and he couldn’t help but picture Kaz, dragged off the streets by tattooed and muscled gang members, looking just like mugshots he’d seen in newspapers. “Ketterdam’s not Lij, we don’t know everyone here. If you wander off and get lost—don’t look at me like that, you know you do—I won’t know how to find you, and you won’t know how to find your way back here. Stay here, so I don’t have to worry about you and impressing the merchers at the same time.” Kaz still looked stubborn, so Jordie took a deep breath and played his trump card. “If you’re good and stay here, I’ll take you to get some hot chocolate when I get back.”

They’d only ever had it the once, at a going-away party for Miss Lauwers at the little schoolhouse in Lij when she’d left to be married. Kaz and Jordie, seven and eleven, had split a cup, and Kaz hadn’t stopped talking about it for weeks, declaring it his favorite drink in the world and saying that he was going to have a cup every day, when he was a grownup. Jordie had seen a stall advertising cups as they walked to the boarding house, but apparently Kaz hadn’t. “Really?” he said, eyes widening, and Jordie knew he had him hooked.

“If you stay here,” he repeated firmly, grabbing Kaz’s chin and forcing them to make eye contact. “Got it?” Kaz nodded frantically and he let him go, leaning down and pressing a kiss to his messy bedhead. “Be good. I love you.”

“Love you too,” Kaz said chirpily, already bouncing up to his feet. Jordie smiled, brushed his hair back one more time, and left.

There were more people on the street outside the boarding house than he’d ever seen in one place in his life. For a moment, Jordie was seized by the same panic that had struck him at the city gate—what am I doing, have I gone mad—but he forced himself to take a deep breath, shoved his hands into the pockets of his second-best jacket, and stepped into the sea of people, letting them carry him along to the Exchange.

The Exchange, it turned out, wasn’t so much a building as it was a whole collection of them, shops and stalls and offices and coffeehouses surrounding a rectangular courtyard full of people, all shouting and waving their arms—the Santka Lizaveta in from Ravka, honey and amber, Jurda fresh from Shriftport, purest in the city— and the noise was so overwhelming Jordie almost put his hands to his ears and ran. But no. This was the Exchange, and his whole plan depended on him being here. He could handle it. He was going to handle it.

“Excuse me, sir?” He grabbed at the arm of the person closes to him, a tall man in his late 20s dressed all in black with a stern look on his face, He turned to Jordie, giving him a disdainful look and he swallowed, squaring his shoulders and trying to look like he embodied the words carved in the façade of the Exchange—industry, integrity, and prosperity. It was hard when he hadn’t worn his second-best jacket since last spring and it was a little tight under his arms from his last growth spirt, pinching him uncomfortably. “Can you tell me who I can ask about a job?”

The man pulled his arm away. “I don’t know.”

Jordie leaned forward, trying not to look too anxious. It was fine, this man was just… brisk. He’d find someone helpful soon. “Do you know who might know?”

“I don’t,” the man snapped, adjusting his grip on the portfolios he had tucked under his arm. “And I suggest you find something more productive to do with your time than hanging around and begging, young man.” With that, he turned on his heel and walked away quickly.

Jordie froze for a moment, then shook his head and swallowed heavily. The Exchange was just more decentralized than he thought. There wasn’t one person in charge, but that was alright. There were hundreds of stalls and offices here. Somewhere, someone in one of them would need a runner or a clerk. They would need him, and Jordie would be ready.

If they did, however, he didn’t find them that day. By time the bells at the Church of Barter tolled to mark five o’clock and people began to pack up, the only thing he had to show for his effort was the blisters on his feet.

Kaz was waiting for him though, in the boarding house, and Jordie forced himself to paste a smile on his face as he opened the door to their room. His brother jumped up expectantly, eyes sparkling. “Did you find a job? Can we go get hot chocolate now?”

Jordie sighed, trying not to betray the exhaustion already settling into his bones. He’d promised, and Kaz was perfectly stereotypically Kerch in his determination to keep track of promises and bargains. If Jordie said no, he’d never let him forget it—and he probably wouldn’t stay in the room again tomorrow either. “I didn’t get a job yet,” he said, “but the Exchange is huge. I’ll find something tomorrow. Let’s go get hot chocolate.”

It became their pattern, over the next few days. Jordie would leave Kaz in their room and go to the Exchange, asking anyone and everyone there if they had any jobs, if they knew anyone who did. The answer, of course, was always no, even as he saw boys his age or even younger being escorted into the Exchange with their fathers, shaking hands with clerks and stall holders and settling down to work even as he was shoved to the side, metaphorically and sometimes even physically, when it was really crowded. In the evenings he would do his best to suppress his frustration and take Kaz out to see the sights—they walked along the Lid, tried food from every stall they passed, watched boats coming in at the various harbors, toured the Church of Barter and climbed the steeples to look out over the city. Kaz became fascinated with street magicians after they watched a particularly talented one on a trip down into the Barrel, and begged Jordie for a pack of cards, which he bought for him so he’d stay in the room.

Kaz’s obsession with the magician was starting to drive him insane but Jordie bit his lip and tried to suffer through it until one day he came back from the Exchange exhausted and irritable, having a seen a boy who couldn’t have been much older than Kaz welcomed as the newest clerk at the Dryden grain warehouse, a job Jordie had been halfway through an interview for. Of course when Jordie asked him his name he’d said Markus Dryden. Like he shouldn’t have been surprised. By this point, a week into their stay in Ketterdam, Jordie really wasn’t.

“Please can we go see the magician again?” Kaz begged once he had finished relaying the story and his brother had made the appropriate sympathetic noises, fidgeting with impatience the whole time.

“I don’t want to go down to the Barrel,” Jordie said, lying back on the bed with his eyes closed. There was a headache starting behind his right eye. “I’m tired. I just want to go to bed.”

Kaz climbed on top of him, settling all his weight on top of Jordie and pushing all the air from his lungs. Jordie shoved him off and rolled over onto his side, trying to ignore Kaz tugging at his arm. “But I’ve been in here all day,” he whined, and his high-pitched grating voice did nothing to help Jordie’s headache. “You get to go out! I’m stuck in here. Please—”

“Fine!” Jordie sat up, rubbing at his eyes. “Fine, fine we’ll go but if we don’t see him we’re coming back and I’m going to bed.”

They didn’t see the magician, but what they found was even better. Just outside a gambling parlor decorated in green and gold—The Emerald Palace, according to curling gold font on the sign—a boy about Jordie’s age was demonstrating a wind-up mechanical dog to a crowd of tourists. Kaz stopped, eyes wide, and grabbed Jordie’s hand to make sure he stopped too so that they could watch the show.

The crowd of tourists eventually wandered away, leaving just Kaz, Jordie, and the boy. He looked up and smiled at them, standing and brushing the dust of the street from the knees of his pants. “Hello there,” he said. He had a country accent, not as strong as Kaz and Jordie’s, but noticeably there. “I’m Filip. Did you like the dog?”

Kaz nodded enthusiastically. “I’m Kaz, and this is Jordie. Are you selling them?” Jordie groaned mentally. He knew exactly how much kruge they had under the mattress in the boarding house, and unless he got a job soon, he was not buying Kaz a mechanical dog. No matter how much he pouted.

“No,” Filip said, folding the dog back up and tucking it away into his coat pocket. “I’ve only got the one. I might soon though, unless this job I’ve heard about pans out.”

Jordie’s ears perked up at that. “You found a job? I’ve been looking all over the Exchange—”

“That was your first mistake,” Filip said. “The Exchange is full of snobby merchers. You’ve got to start small. Someone I know is looking for runners, he owns a coffee shop and trading venture. Do you want to come with me tomorrow, see if he’s got any room for you?”

Jordie couldn’t stop the smile spreading across his face. Something in his chest that he didn’t realize had been tight loosened. “Yes,” he said, and Filip grinned back.

“Perfect. We country boys have got to stick together, and I think you’ll fit right in.” He put his arm around Jordie’s shoulders and he leaned back into them, closing his eyes.

Ketterdam. Finally.

He was on his way.

Chapter Text

Filip’s friend turned out to be a minor mercher named Jacob Hertzoon who offered Jordie a job almost instantly, and for the first week, everything was perfect. The coffeehouse that he owned was a few streets from the Exchange, closer to the Barrel than Jordie might have preferred a weak ago, but once he had the job it felt more and more like an adventure, the type of thing he would have read about in a novel, back in Lij. Plucky orphans on their own in the big city, making their fortune—their lives were practically made to be a storybook.

He hadn’t had a chance yet to read any novels in Ketterdam, though he often found himself looking longingly through the windows of bookstores when he took Kaz around the city, the same way his brother looked at street magicians. Maybe, when he had his first paycheck, he could see if he could find something used—everything was more expensive in Ketterdam, even food, but especially books. That would likely be all he could afford, but even a used novel in Ketterdam would probably be something he hadn’t read before. There had to be all the books in the world here. It was the magic city, like Da had said, and now he was established in it. Soon enough they’d be magic too.

Jordie had been nervous, when he presented himself at the coffeehouse and asked for a job, but Mr. Hertzoon was so friendly he almost instantly forgot to be, once Filip introduced them. He was going to be a runner, exactly what he’d been looking for at the Exchange, even though Jordie had half-expected that he’d be put to work in a kitchen or serving coffee—when he’d arrived, he hadn’t really seen much of a staff, but his offers were quickly brushed aside. He even got to bring Kaz with him—Mr. Hertzoon said that he was happy to let him stay in the coffeehouse during the day and they didn’t even have to pay for the meals they took there.

“Are you sure you’re alright with this?” Jordie asked, holding tightly to Kaz’s hand as they stood on the front steps of the coffeehouse on his official first day. The sun was barely up in the sky, but there was already a line forming on the street as people waited for their morning caffeine fix. Jordie had been up half the night with nerves and was still too wired to be exhausted, but Kaz was half-asleep, leaning against his side as he rubbed at his eyes with his free hand.

“Of course.” Mr. Hertzoon said, reaching out to ruffle Kaz’s hair like he was a stray cat. Like a cat, Kaz leaned into him, murmuring something sleepily to Jordie, who leaned down to shush him quietly, pinching his arm as subtly as he could. If they stood in place any longer, Kaz might fall asleep on his feet. “He can get some more sleep in the back and once he wakes up I’ll feed him some breakfast and keep an eye on him. You’ll be in and out too, you can check on him yourself.” He finished unlocking the door and ushered Jordie and Kaz inside past the waiting crowd. The coffeehouse was dark and empty. “Once you’ve made some money and you’re a little more stable, I’ll help you with getting him back into school.”

“Thank you,” Jordie said. It was easy enough to get Kaz settled and back to sleep—he was a heavy sleeper, most of the time, and he doubted that he’d even remember half of this once he woke up for real. “I really—thank you, Mr. Hertzoon.”

“Of course, Jordie.” Mr. Hertzoon grinned and clapped him on the shoulder, making Jordie stand up taller and smile back. “You seem like a bright young man, and I’d like to help you succeed. Please just let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

He spent the rest of his first day with Filip, learning the ropes of his new job. They spent most of their time going back and forth between the coffeehouse, the Exchange, and the docks—in addition to serving coffee and pastries that were, to be generous, not the highest quality, it turned out that Mr. Hertzoon’s main business was as a broker, using what Jordie and Filip learned from hanging around the docks and the Exchange to guide his clients in making small trades on various goods and stocks—nothing major, nothing he would need a license from the Merchant Council for, but enough to make everyone involved a decent sum. More than he got for the coffee, at any rate. The bitter, burnt taste was still lingering in Jordie’s mouth, and he doubted he’d be going back for a second cup.

“We’ve got to even the playing field,” Filip said as he and Jordie were waiting at Berth One for a ship of Shu spices to come in—incredibly valuable, even if they would likely never be used in cooking. Kerch food, as delicious and filling as it was, was not known for an overabundance of flavor, and most everyone that Jordie knew regarded Shu spices with suspicion. “You saw how it is in the Exchange. Everyone knows everyone and they’re only interested in helping out people that are just like them. The second you introduced yourself with that country accent and country name, you were less than dirt to them.”

“You’re from the country too,” Jordie pointed out, scuffing his shoe along the wooden plank of the dock. His boots still fit him fine, but Kaz would need new ones soon, with the way he’d been growing. His were hand-me-downs from Jordie, and had been on their last legs even before he gave them to Kaz. He mentally pushed back his planned trip to the bookstore. Maybe on his second paycheck—

“And I learned, didn’t I?” Filip countered, fussing with the rolling paper of his homemade cigarette, cobbled together from string and salvaged tobacco. It was true, Jordie supposed. The only sign that Filip wasn’t a Ketterdam native was his lingering accent, and even that was slipping away. Even his surname, Bakker, was nowhere near as rural as Jordie’s. “You will too, Jordan, trust me.”

“Don’t call me Jordan,” Jordie grumbled, reaching over to snatch the makeshift cigarette from Filip’s hand and taking a drag. The smoke irritated his lungs and he bent over double, coughing frantically as Filip laughed.

“Like I said.” He reached over and plucked the cigarette from Jordie’s fingers, taking his own drag—and, of course, not reacting at all. His country accent was almost entirely gone. “You’ll learn.” He dropped the remains of the cigarette to the ground and rubbed it out with the toe of his boot. “Now come on, let’s get back and tell Mr. Hertzoon about the extra loads of pepper they brought.”

It continued like that for a few days—Jordie and Filip scouting information across the city and bringing it back to Mr. Hertzoon while Kaz waited in the coffeeshop, practicing his magic tricks and apparently listening to all the conversations around him. He would report the local gossip to Jordie as they walked back to the boardinghouse at night—neither of them knew most of the people being talked about, of course, except for the few mercher families whose names Jordie recognized from his week at the Exchange, none of whom seemed to be doing anything particularly interesting. It was nothing like the gossip in Lij, where everyone knew who had fallen asleep in church or secretly moved property boundary lines in the middle of the night or why a baby born a month premature was so healthy. Kaz seemed happy to know something that Jordie didn’t however, so he let him ramble about his newly gathered secrets, trying to make interested noises at the right times.

On the fourth day of his new job. Mr. Hertzoon grabbed Jordie’s arm as he came into the coffeehouse, a few moments late—Kaz’s boots were finally beginning to give way, and they’d had to stop to try and find some discarded newspaper to stuff the soles with. He felt his heart climb into his throat—this was it, he was going to be fired—

“Jordie, lad, are you alright?” Mr. Hertzoon said, brows furrowing in a concerned look. “You look like you’re about to have a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry,” Jordie managed to force out, ignoring his heart pounding like a trapped bird behind his breastbone. “I’m fine, you just startled me. I’m sorry for being late—”

“Don’t worry about that,” Mr. Hertzoon said, waving his hand dismissively. “We’ve got bigger problems.” Jordie’s eyes widened and he glanced around the coffeeshop, not sure what he was expecting—the stadwatch, maybe, or gang members strolling up to demand protection? Mr. Hertzoon laughed. “Don’t look so frightened, lad, I’m the one in trouble, not you. I mentioned you and Kaz to my wife, and apparently we should have had you over for dinner last week. Will you come tonight and get me out of the doghouse?”

Jordie blinked, brain slowing as he tried to process the request. “Of course,” he said politely, and his stomach growled, as if waking up to the idea of a homecooked meal. He hadn’t had one in weeks, not since they left for Ketterdam. He hadn’t even realized how much he’d missed it, until now—eating food from stalls and the boardinghouse kitchen was fun at first, but the novelty was beginning to wear off.

“Perfect.” Mr. Hertzoon squeezed his shoulder again, tight enough to hurt just a little. Jordie rolled it out, subtly, once he turned his back to write down the address and smiled when he turned back and gave him the paper, like nothing was wrong at all.

Their house was on the Zelverstraat, it turned out, somehow cozy despite being twice the size of the small farm cottage Jordie had grown up in. The fire in the front room lit the windows from the inside, making the white curtains glow ruby red. The blue front door made it stand out, seem even homier. It was the kind of house he dreamed about, when he dreamed of Ketterdam. The house of someone wealthy. Someone important. The kind of someone he wanted to be someday—Jordan Rietveld, mercher. Jordan Rietveld, youngest trader on the Exchange.

The Hertzoons welcomed them themselves—despite the size of the house, they didn’t seem to have servants, or at least none that Jordie could see. Maybe they were all in the kitchen. Mr. Hertzoon's wife and daughter, Margit and Saskia, both seemed thrilled for Jordie and Kaz to come to dinner and Saskia and Kaz bonded quickly in the way that little kids did, heading off into the mansion to play as Jordie settled into the drawing room with Mr. and Mrs. Hertzoon after dinner, all three of them drinking wine, Jordie’s not even watered down.

“So, Jordie,” Mr. Hertzoon said, leaning back in his chair, a twin of Jordie’s own. It was overstuffed to the point of almost being uncomfortable, upholstered in expensive velvet just like he though mercher furniture would be. He could already picture exactly where he’d put one like it when he had his own mansion on the Zelverstraat. “I assume you don’t plan to work as a runner in a coffeeshop forever.”

Jordie blinked, taking another sip of his drink. He’d never had wine before, beyond a few stolen sips from his father’s glass on a holiday—though it would have gotten him thrashed if he’d been caught—and even a small glass of the stuff was affecting him more than he expected. “No,” he admitted cautiously.

Mr. and Mrs. Hertzoon exchanged glances and Jordie, paused, watching. If he said he wanted to be a mercher himself, live in a house just like this and send Kaz to the university for the best education money could buy, to sit on the Merchant Council and help run the country, would he be overstepping? He was just a runner, after all, a boy from the country, probably one of dozens of people Mr. Hertzoon had working for him, even if he had the only one he’d met of them was Filip. But didn’t Mr. Hertzoon say that any man could become rich, with luck and the right friends? Didn’t that include his employees? “No,” he dared to say, swirling his wine in his crystal glass, more expensive than anything he’d ever touched back in Lij, including the farm equipment. “I want this.”

The adults laughed and Jordie prepared to bristle, get defensive, but it didn’t seem like the mocking, scornful sort of laughter that a statement like that would have drawn in Lij. They were laughing, but not at him. At each other, it seemed, in the way married people did in books. “I always said you had a knack for picking talent, Jacob,” Mrs. Hertzoon said, and Jordie smiled at the compliment.

“That I do,” Mr. Hertzoon said, setting his drained glass aside and picking up his pipe. The familiar vanilla smell of tobacco reminded Jordie of his father’s study, and for a moment he was hit with a sudden bolt of homesickness. “I saw how clever Jordie was from the first moment I met him.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jordie said, taking another sip of his wine—he was warming up to the flavor now, and it was either that or the heat of the parlor fire that was turning his cheeks red.

“You remind me of me at your age,” Mr. Hertzoon continued, a contemplative look on his face as he took another puff from his pipe. Mrs. Hertzoon reached down and picked up some shapeless knitting project from the basket at her feet. “Someday, you’ll be a player in this city, Jordie, and I want to stay on your good side.” He punctuated the final statement with a wink, and Jordie chuckled as he took another sip of his wine. “Why don’t you let me help you get started? We can use some of your first paycheck, make a few safe trades, get your name out there.”

Jordan Rietveld, youngest trader on the Exchange. He could picture his office on the top floor, his name in gold letters on the door, his own mansion on the Zelverstraat. Getting his name out there—but then he could picture Kaz’s boots, the sole of the left one hanging on by a thread, remember the uncomfortable pinching of his second-best jacket. “I don’t know—”

Mr. Hertzoon nodded. “I know you have expenses, but investing will actually improve your profits. You can build up the deposit on a flat, maybe even a house in the Lid. Kaz will need tuition money for university. This is the smart move, Jordie, the Ketterdam move. This is the type of move you make when you’re planning for your future.”

That night, before he left, Jordie pledged a quarter of his next paycheck on a small trade, one Mr. Hertzoon alleged would double his investment and left with a warm glow in his stomach, though he wasn’t sure whether it was from taking the first definitive step towards a future in Ketterdam or the glass of wine. It matured in less than a week and he walked home from the coffeehouse with a grin he couldn’t suppress on his face. Other, similarly-sized trades added to the growing pile of kruge under his mattress in the boardinghouse and one night on one of their walks Jordie even dared to take Kaz to look at apartments—in the Lid, close enough to the Barrel to be affordable on his pay, but not so close he would worry about living there. There was even a national school, one of the ones established by the Merchant Council to try and reduce illiteracy, a few streets away. It would be perfect.

It was Mr. Hertzoon himself who heard the tip about the sugar. Maybe that should have been a sign, though by then he was in too deep to see it. Jordie and Filip came back from the Exchange one evening to an emptier than usual coffeehouse, with only Mr. Hertzoon, Kaz, and a man he didn’t recognize inside, the two adults deep in discussion as Kaz sat alone.

“What’s going on?” Jordie asked, sliding into a chair at Kaz’s table. There was a half-done drawing of the harbor on the table but Kaz had abandoned it in favor of staring at the only two other people in the coffeehouse with wide dark eyes, not at all subtle about his eavesdropping. Luckily, Mr. Hertzoon and his friend seemed to be ignoring him.

“I don’t know,” he sighed, clearly irritated he didn’t have any more information. Kaz had never liked knowing things, even as a toddler—he’d followed Jordie and Da around the farm constantly, asking ‘why’ to anything and everything until Jordie had thrown his arms up in frustration and said, ‘because it is, Kazzie, that’s why!’ “They’ve been talking all afternoon.”

“It must be something important.” Filip had come back to join them, a mug of coffee clutched in his hands. His eyes were sharp, focused on the two men at the other end of the room. “It looks serious.”

“Maybe he’s interviewing a new chef?” Jordie suggested. “I don’t know how you drink that stuff, Filip, it’s awful.”

“Eh.” Filip shrugged, taking a sip. “Coffee is coffee. I’ve had worse.”

“Boys!” Mr. Hertzoon called, making them both jump to their feet. Filip’s coffee slopped from his cup, spilling across Kaz’s drawing, and he gave him a dirty look. “Come here, there’s someone I want you to meet. This is a dear friend of mine, a captain on a ship that just returned from Novyi Zem, and he has very exciting news for us.”

The plan once simple, once he’d explained it. The sugar crop in Novyi Zem was failing, and the price would skyrocket once the news got out. If Mr. Hertzoon bought up the sugar before the markets heard, the money they could make would be astronomical.

“I need your help, though,” his friend said. “I’m not known at the Exchange, and sales of this magnitude will draw suspicion.”

“Jordie and Filip can help make the sales,” Mr. Hertzoon said. “They’re my best runners, they’re known around the city. Would you be willing, boys?”

“Of course!” Jordie said. He started counting up his cut of the sale, mentally adding to the tally of kruge he kept in his head. It wouldn’t be enough for the deposit on the apartment, but it would move their timeline up by months. They could be out of the boardinghouse by the end of the year. “Whatever you need, sir.”

They set out the plan that afternoon—Jordie and Filip would split the sale between three different offices, to make sure that no suspicion was drawn. They would keep track of the sugar prices, and when they reached their height, they would sell and the profits would come rolling in.

“I don’t know,” Kaz said, wrinkling his brow in the way that meant he was about to make trouble as they walked home. “Isn’t that cheating?”

“It isn’t cheating,” Jordie snorted. Cheating was only hiring people you knew, or getting a clerk job when you were barely tall enough to see over the desk. Cheating was going on and on about hard work and effort when you had been born with more wealth than Jordie could have ever imagined before he came to Ketterdam. “It’s good business. And besides, how are ordinary people supposed to move up in the world without a little help? Anyways—” he bumped his shoulder into Kaz’s, swinging their hands and nearly lifting him off the ground. A small smile spread across his face, even as he ducked his head to try and hide it “—don’t you want the apartment we saw?”

“I don’t want to do something bad,” Kaz was staring off into the distance; Jordie followed his gaze and saw it focused on the distant spires of the Church of Barter. “Da wouldn’t want us to cheat. He’d want us to do the right thing.”

Da’s dead and he never gave a damn what you did anyways, as long as I was looking after you, Jordie almost said, but he didn’t want a crying Kaz to bring down his mood. This was the best thing to happen to them in Ketterdam so far, and he wasn’t going to let Kaz’s pouting ruin it. “We are doing the right thing,” he said, trying his best to be reassuring. “This is how it works, Kazzie, I’m not doing anything anyone else wouldn’t.”

Kaz didn’t look as reassured as he hoped, but he let the argument go and Jordie and Filip began to execute the first stages of the plan. Like Mr. Hertzoon had said, they were known around the city at that point—not by name, not to anyone but a few clerks not much older than them, but their faces were familiar, and the sales drew no suspicion, especially when they split them up between three different regional offices. Jordie rearranged his budget to buy a fresh paper each day rather than scrouging yesterday’s from the gutter and they tracked the rise of the prices together as the news spread, Jordie and Filip getting giddier and giddier with each new height they reached. Even Kaz began to feel the excitement, going on about the dog he wanted to get and the fancy new tricks he could learn with another few decks of cards.

When Mr. Hertzoon decided the moment was right, they made the sale. Hundreds of kruge split between the four of them—the lion’s share going to Mr. Hertzoon and his friend, of course, since they were responsible for the plan and the first place but Jordie still found himself richer than he’d been since he’d gotten to the city—not enough for the apartment deposit, even with the money from the farm, but close. Two more months, and they’d be ready.

He came into work two days after the sale and saw Mr. Hertzoon smiling widely—he was usually smiling, of course, he was a naturally cheerful person from what Jordie knew of him, but this was different. It was like the sugar sale—something was happening.

“The rains came again,” he told Jordie and Filip once they’d both set their things down. “The rest of the sugar fields are drowned, and so are the warehouses in Eames Chin. This is big money, and it’s time to go all in.”

Filip sat up, eyes sparkling. “Then we should too.”

“What?” Mr. Hertzoon laughed and shook his head, a disbelieving look on his face. “No, lad, the buy-in’s too high. This is a game from grown-ups. There’ll be other trades, soon, but not this one.”

When Filip began shouting, Jordie was tempted to cover his ears—he saw Kaz doing it, across the coffeeshop, even as all the patrons turned to stare, watching Filip’s face grow red as he shouted and gestured inarticulately in anger—but instead he sat quietly, letting the noise wash over him, waiting for the fight to end. He heard Mr. Hertzoon called selfish, greedy, just like the merchers in the Exchange, using words that made the distant part of Jordie still aware of the situation glad Kaz had decided to cover his ears on his own. When it ended Filip stormed out, shoving past Kaz, who had crept silently over to the table, eyes wide as he reached out to cling to Jordie’s elbow. The few patrons in the coffeeshop returned to their pastries and conversations, voices lower than before, sneaking curious glances over at the three of them. Mr. Hertzoon led them into his office, then slumped back in his chair, an exhausted look on his face. “I—I can’t help the way business is done. The men running the trade want only big investors, people who can support the risk.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, a familiar look of embarrassed regret in his eyes. “Are you angry with me too?”

“Of course not,” Jordie reassured instantly, seeing Kaz nod in agreement out of the corner of his eye. “I understand. He was being unreasonable. You were completely right.” The words flowed off his tongue, easy and familiar, and he felt tension in his shoulders ease as Mr. Hertzoon nodded, seeming to accept them.

“I understand why he’s angry,” said Mr. Hertzoon. “Opportunities like this one don’t come along often, but there’s nothing to be done. I know you boys don’t have that kind of money.”

Jordie thought of the growing pile of kruge under his mattress, of the apartment in the Lid, the new books in the store they’d passed the other night, of the way his jacket was tight across his shoulders and the newspaper stuffed into Kaz’s boots. “I have money. Real money. From selling our Da’s farm.”

“And that’s all you and Kaz have to live on, I imagine,” Mr. Hertzoon said, shaking his head. “I admire your ambition, Jordie, but no. I can’t let you do that. A child your age can’t make that kind of decision.”

A familiar flicker of anger cam alight in Jordie’s stomach, one that had been buried ever since he’d met Mr. Hertzoon. The man had never treated him like a child before, and to do it now? After everything he’d been doing for him, when he had a chance to make his fortune on the biggest trade the market was likely to see in a decade? “I’m not a child,” he said through gritted teeth. “If it’s a good opportunity, I want to take it.”

They headed back to the mansion at the Zelverstraat and argued into the early morning, Jordie standing firm in his stance—he had the money for the stake, he wanted to take the risk same as any other man. Kaz fell asleep, curled up like a cat on the floor, as Jordie slowly wore Mr. Hertzoon down, and by the time the sun was starting to come up over the canal they’d reached a deal. At the bank the next morning Jordie handed over what remained of the farm money and the few paychecks he’d earned—they should keep what they’d earned from the earlier sugar sales, Mr. Hertzoon said, to tide them over for the week it would take for the profits to accrue. Back at the boardinghouse he’d hugged them both and told Jordie, “remember, there’s always the slim chance something will go wrong. I’m trusting you to let us take this risk together.”

“The deal is the deal,” Jordie promised, shaking his hand. “I’ll see you in a week.”

For that week, it was perfect. He indulged in all his desires, thinking of the money to come—he bought Kaz new boots and tossed the old ones aside happily, along with his second-best jacket once he purchased a new coat. He even bought books, new ones, and read them in their room at the boardinghouse as he discussed plans with Kaz—for school, once he started again, the kind of furniture they wanted in their new apartment, the trades Jordie would make at the Exchange with their excess profits. And then, at the end of the week, they went hand in hand back to the mansion on the Zelverstraat.

He might not have recognized it, if not for the blue door. The house stood cold and empty, with even the curtains in the front window gone. When Jordie and Kaz stood on their toes and peeked in the windows, the furniture was gone as well, with the few pieces too heavy to move covered in white sheets. “Do we have the wrong house?” Kaz asked, and Jordie wished he could say yes. Instead he turned around, glancing up and down the street, trying not to look as worried as he felt.

“Let’s ask,” he said, turning to the house next door. A maid answered, glancing them up and down with a disapproving look. Jordie smiled, shifting awkwardly on his feet. “Excuse me, Miss, do you know where the family next door went? The Hertzoons?”

“They were renting,” she said briskly. “Tourists from Zierfoort. They went home a few days ago.”

Jordie felt his stomach drop, vision blurring with tears of panic he refused to acknowledge. Kaz’s grip on his hand tightened and he squeezed back absently, trying to keep his smile up, not panic him. Not yet. “No, that—that has to be a mistake. They’ve lived here for years—”

“No.” The maid shook her head. “They’re gone. Excuse me.” With that, she shut the door in their faces and Jordie felt his last hope plummet off a cliff.

He tried to calculate how much kruge they had left as they walked back to the boardinghouse, whispering vague reassurances that he barely believed to Kaz at the same time. He needed to—he needed to make a plan, figure out what was going on, keep Kaz from panicking until he knew more. Keep himself from panicking, too, ideally. “There must have been a mistake,” he lied, swallowing heavily and not daring to look at Kaz in the eye, for fear he’d know he was lying. “They’re sick, or something called them away. He’ll write to us.”

No news came the next day, not that Jordie had expected anything. He tried to keep a calm face for Kaz, even as he gathered up his new books and returned them to the bookstore, only getting a few paltry kruge in exchange, barely a tenth of what he’d paid for them in the first place. The coat and boots couldn’t be returned at all, and Jordie was unwilling to sell them yet, not when they might need the warmth in the next few days.

Like he suspected, the loan agreement was a fake, and no one at the bank had heard of Jacob Hertzoon or anyone in his family. Even Filip was gone—there was no sign of him at the coffeehouse, also empty, and no one along the Barrel had seen or heard of him, if they were even willing to answer any of Jordie’s questions. He went back to the shop and tried to return his coat again, but they refused to take it, though they gave him five kruge for his old one. Kaz’s old boots were too worn to be sold to anyone.

In the end, it didn’t even come down to a choice between rent and food—they couldn’t have afforded rent anyways, even if Jordie was willing to skip more meals than he currently was. He was down to one a day, trying to get more food into Kaz, secretly glad that he was too stressed to eat and hating himself a little for it too, seeing how sharp his cheekbones were becoming in his face.

“Please,” Jordie still begged their landlady that Sunday, the day he’d normally pay for another week. “Please, I think I’ll have a job soon. Just one more week, please.” It was a lie, but a week would give him a little more time, time to try and figure something out.

“Look, I’d like to help, but this is a business.” She didn’t even raise her head from her ledgers—Jordie could see his name, and the sum that had seemed so trivial when they first arrived in the city printed next to it. Now, it seemed like a fortune. “Either pay your rent or get out, I’m not running a charity.”

No one in the city seemed to be running a charity, it turned out—even the stadwatch, who rousted them from the bridge where they’d been trying to sleep, giving Jordie a black eye in the process. The Church of Barter offered free meals to beggars, but only children—boys Jordie’s age were old enough to work, the priest in charge told him with a scornful look. They weren’t going to supplement laziness, not when there were plenty of jobs in the city.

“Where are they, then?” Jordie demanded, tapping his foot impatiently as he watched Kaz pick at his stew—he wouldn’t have blamed him, a few days ago, it was unappetizing sludge with a disturbingly fishy smell, but now he was half-tempted to go over and shove it down his throat, just to get some calories into him. “Because I looked for weeks, and people only want to hire their friends, people they know.”

The priest looked at him over the rim of his glasses, thin lips pinched together so tightly that they almost disappeared. “You need to be less picky, then, young man. Beggars can’t be choosers and Ghezen will reward hard work no matter what industry you devote yourself to.”

“I need enough to live on, at the least!” He said, panic clawing its way up his throat. “We don’t even have a place to sleep, there has to be something you can do—”

“I’m sorry young man, but that’s not the Church’s job.” The priest glanced him up and down, lips somehow thinning even further when he saw the bruises on Jordie’s face. “You’ll get three meals a day and a bed in Hellgate, if you’re truly that desperate.”

Jordie would have spat one of the hundred curses flying through his head at him, but then he saw Kaz out of the corner of his eyes, spoon halfway to his mouth as he watched the brewing fight. He knew that cursing out a priest would likely only get them banned from the church grounds and he wasn’t willing to risk that food supply getting cut off, not yet. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said instead, trying to keep the hatred in his voice to only an undercurrent. “Come on, Kaz.”

There was only one place to go when they were this desperate, and like every other person in Ketterdam with nothing left to lose, the Rietveld brothers found themselves drifting deeper and deeper into the Barrel.

“It won’t be a great job,” Jordie told Kaz. They’d found a relatively secluded area under the steps of a tavern—the ovens kept it surprisingly warm, despite the smell of stale beer, trash, and the canals. He’d spent some of the last of their kruge on a heel of stale bread and was picking at his half, trying to summon a little more of an appetite. Kaz had devoured his and was eyeing Jordie’s portion slyly, and he handed it over. “Not like the Exchange. But I’ll find something soon, don’t worry.”

“I could get a job too,” Kaz suggested. “I’m small, factories like that.”

“No,” Jordie said instantly. “No way. You’re just a kid.”

“So are you.” Kaz’s lip stuck out stubbornly.

“I’m 13,” Jordie insisted, but the words rang hollow, and he tucked his new coat—his stupid new coat, he could have lived with that jacket—tighter around his shoulders. “I’m the older brother, okay? It’s my job to look after you.”

The next day he started his job search over again, going into any store and factory he could find and presenting himself, young and willing, if not eager, to work. There was little interest—even here, in the most desperate part of the city, his country accent and the nine-year-old hanging off his arm hardly made him an appealing candidate.

“Please,” he found himself begging the owner of a rag-and-bone store, one of his last stops of the day. He was exhausted—his feet ached from walking all through the Barrel and neither he or Kaz had had anything to eat since they finished the last of the stale bread that morning. “Please, I can—I can run errands, or do your books or watch the shop, anything—”

He must have looked particularly pitiful because the man paused, glancing him up and down. Jordie squared his shoulders, trying to look less exhausted than he was. He hadn’t been able to catch a glimpse of himself in a mirror, but from the way his face felt whenever he touched it, he knew his bruises must stand out, even in the dim lighting of the shop’s parlor. “How old are you?”

“13,” he answered quickly. “But I’ve left school, and I grew up on a farm. I’m strong, sir, and—” he snapped his mouth shut as the shopkeeper raised his hand, eyes glinting in the dim lantern light.

“What’s your name?”

“Jordan, sir. Jordan Rietveld.” This might be it. Ghezen, this might be it. He tried to summon up the excitement and relief he knew he should be feeling, ignore the finger of dread sliding along his spine, wrapping around the back of his neck.

“I’m Jochem Smit. Now come here, Jordan, and let me take a look at you.” He let go of Kaz’s hand and took a few steps forward awkwardly, closer to the lantern light. Mr. Smit made a humming noise in his throat, leaning forward and brushing his fingers along Jordie’s jawline. They were warm, warmer than he expected, almost burning him with his touch. He coughed, once, before grabbing Jordie’s upper arm and pulling him even closer, close enough for his warm breath to blow across his face. It smelled like garlic. “Yes, I think I might be able to find something for you, if you come back later. Alone. Tonight, maybe.” His hand moved up, cupping Jordie’s cheek. He was frozen in place, breath coming in frantic little pants, stomach twisting as he was pulled even closer, hand on his arm tight enough to bruise.

“I-I’m so sorry.” He managed to force the words out, scanning the store for Kaz, who, thank Ghezen, had gotten distracted thumbing through a pile of worn-out pamphlets and didn’t seem to be registering any of this. “I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding—let me go!” Mr. Smit’s grip on his arm had tightened, and Jordie was only able to pull away when he broke into another coughing fit, bending over and gasping for breath.

“What happened?” Kaz said as he pulled him along down the street, hands shaking with what he told himself was anger. “Jordie—”

“Nothing happened!” he snapped. “Nothing, okay! Just—just leave it alone, Kaz, stop being so nosy all the time, for Ghezen’s sake, you don’t have to know everything!” He was crying now, right in the middle of the street, crying like he hadn’t in—in a long time really. He hadn’t cried much after Da died even, too busy with the funeral and selling the farm and making his stupid, naïve plans to come to Ketterdam—Ketterdam, where he was hungry and tired and afraid. The tears kept coming and eventually Jordie gave up on forcing them back, collapsing into the gutter and crying until he was too tired to cry anymore.

He felt Kaz’s arms wrap around his waist, pressing all his weight into him—less than the last time they’d hugged like this, Jordie couldn’t help but note. “Are you okay?” he asked, voice soft and tentative.

Jordie nodded, relaxing a little and letting his arms snake around Kaz’s shoulders, hugging him tightly. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just tired. Let’s get back to the tavern and get some sleep. We’ll find something tomorrow.”

Their little hideaway didn’t turn out to be as secluded as they thought. Halfway through the night Jordie found himself woken by a kick in the ribs, only instead of a stadwatch officer responding to the complaints of tourists, this time he found himself staring up at a boy a few years older than himself, wearing the brightest, most-mismatched clothes he’d ever seen, backed up by a few others in similarly ugly outfits. “You’re in Razorgull territory,” the leader informed them bluntly, cracking his knuckles.

Jordie glanced around their little refuge with a critical eye, using the move as a chance to shove Kaz, still half-asleep, behind him. “It’s an alley,” he said bluntly.

The punch to the jaw didn’t surprise him at all, though it did make him cry out in pain. They were on him instantly after that, pounding Jordie into the ground of the alley and making him cry for mercy, extracting promises that he’d stay out of their territory—though how he was supposed to figure out where that was was never quite made clear. They mostly left Kaz alone—even gang members seemed to find beating on a nine-year-old beneath them, though Jordie did hear a splash when he was shoved into the canal before he was knocked to the ground for the final time and the Razorgulls left, delivering one final kick in the ribs as a reminder.

When he managed to fish him out Kaz’s lips were blue and he was shivering. His new boots were gone, and that almost set Jordie off on another crying jag—he remembered the 30 kruge he’d spent on those boots. Knew exactly how much bread 30 kruge could buy them, now.

“I’m hungry,” Kaz said once he’d wrapped his coat around him.

“I’m not,” Jordie said. His stomach was still tense from the earlier encounter with Mr. Smit and the repeated kicks to the ribs had hardly done wonders for his appetite.

For some reason that got Kaz laughing and Jordie found himself joining in, voice shrill and just on the edge of hysteria. They wound up collapsed against the wall, curled up together—they’d have to move, tomorrow, find a new place, but for now he was too tired to stand. Jordie pressed his lips to Kaz’s damp hair, trying to ignore the smell of canal water. “The city is winning now,” he said. “But you’ll see who wins in the end. Rich as kings, Kazzie, remember?” He felt Kaz nod sleepily against his chest as he burrowed in closer. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” Kaz whispered.

They were the last words he heard his brother say.

The fever hit him hard and fast and the next morning he was too sick and exhausted to even move. He tried, remembering the Razorgulls’ threats—there was no way he could withstand another beating, let alone protect Kaz, not in this position—but he couldn’t force his body to obey and no one came to bother them anyways. It seemed like the whole world was sick—there were bodies everywhere, and the sick boats rowed constantly up and down the canals, collecting them to be taken for burning at Reaper’s Barge.

He didn’t remember much of the plague—almost everything he knew about it he had had to learn later, once the fever was gone, and what he did remember felt like a dream. He remembered Kaz curled up against his side, so hot with fever it felt like a live coal was being pressed to his skin. He remembered the way his skin itched and blistered, blood crusting under his fingernails as he scratched frantically. He remembered the powerful, desperate thirst that seized him, the certainty that he would die if he didn’t get a drink of water, the chills that wracked him to the point he bruised himself on the cobblestone ground from how hard he was shivering. He remembered shaking Kaz frantically, watching his eyes flutter but unable to rouse him, screaming his name until his voice was gone.

He remembered somehow finding the strength to stand, making his way onto the main streets—they were totally empty, the only sound the constant ringing of the plague siren and his own desperate pleas—someone, anyone, please, help us, please. He remembered seeing a person—a young man, dressed in a medik’s dark gown, grabbing his arm and begging in what was probably barely-understandable, fever-addled Kerch, promising anything and everything—please, I’ll let you do whatever you want, please, just help¬—remembered dragging him back to the alley.

Remembered it being empty.

Remembered Kaz being gone.

And after that, nothing.

Chapter Text

They started planning for the strike in earnest a few days after Jordie’s 21st birthday—a cold, rainy day in early February, like pretty much every other day in southeast Kerch. Sometimes it seemed like it had been cold and rainy the entire 8 years he’d lived in Veldhoven, though he knew that realistically that was impossible—the land in Kerch was too low-lying, even in the relatively hilly south. They all would have been washed away.

Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly morbid, Jordie would actually wish for a flood, one that would carry him back to Ketterdam—not to the city he’d known, in all of its tattered glory and empty promises, the city he’d swore he’d never set foot in again, but to the harbor. Bodies were burned out there on Reaper’s Barge, for fear of plague and lack of space to bury them, and it's where Kaz would have been taken after the fever claimed him, his ashes left to sink beneath the waves, no one to collect them, no one to visit or remember. He wished for a flood that would carry him back, let him slip beneath the waters of the harbor and find Kaz there, waiting—actually find him, rather than turning his head to look and seeing nothing whenever he heard a child’s laughter, an older sibling’s exasperated scolding, a glimpse of dark hair out of the corner of his eye.

But he couldn’t be morbid for eight years straight, the same way it couldn’t rain for eight years straight. Either would have just been too exhausting, for him and the land. Anger was easier—he was angry most of the time, it seemed. Angry at Mr. Hertzoon, or whatever his name had been, angry at himself for falling for the scam—it had been a scam, that was clear enough from the moment the Hertzoons disappeared, and from what he’d learned later on scams of that type weren’t even uncommon in Ketterdam. He wouldn’t have been the target, or even on the radar, not until he put himself there—his paltry savings from selling the farm were nothing compared to the money Mr. Hertzoon would have been raking in from the prominent citizens of Ketterdam, desperate to get some sort of advantage in the competitive sugar market. He had been just another useful tool to make the whole thing more real, and he might have escaped if he hadn’t talked his way into his own destruction. If he hadn’t been so Ghezen-damned arrogant, hadn’t thought he deserved wealth, success, admiration, hadn’t swallowed the stories he learned—from church, school, even Da—without thinking.

So, anger. Anger was easier than grief. Anger was a burning coal in his stomach, the same desperate heat as Kaz’s tiny, feverish body pressed against him. Anger rose in his throat, choked away the tears that would have overwhelmed him in those first feverish weeks—even after it became clear he’d live, he was still sick and weak, and recovery was a long, delicate process, one he wasn’t sure he’d ever really completed. He’d certainly not been given the chance to get the long rest he’d probably needed, and even eight years later he carried the scars—some physical, like the pox marks on his cheeks and arms, some less obvious, like the persistent aches in his joints and the light-headedness that always came when he stood too long. Anger carried him, past the listlessness, the grief and blame that overwhelmed him, threatened to drown him.

The others were angry too, he knew, though they’d not shared every aspect of their stories—some things Jordie knew he would never share again. He just didn’t have the words for them, and it was likely the same for Máiréad and Dirk and Hanna, even as bound together by anger and fear and loss as the four of them were. He wasn’t the last of them to turn 21—that was Hanna, the baby of the group at 19, still bound for another two years by the indenture she’d been forced to sign by the Aid Society like the rest of them.

Orphanages were uncommon in Kerch—unlike in Ravka, where from what he’d read they were everywhere, they didn’t have generations of war wiping out entire towns, or saints that were supposed to help abandoned children. Out in the countryside, in small towns like Lij, children were taken in by extended family and neighbors, grateful for an extra set of hands—Jordie and Kaz had been unusual, in their lack of family and Jordie’s stupid, naïve determination to become something else besides a farmer. Even in larger cities, from what he’d seen in the brief time he’d lived in Ketterdam, unwanted children tended to gather together on the streets, look after themselves. Charity might make them weak, dependent rather than reliant on their own industry as the Church demanded

The Aid Society though, founded in the aftermath of the Queen’s Lady plague, was hardly trying to be an orphanage and it conformed almost perfectly to the principles of the Church of Ghezen—nothing was given away for free, and they used all their bargaining power to make sure they and the merchers who funded them got the best of every deal. Children with nowhere to go, orphaned or abandoned by families that could no longer care for them, were offered places out of the city, in the care of wealthy famers or factory owners—with signed indentures, of course, binding them until they were 21, to make sure their new guardians’ investment in them was repaid.

In some ways, Jordie had been the perfect candidate for them: young, but old enough to do hard work, heavy chores, to leave school and devote himself to whatever profession he was ordered into. No ties to Ketterdam—nothing to run back to, no gang tattoos or city accent or uncouth habits to frighten country housewives. Desperate to leave Ketterdam—all of the ugly memories, reminders of his own failures—behind. Unsophisticated and frightened enough to sign what was put in front of him by a priest and a mercher, no questions asked.

Veldhoven was nothing like Lij or even Ketterdam—it was a small industrial town on the western edge of the True Sea that seemed almost entirely grey and eternally damp and miserable, centered around a textiles mill owned by the Vanderwaal family, the oldest and richest in town. Jordie had only met Mr. Vanderwaal, the official owner, the once, when the man affixed his name to the stack of blank indentures that arrived with the children he’d sent for. He’d stood beside Máiréad, he remembered—her red Kaelish hair had been the brightest thing in the hall, if not the whole town, and half the other kids had gravitated toward her—especially the younger ones, raised in the Barrel, who were used to bright colors, found them comforting. He didn’t know where Dirk and Hanna had been standing—he hadn’t known to look for them then and even when they discussed the ceremony later, in their own meetings, where they’d stood had hardly been a topic on the agenda, not when they had to deal with everything else that had been done to them.

Still, he remembered a sharp elbow digging into his ribs, prompting him to turn to look at the girl beside him—she was older, he’d been able to tell even then, a year older and an inch or so taller than him at the time. He’d outgrown her somewhere around turning 15. Máiréad Powers—he’d heard her name on the boat they’d taken out here, one of the matrons calling it in exasperation as she leaned over the edge and dragged her hand through the water of the canal—smiled at him, and something about the curve of her smile reminded him of Kaz’s crooked grin, the one he only ever gave when he’d done something clever and was particularly pleased with himself.

Grief had hit him so hard he nearly doubled over, an armored glove sinking into his stomach, making the jab in the ribs seem like nothing in comparison. He still found himself smiling back.

Her elbow was digging into his ribs now, despite the height difference—the inch she’d had on him at 13 was nothing compared to the half-foot or so he had on her now. Jordie turned from the window of the flat—it only had the one and he’d monopolized it that evening, perching on the sill and leaning his head against the bubbled glass to watch the rain fall. The others were sitting around the kitchen table, or at least they had been until Máiréad walked over and poked him. “I’ve been calling your name for two minutes,” she said, hands on her hips.

“Sorry.” Jordie turned his head from the window, pushing himself to standing and walking over to the kitchen table. The four of them shared this flat, a ‘gift’ of the Vanderwaal Textile Mill, rent helpfully taken out of the wages they earned—or that he, Dirk, and Máiréad earned, now that they were 21. It was small, just three rooms, with a communal washroom down the hall—the whole building was full of flats like this, filled with former and current orphans and indentures. “You were saying?”

“I was saying this is impossible.” It was one of Dirk’s favorite phrases. Like always, he was rubbing his left arm as he said it—Jordie knew there was a hand tattooed there, a remnant of his brief time as a member of the Black Tips, before the plague turned all of their lives upside down, and his hazel eyes were downcast, brow furrowed with worry. He’d have wrinkles before he was 30, if any of them lived that long. Even eight years after leaving Ketterdam he still had a Barrel accent. Not that Jordie could talk—he’d tried to shed his own accent, but Lij still clung to every other word. “If we go ahead with this plan we’ll all end up in court on charge of breach of contract. That’s a two year sentence minimum, and all of us conspiring together will get us some sort of enhancement for sure.”

“You won’t,” Hanna said, running a hand through her dark curls, half falling out of her bun. Jordie didn’t have many memories of his mother—she had died when he was four, after all—but that gesture always seemed to trigger them. She and Hanna had the same dark hair, which Kaz had inherited. He couldn’t remember how tall she had been, but Hanna was small and slight even at 19, and it was a constant visual reminder of the few years they all had on her, the unique danger they might be putting her in. “You don’t have contracts to breach anymore. I might.”

“With everyone involved, they can’t arrest us all, that’s the point of a general strike,” Máiréad said, pacing back and forth. In a few minutes she’d start gesturing expressively, and whoever was standing near her would have to duck to avoid getting whacked in the face, a lesson they’d all learned the hard way. Not the hardest lesson he’d learned in the past eight years, of course, or the hardest he’d been hit in that same time period, but Jordie still took a step back apprehensively, careful of his jaw. “For one thing, the town jail’s just not big enough.”

“And what do you know about the town jail?” Jordie smiled at her, trying to lighten the mood—the rain seemed to have gotten into everyone, making them as miserable and grey as the sky above them, hardly a mood conducive to planning. “Leading a secret life of crime you haven’t told us about, Miss Powers?”

She laughed at the formal term of address—none of them had ever gone by surnames with each other, it had been Jordie and Máiréad and Dirk and Hanna since the first few weeks in Veldhoven—and gave an exaggerated curtsy, dark skirts rustling. “A lady never reveals her secrets, Mr. Rietveld.”

“Well when I see one, I’ll be sure to let them know—hey!” Her elbow dug into the soft space below his ribs with shocking speed for the second time that night. “Why are you so pointy?”

“It’s a tactical advantage,” she answered primly. “For the local stadwatch. Brass knuckles and nightsticks will be no match against my pointy elbows.”

“I can attest to that.” Jordie rubbed the side of his torso—he might actually have a bruise there tomorrow, though he didn’t bother unbuttoning his waistcoat or lifting his shirt to check. “Those things are a lethal weapon, go down to City Hall and get them registered.”

“I’m not going down to City Hall for anything but this.” Máiréad said firmly, sitting back down at their battered table, where half-drunk cups of black coffee had been pushed aside to make room for the stacks of small pieces of sturdy cardstock, being copied out in Hanna and Jordie’s steady hands. They’d both had the most education of the four of them, Jordie having gone to school in Lij and Hanna a national school in Ketterdam, before her mother had died of the plague, and had the best handwriting as a result.

They weren’t the only ones involved in the planning, of course. The strike would never succeed if they were—four workers were nothing compared to the hundreds, if not thousands, that kept Vanderwaal Textile Mills going. The four of them alone could easily be sacked or, as Dirk reminded them at every turn, thrown into jail and maybe even excommunicated for conspiracy and breach of contract and it would make absolutely no difference to the mill, let alone Veldhoven or Kerch at large.

But it had been their idea, coming altogether in a way that likely never would have worked if any one of them had been absent, or different from what they were. If Máiréad hadn’t come from the Wandering Isle with her parents when she was 12 only to lose them in the Queen’s Lady plague, they wouldn’t have had her outside perspective, a skeptical look at the Kerch reverence for commerce and contract Jordie knew he found himself falling into without thinking, as much as he cursed the Church of Ghezen once he had a few glasses of whiskey in him or just the privacy of his friends’ sympathetic ears.

Without Hanna and her single shopkeeper mother, always complaining about the impossibility of finding work at a decent wage with someone even more desperate always willing to undercut her and work for less and without Dirk and his year and a half of experience in the Black Tips, not to mention a childhood in the Barrel, to give them a quick grounding in the world of bargaining, blackmail, and extortion, as well as his extensive knowledge of the Kerch legal code they might have thought their problems unique to the Vanderwaals or Veldhoven, surely illegal in some way, grumbled to themselves and made plans to leave—try some other city, some other industry, not knowing that things would likely be functionally the same wherever they went—or maybe brought them to the courts, hoping someone would take their side.

Jordie’s principle contribution to the cause came from the fact that he still read everything he got his hands on, from the few books available in Veldhoven’s town library to the scraps of newspaper left in the gutter, pouring over all of them until the damp ink smeared off on his palms or the stern-faced librarian threatened to ban him for life if he didn’t let him go home and eat dinner. He read economics and theology and news articles—not just from Kerch but Ravka and Novyi Zem and the Wandering Isle, once they’d been translated—and even one slender book on political theory that some university student on holiday must have lost track of, and he came up with a word for not just what they wanted, but how they could accomplish it: strike.

So here they were on a rainy February night in their flat, writing out the cards they’d pass around and use to get an official measure of their support—they had an unofficial one, of course, but a clear show of numbers might get them into a bargaining position without having to risk arrest or just extra-judicial beatings by the local stadwatch. Jordie had his doubts—he’d read enough theology to know the place of a worker in a hierarchy was divinely ordained, that only advances supported by Ghezen’s hand and their own individual efforts were legitimate, that anything else was a heretical attempt to subvert the natural order of the world. From the long prayer Mr. Vanderwaal had recited the only time he’d ever met him and his insistence on all his workers attending Church weekly, going to the point of docking their wages if they didn’t make an appearance or present evidence they’d been deathly ill—even those not raised in the Church, like Máiréad—he didn’t seem the type to go for what their teachings would likely define as straight-up heresy.

They didn’t burn people at the stake in Kerch anymore. Jordie had made a point of checking. Just in case.

“City Hall’s a last resort,” he said, taking a break from copying out cards to fill his pen with ink. “They won’t take us seriously if we don’t do this right, start from the bottom.” Máiréad made a face, one that made the dimple in her freckled right cheek stand out, and Jordie rolled his eyes fondly at her. “Not all of us have your pointy elbows, Meg, I’ve got no desire to tangle with the stadwatch if I can help it.”

“Jordie’s right,” Dirk said, picking his mug up and swirling the cold coffee inside around before taking a sip, using his free hand to pinch at his long nose, looking even longer as he drew his top lip back in a disgruntled look at Máiréad’s glare. “What? You may be acquainted with the town jail, but I’m not, and I prefer to keep it that way. I joined a gang for protection, not out of some inherent love of breaking the law.”

“You’re actually the most boring gang member I’ve ever met.” Hanna pushed her curls back from her face again, smearing ink across her forehead. Dirk rolled his eyes and she made a rude gesture at him, some of the ink on her hands splattering across the table.

“A bad law is no law at all,” Jordie quoted. It was some Zemeni legal principle he’d read in a theology book years ago—the Church has gone on to thoroughly debunk it, of course, but he’d liked the phrase and it had stuck with him.

“I’m sure that will go over well in court. Yes, your honor, we knew what we were doing was illegal and probably heretical, but we just thought the law was stupid—”

“The law is stupid,” Máiréad said, tossing her head back. Her red hair caught the dim lamplight, still the brightest thing in Veldhoven. “People are just people, no different than anyone else no matter what job they’ve got. Shouldn’t the Church be using some of those tithes and fancy buildings to help people, rather than just sit around and tell us what we’re all doing wrong with our lives?”

“They should put you on the Merchant Council.” Jordie took a moment to lean back in his chair and stretch out his cramping hands. “You’d have the country running right in a week.”

“Only if you came along to do my research for me.” Her dark grey eyes caught his, and Jordie looked back down at the table, tapping his pen against a blank piece of paper and ignoring the ink stain it left behind. “It’s your arguments that’ll really get this off the ground, Jordan.”

“Don’t call me Jordan,” he grumbled, feeling his cheeks turn warm and pink. University had been Kaz’s dream, or his and Da’s dream for Kaz, but sometimes, when his daydreaming and rumination took a more positive tone, he pictured himself there. Or at least in the library. In his mind, the library at the University of Ketterdam was the size of a city block, full of any book you could imagine, all the answers to all of the questions in the world. He could bring Kaz—or the memory that haunted him, at the very least—with him, show him, say look, Kazzie, this is what you would have had if I hadn’t been so stupid. Some type of penance, or just letting Kaz live vicariously through him. “I’d come, but only if your first act as the only member of the Merchant Council is to build me my own library.”

“Well of course,” Máiréad said. “You’ll need it, for all your research.”

“Once you let him in there we’d never see him again,” Dirk sighed, but there was a faint smile on his face. Jordie shoved his shoulder lightly, ducking to avoid a retaliatory swat.

“I don’t know,” Hanna tilted her head to the side, loose curls brushing against her shoulder. “He’d have to come out to get something to eat, at least.”

“No,” Jordie laughed. “I’d want meal delivery too. I’m going to be busy after all—”

“I’ll have to raise taxes at this rate,” Máiréad grinned. “We can call it the Rietveld book tax, you get 10% of government revenues for your fancy library instead of tithes—”

“And then we’d all get overthrown in a bloody coup,” Dirk sighed. “Except for Jordie hiding in his library, I suppose.”

“You can come if you’re nice to me,” Jordie promised. “I’ll need someone to lift heavy books, I suppose.” He was strong—he’d worked in a textiles mill for eight years after all, and had developed a wiry strength that wasn’t always obvious at first glance, but Dirk had the broad, sturdy build of a wrestler and the muscle associated with it, and his ability to lift all of them entirely off the ground—separately, of course—was a point of pride.

“And I’ll flee back to the Wandering Isle in political exile and write sad Kaelish poetry,” Máiréad sighed dreamily. “Hanna can come with me, she’ll be my agent.”

“A perfect plan,” Hanna said dryly. “Should we stop copying these out then?”

“Might as well finish up,” Jordie said, reaching for his pen. “Just in case.”

They did finish, though it took another couple hours to do so—Máiréad and Dirk had both excused themselves to bed by time they were done and Jordie didn’t bother turning on a lamp as he stripped down to his nightclothes and collapsed into bed, the familiar sound of Dirk’s snoring quickly lulling him to sleep.

The next morning was still rainy and grey, but there was an optimism around the four of them now that hadn’t been there last night. Jordie tucked the cards into various pockets of his coat—it wasn’t the same one he’d bought in Ketterdam, of course, that had been lost with Kaz and he would have long outgrown it anyways, but it was a similar style. A little out of fashion eight years later of course, but it had been cheap secondhand and the nostalgia had hit too strongly for him not to buy it. Whoever had owned it before him had torn up the lining adding extra pockets everywhere, which made it perfect for this part of the plan—he could hardly just carry the cards in and start passing them out, not if he didn’t want to be fired or worse.

It was too hot in the mill itself to wear his coat, so it had to be left in the cloakroom with everyone else’s. Not that it mattered—it was too loud to talk anyways, with the machines going. Jordie had thought he would go deaf for sure, the first time he’d stepped foot on the mill floor—even the Exchange, with all the people shouting and bargaining, hadn’t been so loud. Some people had, or at least lost a good bit of their hearing—Jordie had started stuffing his ears with stray bits of cotton, once he learned that. It was still hardly the worst injury that you could suffer in on the mill floor, thought—he’d probably always remember helping Hanna and Máiréad put their hair up for the first time, when they’d both probably been too young for it socially, after they’d all watched a girl nearly get scalped when her braid had been caught on one of the spinning machines. The supervisor on duty at the time had been upset, he remembered, because her blood had stained the white cotton thread they were spinning, and the whole batch had to be thrown away. He didn’t recall what had happened to her—he hadn’t seen her again, after that.

So, for safety alone he kept a very close eye on his work, quickly retying broken threads and adjusting the looms he was supposed to keep track of, trying not to inhale too much of the dust and debris flying around the workshop, as futile an effort as it probably was. There was a rhythm to it that he might have been able to enjoy, if he wasn’t worried about getting his scalp torn off or his fingers caught in the machines—that sort of thing tended to suck an enjoyment out of an activity, even one he might have actually enjoyed rather than just trying to find something about it that he liked. With that fear and the anticipation of the cards back in the coatroom it seemed to take hours for the lunch break to come.

They only had half an hour, but that was plenty of time—they’d discussed this with the others, of course, and everyone knew what was coming. Jordie had felt eyes on him all morning. Some of the younger kids had even been practically bouncing in anticipation. Still, he didn’t dare make too much of a scene handing them out—that was asking for trouble, and it wasn’t the position he wanted to be in when their activities were inevitably discovered either. Dirk was right, as he usually was—what they were about to do was certainly illegal and likely heretical. Not that Jordie cared much for the state of his immortal soul and he did expect he’d be making a visit to the town jail before this was all over, but not now. Jail wasn’t part of the plan until later.

So the cards were handed out subtly, passed from hand to hand as people hugged, chatted, shared items from their lunches. The four of them sat together, as always, and pretended not to notice the whispers or the eyes on them. Jordie probably couldn’t remember what they talked about even under torture but lunch flew by in the blink of an eye and no one seemed suspicious. The afternoon part of his shift dragged out and the sky was dark when they finally left the mill—not that he’d expected any differently. Working a standard 13-hour shift meant that was dark when they left the flat and dark when they got home, especially in February. Still, despite the dark Jordie tilted his head back, breathing fresh air in deeply and letting the almost ever-present rain cool his face. When he looked back at his friends, the faint gaslight of the streetlamps let him know that they were smiling.

It took almost a month and a half to collect all the cards back, enough time for the rain to lighten and the flowers in front of the library to begin to bloom. Every morning they would wake up to more of the cards slid under their door, and every lunch Jordie practically had to beat people eager to ask him questions with a stick. They had more meetings—some just the four of them, some larger, hammering out a firm list of demands: the cancellation of indentures for all the employees still bound by them, an eight hour day with an hour break for lunch, no more forced church attendance or at least an extra day off for a five-day work week, higher wages and actual safety equipment, provided for them without charge. They were unlikely to get all of it—they were unlikely to get any of it in the original form, frankly. But it was a starting point, and he was Kerch enough to know to never go into a bargaining session empty-handed.

Finally on a Saturday evening in early spring they had their official tally—85% of the cards had been returned with a yes. They would support their list of demands and if they were refused, 85% of the mill would strike. Their neighbors might have objected to the cheering coming from their flat if they hadn’t been some of the first to return their own cards. Instead half the doors on the hall were flung open and people came rushing out, chattering and cheering. Someone had brought whiskey—not the good stuff from the Wandering Isle, none of them could have afforded that, but it was whiskey and that was good enough for them—and there was drinking, singing, even a little dancing.

Jordie knew he tended to be stupid when he’d had a few glasses of whiskey, but that somehow never seemed to stop him the next time an opportunity to get his hands on some of the stuff came around. So he drank and celebrated and he didn’t curse the Church or talk to his brother’s ghost or go into a long lecture on proper barley farming techniques, an incident his friends had never let him live down. Instead, he did something even stupider, probably the stupidest thing he’d ever done drunk. He woke in his bedroom with a pounding headache, the taste of whiskey in his mouth, and Máiréad’s red hair spreading across his bare chest as she curled up against him and thought oh, shit.

There was no time to discuss it, and she didn’t seem to want to—Jordie had avoided her all through the next Sunday, but she acted and spoke completely like normal and he eventually did so too, slipping back into their habitual banter and late-night planning sessions like the night had never happened. Eventually Jordie was able to convince himself that maybe it hadn’t, that maybe it had been one of his vivid fever dreams, another lingering gift from the plague.

It took another month to get a meeting with Mr. Vanderwaal, and in the end they had to resort to straight-up lying—Dirk forged a note about some sort of high-level business meeting regarding investment in the mill—Jordie hadn’t paid much attention to the details—and they had a date and directions to his office.

“It’s not really a lie,” he’d said when he showed Jordie the reply. “Agreeing to our demands would be an investment—more people would want to come work here, if the conditions were better.”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Jordie said, grinning as he clapped him on the back.

A day of missed work might have been disastrous under other circumstances, but no matter how this meeting went Jordie had a feeling it would the least of their problems. It was still strange to sleep past sunlight on a Tuesday and dress in his church clothes—the only things he owned that seemed nice enough for the circumstances—and from the look on his friend’s faces, it seemed strange to them too.

He didn’t look at the dove-grey shirtwaist blouse Máiréad had on. He’d seen her in it enough times to know that it was the same color as her eyes.

Dirk’s reply letter got them into Mr. Vanderwaal’s office but it only took one look for him to know that they weren’t the rich investors from Belendt he’d expected. “And who might you be?” he asked, voice like ice.

Jordie exchanged glances with the others, who seemed frozen and uncertain, and stepped forward. “My name is Jordan Rietveld, sir, and I work for you at the textile mill in town.” The man’s nose wrinkled, and he wondered if it was his country accent or his employment that put the expression of disgust on his face.

“And why did you and your little friends lie your way into my office, Mr. Rietveld?” He was practically frozen with anger, so still he could have been a painting of a mercher—or at least a tall, thin, balding man dressed in mercher black. “I’d suggest speaking quickly, before the stadwatch gets here to throw you out.”

Jordie nodded to the others, who began producing cards from their pockets, adding to the stack he was pulling from his coat. “We’ve conducted a survey of your workers, sir,” he said, watching Vanderwaal’s face turn a shade of purple that might give Máiréad’s hair serious competition for the brightest thing in town. “And they’re unsatisfied with the current conditions at Vanderwaal Textiles.”

“How dare you—"

Jordie continued as if he’d not even spoken—if the was coming, he only had limited time. “We’ve taken the liberty of coming up with a list of demands to improve things.” Vanderwaal recoiled as if he’d set a dead animal down on his desk instead of a piece of paper. “It’s a starting point of course, but I’m sure we can work something out.”

“You—you arrogant, heretical—how dare you!” He slammed his hands down on the desk as he stood, a gesture that once might have made him flinch. Jordie stood firm instead, a pleasantly blank look on his face even as he watched his friends out of the corner of his eye—Hanna took a step back, but none of them reacted any more than that. “Who do you think you are, boy?”

“No one in particular,” Jordie shrugged.

“No one in particular—” he repeated in mocking disbelief. “And you expect me to just accept these demands? Tell me, Mr. Rietveld, if you’re no one in particular, why in Ghezen’s name should I listen to you?”

“I may be no one in particular, but I’m not the only one who signed those cards or agreed to those demands.” Jordie took a deep breath, squaring his shoulders. “That’s 85% of the workers at Vanderwaal Textiles, sir. And if you don’t negotiate with us in good faith, every single one of them will strike.”

Vanderwaal looked down his nose at him before laughing, high and cold. Jordie stood, biting the inside of his cheek, and waited for him to finish. “A strike? Strike away, Mr. Rietveld. But when this little temper tantrum inevitably fails, don’t come crawling back to me for your job. Don’t come crawling back to anyone in Veldhoven as a matter of fact.” He smirked. “None of you will ever work in this town again.” He sat back down at his desk, ripping the demand letter Jordie had set in front of his in two. “Now get out of my office.”

It was what they’d expected, but it was still a blow. The four of them exchanged glances once they’d left the building and Jordie could see the doubt in their eyes, doubts he was sure were reflected in his own—it was easy to talk about demands and strikes in their flat, bouncing ideas off each other with no consequences but gentle ridicule if someone suggested something ridiculous. This—this was real. This could change everything or ruin their lives.

“Well,” Hanna said, swallowing heavily, fists clenched in her skirts, “you heard the man. It’s a strike or leave Veldhoven, and I’ve got an indenture and none of you have enough money for a canal ticket.”

“When you put it like that,” Dirk said, “I guess we’re doing this.”

Jordie exchanged a glance with Máiréad, the first one he’d given her since she’d put on that grey blouse. “Well, fearless leader?”

“I’m not the leader-“ he protested, but from her smile—the same one she’d given him eight years ago—he knew it was pointless. “Fine. Spread the word. The strike starts at lunch.”

The word spread, and Vanderwaal Textiles ground to halt almost instantly—even if they had let the 15% of the workers who hadn’t signed on back in the building, it simply wouldn’t have been enough to keep production going, certainly not at the level that Vanderwaal would have expected. But a strike was more than simply not showing up for work—that would just get them fired or arrested for breach of contract. They had to shut the mill down entirely and hit the Vanderwaals where it would hurt the most—their wallets—and ideally get the public on their side as well.

So they did more. They blocked the gate of the mill, physically, linking arms and digging their heels into the ground. Some of the younger kids, the indentures with prison sentences hanging over their heads if this whole thing failed, threw rotten fruit and stones at the stadwatch sent to arrest them or at least break up the strike. They made banners. They fought back against the strikebreakers and the stadwatch, and an uncomfortable night spent in the town jail before he could come up with a sufficient bribe for his freedom showed Jordie that Máiréad had been right—it was not big enough for all of them.

How she had known, he never asked.

But it kept going, somehow, even when he spent a night in a cold stone cell nursing a broken nose, even when Hanna was pushed down and nearly trampled by a horse, when people were arrested left and right and they were denounced by police and business leaders across the region, not just in Veldhoven. Despite everything, more people joined: friends and family members, other workers in Veldhoven, people he’d never met before in his life. Jordie found himself greeting people constantly, coordinating counterattacks on the stadwatch, staying up half the night—for once, not with a book—to draft speeches and manifestos, trying to figure out ways to tell stories, win people to their side.

And then he found himself winning.

Maybe Vanderwaal had sensed the tide of public opinion was on their side—it seemed to be, at least, with the crowd outside the mill gates growing bigger every day. Maybe the shutdown of the mill was starting to really affect his finances. Maybe, though Jordie considered this to be by far the least likely scenario, he'd actually had a change of heart. Either way he appeared at the mill gates two weeks into the strike and made a speech, half of which Jordie missed entirely, too caught up in just staring and wondering what the hell his life had come to. All he heard were disjointed phrases—”industry and hard work”, “signs of Ghezen’s favor”, and “preliminary negotiations”. Then he was pulled up to shake the man’s hand as camera’s went off in their faces and the crowd was cheering. He saw Dirk picking Hanna up the waist and spinning her around, Máiréad jumping up and down with her fists in the air, face alight with joy, and he found himself smiling so wide his jaw ached.

It didn’t even matter that they were knocked off the front page by news of Jan Van Eck’s arrest for market manipulation. He didn’t give a damn what happened in Ketterdam, not when he was drunk on victory. He found in friends in the crowd and was instantly enfolded in their hug, squeezed to the point he could barely breathe, laughing and cheering until his voice was gone.

They’d done it. They’d won.

He pulled away from them after a while, stepping onto a quieter side street and closing his eyes, leaning his head back to rest against the cold brick of some building—it might have been a tailor’s shop, though he was too tired to remember. When he opened his eyes again and looked up, he could see the stars—it was a beautiful clear night, the sun just slipping below the horizon. He traced the constellations, remembering Da pointing them out, his voice as he told them the stories. Remembered Kaz clinging onto his arm, full of follow-up questions.

“I miss you,” he whispered, half to himself, half to the ghosts that haunted him. “I know it’s not the same. I know it wouldn’t have changed anything.” He had no illusions about that—a strike couldn’t stop a man from losing his grip on his plow. A union couldn’t kill a plague. “But I did it for you anyways”.” He felt a lump in his throat and swallowed around it, trying to remind himself that this was a happy occasion. “Are you proud of me?”

There was no answer, not that he’d expected one, just the sound of boots on cobblestones. He glanced up, at that, and saw Máiréad at the intersection. Her hair was tumbling down around her shoulders—it must have come loose from her pins during the celebration, and she was smiling. Jordie felt like he’d been hit in the gut with an armored fist again. “Jordie?” she called. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” he said, relaxing his shoulders a bit, trying to smile again. From the way her eyes darkened, she didn’t seem convinced. “Just—needed some air.”

She took a step closer, pausing, and then walked over to him when he didn’t protest. He reached his hand up, involuntarily, and brushed a stray hair back from her forehead. “We won.” She said. “We did it.”

“I know.” Jordie took a deep breath. “It’s just—is it enough?”

Máiréad shrugged, eyes alight—he could seem them in the gaslight, wide and grey. “It’ll have to be,” she said, then reached down and grabbed his hand. “Come on. Let’s celebrate. We’ve got more work to do in the morning.”

“That we do,” Jordie said, and followed.

Chapter Text

The boat ride back to Ketterdam was everything and nothing like the trip he had taken out to Veldhoven as a child—he’d been a child, he realized now, even though at the time nothing had offended him more.

Ten years after leaving the city for the first time and two years after the strike had begun, he could afford a second-class ticket on the canal boat, something would have been far beyond his reach when the whole thing started. It was still a strain on his finances—the strike had been some measure of successful, in that they’d brought Vanderwaal to the table and won some concessions—the end of mandatory church attendance had been the smallest but the one Jordie had relished the most, if only for the look on Máiréad’s face when Vanderwaal had agreed. The curve of her pleased smile had reminded him of the barn cat they’d had when he was young—he’d had the same self-satisfied expression whenever he’d dropped a half-eaten mouse into Jordie’s shoe. But only some.

The end of mandatory church attendance. Half days on Saturdays off. Discounts on safety equipment, which was provided by actual reputable manufacturers. A paid lunch, even if it was still half an hour, and a 10 hour day rather than the twelve or thirteen hour shifts that had been demanded before. A very small raise for the non-indentured workers, which was what gave him the money to even afford this journey.

Some days, he could enjoy his small victories—mostly his Saturday afternoons, spent in the library reading for pleasure, not frantically researching for any caselaw on their side, any advantage he could get. His Sunday mornings, some spent planning, some spent visiting with their neighbors, checking in on their problems and concerns, some spent with just his friends in their apartment, allowing themselves to relax.

Some days—when more children came in, affixing their names to indentures they couldn’t understand even if they did read Kerch, which was never a sure thing. When there were accidents, because the safety equipment might have been real and discounted, but wages hadn’t risen as much as he wanted and for some it would always be unaffordable. When even at the end of ten hours he came home exhausted to the bone, ears ringing from the sounds of the equipment, a cough starting deep in his lungs from the fibers he was almost certainly inhaling, when his joints ached with long ago fever but he couldn’t afford a day off just to rest. Some days he saw everything he’d done wrong in the whole process, every opportunity he’d missed, every pressure point he could have pushed and let slip by. Every way he'd failed again.

Two years in, though, it became clear Vanderwaal Textiles wasn’t the only place in the world where things were changing, or at least trying to. It wasn’t even just Veldhoven or their small corner of southern Kerch, where they'd had two years to consistently aim to get the public on their side. Jordie still read every paper and every paper, from Ketterdam or Ravka or even Novyi Zem and Fjerda confirmed the same—there was something in the air, some hint of something more. Ravka had elected a Grisha queen. Novyi Zem had flying machines that let them escape Kerch naval dominance, and the crown prince and princess of Fjerda were openly discussing equal rights for Grisha. The world was changing, and the four of them found themselves caught up in it, imagining their own triumphs, their own small changes for their corner of the world.

For them, it started with pirates in the True Sea. They were always there—Jordie had grown up on stories of pirate kings and queens and brave Kerch navy that hunted them, though he had never enjoyed them as much as Kaz had. Merchers, he knew, lived in fear of their trading fleets being attacked, hiring and indenturing guards and Grisha to try and outrun or outfight them and every time those protective measures failed a new tax was leveled to increase the size and efficiency of the navy. So news reports of increased pirate activity were common—Jordie and Hanna had had a lively debate about whether they were even real or planted by the Merchant Council to justify some sort of new tax, Dirk’s cynicism and Máiréad’s love of dramatic conspiracy theories egging them on.

This pirate, though, was unlike any other Jordie had read about. There was disagreement about who she was or where she came from—every paper and occasional visitor from Ketterdam had a different theory, each more outlandish than the last. The only thing they could all agree on was that she was a girl, Suli, barely out of her teens at the oldest but still the undisputed captain of her ship, called The Wraith. That, and that she hunted slavers, chasing rumors and human misery across the True Sea, making her home in Ketterdam where the worst of them reigned. Whoever she was, she quickly became a folk hero—not just among the four of them, though Jordie did catch Hanna looking at a wanted poster and blushing, though she’d denied it up and down when he asked. Some people were even calling her a saint—with everything that was happening in Fjerda, making new saints seemed to be all the rage.

So it started with pirates in the True Sea, but it continued with the Van Ecks. Jan Van Eck’s arrest and subsequent trial had knocked the strike in Veldhoven out of national news, relegating them to the metro section of the local paper, and Jordie held a bit of a grudge over it, as childish as he knew it was—it wasn’t like the Van Ecks would have wanted that story to wind up on the front page either, in retrospect. The trial had dominated the papers for six months, every merchant in the city rushing to give their thoughts to the paper, expressing their shock, disappointment, and subtly endorsing their own law-abiding investments, making Jordie roll his eyes so hard he thought they might pop out of his head with every article. Van Eck had done nothing that the rest of the Merchant Council wouldn’t, if given half a chance. That they probably did, even if they’d convinced themselves they were far above such things, that whatever dirty tricks they and their accountants got up to were different. There was nothing unique about Jan Van Eck or his business activities, besides the unfortunate luck of having an ambitious heir willing to spill his secrets rather than wait for his father to die like the rest of the merchers’ sons would.

He had expected nothing from Wylan Van Eck, let alone for him to come out in subtle support of the Wraith, to push for funding for schools and public health projects in the Barrel, and to attempt to cancel all indentures owed to the Van Eck company, from workers at the mills they owned down in Zierfoort to the Grisha who guarded their trade ships. He had to piece these accomplishments together, of course, from articles and editorials about job loss in the south and coddling criminals, questions about Van Eck’s connection to the Barrel—apparently he’d been held hostage there before Jan Van Eck’s crimes were exposed, and the press liked to imply he’d developed some conflicting loyalties. That, or that he simply had no idea what he was doing and was being taken advantage of by outside forces using him for their own nefarious ends.

“Someone should talk to him,” Máiréad said one morning as Jordie set down the Sunday paper, another story about Zierfoort on the front page. “Van Eck, I mean.”

“Wylan Van Eck?” Jordie wrinkled his nose, taking a sip of his coffee, which had gotten cold as he became absorbed in the article. He saw Dirk look up from his own section of the paper—horse race results, most likely—and Hanna raise her eyebrows, tilting her head to the side with a considering sort of look on her face. “Why?”

“He’s somewhat on our side,” Dirk said before Máiréad could even open her mouth, nodding slowly to himself, eyes darkening with thought. “Or open to the perspectives of non-merchers. Or being manipulated by people who are, which is essentially the same for our purposes.”

“Exactly!” Máiréad pointed to the picture of the mill at Zierfoort with her typical enthusiasm, stabbing the paper so hard she literally pushed back an inch towards Jordie. Better than accidentally smacking someone in the face, at least. “Indentures and workers are in the national conversation—”

“And he, or the people that are telling him what to do, are actually doing something about them,” Jordie finished the sentence for her, glancing down at the photo—the gates of the mill were open, and there was no smoke coming from the half a dozen chimneys. Closed, for the moment, while Van Eck industries negotiated new pay standards for their workers. The article had lamented the production loss, wondered if Wylan Van Eck knew what he was doing, if the stress of his father’s trial and inheriting the Van Eck company so young was messing with his mind. They didn’t say the word mad, not outright, but the implication was hardly subtle. Just obscure enough to avoid being sued for defamation. “Or trying to.”

“Trying’s better than anything else anyone else is doing, especially on the Merchant Council,” Hanna said in her practical sort of way, taking a sip of her own coffee—she drank it with milk and sugar now that they could afford it, unlike the rest of them, so sweet it made Jordie’s teeth ache even to think about. “It might be worth it to go to him with our original list, see what he’ll do for the workers in Zierfoort. Maybe even discuss funding for the Aid Society.”

“We can try and check him out at least. See if any of this is sincere,” Jordie sighed, resting his chin on his hand, staring down at the paper. “It’ll mean going to Ketterdam.” A city he’d sworn never to step foot in again, after everything that had happened there. A city full of ghosts. “Can we afford tickets on the canal boat for the four of us?”

“We don’t need to,” Máiréad said. “It should just be you.”

“What?” Jordie shook his head instinctively, feeling a pit in his stomach. He could handle Ketterdam, maybe, if he didn’t have to go back alone. “No, it’s been the four of us together, it’s best like that, we should keep it that way—”

“Look, Jordan.” Máiréad’s grey eyes met his own brown ones, an uncharacteristically serious expression on her freckled face. He closed his mouth, not even protesting her use of his full name, watching her as she began to tick off reasons for him to go alone on her long, elegant fingers. “You’re the president of the union. We chose you for a reason, because you’re scary fucking smart and you can speak and make a persuasive case when you get out of your head. You’re also not an immigrant, a woman, or a former Barrel rat, so you’re the most socially acceptable of all of us, and a merchant might actually be willing to meet with you. Besides, there’s always going to be work do here. We can’t all leave.” He opened his mouth to protest but she carried on, ignoring him entirely. “I know you hate Ketterdam, but this is our chance to try and make it better. Isn’t that what we’ve wanted all along?”

It was a question that only had one correct answer, especially when it was Máiréad that was asking, and so two weeks later Jordie found himself in a second-class cabin on a canal boat, heading for the nation’s capital with nothing but a carpetbag, a pile of old papers and policy proposals, and a half-written speech.

It was a nice cabin, nicer than pretty much any place he’d ever stayed besides maybe the boarding house he’d lived in in Ketterdam, before everything went wrong. He couldn’t stand to spend time in there, besides when he forced himself to try and get some sleep, not with those memories hanging over his head. The deck was hardly much better, with the canal boat taking the same route it would have 10 years ago, from Ketterdam to Veldhoven and now back again. He wished he wasn’t making the journey alone. He wished he wasn’t on this Ghezen-damned boat at all.

Maybe Máiréad was right and he could make a decent speech when he got out of his head, but that required, well, getting out of his head, a skill Jordie knew he was somewhat lacking. He had a tendency to ruminate and fixate, especially after the plague, and returning to Ketterdam on the same route he’d taken out of the city ten years ago, passing the same fields and cities, looking like no time had passed at all, was not helping the matter.

He found himself reading every newspaper article about Ketterdam and Wylan Van Eck he could get his hands on, half to prepare, half to distract himself. The newest and youngest member of the Merchant Council was 18, newly 18. A year younger than Kaz would be, if he’d lived, if he wasn’t permanently 9 years old, thanks to Jordie’s arrogance and mistakes. He would have been 16, then, when his father was arrested—when he had his father arrested, and 16 when he testified against him, laying out his corrupt business practices for the world to see. At 16, Jordie would have given his left arm to see his father again, even for a few minutes. What kind of man—or boy, that’s what he’d been at the time—what kind of boy could calmly send his father to a life sentence in Hellgate, then turn and begin the biggest push to improve the lives of ordinary people in Ketterdam the country had seen in decades?

Maybe Wylan Van Eck was mad—not a raving lunatic, the papers would have latched onto that with gleeful delight, but a calm, collected sort of mad. The kind of man with no feelings, no heart, who could look at each decision and weigh a list of pros and cons without considering any of the human lives behind them, only his own personal gain and reputation. Send his father to prison for life to get his hands on his fortune. Improve the Barrel to gain an army of loyal supporters who weren’t afraid to enforce their will through violence, but who could be conveniently discarded if his hands ever came close to being dirtied.

Was it madness? Or was it a cold, calculated pragmatism, the same that drove every other rich man, every man who wanted to be rich, that Jordie had ever known? Maybe none of them were mad. Maybe they all were. Unless he somehow miraculously came into a fortune, he’d likely never know.

He paced the deck of the canal boat on the way to Ketterdam, trying to ignore the all-too-familiar views and the pit they created in his stomach, trying not to remember the journey out—still weak from fever, knuckles stinging from asking too many questions, tired and sick and grieving. Half-tempted to throw himself into the canal and be done with it, too frightened and exhausted to try. Certain that wherever he was going, there was no way it could be worse than where he’d just been.

Ketterdam. It always seemed to come back to Ketterdam, in the end. It was raining when they arrived, the same way it had been 10 years ago, only this time there was no Kaz to hold his hand, no second-best jacket pinching him under the arms. Jordie stared up at the spires of the Church of Barter, remembering Kaz’s wide eyes, the excited smile that had crept across his face, confident that Jordie would succeed. That Jordie would protect him.

Even from the river, Ketterdam reminded him of his failures.

I know you hate Ketterdam, but this is your chance to try and make it better, Máiréad had said. With that serious look in her dark grey eyes, Jordie hadn’t want to correct her. He didn’t hate Ketterdam. He didn’t know it well enough to hate it—what had happened here was the turning point of his life, but realistically he’d been in the city a month. A month and a half, if he counted his time with the Aid Society, where he’d hardly been given the chance to roam the streets. He hated the choices he’d made here. The person he’d been when he walked into the city for the first time, sometimes, though more often he found himself pitying the Jordie of the past, the naïve arrogant child he'd been. Hating the people who had led him there, who had stood by and watched him hang himself when they weren’t handing him the rope.

But whether he hated it or not, Ketterdam was the last stop on the canal line, and Jordie had no choice but to get off the boat and make his way along its streets.

The last time he’d been in Ketterdam it had been spring, and the weather had still been cold—he remembered people bustling along the streets in thick wool coats, the cold that had crept into his bones during the nights he and Kaz had spent under the bridges. The new coat had helped, some—with all the kruge he’d spent on it, it better well have—though that had been lost with Kaz’s body. Not that it would have fit him, 10 years later. Or that he needed a coat—Ketterdam in June was an entirely different beast from Ketterdam in March.

The Council of the Tides controlled the Ketterdam harbors, allowing ships in and out and keeping the land bridge that would connect Kerch with Shu Han flooded. They were all Grisha, squallers, and their work with the waters of Ketterdam harbor and the True Sea kept the air in Ketterdam so humid you could practically swim in it, and the temperature almost ten degrees warmer in the summer that the surrounding towns and countryside. In June, the Ketterdam streets were still full of people but they were walking slower, made lethargic by the heat—except for the children, who were running back and forth between a storefront and a fire hydrant that someone had pried open, letting water spill out onto the street.

Jordie froze in the middle of the street, clutching his carpetbag tight to his chest. Memories of a thousand hot summer days in Lij hit him like a train—sneaking away from his chores. The rope that hung from the thickest branch of the oak tree, the perfect length to swing and jump into the deepest part of the pond. The cold water closing over his head, knocking the breath out of him. Kaz, challenging him to contests—who could hold their breath the longest, or swim to the big rock and back fastest. Chicken fights with some of the other boys in the village, Kaz balanced on his shoulders. Laughing so hard he could barely breathe. The satisfied exhaustion afterwards that had him nearly falling asleep at the dinner table.

He was only jolted from his thoughts by someone slamming into his shoulder, physically knocking him back a step. Jordie glanced up, rubbing at his arm, but whoever had shoved into him was gone, lost in the crowd. He shook his head—he hadn’t been to Ketterdam in 10 years, but it still looked the same, and he’d read the papers. Standing around dreaming and paying no attention to his surroundings was only likely to get him robbed blind.

The little harbor where the canal boats arrived wasn’t far from the Barrel—he could hear the cries of the hawkers and see the glittering buildings, gaudy decorations only standing out more under the light of one of Ketterdam’s rare sunny days. Most of his fellow passengers seemed to be heading in that direction, fading into the crowds. Others, the more seriously minded businessmen—or at least those dressed like them—headed in the opposite direction, each walking quickly as if to show they had more important places to be.

Jordie touched the wallet in his jacket pocket just the once, to remind himself it was still there. That he wasn’t a resourceless child again, invisible to the world around him. He was 23 years old, a grown man. Someone who could make a speech if he got out of his own head, as Máiréad would say. He was here for a reason, with a budget and a plan, and once he was done, he was going to leave. Go back his life now, in Veldhoven.

Ketterdam wasn’t going to define him, not any more than it already did.

After he’d found a hotel and rented a small room for a few days at what seemed to be a reasonable price, his feet took him towards the Exchange—that hadn’t changed much in the past 10 years. At all, really—he thought it might seem smaller, through his 23-year-old eyes, but the building still loomed overhead, and the words carved into the entryway still seemed larger than life. Industry, Integrity, Prosperity.

He drew some attention from the crowd when he scoffed and shook his head. Jordie found that he didn’t particularly care.

He didn’t know much about the habits of members of the Merchant Council, besides what he could glean from the newspapers, of course. He asked Hanna and Dirk, both Ketterdam natives, what they knew and neither of them had been able to tell him anything more—Barrel rats and daughters of singer shopkeepers didn’t have much reason to interact with members of the government, after all. The only thing he’d been able to learn was that they all had offices here, even if they weren’t their main ones.

So he was back at the Exchange, only looking for a meeting instead of a job.

“Excuse me?” He tried to ignore the churning in his stomach as he smiled at a harried-looking clerk who couldn’t be much older than him, suddenly aware of his worn wool trousers and flat workers-style cap, so different from the crisp suits and felt bowler hats that dominated the Exchange. “I’m looking for the Van Eck offices.”

“Van Eck?” The clerk blinked, scanning him up and down and Jordie hoped his hair and hat covered his ears, which he knew were turning red. “He’s very busy—”

“I’m aware,” Jordie smiled, trying to hide the twisting feeling in his gut. Ghezen, it even smelled the same, ink and sealing wax and wealth, if wealth could have a smell. Good leather, maybe, and horses. “I’m just hoping to speak to him.”

“Good luck,” the clerk shook his head as he adjusted the pile of papers in his arms. “I’m Robert, I work for the Radmakkers, but my friend Pieter is a clerk in the Van Eck office down by the harbor and he says that they’re constantly swamped. Meetings have to be scheduled at least a week out unless you’re really important.”

“Jordan,” Jordie introduced himself as he reached out to take some of the papers that were slipping from Robert’s grip, but he pulled back with a quick shake of the head. “Is that normal for the Merchant Council?”

Robert shook his head again, glasses sliding down his nose and more papers slipping from his hands. “No—most of the Merchant Council have figured out how to avoid visitors they don’t want to see, but Van Eck’s staff are newer and his main secretary, Fahey, doesn’t really have any office experience.” He leaned closer to Jordie, a small smile on his face. “He’s from the Barrel, originally. Used to be a member of the Dregs—”

“The Dregs?” Jordie interrupted. He had a vague grasp of the gangs that had been in Ketterdam 10 years ago, from the few stories Dirk was willing to tell, and the Dregs had not been one of them. “I’ve never heard of them.”

“What?” Robert laughed disbelievingly. “Are you serious?”

Jordie just shrugged. “I’m not from Ketterdam.” He was surprised that Robert hadn’t picked up on his country accent earlier, but maybe he was too polite to say anything, or more interested in spreading gossip than running his errands, even it was with some country factory worker.

“Well they’re the biggest gang in town. That used to be the Dime Lions—” that name he knew, though Jordie didn’t interrupt. Robert was talking so quickly and intently he doubted he’d be able to get a word in edgewise. “But then Dirtyhands killed his old boss and became leader of the Dregs and he made Pekka Rollins beg on his knees in the Church of Barter and ran him out of town. Now and the Dregs pretty much rule the Barrel—half the city, really, with his shares in Fifth Harbor and his old second in Councilman Van Eck’s office and his bed.”

“That’d be Fahey?” Jordie kept his tone neutral, a skill he’d cultivated after two years of almost constant negotiation. He had no interest in Ketterdam gang politics—or at least he thought he did, before he learned that Van Eck’s secretary was a former member of the most powerful gang in the city.

Gang politics might be important, if he had to deal with that.

Robert nodded. “Jesper Fahey. Used to be Brekker’s right hand man before Van Eck Senior went to Hellgate. Then he moved in with the current Van Eck and became his secretary, swore he was reformed.” He snorted. “Like anyone believes it.”

“And this Brekker and Dirtyhands, they’re the same person?” He’d never heard either name before—well, he’d heard of Brekker machinery, of course, it was the same manufacturer that built looms at the mill, but he’d never heard it as a surname. Then again, if the Dregs had recently risen to power, there would have been no reason for him to.

Robert nodded. “Leader of the Dregs. Bastard of the Barrel they used to call him, back when he was just Haskell’s rabid lapdog. Of course now he owns half the city, so they call him the King of the Barrel instead.” He shook his head, a conspiratorial expression on his face—something about it reminded Jordie of telling ghost stories with the other boys in Lij, each trying to one up the other with more and more absurd, bone-chilling details. “He’s young, probably not even 20, but no one knows his family or where he came from.” Jordie found himself leaning in closer, drawn into the story despite himself. “Some people think he was Haskell—the old leader of the Dregs—some people think he was Haskell’s own bastard who turned on him or Pekka Rollins’s. Some people think he crawled out of the harbor like a demon, or that he’s some type of experiment from one of those creepy Shu labs.”

Jordie laughed a little—this Brekker sounded like a character from one of the pulp horror novels he occasionally indulged in, though he suspected even they might have found him to be a bit much. “Seriously? He’s human, isn’t he?”

“As far as we can tell,” Robert said ominously. When Jordie laughed again he looked a little offended saying, “seriously! He always wears black and carries this black and silver cane with a crow on that he uses to beat people half to death with. Always wears gloves, too—I don’t think anyone’s seen his bare hands and lived.” He was watching Jordie’s face, as if waiting for a reaction. When he got none he continued, “some people say he’s got claws, or that his hands are stained red with the blood of the people he’s killed. A girl I knew who worked at a café near the Barrel said they’re rotted and black like his soul.”

“So I have to speak to Fahey if I want a meeting with Van Eck?” Jordie asked, trying to steer the conversation back towards the original topic—the story had been fascinating, in a delightfully morbid sort of way, as unbelievable as it was. But he wasn’t here for gossip. If Wylan Van Eck was in bed with the Barrel, figuratively or literally, it didn’t much matter to him. It might even be beneficial to their cause, if that was where the push for reform was coming from. And he didn’t care if gang leaders in the Barrel had claws for fingers and drank the blood of kittens—he had no intention of going back there anyways. He’d had enough of the Barrel for a thousand lifetimes 10 years ago. If Kaz’s ghost was going to linger anywhere in the city, it would be strongest there.

Robert sighed and nodded—he’d clearly been hoping for a longer chat, or at least an excuse to delay whatever errand he’d been sent on. “Yes, he seems to handle most of the scheduling, or at least he gets the last word. Their offices are on the third floor, east corridor—there’s the Van Eck crest on the door, it’s laurel leaves—”

Jordie managed to thank him for the directions when he paused to take a breath and headed off towards the eastern corridors—now that he knew where he was going he found himself surprised at how much he actually remembered about the Exchange. The Van Eck offices were higher than he’d dared to go when he was 13—then he'd stuck to the lower floors, where the lower-level clerks and runners he’d wanted to be were headquartered. Still, he knew the east side well enough to find the staircase, and from there it easy enough to find his way to the Van Eck offices—Robert had been right, they really did put those laurel leaves everywhere.

A frazzled looking clerk was sitting at the front desk, ink smeared on her hands from the ledger she’d been writing in. She scanned Jordie up and down when he stepped into the front office and he felt his ears turning red, once again aware of how shabbily he was dressed in comparison to practically everyone around him—he made a mental note to visit some secondhand shops if he got the chance, try and find something that might pass for the sort of suit that clerks and slightly-successful businessmen wore. “May I help you?”

“I’d like to make an appointment to see Councilman Van Eck,” Jordie said, tilting his chin up and swallowing slightly, trying to sound like he was confident that the Councilman would want to see him—immediately, preferably, though he had little hope of that.

The clerk—Emma, from the nameplate on her desk—didn’t seem impressed, but she didn’t seem scornful either. If Johannes was right and Van Eck was as busy as he said, she probably dealt with a dozen similar requests a day. “And what would it be in regards to?”

“The negotiations at the mills in Zierfoort,” Jordie answered honestly. “I have experience in similar matters and I wanted to—”

“The mills in Zierfoort are owned by the Van Eck family alone,” Emma sighed. From the omni-present articles in the paper and her half-bored, half-defensive tone, Jordie could tell it wasn’t a new conversation. “Councilman Van Eck will decide what’s done with them by himself and he has received plenty of legal and business advice.”

“Look, I have no desire to tell the Councilman what to do,” Jordie said quickly, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’m hardly qualified for that. I just—I really do have experience in these matters. In Veldhoven, if you’ve ever heard of it, I actually—”

“Veldhoven?” She paused in her writing, pen dripping ink onto a fresh page of the ledger. “I think I have, actually.” Her eyes scanned him again and Jordie had to fight the urge to shove his hands in his pockets and hunch his shoulders. Emma pulled another leather-bound book from the desk and flipped through it, eyes narrowing in concentration. “Well the Councilman is quite busy—”

“I’m in town for a while.” Jordie touched the wallet in his breast pocket again. He’d rented a room for four days, but he had the funds for at least a week, maybe a week and a half if he budgeted carefully. And he was certainly going to budget carefully. “From what it says in the papers, the negotiations have been going on for some time anyways.”

Emma snorted, the first break in her professional façade. It made her look younger than she’d seemed at first, maybe Hanna’s age. “It’s the lawyers. They get paid by the hour and even after two years—” she caught herself and straightened back up, resting her pen to the side and flipping through the pages of the new ledger, which seemed to be a date book. “Does the Monday of the next week work for you?”

That was six days from now—longer than he’d hoped to be in Ketterdam, but better than he’d expected from Robert’s gossip and Emma’s original dismissiveness. “Monday’s fine for me,” he said honestly.

“And your name?”

“Jordan Rietveld,” he said, just as another man entered the front office.

Emma instantly straightened behind her desk, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear and reaching for the ledger she’d first been working on when Jordie arrived. Curious about what could inspire such a sudden reaction he turned, half-expecting to see some terrifying manager of some sort, ready to breathe fire on a young employee chatting away rather than doing whatever she had been working on before Jordie had shown up.

What he actually saw was a cheerful looking, rather handsome young man—a boy really, from one glance Jordie would put him about 18 or 19, university age. Kaz’s age.

This boy, thankfully, looked nothing like his long-dead brother—he was tall, taller than Jordie, who was hardly short himself at an even 6’. This boy had to be at least 2 or three inches taller, though his expensive silk top hat made it hard to judge. He had dark hair, like Kaz and Jordie both, but that was where any similarity ended—he was dark-skinned, Zemeni, with what little hair that could be seen under his hat cut close to the skull. His eyes were a startling grey, which went well with the color—colors, really of his outfit. Jordie had never seen Barrel flash in such expensive fabrics and cuts, and he wasn’t sure if it was the quality of the material or the boy’s complete confidence that made an orange plaid suit, worn over an arsenic green shirt and a red checked waistcoat, somehow work.

Well, maybe work was being generous. Jordie still felt a little shell-shocked at all the color. No wonder the kids from the Barrel had been so attracted to Máiréad’s hair in Veldhoven—coming from a place where people regularly dressed like this, it must have been like going blind.

“Mr. Fahey,” Emma said, blushing a little. “We weren’t expecting you—”

“That’s alright,” Fahey—it had to be Jesper Fahey, from the Barrel flash alone—said. “I wasn’t expecting to be expected. I was running errands down by the harbor, but I thought I’d swing by to make sure the stacks of paper in his office haven’t eaten Wylan alive and see if he’s willing to have some lunch.”

“I haven’t seen him, but I also haven’t heard any screaming,” Emma said. “So I can’t make any judgements one way or the other over who won the fight with the monthly earnings reports.”

“A surprise,” Jesper Fahey grinned, hooking his thumbs in his belt loops and leaning back on his feet—Jordie was almost scared to look and see what kind of shoes he had on. “Always exciting. I wasn’t going to interrupt if he had a meeting, though—”

“I’m not here for a meeting,” Jordie said, smiling politely. Fahey’s eyes darted to him, darkening for a moment, and his hand rested at his waist, jacket pushed back just an inch, enough for Jordie to get a flash of something pearl-colored—was that a revolver? He swallowed, just the once, and tried to keep the smile on his face. “Just to schedule one.”

“Rietveld, right?” He could feel Fahey’s eyes on him as held out a hand to shake; Jordie took it with only a second of hesitation. Fahey’s hands were warm and calloused, the texture almost familiar—Jordie wondered if he’d ever spent time on a farm. Not that there were many farms in Ketterdam. Maybe they came from some other type of manual labor. “Are you here about the trial?”

“The trial?” Jordie raised his eyebrows, trying to recall the most recent headlines. “I thought that was finished last year.”

Fahey shrugged. “He’s appealing,” he said, and while his tone was seemingly light Jordie could hear the barely disguised anger underneath. He remembered the flash of a revolver at Fahey’s waist and held back a shudder. “He feels there were witnesses in his favor that should have been called and weren’t.”

Jordie had no idea how to respond to that—he was somewhat familiar with the Kerch legal system through his reading, but he hadn’t spent much time diving into the intricacies of the court of appeals. “Well I hope it works out for you,” he said cautiously, shoulders relaxing a fraction when Fahey flashed a brilliant smile.

“Here,” he said, stepping back and gesturing towards the door of the inner office. “Wylan should be free for lunch, or I’ll make him free. I think he’d like to talk to you.”

“You don’t even know why I’m here,” Jordie muttered, mostly to himself, but he wasn’t going to pass up the chance Fahey was so casually handing him. He followed him into the inner office where, like earlier, he didn’t bother to knock.

Instead he breezed into the inner office, smiling and winking at the clerks and secretaries who populated, getting blushes and greetings in return. Jordie followed along in his shadow, still unsure what was happening and why he was here but willing to go along, at least for now.

Fahey didn’t knock at the final door either—he threw it open and leaned against the doorframe in a move Jordie might called ‘seductive’ if the person doing it wasn’t four or five years younger than him. “Are you alive in there or do I have to start rescue breathing?” he called, turning to wink at Jordie. “Please say no!”

“I’m alive,” a new voice responded. Even without seeing the person it was attached to, Jordie could hear the stress and exhaustion in their tone. “Though I wouldn’t say no to a few rescue breaths. Just in case.”

“Maybe at home.” Fahey stepped into the office, allowing Jordie to stand in the doorway and get a glimpse of the room inside—which was full of paper, with an adding machine shoved into a corner and an oakwood desk barely visible in the chaos. “I’ve brought a guest.”

The figure at the desk looked up, and Jordie got his first glimpse of Wylan Van Eck in person.

He’d known he was young, but in person, he looked even younger—Jordie would have put him at 16 at the oldest, with those wide blue eyes and almost cherubic red-gold curls. It was the dark circles under his eyes that made him look older, that and the dark mercher suit he was wearing—the same cut and fine fabrics as Fahey’s, though nowhere near as colorful. “You made a new friend, Jes?”

“He was waiting in your office looking sad and confused.” Fahey gestured back to Jordie, who was still lingering awkwardly in the doorway. “You can come in, you know, he doesn’t bite unless you ask.”

“Jesper!” Van Eck scolded, flushing bright red. He turned to Jordie, smiling awkwardly. “I’m so sorry. Please, come in.”

“Thank you,” Jordie said as he stepped into the office, trying to find a place where he could stand without disturbing any papers that looked particularly important. “I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch—”

Van Eck waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry. Monthly earnings reports are due to the Merchant Council this week, so I was just planning to stay here.” He glanced down at the stack of paper nearest to them and handed them to Fahey, who grabbed a pen from his desk and scrawled his signature, ignoring the ink stains the splattered his waistcoat. Jordie supposed it could hardly clash with everything else he had on. Most people would probably think the stains were part of the pattern. “You’ll actually be doing me a huge favor if you talk about anything besides consolidated income tax and gross profits.”

Jordie smiled as best he could, unsure how to respond yet again—this was hardly the situation he’d pictured when he’d tried to imagine meeting with Van Eck. He’d been prepared for a ruthless mercher, the same type of man who’d shoved him aside at the Exchange and funded the organization that manipulated him into an indenture.

Not an 18-year-old embarrassed to be caught flirting with his boyfriend in front of a stranger, quick to sense his own nerves and try to put him at ease.

“How may I help you?” Wylan Van Eck said, and Jordie was so surprised by his genuinely friendly tone that any speech he might have made flew entirely out of his head.

“My name is Jordan Rietveld,” he said instead, realizing he had yet to actually introduce himself, “and I—”

“I’m sorry,” Van Eck raised a hand to cut him off, looking just every inch the imperious, industrious mercher for a moment, despite the ink stains on his sleeves. “Did you say that your name was Rietveld?”

“I did,” Jordie wrinkled his brow, remembering Fahey’s same reaction to hearing his surname in the lottery, the dark flash in his grey eyes and the way his hand darted to the revolver at his waist. The barely hidden anger when he’d explained that the trial was still ongoing, that Van Eck senior was appealing. “Is there something—”

“Do you know a Johannes Rietveld?” Van Eck leaned forward, blue eyes wide and urgent.

Jordie blinked. “I mean, yes. That was my grandfather’s name. Mine too, sort of. My full name is Jordan Johannes Rietveld.” He saw Fahey and Van Eck exchange unreadable looks and shifted awkwardly. “It’s not an uncommon name—”

“Have you ever been to Ketterdam before?” Fahey asked, voice low and urgent, totally unlike the light, friendly tone he’d used on Van Eck and the office workers.

Jordie nodded, despite the twist in his stomach. It was a simple enough question, even if he had to take a deep breath to force himself to answer it. “Yes,” he said, clearing his throat and ducking his head a little. “10 years ago. I was born in Lij and live in Veldhoven, but I visited Ketterdam once when I was 13.”

Van Eck and Fahey exchanged another look, Fahey nodding his head while Van Eck raised his eyebrows. Then they turned back to him, both with the same blank, vaguely pleasant look—it was more convincing on Van Eck. Fahey looked like he was up to something.

“Mr. Rietveld,” Van Eck said. “I’m afraid I don’t have time to give this afternoon to give this meeting the attention it deserves. Would you mind coming to my home for dinner tonight?”

Jordie blinked, glancing down at his clothes and back up and Van Eck and Fahey, both clearly waiting for his response. They could hear his country accent; Fahey had felt the callouses on his hands from working on the farm and in the mill. They could see his clothes, so unlike their own—in what universe was he, Jordie Rietveld, the sort of person who got invited to a mercher’s home for anything, let alone dinner?

Maybe Van Eck really was mad—not a raving lunatic or a cold-hearted monster but some new type of mad that hadn’t been invented yet.

Mad or not, when a member of the Merchant Council made an offer like that, there was only one correct answer. “I’d be delighted,” Jordie found himself saying, only hoping he wasn’t walking straight into another Ketterdam trap.

Chapter Text

The cheapest place to get a secondhand suit on short notice in Ketterdam was, of course, the Barrel.

Jordie hadn’t wanted to go there, if he could avoid it. He knew Hanna would ask about it, and Dirk would want to know even if he didn’t say anything, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t bear to face it, had known that from the beginning. Even the smell of it—the scent of garbage, stale urine, and the dregs of the canal—sent him back in time, back to the back steps of a tavern, the warmth of the ovens, the feeling of the Razorgulls driving their boots into his ribs, curling into a ball to try and avoid injury, keep the little food he’d managed to scrouge up down. He remembered Kaz, he couldn’t not remember Kaz, tiny and shivering—he had been so Ghezen-damned small—wrapped in Jordie’s new coat with holes in his socks and hair dripping with canal water.

Sometimes he wondered if that was what had made the difference, Kaz falling into the canal. He’d always heard that you could catch a cold that way—he remembered Da screaming at him, the one time he could remember him being angry enough to actually thrash him instead of just threatening jokily, when he’d snuck out to go skating on the frozen village pond with his friends early one morning before the men of the town could test the thickness of the ice. You could fall through the ice and drown, or catch your death of cold, he’d screamed, before pulling him into a hug so tight that Jordie couldn’t breathe. Kaz had fallen into a canal; he hadn’t. Maybe it was just that simple. Maybe, if he’d fought back, protected him, had swallowed his pride and just given in—

Jordie shook his head, trying as best as he could to dismiss the memories, focus on the Ketterdam of now, not the city as he remembered it from ten years ago. In the heat of summer, Ketterdam smelt worse than before—he’d been able to smell it even from half a mile up the river. Some of it he was blind to, after a while in the city, but the smell of the Barrel was a different beast altogether and Jordie found himself at a standstill on West Stave, trying not to choke on the toxic air around him, that and the memories.

If he had to remember—and it seemed he had to remember—he didn’t want to focus on that. He wanted to focus on something that would be useful to him now, or at least something that wouldn’t be so distracting. West Stave—West Stave was the same as he remembered, pretty much. He’d taken Kaz here, years ago. The main business of this part of the Barrel was pleasure, but Kaz had been too young to understand why there were men going in and out of the buildings lining the canal and Jordie had been just the right age to be too embarrassed to think about it. Instead they had watched the costumes—most of the prominent men of Ketterdam didn’t go to brothels bare-faced, instead choosing to wander the streets as their favorite character from the Komedie Brute, all of whom wore full-faced masks. Kaz and Jordie had watched them and the street performers that had defined the characters, and had participated in all the traditions—hissing at the Madman, throwing old, half-dead flowers they picked up from the street at the Scarab Queen, scrambling after Mister Crimson’s fake coins, caught up in the flash and thrill, believing in the magic.

Ten years later, Jordie didn’t cheer on the performers around him, or gawk at the half-dressed girls hanging out of the open window of the House of the White Rose—like almost everyone in the Barrel, they’d gone all in on the theme; he didn’t think any sort of plant could grow in the smoggy, coal-filled air of Ketterdam, but there were roses climbing the columns of the pleasure house and wrapping along the railings of the balcony. He wondered if there was a Grisha indenture charged with maintaining them—a tidemaker might be able to keep them watered enough, or maybe a durast could keep a plant alive—or if they were a passion project for one of the girls who worked inside—maybe from the countryside, missing things that grew in the same way Jordie had, even after he was so determined not to become a farmer.

He turned his head away, eyes landing on another house across the way from the White Rose—this one dark and abandoned, windows boarded over. On the lower floor, at least. On the upper floor he could see gilded bars on the window—well, they might have been gilded once, before the ever-present rain and thieves of Ketterdam had stripped most of the golden paint away. Without that thin gilded covering the whole building looked like a bird cage, or maybe the cage of an animal at a zoo. Something designed for the sole purpose of keeping people trapped. There was a sign resting next to the door, and the script was faded but still legible—the Menagerie, it had apparently once been called.

Even clearly abandoned, it made him shudder—Jordie turned his head away as he walked past, trying his best to ignore the disappointed murmurs of the men gathered outside, staring into the dusty room that might have once been a parlor. Tried to ignore them, at least, until he heard one mention the Wraith, and stopped right in his tracks, lingering in the shadows of the abandoned building—Hanna would ask about her hero, he knew, he might as well have some gossip to give her. It might be the only thing he was able to bring any of them, unless he felt like spending some his spare kruge on the cheap souvenirs made for tourists.

“It’s that bitch’s fault,” one of the men was saying. “Her and that ghost ship—”

“Don’t tell me you believe those silly rumors, Beekhof,” Another man scoffed, tugging at the edges of his Mister Crimson mask. “Ships sink on the True Sea, especially in summer storms. Tante Heleen was ruined by that plague scare and Dirtyhands ran Pekka Rollins out of town. It’s just a series of unfortunate coincidences—business will bounce back. The Merchant Council will happily loosen restrictions once the tourist money dries up.”

Beekhof—Jordie put him in late 30s, early 40s, a stout man with a bristling, walrus-style mustache visible even under his Imp mask—shook his head. “You think this is coincidental, Brekker’s best spider leaving Ketterdam—”

“As far as we know,” the first man interrupted, but Beekhof continued with his rant as if he hadn’t spoken, ignoring the annoyed demeanor of his companions.

“Brekker’s best spider hasn’t been heard of since he ran Pekka Rollins out of the Barrel and now a ship bearing her name haunts the True Sea destroying valuable cargo. The Van Verent Company lost a whole haul of kvas out of Os Kervo—another loss like that and he’ll be ruined. Something has to be done. Brekker should have seen the noose years ago. He’s behind all this, mark my words.”

The two men he was speaking with exchanged looks again and Jordie found himself holding his breath, unable to read their faces through their masks, or guess what they’d say. “Even if we wanted to do something,” the other one said, slowly, like they’d had this same conversation before and from his practiced tone Jordie would certainly believe they had, “the Merchant Council needs to be the ones to act, and Wylan Van Eck won’t let anyone touch his pet Barrel rat.” He scoffed. “Not that I understand the hold Brekker’s got on him. At least Fahey’s good-looking.”

“I supposed we’ll just have to see how long he can keep that rabid dog on a leash,” Beekhof sighed, checking his golden pocket watch with a shake of his head. “Pity. Heleen had real business sense. Filled a vital niche in the market.”

“That we can agree on,” the first man said and all three of them broke into laughter, the sound making Jordie feel suddenly, unexplainably sick and turned to—to leave, he told himself, not to flee, because it was ten years later and he was a grown man, grown and past the dim lighting of a rag and bone shop, a too-warm hand on his face and smell of garlic strong enough to make his eyes water. He left, because he came here for a reason, left and tried to ignore the memories and crowds both nipping at his heels.

The crowds, at least, died away as he left the glittering ugliness of West Stave behind, ducking down a quieter side street. The memories were more stubborn. At midday, the Barrel was as empty as it ever seemed to get—the only company Jordie had as he headed away from the canal were the rats, larger than any he’d ever seen in Lij or Veldhoven, some the size of the small dogs that rich ladies always had in portraits. Part of him wondered what they ate. Part of him didn’t want to know.

He lingered at the door of the first secondhand clothing shop he found, hand on the door before pulling it back, trying to glance in through the grimy windows and seeing nothing. Part of him wanted to run—not just out of the Barrel, but out of Ketterdam altogether, back to Veldhoven, back to a place he knew, a place he knew he could make a difference. Back to his friends—he could tell Hanna and Dirk about Ketterdam, how nothing had changed at all. How there were ghosts, everywhere, ghosts and the ever-present feeling of human misery sinking into the cobblestones.

Maybe Wylan Van Eck cared, or maybe he was hoping to win over hearts in the Barrel because the rest of the Merchant Council hated him. Maybe he was just trying to impress his boyfriend, or use shady Barrel business practices to improve the Van Eck finances after they’d been destroyed by his father’s legal fees. Maybe the Wraith, whoever she was, was hunting slaver ships on the True Sea, or maybe summer storms had been worse for the past few years and reckless investors were looking for an outside force to blame. Maybe none of it mattered—maybe Ketterdam was Ketterdam and nothing any of them could change it, maybe it would just continue on as it was until it sunk into the harbor under the weight of its own corruption and greed and maybe the country would be better off for it.

Leaving me again? Kaz taunted as Jordie pulled his hand back from the dinged brass of the door handle, taking a few steps backwards down the street, looking behind him to make sure he avoided the rats. Sounds like you, Jordie. Suppose I shouldn’t expect anything else.

“I’m not leaving you.” He forced himself to take a deep breath, nearly choking on the coal-smoke filled air of Ketterdam. “Not again. I just don’t know if I can help you here.” He didn’t know Ketterdam—he hadn’t been here in ten years, after all. Hadn’t known it even then, had fallen into one of thousand traps the city laid for the unaware. Had taken Kaz down with him, then abandoned him to Reaper’s Barge. What could he accomplish, ten years after the fact, walking into a political situation that seemed to be balancing on a knife’s edge? He was a factory worker. A bookworm. An orphan with a primary school education, still haunted by the stupid decisions he’d made as a child, by glasses of unwatered wine and too-new coats and a few, brief touches. Who was he, to think he could come from Veldhoven to Ketterdam, to think he could negotiate with even the newest member of the Merchant Council like an equal?

Wylan Van Eck invited you to his home, he reminded himself, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to figure out how to start breathing again. Even if it is a trick or an interrogation you should still try and trying means getting over yourself and buying a suit. Figuring out what he wants and hoping you can at least get something out of it. Just play the game for an evening and then you can go home again.

Maybe Máiréad would be disappointed in how quickly he was considering giving up, though they’d spent enough long, quiet evenings together that it was easy for Jordie to picture the look that would cross her face when he told her about this moment, the mix of righteous anger and quiet sadness. Máiréad had ghosts too. They were all four of them haunted, in their own way. Maybe they had thought he, not a native of Ketterdam, would be able to handle it best. Maybe he would—maybe this was the best any of them could have handled it. Maybe this was the best they could ask for.

He took a deep breath and tilted his chin up, touched the wallet in his breast pocket for one final reassurance, then stepped into the clothing shop. The shop bell chimed, out of tune, and the girl behind the counter glanced up from her newspaper, giving him a bored look. “Help you?”

“Yes,” Jordie stepped forward—the light in the shop was dim, but better closer to the counter—and smiled. “I’m looking for a suit for dinner this evening—”

He cut off awkwardly, unsure of how to respond to the shopkeeper’s demeanor. Rather than nodding along as he explained or writing something down or even turning to look at the racks of used clothing behind her she was simply staring at him, eyes wide enough he could easily see the color—brown, so common in Kerch. So like his own, his and Kaz’s—though Kaz’s had been darker, almost a true black. “Wow. Has anyone ever told you that you look just like him?”

“What?” Jordie shook his head, fighting the urge to stuff his hands in his pockets and hunch his shoulders forward, make himself smaller the way he’d learned over the years. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She rolled her eyes, drumming her fingers on the counter impatiently. “Dirtyhands. Seriously, it’s strange, I thought you were him for a second until I saw you didn’t have the gloves or the cane.” She tilted her head to the side and Jordie could feel her studying him, surprisingly astute despite her casual demeanor. “You don’t limp, and I think you’ve got different chins—let me see your eyes?”

Something about her steamrolling reminded her of Máiréad and Jordie complied with a half-smile, leaning forward over the counter a little. “Lighter eyes,” the girl declared. “Still. Weird.”

“How do you know what Dirtyhands looks like?” Jordie asked, pulling back and straightening his shoulders out. “Have you met him?”

“It’s the Barrel,” the girl responded, rolling her eyes again. She was young, 18 or so, and the gesture made her look even younger. He found himself ducking his head to hide an amused smile that he couldn’t quite suppress. “Everyone’s seen him. Seriously. Where are you from?”

“Veldhoven,” Jordie said quickly—the shortest answer, and the truest. Wherever he might have been born, wherever he might have spent a month when he was 13, Veldhoven was his home now. “I haven’t been to Ketterdam in years.”

“Oh.” The girl gave him a disdainful look, like anyone not from Ketterdam wasn’t worth her time or attention. “So you don’t know anything.”

“That I don’t.” Jordie gave a wry grin. “Still, I’ve heard quite a lot. He seems to be making quite a name for himself.”

The girl nodded, perking up slightly—clearly this was a topic of conversation she enjoyed. The whole city seemed enthralled with stories of Dirtyhands, like he was a local legend come to life. There had been stories like that in Lij—Jordie had grown up on stories of ghosts that haunted crossroads and broken deals, spirits that would lure unwary children away from the safety of the town paths, but none of them had had the same hold on his tiny hometown that Dirtyhands did on the whole city of the Ketterdam. The spirits of Lij would be jealous.

“My sister’s in the Dregs,” she said. “Works for Dirtyhands himself. She said that he beat down the whole leadership of the gang, nearly killed them. Did kill a few, actually. His boss set them on him as a test and he won. Ran him out of town and took over, so now Anika’s a lieutenant and the shop’s under Dregs protection.” She paused in her story, blinking as if just realizing she’d forgotten something. “I’m Katrijn, by the way.”

“Jordan.” He shook her hand, still trying to hide his amused expression and now sure he wasn’t succeeding. “It sounds like it’s been a busy few years here.”

Katrijn shrugs. “That’s the Barrel, pretty much. Something’s always happening. The Dregs have just been lucky, or Dirtyhands has just been clever. Probably both.”

“Probably both,” Jordie agreed. “I do still need a suit—”

“Of course!” She clapped her hands together, perking up. “I’ve got something perfect for you, it’ll look fantastic—”

The one thing Jordie hadn’t considered about shopping for used clothes in the Barrel was that most of them would be, well, from the Barrel. Stepping into the back of the store was something like what he imagined stepping into a rainbow would be like—there was color everywhere he turned, all of them brighter than anything he’d seen in nature, the smell of chemical dyes so strong that his sense of smell shorted out for a moment, too overwhelmed to process all the sensory input. “Here!” Katrijn said, shoving something in an eye-watering shade of teal into his arms and Jordie tried to not picture how his friends would react to that— Máiréad, he knew, would insist it was his color.

“I was hoping for something a little more…sedate,” he said, folding the shirt carefully, trying to hide his wince as he noticed the explosion of ruffles at the collar. He hadn’t paid much attention to Katrijn’s clothes before, in the dim light of the front parlor, but now he saw that her shirtwaist was almost the same color, contrasting not unpleasantly with her dark green wool skirts. “The dinner’s not exactly in the Barrel.” She raised an eyebrow and Jordie winced, admitting, “Councilman Van Eck invited me to his home.”

Her eyes widened but then she nodded, a determined expression on her face like she was going to war. “The Merchant—I’ll do my best, but I’m not making any promises.”

“I have complete faith in you,” Jordie assured her.

He wasn’t sure if it was the compliment or the promise of a customer with enough kruge to be dining with a member of the Merchant Council that spurred her on but eventually Jordie wound up with a gently used black wool jacket that was only a little too tight in the shoulders and a pair of pants the same color that fit him nearly perfectly. “Not a popular color in the Barrel, black,” Katrijn said as she removed the last pin from the jacket. “The only one who really wears it is—”

“Dirtyhands?” Jordie guessed.

Katrijn nodded. “It’s weird. Makes him look like a mercher, not a gang boss. You’d think he thinks he’s too good for us, but everyone knows he’s a Barrel rat through and through, including him.”

Jordie made a neutral humming noise, examining himself in the mirror as Katrijn continued to chatter—he looked older in black, he decided, mature. He didn’t think he’d ever dressed so nicely in his life, not even for church or Da’s funeral, all those years ago. This was a look for people with money, serious money, something he’d never had. Something he used to crave—he would have loved to dress like this at age 13, would have loved to play at being a Mercher, imagine himself as an adult with a reason to wear such a fancy suit.

Now he was 23 years old and studying himself in a mirror, trying to decide if it looked like he was just playing dress-up, when Katrijn cut herself off, folding the last of the rejects pile and placing it back on the shelf it came from. “Ghezen you really do look like him, especially in black. Strange.” She tilted her head to the side and Jordie sucked in a short breath, remembering Kaz making the same gesture, baby-soft hair falling across his forehead before Jordie had pushed it back and kissed his forehead, promised a treat if he stayed in the room, stayed safe. He’d tried so hard to protect him from the obvious monsters of Ketterdam, all while walking into another’s only slightly more subtle trap, never even suspecting he might be making a mistake until it was too late. “Are you sure you’re not from Ketterdam?”

“No.” Jordie squeezed his eyes closed, trying to banish the images of Kaz—so small, so feverish, all his fault—from behind his eyelids. “No, I’m not from Ketterdam.” He wasn’t from Ketterdam, and the city knew it, extracted its revenge for his arrogance, his presumption. Had taken Kaz as its payment, Kaz and the last of Jordie’s childhood.

“Huh,” Katrijn shrugged. “Odd. Wearing that suit, you look as much like him as I look like Anika, and we’re twins.” She wrinkled her nose. “Fraternal, I suppose, but still. What a coincidence.”

“I suppose so,” Jordie agreed, pulling his wallet from the inner pocket of his old jacket and handing over a few kruge for the suit. “Thanks for the help.”

He left Katrijn behind and headed back out into the streets of the Barrel—they were more crowded now as the evening came closer, gambling parlors and pleasure houses kicking up into full swing. Jordie had to weave his way carefully through the crowds, making sure not to check his wallet too often—the move was instinctual, but he’d heard enough stories from Dirk to know that that was the first thing thieves looked for—only people with money to spare worried about keeping track of it. So he kept his hands away from his chest, making his way back to the Lid—even ten years later he still remembered the pattern of the streets, at least the main ones—if he tried to wander the back alleys he’d almost certainly have been lost, but he had no desire to make himself a tempting target to be beaten and robbed, not when all he really wanted was to go home.

It occurred to him, when the tower at the Church of Barter chimed six bells, that he didn’t know when people ate dinner in Ketterdam. At home, in Veldhoven they ate late, even with the new ten hour days and when he had last been in Ketterdam he’d been too enthralled with his freedom to eat whatever he wanted, as long as it was sold from a food stall, to really focus too much on the concept of regular meals. And Wylan Van Eck wasn’t just anyone, he was a Councilman—he probably hosted all sorts of dinner parties, made important deals over dozens of rich courses, all eaten off of fine porcelain with real silver tableware. Jordie recalled only portions of an etiquette manual he'd read years ago, in a fit of desperate boredom, but even those vague memories were enough to know that he was already hopelessly behind.

More proof Van Eck’s mad, he tried to tell himself, but it was hardly reassuring—he was rich enough to be mad. Jordie had no such insurance. People like him were never given the benefit of the doubt—he remembered all too well the priest at the Church of Barter offering him three meals a day in Hellgate, focusing in on the bruises on his face like they defined his fate, like one beating from the stadwatch would multiply into thousands, then into prison. Wylan Van Eck might be gossiped about behind his back but madness, true madness, would get him nothing but political enemies and a steady hand to be the real power at the Van Eck shipping company. For the rich, transformation was easy—madness became eccentricity. Cruelty became good business sense. They changed, or maybe the world changed for them, to make everything easier, while someone like Jordie could no more shed his birth and position and the suspicion they would bring than he could his country accent.

He tried to push the thoughts away as he took a gondel up the Geldcanal, heading towards the Van Eck mansion. Wylan Van Eck was not the representation of the Merchant Council—most of them seemed to not-so-subtly despise him, after all. It would do no good to vent all of his anger and resentment onto a boy five years younger than him, a boy who might be their only hope for seeing any legislation to protect workers passed, their only hope for any change in the country at all. It was one dinner—he'd already survived so much worse. Surely he could survive this.

It was still all too like the Hertzoon’s fake home—they had red tulips painted above the door, not a plain blue one, but Jordie still found himself stumbling back, breath knocked out of him as if he’d been punched in the stomach. There was even the same cheery glow behind the windows—lamplight, though the sun had yet to set. Not that it mattered, the Van Ecks certainly had the money and oil to burn.

He wanted to run. He’d wanted to run since the boat first arrived in the city, since he’d first purchased the ticket. He wanted to run and keep running, go faster than the ghosts. He wanted to run but instead he stepped forward and rapped at the door, holding his breath.

A maid answered—a woman probably about his age, maybe a few years older, dressed in a starched black and white uniform. Jordie gave a polite, tense smile and said, “my name is Jordan Rietveld. The Councilman invited me for dinner?” He winced at the way his voice crept up at the end of the sentence, turning what should have been a confident statement into a question, but the maid didn’t seem bothered, like this was hardly the strangest thing she dealt with. Remembering Fahey’s bright orange suit, Jordie realized it probably wasn’t.

“At least you knock,” she said, a statement that he had no idea how to respond to politely. “Please, come in.”

When he entered the hall, Jordie found himself ever wondering how he could have mistaken the Hertzoon’s rented home for a mercher’s mansion. Wylan Van Eck’s mansion exuded wealth, from the flickering gas lamps that lined the walls to the brocade they were papered with, the elaborately woven rug beneath his feet. The wood was dark, rich oak—perfectly polished, of course. Everything was perfectly maintained, because maintenance was easy.

“Lore?” Jordie glanced up from studying the pattern carved into the banister at a woman’s voice—she stood at the top of the stairs, wearing a black silk dress. Even from this distance Jordie could see the fabric was silk, no doubt ruinously expensive. The only jewelry she wore was an ivory broach at her throat, glimmering in the gaslight, and her red hair, the same color as Wylan Van Eck’s, was caught up in a simple braided bun, the style worn by all the devout mercher’s wives. “Who is this?”

“Jordan Rietveld, Mrs. Van Eck.” Lore dropped into a quick curtsy. “One of Mr. Van Eck’s guests for the evening.”

“Mr. Rietveld,” Mrs. Van Eck smiled at him as she descended the stairs—Jordie held out a hand to help her, surprised at the force of her grip despite her slender, almost fragile appearance. “What a pleasure. I’m Councilman Van Eck’s mother, Marya Van Eck.”

“I could have sworn you were his sister,” Jordie responded and she laughed—she and her son had the same laugh, he realized, though that and the hair was the only obvious resemblance between them. Wylan Van Eck must take after his father. “Thank you so much for having me in your home.”

“I always enjoy meeting Wylan’s friends,” she said. “Though I do appreciate you using the front door.”

Jordie was desperately curious at what they both could be referencing but no idea what to ask to get the answers he sought, let alone how to ask it, so he just nodded, letting Marya lead him upstairs to what must be the drawing room—from the etiquette manual he’s gotten the impression he was supposed to be the one doing the leading, but he’d been following pretty much ever since he’d gotten to Ketterdam, he hadn’t really expected dinner to be much different.

The drawing room was much the same as the hallway, in that it was almost certainly the most expensive room Jordie had ever stepped foot in. This drawing room, at least, was cozier than the hall—the curtains were open, giving a view of the Geldstraat below, and furniture was dark, upholstered in something that looked like velvet—he remembered the one single chair in the Hertzoon’s rented home, how impressed he’d been by just that single item of furniture. 13-year-old Jordie might have had a heart attack, seeing this. He stood awkwardly in the doorway, suddenly all too aware of his secondhand suit, the Barrel mud on his boots. He didn’t belong here—the only question was how long it would take them to tell.

Van Eck and Fahey, in contrast, fit into the room perfectly. They were sitting on the couch closest to the unlit fireplace, Fahey sprawled out, long limbs taking up far more than his share of space—not that Van Eck seemed to mind, from the way he had his cheek resting on Fahey’s shoulder, a small smile on his face as he sipped at a glass of some amber-colored liquid—whiskey, perhaps. Fahey had his own glass resting on a side table—wood, inlaid with what looked like gold—and Jordie winced involuntarily as one of his dramatic gestures nearly knocked it to the floor.

There was a third person in the room—a girl, the same age as Fahey and Van Eck. It took Jordie a moment to notice her, she was so still, blending into the shadows like she was a part of them, but when he did, he did an almost instant double take—he knew that face. He’d seen that face before, seen Hanna staring at the face on wanted posters and teased her for it—a round, youthful face with wide, dark brown eyes, a straight nose that would be called handsome if it were on man, thick black brows the same color as her long straight hair, held back in a simple braid that started at the base of her scalp. That would have been enough even if she wasn’t dressed like, well, a pirate—a flowy white shirt that practically glowed against her bronze Suli skin, dark pants that tucked into practical tall boots—a dark coat was lying over the couch right behind her, clearly discarded as she’d settled down onto the couch opposite Fahey and Van Eck.

The Wraith, the saint of the True Sea, the scourge of slavers, leaned forward and clinked her glass against Fahey’s, laughter transforming her face from just pretty to, well, stunning. If that expression had been on the posters in Veldhoven, Jordie wasn’t sure he’d ever have been able to drag Hanna away.

“Wylan, your guest is here,” Mrs. Van Eck said, letting go of Jordie’s arm to step into the drawing room, skirts rustling. “This one was polite enough to knock, try and be polite enough to keep him coming back.”

Wylan Van Eck covered the lower half of his face with his hand for a second, though it did nothing to cover the snort he was clearly trying to hide. “Even I change the locks he’s not going to stop, Mama, so we might as well all get used to it.”

“I like knowing if I’m coming downstairs to guests in my kitchens,” Mrs. Van Eck said, voice mock-stern, but the way her hand rested on Van Eck’s red curls, lingering for just a moment longer than strictly necessary, made Jordie turn his head away for just a moment, stomach twisting. Van Eck smiled up at her, reaching for her hand, and squeezed it gently.

“I can ask,” Jesper said. “But if I do, he’ll only keep doing it.”

“He’s like a cat.” The Wraith took another sip of her drink, mysterious half-smile on her face. “It’s the only way he knows to ask for attention.”

Van Eck sighed, rubbing his temples—that gesture made him look like a mercher, Jordie thought. “Well, I invited him. We’ll see if he actually comes—”

“Inej is here.” Fahey said, setting his glass firmly down on the table as if to emphasize his point. “He’ll come.”

So that was the Wraith’s name. Inej. He stored the fact away to tell Hanna—it was a Suli name, not a Kerch one, and he repeated the pronunciation to himself, determined to get it right. His thoughts were interrupted when Van Eck turned to him, the same polite smile he’d had in the office earlier on his face now as he stood, holding out his hand for Jordie to shake. “Mr. Rietveld. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation—”

“I was happy to,” Jordie said, smiling back. “Thank you so much for having me.”

“Please, have a seat.” Van Eck gestured to the couch and Jordie did, settling down next to the Wraith, whose gaze was fixed on him, eyes dark and intent. “Emma told me you wanted to talk about Zierfoort?”

“I did,” Jordie said, and so he talked—not about Zierfoort as much, as he’d never been there, but about Veldhoven, the city he knew best. Van Eck nodded along, asking questions, adding his own fact—Fahey and the Wraith added things as well, Fahey taking notes as he did, adding even more ink stains to his suit. Jordie said as much as he could remember, as much as he was willing to say—some things were inapplicable, some unnecessary, some private. His friends he discussed only in the abstract, how he got to Veldhoven he glossed over—the Aid Society was something else entirely, some nerve too sore to touch while still in the city. He was here to offer..advice, if Van Eck would take it. To improve things for others, not to address his own wounds.

They talked until the sun began to set fully and the gas lamps became necessary, until the bottle Fahey had been refreshing their drinks from was half-empty and Jordie felt his head starting to spin—he didn’t want to be drunk or even mildly tipsy, and he was irritated at himself for his indulgence. This was important. This was working.

They talked until Van Eck—Wylan, he’d insisted, though Jordie wasn’t sure he could actually bring himself to call him that to his face—paused, raising his hand in the air to cut off all conversation. Jordie felt the absence beside him, suddenly, and glanced over to find the Wraith—Inej, all of them are so casual with their names—gone, only catching a glimpse of the end of her braid as she slipped from the drawing room. With the sudden silence he could hear that there was a thumping noise on the stairs—footsteps, aided by something, almost like—almost like a cane.

“Kaz!” Jesper Fahey perked up and Jordie choked on his final sip of whiskey, only reflex keeping him from spilling it all over his lap. “Finally, we were expecting you ages ago. Did the new locks actually cause you trouble or were you just determined to be fashionable late?”

“Maybe I was just busy,” the new arrival—Dirtyhands, he could tell from the cane and gloves and had Jesper just called him Kaz?—said. “You and Wylan might not be busy, but I do have a life—”

His words faded away when Jordie saw his face even though his lips were still moving, even though some distant part of him processed that Jesper had started speaking again. Dirtyhands—Dirtyhands was young. 19, he knew. 19, and his birthday was in November—it always rained, but that didn’t matter because Da would make an apple tart with the dried fall apples and tell stories, all the stories they wanted, even stories of Ma. 19, with dark hair, darker than his own, falling across his forehead into his dark eyes—those were darker than Jordie’s too, like the same artist had drawn both of them, but his pen had leaked on Kaz, adding more ink to the picture. He was tall, even with the cane—his steps were heavy, he favored his right leg, it was clear that the cane wasn’t an affectation—he was tall and if they were both standing Jordie was sure they’d be within a fraction of an inch of each other. There were scars on his face—one through his eyebrow, Ghezen, how had that not blinded him, one cutting through his upper lip—small dots that might be—that had to be pox scars, Ghezen almighty.

It had been ten years. Jordie recognized him instantly.

“Kaz,” he breathed out as their eyes met and Kaz—Dirtyhands, the King of the Barrel, his baby brother—froze in the doorway, gloved hands tensing around the crow’s head grip of his cane. Froze in the doorway, then turned to run. Jordie found himself on his feet without remembering how he got there, chasing after Kaz— when he caught up to him at the bottom of the stairs his eyes were wide, his breathing shallow and when Jordie reached out to pull him into a hug he flinched, holding the cane between them like a barrier. Like he needed protection from Jordie’s touch.

“I don’t know who the hell you are,” he growled, and his voice was low, lower than even ten years and puberty would lead him to expect. Hoarse, a rough, rocky rasp. Damaged, and how could a voice be damaged? Plauge, it had to have been plague, and that was his fault, all of this—the cane, the scars, Dirtyhands, it was his fault. “But stay the fuck away from me—”

“It’s me,” Jordie said, reaching for his hand, trying to hide his hurt, his worry when Kaz flinched away from him again, pulling his hands back like he’d been burned. “Kaz it’s me, Jordie, I—”

“Jordie is dead,” Kaz snapped, and Jordie ached, sharp and sudden, because hadn’t he thought the same thing about Kaz. “Jordie is dead, and if whoever sent you had any idea what they were doing, they’d know that. Now leave, before I send you back to them in pieces.”

“No one sent me,” Jordie promised, reaching for him again—he had to see, had to touch him, had to make sure this wasn’t some strange, wonderful dream. “I promise. It’s just me, Kaz. I don’t—”

Kaz flinched again, face twisted into a snarl. “Liar,” he spat, and the word hurt worse than if he’d slammed that cane into Jordie’s side.

“I’m not lying,” he reassured, speaking softly and slowly, like he was soothing a frightened animal. From the tense way Kaz held himself, the way he was prepared to run, he might as well be. “It really is me. I’m visiting in the city. I went to West Stave today, to buy a new suit—do you remember how we used to watch the performers there? And then we got those omelets at that little stand, and you wanted onions in yours, and I told you that they were disgusting?” Kaz wasn’t relaxing at his voice but he wasn’t running either, and Jordie decided to count it as a success. “It’s me, it's really me. I promise.”

“Jordie,” Kaz breathed out, shaking his head—his posture was still tense, but his eyes were less wild. “How—”

“My fever broke.” He whispered, softly. “I left to get help, but when I came back you—you were gone.”

Kaz shook his head again. “I don’t—”

“I’m sorry, Kazzie,” Jordie said, reaching for him again, hoping for—hoping for something but Kaz growled, actually growled and flinched back so wildly he nearly cracked his head against the plaster wall, like the idea of Jordie’s touch was actual repulsive to him. “Oh Kaz—”

Kaz flinched from him, Kaz couldn’t stand his touch, Kaz wore gloves and long sleeves even in the summer heat. Kaz was the brutal leader of the most feared gang in the city. Kaz had been alone in Ketterdam for ten years. Kaz walked with a limp, had scars that Jordie didn’t even want to imagine, didn’t want to know anything about, scars that only made him imagine the worst. Kaz had put Pekka Rollins on his knees in the Church of Barter and made him beg and Ghezen—Jordie remembered, as much as he didn’t want to want to, as much as he had wanted to leave everything behind—Mr. Van Rijn’s warnings, the few touches in the rag and bone shop that could have gone so much further, the roses growing on West Stave and the once-gilded bars of the Menagerie. Things he’d never feared before, things he never thought he had to. Things he hadn’t ever imagined. “Oh Kaz,” he whispered, pulling his hand back, letting him breathe, fighting back his own tears, the ever present feeling of guilt that threatened to drown him. “Oh, Kazzie, what did they do to you?”

Kaz glanced up, eyes narrowed—narrowed and focused, full of anger so fierce that Jordie stepped back involuntarily, unable to hide the wince across his face. “What did they do to me?”

“You’re hurt,” Jordie said, and an expression he couldn’t name crossed Kaz’s face. “You’re hurt, I can tell, just—I can—”

“No. Fuck you, Jordie. Fuck. You.” Kaz was breathing heavily. Even with his gloves, Jordie could see that his grip was tight on the head of his cane. “You can’t imagine you did something wrong. This can’t be your fault. It had to be someone else, someone you can hurt. Something you can avenge.” His laugh was harsh, unsteady, tripping out of his mouth like a drunkard falling down the stairs. “23 years old and you still don’t get it, do you? Your actions have fucking consequences, Jordan!”

Jordie said nothing—he had nothing to say. His brain had gone completely blank, words beyond him. All he could do was stare at Kaz’s face, Kaz’s face and the expression of pure hatred on it. “You’re dead,” he said, and it wasn’t a frantic denial. It wasn’t a threat or a promise. It was a nothing, a simple statement of fact, and that, that was worse than any screaming or cursing, any vows of revenge. Those at the least, would require something, some level of emotion, not just…not just this. Not nothing. “You’re dead, no matter what canal you crawled out of, what tiny corner of the country you’ve been hiding in.” He paused, clenched his jaw—he looked like Da when he did that, Jordie realized with a pang. He wondered if Kaz knew, if Kaz remembered. “You’re dead, Jordan, and I’m tired of ghosts. Leave.”

“I’m sorry,” Jordie said again, fruitlesly, and did.

Chapter Text

Get out, Kaz had said, and Jordie was happy to obey—his carpetbag was open on his bed, clothes scattered around the small hotel room as he pulled open drawers and searched for loose socks under the bed—how he’d manage to scatter his things around so broadly in the short amount of time he’d been in the city was beyond him, but if he couldn’t find all of them, he’d live. His main objective was the same was it had been since the beginning—to get out of Ketterdam as fast as possible, to get out while he could still convince himself that it had all been a dream. To flee, to go home, to leave the ghosts of Ketterdam behind like they seemed to want him to.

Kaz was alive, and it might be a dream he never wanted to wake up from if not for the way he flinched from his touch, the pure hatred in his eyes—fuck you, Jordan—the way he’d looked like he’d been restraining himself from tearing Jordie to pieces. Kaz was alive and he hated him, and that’s how Jordie knew that this had to be a nightmare, and like all his nightmares all he wanted was to wake up. To wake up and move on with his day and his life and—and what, he didn’t know, but he didn’t need to be in Ketterdam to do it. He didn’t intend to come back to Ketterdam ever again—Máiréad could make the speeches, Hanna could take the meetings with the merchers, Dirk could give them draft legislation. He was done. He’d had more than enough of Ketterdam, enough to last him a lifetime.

He didn’t notice the Wraith sliding open the window and slipping inside his hotel room until he caught a glimpse of her in the stained and spotted mirror hanging on the opposite wall—she’d changed from the disastrous dinner party, exchanging her flowing white shirt and knee-high boots for a practical dark tunic and leather slippers, scarf wrapped around her head so that only her dark eyes were showing. There was a knife strapped to her thigh and another to her left arm, nearly as long as the limb itself, both of them clearly deadly sharp. She’d gone from pirate to spider, from Saint of the True Sea to the Wraith.

What had Kaz’s transformation been like, he wondered? When had he started to cut his hair crookedly, to mock merchers by dressing as one of them? Where had he gotten his scars, when had he started leaning on that strange crow’s-headed cane? Had it been as easy as changing his shirt, slipping from Kaz Rietveld to Dirtyhands, losing his country name and his country accent? Even from the few growled words he’d spoken, Jordie had heard no traces of Lij in his tone—it was Ketterdam through and through, same as the rest of him—short, clipped vowels, harsh consonants, Barrel slang peppering his vocabulary as he’d bantered with Jesper—had he had to try for that, had to copy words and phrases from the people around him, or had they come to him naturally, had he woken up one morning a complete creature of Ketterdam? Had he chosen to leave it all behind—his country accent, his surname, his crooked smile and cheerful exuberance, or had it been taken from him?

Maybe that was what everyone became, if they stayed in the city long enough—a dark shadow of their former self, city expanding to fill the gaps left behind. He remembered Kaz flinching from him, drawing back, the gloves and the way he’d held his cane between them like a barrier. Maybe that was what everyone became. Maybe the city dragged them down to the depths, trapped them and made them perfect prey. Maybe they did damage because it was all they knew, all they could do, all that had been done to them.

Maybe, if you stayed long enough, there was no way to leave Ketterdam alive.

“You’re leaving,” the Wraith said, and Jordie shrugged—with his bag on the bed and the half-folded shirt in his hands, there was really no other explanation for his actions. It hadn’t really been a question anyway.

“Kaz—” he had to pause at his brother’s name, swallow—Kaz was alive, Kaz was alive and Jordie left him and now he was leaving him a second time even if that was what he said he wanted, what kind of brother was he—swallow and take a deep breath and try and keep himself from breaking down sobbing for the second time in an hour, not when the remains of his first crying jag were probably still visible on his face. “Kaz asked me to.”

Kaz had asked him to, and Jordie could never deny him anything—not after ten years, not after seeing him flinch from his touch. He wondered if Kaz knew that, if he’d been counting on it, if some part of whoever he was now still knew that Jordie would kill and die for him, if he asked, even if he didn’t.

The Wraith—Inej—paused and glanced down at the empty bag on the bed before unwinding the scarf from around her head, letting him see her whole face—she looked young, he couldn’t help but think. Young and sad and far away, large brown eyes focused on some point in the distance, thick black brows furrowed as she squared her shoulders and sat on the bed, mattress creaking even under her slight weight, pushing aside a few books he’d taken from the Veldhoven library to entertain himself on the canal ride up and hadn't touched.

“When I was a young girl,” she said, voice low, “I was taken by slavers from the coast of Ravka. My family was there—we were performers. Suli acrobats, on the road. We’d made camp by the sea and I was sleeping in that day when the slavers burst in and took me.” She ran her fingers over the scarf in her hands, gaze focused on the pattern embroidered in dark thread.

Jordie stood awkwardly, back pressed against the dresser—he could feel the brass knobs poking into the small of his back—unsure what to say, unsure how Inej would react to anything he might come up with. She seemed—not lost. Her pauses and words were both deliberate, like she knew where she was going, why she was speaking. She paused like she knew what she was going to say but had to get up the courage for it, like she was trying to remember the words to a half-forgotten story.

“They brought me here,” she said, gesturing to the city outside the window—the sun had set hours ago, but Ketterdam was the city that never slept, and the lights from the Barrel kept it bright enough Jordie could see the buildings surrounding his hotel and, beyond that, the harbor, lights glimmering off the dark waters far in the distance. “To be—” her hand moved to her other arm, rubbing at something he couldn’t see and her eyes went blank for a moment, focused on something far away, something long ago. “I was indentured to the Menagerie, forced to sign papers in a language I couldn’t read, bound to a debt I could never pay off. Forced into a brothel when I was fourteen years old, when I’d only had my first kiss a few months before.”

She laughed, harsh and bitterly—the laugh of an old woman worn down by the years, not the laugh of a young girl, and she was young, to Jordie’s eyes. They were probably only four or five years apart—she was Kaz’s age, a child, another child, chewed up and spat out by this uncaring, cursed city. “I’m sorry,” he said and Inej gave him a quick, watery smile and a short nod of acknowledgement, taking a deep breath and squaring her shoulders again, hands tightening in the silken fabric clutched in her lap.

“I won’t say it was a long time ago, or that I’m over it, or that it doesn’t matter anymore,” she said, fingers still running over the pattern embroidered into her scarf, eyes still focused outside the window. “It will never stop mattering, to who I am and the work I do. But I will say that I’ve been learning to bear it. Kaz, Jesper, Wylan, our other friends, my crew—they helped. So does my work. Saving others the way I wanted to be saved, before I had to do it myself.” She smiled, looking away from the window and back to him, shoulders relaxing slightly, like she no longer had to hold herself quite so tensely. “Thank you, Jordan, anyways. For saying it.”

“Jordie,” he said impulsively, word leaving his lips before his brain had time to catch up with his mouth. “Please—everyone calls me Jordie.”

Something sparked in her eyes at that, like a piece of a puzzle had slotted into place. “Jordie, then,” she said, mouth curving around the word, like she was testing the sound of it, like she was still unsure that she was allowed to say it. “Well. I met Kaz, and he helped me save myself. Showed me how to be dangerous, if I wanted to be.” Her hand moved to run along the blade of the knife strapped to her arm, fingertips ghosting on the edge just lightly enough that it didn’t cut her. “I became the Wraith. A spider, his right hand. A killer.” Her smile was tight, bitter, just a motion of her lips, like rigor mortis. “I saved myself, but the girl I had been died in the belly of a slaver’s ship. I was someone new, someone I didn’t think anyone would recognize.”

She reached up and clasped the charm hanging around her neck—he recognized as some sort of saint’s token, though he didn’t know which—Ravkan saints weren’t commonly worshipped in Kerch, especially in the areas outside of Ketterdam, where, according to a guidebook he’d paged through before coming, there was a small community of Ravkan immigrants that had brought their religion with them. “My mother gave me this, when I turned thirteen. To protect me. For a long time, it was the only thing I had tying me back to my old life, and there were times I wanted to throw it in the harbor, leave the old Inej behind. I wanted to see my family again desperately but at the same time I was terrified that they wouldn’t know me. That they would be horrified at who I’d become, if they did recognize me. I let myself dream of leaving Ketterdam and finding them again because, deep down, I thought it was impossible.”

She lowered her hands to her lap and closed her eyes—the flickering gaslight made her bronze skin shine, caught the highlights in her dark hair. She glowed, almost, from within, and Jordie could see why they called this small, fragile-looking girl a saint. He could imagine what she might look like, smeared with blood and full of righteous indignation, knives in her hands. She could be a painting; she could be an icon.

“When Kaz tracked down my parents,” she said, “and brought them here, I was—overwhelmed. I could hardly breathe, I was so happy. To see them, to let them know I was alive—it was the best gift I could ever ask for.” Her hand returned to the charm around her neck and she smiled—a real smile, the same one she’d had on her face when Kaz stepped into the room at the Van Eck house, before it all went to hell. “And I was terrified.”

She let out a shaky breath, like she was on the edge of tears, but as Jordie leaned forward to—comfort her, in some way, though he wasn’t sure how—he saw that her eyes were dry. “Now I couldn’t imagine it the way I wanted it. Now they would see me as I was and I would have no control over their reactions. They were my parents, and I knew they would know.” She snorted, more of a breathy exhale of air, and touched the charm around her neck again. “It had only been two and a half years, but I was afraid it had been too much time. That there was a gap, a bridge we could never cross.”

“It’s been ten years, for us,” Jordie found himself saying. He turned from Inej and faced the dresser, setting his wrinkled shirt on it and trying to ignore her face in the mirror, watching him. “I was thirteen. Kaz was nine.” He cleared his throat and stared down at the dresser, tracing the grain of the wood with eyes, trying to push the tears back. “Ten years. We were apart longer than we were ever together. I don’t know how—”

Inej shook her head as Jordie cut himself off with a sob he couldn’t quite suppress—he could only tell she was doing it from the glimpse of the motion he caught in the mirror. Her silence was eerie—he’d never meet someone who could move so quietly, who didn’t seem to have a presence at all. He could see why Ketterdam thought her a ghost—she reminded him of one of the figures from the Kaelish legends Máiréad had told them, the spirits that wandered the hills, trying to lure travelers off the path, only visible out of the corner of your eye.

“You don’t have to know how,” she said, standing from the bed and walking over to him—she was so light on her feet she didn’t make a sound, even on the creaky floorboards of Jordie’s hotel room. “I didn’t know how. Ten years, two and a half years—with everything that’s happened it’s a lifetime no matter how long actually passed on the calendar.” She let out another of those short, bitter laughs, the sound making the hair on the back of Jordie’s neck stand up. “None of us are the people we were. None of us are the people that we remember. Kaz, me—you, Jordie. You don’t have to be the same person you were. You can’t. You can only be the person you are now.”

“Your parents,” he found himself asking, watching her face in the mirror—he wasn’t ready to turn and face her head on, not quite ready to look at her so directly quite yet. Not quite ready to make it real, though even in the mirror he could see Inej’s eyes soften, like she sensed his question before he even got up the courage to ask. “Did it—were things alright, I mean? After you met them again?”

It was his turn to flinch as someone reached for him—Inej’s hand on his arm was warm, despite her light touch. She wore gloves, probably for a better grip while climbing, but they were fingerless, unlike the black leather ones that Kaz had worn. Kaz’s gloves—Jordie remembered the way he flinched, dark eyes going wide and blank—he knew the signs of panic when he saw them, knew what Kaz looked like when he was afraid, even ten years later. It was hard to remember the rumors about Dirtyhands—how he’d dangled a man off a roof, killed a clerk in his office, broken the Dime Lions and ran them out of the city, poisoned a well and killed a dozen innocents to get to the man he wanted, extorted the Merchant Council and robbed half of them blind, how his hands were claws, rotted, stained with blood—it was hard to reconcile the rumors about Dirtyhands with the boy who had been in front of him when he remembered Kaz, frightened and wide-eyed and so very, very young, even if he was an adult, even if he was as tall as Jordie now.

“It wasn’t perfect,” she admitted. “There were a lot of things I didn’t know how to tell them. Things I didn’t want them to know. They didn’t understand my work, at first—they wanted me to go back to Ravka with them, wanted to try and protect me. Wanted things to be the same as they were, before.” She snorted, and this time there was some humor in it—he could see her mouth curve up in the mirror, something spark in her eyes. “I had the hardest time convincing my father Kaz hadn’t kidnapped me. But—it worked. We knew what we’d almost lost, and none of us wanted to lose it again. I see them whenever I’m in Ravka, and I try to be in Ravka as much as I can.” She paused at that, a distant smile on her face, like she was remembering a pleasant journey, an afternoon spent by the seaside.

“Is that—” Jordie paused, unsure of what his question even was, let alone how to ask it.

“Enough?” Inej seemed to know what he wanted without asking, and he wondered if it was part of being a spy or if the confusion and longing he felt was just that obvious on his face. “I don’t know. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it feels like it was before, when I’m helping my mother make dinner or helping my father plan the newest show routines. Sometimes they cross a line none of us knew was there. Sometimes I say and do things that frighten them. Sometimes we only remember the horrors, all the years we missed, the worst of everything. But even then, none of us run away.”

“I don’t want to leave,” Jordie admitted to her, and surprised himself with it—he hated Ketterdam, he still hated Ketterdam, but Ketterdam had given Kaz back to him and he couldn’t leave, not yet. “But Kaz wants me to. And—I don’t want to hurt him anymore than he’s been hurt, especially after—” he swallowed, closing his eyes and spoke the next words in a shaky whisper, “especially after everything I’ve already done to him.”

“Then don’t,” Inej said insistently, leaning forward just an inch or so, brown eyes wide in her face. “Don’t leave. Kaz will try and push you away—he tries to push everyone away, makes himself a monster, wants to make people leave him so he knows that it’ll happen, so that he can control it. Don’t do it. Let him wear himself down and when he’s ready, still be here. That—that’s the best thing you can do for him. That’s what he needs, even if he doesn’t know how to ask for it.”

It reminded him, in a way, of the horses they’d raised back on the farm in Lij. They’d been sold by time that Da had died, but Jordie remembered them looming over him, holding out a hand to try and pet one’s velvety nose. Be still, he remembered Da saying, I know it’s big, but it’s nervous, Jordie. You have to let it come to you on its own time, and then it’ll learn to trust you.

“I’ll stay,” he found himself saying. “For—for as long as I can, at least, I can’t—I have a life.” It’s been ten years, he thought. Ten years, and who had they become?

Kaz Brekker, Dirtyhands, a monster who wore gloves because his hands were stained with blood. Jordie Rietveld, who was—who was Jordie, just Jordie, who was still unsure, still naïve, who still loved his little brother beyond all words, no matter what kind of monster he’d made himself in his absence.

“I’ll stay,” he promised and turned to face Inej, saw her smiling. “You love him, don’t you?”

“As much as you do.” She picked up her scarf from where she’d left it lying on the bed, small smile still on her face. “Thank you, Jordie.”

“There’s nothing else I could do,” he said, and meant it.

Inej left and Jordie unpacked his belongings again, trying to fold the shirts and pants he’d shoved into the bag and wrinkled in his haste—there was no clothespress in the cheap room he’d chosen, the room he’d hoped to vacate as quickly as possible before—before Kaz. Before everything had changed, again. Inej had left the window open—he wondered if she was the friend who couldn’t use the front door Mrs. Van Eck had mentioned—and he could smell the city, smell the harbor. Ketterdam—it seemed to awake some sense memory in him, reminded him of the child he’d been, holding hands with Kaz as they walked along the harbor, looking at the ships, imagining the places they’d come from, imagined sailing on adventures themselves. Imagined they would always be young, happy, together.

He didn’t hate the child he’d been. He didn’t scorn him either, think him stupid or naïve or arrogant—not now, at least, with the scent of the harbor in the air. He’d just simply been unsuited for this city, too willing to trust—and why shouldn’t he have been, when he had every reason to be, when he’d grown up in a town that, if it was small and cloying and gossipy, had cared for him in abstract sort of way, that would have sheltered him and Kaz if he had asked for it? Why shouldn’t he have been able to trust people that said they cared for him?

Ketterdam. He wasn’t meant for it, but that didn’t matter. Not when Kaz was here.

It was harder to concentrate on that the next morning, when the harsh sunlight came through the open window and the smell of the sea was replaced by the smell of the sea was replaced by the smell of fish being gutted on the docks, when the lights and revels of the Barrel were replaced with the aftermath—tourists and residents alike passed out on the streets, pockets picked clean by a swarm of ragged children—Kaz’s age, when they were separated. Was that how he survived?—and vomit pretty much everywhere. He had to pick his way around the puddles of it as he left the hotel and purchased an omelet at a nearby street cart for breakfast. It was a lot harder to be romantic about the city when he had to walk carefully to avoid stepping on a drunk’s face.

He still tried, though. Tried to see more of Ketterdam, tried to remember the magic that had captured him a decade ago, the swoop in his stomach as he stared up at the towers of the Church of Barter, heard their bells chiming to mark the hour. When he’d heard the babble of half a dozen languages—Kerch, Ravkan, Shu, Zemeni, even Kaelish and Fjerdan, seen the gabled roofs of the University District. He tried to remember how he’d pictured the libraries that must be there, all the books in the world, or so he’d thought at the time. Maybe he should go—students were always looking for new political causes—but he couldn’t face it quite yet. Even with Kaz alive and on the other end of the city, doing whatever gang bosses did with their time, even with Kaz alive, that might be a step too far. That might be a ghost he wasn’t ready to face.

So he stayed away from the university and the students and, as a consequence, spent more and more time in the Barrel. This was Kaz’s place—everything he’d heard confirmed that, even before he knew who Dirtyhands was. This was Kaz’s place and Jordie wanted to understand it, immerse himself in it, be ready when the time came—if it came at all. It had been easy to be optimistic, in the dim light of his hotel room, with the Wraith telling him all he hoped to hear—that Kaz was alive, that ten years might not be too much, that there was still a chance for something between them if he waited, if he was patient enough. In the Barrel itself, though, optimism was a lot harder to summon.

It wasn’t just the memories. He knew that the memories would come, could accept that even if they sometimes overwhelmed him. Part of him wanted to remember, remember the children they’d been, the innocent child Kaz had been, before it all went wrong. He was prepared as he could be for that, ready to try and stop and remind himself that it was ten years later, that Kaz was alive, that they both had lived. How well it worked was open for debate—he couldn’t dare to venture down the alley that would lead the backsteps of that tavern where they had both been so sick, where Kaz had nearly—there were some places he didn’t dare go, some lines that he didn’t push his brain to cross. Some ghosts that refused to be exorcised.

He was prepared to try and handle the memories, as much as anyone could be. The present day was a little harder to try and get a grasp on.

The whole city seemed obsessed with Kaz’s every move—in his more cynical moments Jordie wondered if Kaz was spreading rumors himself, trying to frighten him into leaving—he makes himself a monster, Inej had said, and Kaz seemed determined to flaunt his monstrousness in the days following their disastrous encounter at the Van Eck mansion. He heard stories about Dirtyhands from the moment he left his hotel room until the moment he shut his door at night and tried to write letters to his friends, explain any of what was happening and failing completely. He heard about past bloody deeds—murders and daring thefts, kidnappings and torture, breaking bones and taking out eyes of people that even looked at him the wrong way, of his past as Haskell’s attack dog, though no one seemed willing to share how old Kaz was when he earned that reputation—about past bloody deeds and new ones, within the week that he had been in Ketterdam, fights over territory and crackdowns on up and coming gangs, Kaz solidifying his place as king of the Barrel with a quick show of overwhelming force the same as he had when he came into the position, only this time he didn’t seem inclined to let his opponents off with just humiliation.

Jordie was half-tempted to give him what he wanted, to pack up and leave Ketterdam forever. Five people had died at last night’s fight at Fifth Harbor—because apparently Kaz owned a harbor, of all things—and some part of him felt like it was his fault, that if Kaz hadn’t been trying to drive him from the city, they might still be alive.

Maybe he was taking too much onto himself—Máiréad would certainly say so. She had never been one to indulge his moments of self-doubt and self-pity—his martyr complex, as she called it. His belief that if he couldn’t save Kaz, if he had led Kaz to his death, he had to make up for it by saving everyone else. It’s ego, she’d say—he could picture it easily, she’d said it a million times before, the same stubborn frown on her face every time. Thinking that you have to save everyone, that you have to do it alone. Nobody has that level of control, Jordie, you have to accept that. You can’t save everyone by yourself. That’s why we’re here.

She’d thought he’d drop dead of a stress-induced heart attack by 25 if he kept it up, and a week into his stay in Ketterdam, Jordie could admit there was some merit to her concerns. He could feel the stress and lack of sleep wearing on him, the memories creeping in more and more as he went deeper and deeper in the Barrel looking for—something, though he wasn’t sure what. For answers, if Kaz wasn’t willing to give them. For the truth, for the ten years he’d missed—he saw children, everywhere, in the Barrel, saw Kaz in their faces. He didn’t know what he was looking for, exactly, but he did know he that he didn’t find it.

People were willing to talk about Dirtyhands, but not to answer questions. All he got were the same rumors he’d heart over and over again, the demon that had crawled up from the harbor, the rabid attack dog with a Councilman holding his leash. The ruthless king of the Barrel.

Even Wylan and Jesper didn’t know anything, or if they did, they weren’t willing to tell him—he’d met with them again, to discuss Zierfoort and once they finished that business the conversation had, inevitably, turned to Kaz.

“Look,” Jesper said, pushing the last of his pages of notes aside and rolling his sleeves back down—his fingers were still covered in ink, of course, but that seemed to be somewhat inevitable. “I’m serious, you probably know more than we do. I didn’t even know who you were before you showed up here.”

“We only knew the name Rietveld because Kaz used it for...a job,” Wylan added, picking up a pen and signing his name to the paper Jesper handed him without looking at it. “I didn’t even know that he wasn’t from Ketterdam. He’s never said anything about his childhood.”

Jordie sighed, slumping back in his chair and resting his chin in his hands. “No one seems to know anything except rumors, and I think he spread half of those himself.”

Jesper snorted. “Wouldn’t surprise me. Saints know he loves to hear himself talk.”

Jordie found himself smiling back—that, at least was the Kaz he remembered. “That he does. Once he figured it out we couldn’t shut him up, until—” until Da died, and Kaz had gone worryingly silent. Until Jordie had brought them here. “Well. Sounds like some things stayed the same, at least.”

“Look,” Jesper leaned forward across the desk, normally sparkling grey eyes dark and serious. “Kaz cares about his people, even it’s buried under about fifty layers of sarcasm and really bad fashion sense. You’re brothers—that’s going to mean something to him, even if he doesn’t know how to handle it.” He paused, for a moment, like he was lost in some sort of memory and Wylan glanced between them, brows furrowed in thought. “Have you ever had a cat?”

“Jesper, I grew up on a farm,” Jordie said, rolling his eyes a little even as he smiled at the younger boy. “Of course I’ve had a cat.”

“Then you—wait, you grew up on a farm?” Jesper paused, grin spreading across his face,. “Wy, did you hear that?”

“I heard it,” Wylan was grinning too, a mischievous expression that didn’t match his stolid mercher blacks or the dark circles under his eyes. “I’ll swear to it in court, even.”

“Did you not know that?” Jordie half-laughed, glancing between them—they looked like Saint Nikolai’s day had come early.

“No,” Jesper said incredulously. “Holy shit, I can’t believe he used to make fun of me for being a farm boy. All that ‘my mother is Ketterdam’ bullshit, I should have known it was a cover, he’s so fucking pretentious—”

“Jesper,” Wylan said, glancing back and forth between them like he was watching a game of tennis, “I think we may be getting slightly off the subject.”

Jesper leaned back in his chair. “A farm—right, sorry. Well Kaz is like a barn kitten—he hisses but if you hang around and bother him enough, he’ll realize being petted’s actually not so bad. Not that I recommend actually petting him, unless you like having a fractured wrist.”

Jordie might have pressed for more details, but before he could come up with the best way to form the question the bells at the Church of Barter began to charm—six bells, the end of the official working day, at least for merchers and the people associated with them. Wylan glanced down at the pocket watch he wore and sighed, rubbing a hand across his face. “We should go,” he said to Jesper. “Karl Dryden invited us for dinner tonight, something about a trade expedition to the Southern Colonies he wants funding for—”

“Karl Dryden’s so boring,” Jesper sighed but he reached for his coat and jacket anyways leaning over and pressing a kiss to Wylan’s forehead as he stood from his chair. “And it’s a business dinner, so he won’t even break out the good champagne.”

“Truly your life is suffering,” Wylan said dryly, gathering the papers on his desk into one quick stack to be stored in the safe. “Jordie, if you wait a minute we’ll be happy to walk you back to your hotel—”

“Don’t bother,” Jordie said, reaching for his own jacket and cap. “It’s not a long walk, I should be fine going by myself.”

Jesper hesitated, hand rested on his hip where Jordie knew one of his pistols was stored. “I don’t know—”

“It’s not late,” Jordie said, “and you have plans, don’t delay them because of me. I can take care of myself.”

“I’ll happily avoid Karl Dryden as long as possible,” Jesper said, grinning, but his face straightened out somewhat when Wylan cleared his throat pointedly. “But if you’re sure—”

“I’m sure,” Jordie said firmly. “Go. I’ll be alright.”

Jesper and Wylan left quickly after that, while Jordie lingered at the streets around the Exchange for a little longer, purchasing some sort of Shu dumpling from a nearby street vendor and enjoying his dinner—if there was one unambiguously good thing about Ketterdam, it was the sheer variety of food available to try. Jordie purchased two and ate them as he watched the crowd—mostly merchers and clerks heading back home, ready for a hearty dinner and a relaxing evening in front of the fire, the kind of life he’d imagined for himself last time he was here, the kind of life that seemed a million miles beyond his reach ten years later. The kind of life he wouldn’t know what to do with, when he had Veldhoven and the union, when he had Máiréad and Hanna and Dirk, when he had work to do.

It was dark by the time he finished and started to walk back to his hotel—the streets emptied out as he left the Exchange and headed deeper into the city, taking a longer route instead of the direct one—he needed the fresh air and space to think. He’d never been able to concentrate when he was cooped up, a legacy of a childhood spent in the outdoors, and Jesper and Wylan had given him even more to think about, more to try and digest.

He didn’t hear the footsteps, or if he did, he didn’t notice them as anything out of the ordinary, anything more than the sound of the city—he was in an alley in the Barrel, near the harbor, close enough to hear the sea lapping at the shore, to see the lights of Hellgate off in the distance, the dark spot that marked Black Veil Island, and there was noise everywhere, loud enough to distract him. There was noise everywhere and even after ten years, he didn't think to be afraid.

He stopped there, looking out at the sea, trying to focus on the waves and the boats bobbing in the distance, and he didn’t hear the footsteps until someone grabbed his arm, pulling him back and slamming him against the wall of the nearest building. “What—”

“Who are you?” The person growled—they were taller than him, and broader, but that was all he could distinguish—no gas lanterns had made their way into this part of the Barrel, and their face was hidden in shadow.

Jordie gasped for breath, head and shoulders aching from where he’d hit the building. “I don’t—who are you?”

“Who am I?” Jordie squirmed, trying to free himself, but the man holding him was strong, pinning him to the wooden wall behind him with ease, not even reacting to his kicks, even when one made solid contact with his shins. “Ghezen above, Dirtyhands doesn’t normally send out such idiot spies. Guess with the Wraith gone he's getting sloppy.”

Jordie froze, not even daring to breath, when the man slipped a knife from his pocket—even in the dim light he could see how sharp it was, see how it was only inches from his face. “I’m—I’m not a spy—”

“Then why else are you wandering around asking questions, meeting with Dirtyhands’s pet mercher?” The man snorted disbelievingly, pressing the knife closer to Jordie’s left eye, so close that it blurred in his vision, too close to focus on it properly. “You’ll have to come up with something better than that, boy.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about—” Jordie gasped in pain as the man lowered the knife, slashing across his bicep and sending blood running down his arm, ruining in his secondhand suit. “I—please—”

“This doesn’t have to hurt if you tell me what I want to know,” the man snapped, cutting him again, just below the first slash. Jordie’s voice cracked as he cried out in pain and he arched away from the wall, crying out again at the pain in his arm as he tried to pull away, then gasping for breath as the man punched him in the stomach, hard enough to knock the wind out of him.

He dropped to his knees, gasping for breath and barely aware enough to dodge the next swing of the knife, not able to avoid being kicked in the back. The man grabbed him by the hair and Jordie tried to pull away, closing his eyes as the grip tightened and he was held in place, the cool steel of the knife just kissing his throat—

And then the grip was gone and he slumped back to his knees, opening his eyes just in time for blood to splatter across his face as Kaz pulled back, bringing his cane down across the man’s skull. He hit him again as Jordie scrambled back on his hands and knees, barely avoiding being covered in blood yet again. Kaz’s face was twisted and his eyes were wild and he brought the cane down a third time, adding to the growing puddle of blood, making the man scream in pain, then scream again before Kaz slammed the cane down yet again and his throat was crushed, leaving nothing but a red ruin behind—Jordie could hear his breath rattling in his throat, then stopping altogether as he died.

Jordie took a step back involuntarily as Kaz turned to him—the moon came out from behind a cloud, then, and he could see the blood on his face, the wild, near animalistic look in his dark eyes. There was blood on his shirt, too, and blood running down his cane, the silver crow’s head turned red with it, blood everywhere.

There were a lot of things he could have said, in that moment. He could have screamed. He could have run. He could have cursed Kaz, could have called the stadwatch, could have asked what to do with the man’s body. Instead he cleared his throat and asked, “how did you find me?”

“You’re not subtle.” Kaz said, reaching for a handkerchief and wiping the blood from the head of his cane, ignoring what was splattered on his face—not that the handkerchief would have done much good, anyways, with how much blood there was. “I’m surprised someone waited this long to get the jump on you, with how distracted you were. You still don’t know how to handle Ketterdam, you never did.”

“I—” Jordie bit his tongue to stop himself from snapping back defensively. “That’s not an answer to my question.”

“You’ve been wandering around in back alleys in a daydream, did you want to get your throat slit?” Kaz handed the bloody handkerchief to him without meeting his eyes and Jordie took it, wiping blood from his eyes and mouth—the rest would have to wait until he could wash his face for real, he could already feel it starting to dry.

Even ten years later he recognized Kaz’s posture—the slumped line of his shoulders, the way he pressed his lips together and didn’t meet his eyes, shuffled his feet back and forth. “Kasper Benjamin Rietveld,” Jordie said slowly, noting the way Kaz startled at the use of his full name, “have you been following me?”

“I’ve been trying to keep you from getting yourself killed,” Kaz snapped, straightening his shoulder and tightening his grip on the head of his cane, still not looking Jordie in the eye. “Clearly you needed the help.”

There was more he could say to that, but none of it seemed right. Jordie sighed, softly, and tucked Kaz’s handkerchief into his pocket, took a step closer and watched his brother’s eyes widen, his hands shake ever so slightly, sweat prick along his brow. Panic. Again. “Are you hurt?”

Kaz didn’t respond for a moment, like he hadn’t heard him, even though he was staring right at Jordie, brown eyes wide in his pale face. He was shaking all over, Jordie realized, and when he lifted his hand to try and hold it out to Kaz his gaze snapped onto it, grip tightening on his cane as he took a small, quick step backwards, back into the puddle of blood. “Kaz. Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” he snarled, glancing away, back down to the body at their feet. “I don’t need your help, Jordan, you’ve done enough.”

It was intended to make him flinch, and it succeeded—Jordie felt a rush of hurt flood him at Kaz’s words, involuntary tears of stress and frustration spring up in his eyes—maybe Jesper and Inej were wrong, maybe ten years was too long, maybe what he’d done was too much, because Kaz had just saved his life and Kaz still hated him. “I’m sorry for asking,” he snapped and Kaz glared back up at him, teeth bared in a snarl. “Ghezen forbid I care, I suppose.”

“You don’t care,” Kaz snapped, drawing himself up to his full height—he might be taller, now, though they were within half an inch of one another. “You don’t care, not after—stop pretending to give a damn, Jordan!”

Jordie bit his tongue to keep himself from snapping anger—anger was what Kaz wanted. He wanted to be proven right, he always had—he remembered Da, one time, trying to talk Kaz out of a tantrum—would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?, he’d asked and Kaz had stomped his foot, pout still on his face, and said, I can’t be happy unless I’m right! “I give a damn,” he said, forcing himself to keep his voice level, to not respond—he had to stay still. Let Kaz come to him. “I’ve always given a damn. If I’d known you were still alive, I never would have left. I would have done everything I could to find you.”

“I wasn’t,” Kaz snapped, so tense he was practically vibrating with it. “I wasn’t, I died, Jordie, the brother you knew is dead!” His voice cracked on the last word and Jordie reached for him, involuntarily, and felt his heart cracking in two as Kaz flinched from him yet again.

“Kaz,” he said, voice soft, “you’re standing right in front of me.”

“I’m not Kaz Rietveld anymore,” he snarled, glaring up at Jordie with blood smeared on his face, teeth bared in a snarl. “I’m not. I’m never going to be him again. Don’t waste your breath trying to dredge him up from the harbor. There’s no point in it, there’s nothing of him left!”

He saw it then, what Kaz was afraid of, what kept him watching Jordie with his breath half-held, ready to lash out if he took a single step forward. What made him close his eyes, turn from him, hide away for a week, refuse to answer questions, play the monster and insist there was nothing else underneath.

He saw it and stepped forward, hands by his sides, eyes on Kaz’s refusing to look away. Kept his face calm, his voice smooth and steady, remembering the feeling of Kaz in his arms, all knees and elbows—he’d been growing, then, still so young—remembered the feeling of Kaz in his arms as he soothed him from a nightmare, as he tried to comfort him as he burned with fever. Kaz who had loved him, depended on him, believed he would protect him.

“Kaz,” he said. “Kaz Rietveld, Kaz Brekker, I don’t care what you call yourself, what you’ve done, what kind of monster you think you are.” Kaz was watching him, warily, like he didn’t believe a word he was saying, and that could break Jordie’s heart again, if he let it, but he didn’t have time for that, not when he might finally be breaking through. “You don’t owe me anything, Kazzie, you’re my brother.”

He stepped closer again and Kaz didn’t move, didn’t flinch away—he didn’t even seem to be breathing. “If you want me to leave, I will. If you can’t—” he paused, groped for the right words “—if this is too much, I understand and I will, because I’ve never wanted to hurt you and I know I have. I’m sorry for that. But, please, Kazzie, I’ve lost ten years with you already.”

“It won’t—” Kaz cleared his throat and turned his head, keeping Jordie from seeing his face straight on. It might have worked, if he didn’t know what his little brother sounded like when he was on the edge of tears. “It won’t be the same. It won’t be like you think.”

“I don’t care,” Jordie said, and meant it. “Whatever you have to offer, Kaz, whatever you’re willing to give me, I’ll take it.” He reached forward to grab his hands, only stopping himself at the last minute, and saw Kaz’s gaze snap back to him. “I meant it. You don’t owe me anything.”

Kaz wavered—Jordie could see his hands flexing around the head of his cane, bloody leather pulling tight over his knuckles—Kaz wavered until his spine straightened and he looked up, dark eyes meeting Jordie’s slightly lighter ones, and he smiled, despite himself, because he knew that look. That look was Kaz, making a decision, and once Kaz made a decision, he followed through. “It won’t be the same,” he warned, slowly. One last chance to turn, walk away—something Jordie knew he could never do, not unless Kaz gave him no other choice.

There was still blood on Kaz’s glove when he held out his hand, smearing on Jordie’s hand when he took it—one last chance to pull away, one final test.

He took Kaz’s hand and shook it, felt his pulse racing under his fingers, saw his breath hitch in throat. “I’m here,” he said.

“I know,” Kaz whispered.

It was enough.