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Kaz Brekker had freckles. It was something most people weren’t aware of; those who got close enough to notice didn’t typically find themselves in a state that left them capable of sharing the information at a later date.
Ketterdam wasn’t a particularly sunny place, but it did have its months where the clouds were more likely to give way to a few hours of semi-clear skies. During those rare bouts of pleasant weather, sunlight would cut through Kaz’s office from just past four bells to just before six, spilling its rays across his pale face as he sat at his desk — and Jesper, loitering in the doorway for some reason or other, would sneak a look.
They collected in patches too faint to see from a distance. A cluster of them sat beneath his right eye and spilled down onto that dastardly cheekbone; a few dusted across the bridge of his nose. As freckles went, they were incredibly faint, only a few shades darker than the rest of Kaz’s skin. But they were there, and they were honestly kind of adorable. (Not that Jesper would ever say that out loud. It’d probably get him skinned alive.)
Once, Jesper had leaned a little too close after a night at the tables. He’d been full of whiskey and feeling bold. Kaz had rammed the head of his cane into Jesper’s chest, knocking the wind from his lungs and shoving him away — but not before Jesper caught sight of two new freckles just above his eyebrow, which he counted as a small victory. He never thought he’d get near enough to see them properly, though. Kaz was someone to be studied from a distance, a museum painting kept safe behind glass.
That changed today.
Today, Kaz’s face was lit by a burst of sunlight that had found purchase in a gap between rolling Ketterdam clouds. Today, Kaz’s lips were moving, but Jesper couldn’t quite make out the words they were so urgently forming. He thought that Kaz might be easier to understand if it weren’t for this terrible rushing in his ears.
“Jesper,” he finally made out as Kaz’s voice grated through the crashing waves in his head — or were they the waves of the harbor? It was difficult to tell.
“Yeah, boss?” Jesper said, except it came out as more of a wheeze and a splutter.
“Focus. Stay awake.”
Jesper wasn’t planning on falling asleep. He was here on a job, wasn’t he? Not exactly prime time for a nap. He was also, however, lying down, which was strange; he could’ve sworn he was just on his feet, guns in his hands, smoke trailing from one of their barrels. Now, ill-maintained cobblestones poked through his jacket and jabbed at his back. Something pressed against his neck, too — fingers, he realized, gloved fingers searching for his pulse. “Not terribly professional,” Jesper mumbled, “getting handsy on the job.”
“Shut up,” Kaz hissed.
Jesper’s eyes focused long enough for him to realize that Kaz’s skin was drained of color beneath those damned freckles. He looked almost like a ghost, framed by gray harbor waters and a gray sky to match. “You okay?” Jesper asked, and he was pretty sure he heard Kaz laugh. It was a dry, mirthless thing, but the sound was unmistakable.
“I’m fine.” Kaz’s voice was as steady as ever, but Jesper knew he wasn’t imagining the way Kaz’s hand trembled against his skin. “I’m not the one who’s been shot, you absolute podge.”
Oh. Was that what all this fuss was about? It did explain the searing heat that radiated from somewhere around his ribcage — heat that burned much, much hotter as Kaz pressed down hard with both hands.
“Saints, Kaz!”
“Would you rather I let you bleed to death?” Kaz demanded. “Because that can certainly be arranged.” There was a harried look about him; loose bits of dark hair were falling across his forehead, and his breaths came in quick stabs.
“At least warn me!”
“Shut up, Jesper. And stop moving.”
If it didn’t feel as though there were a hot iron poker driving into his gut, Jesper would’ve broken out his best pout. Here he was spilling his insides all over the street, and Kaz couldn’t spare him so much as a note of concern. This wasn’t at all how you were supposed to treat the mortally wounded. Fair maidens in storybooks got weeping princes that doted over their ailing bodies; Jesper got a grumbling Barrel boss with no sense of common courtesy.
“I said stop moving.” Kaz again, sounding somehow even more frustrated than before. “I won’t ask again.”
You didn’t ask the first time, Jesper thought, but the words didn’t make it to his mouth; any protest or complaint his brain tried to form fizzled out before he could get a proper grip on them. It was awfully hot out today, wasn’t it? “What… what happened?” he asked. His voice felt very far away indeed.
“Have you already forgotten?”
“I’m not that far gone,” Jesper said. He squirmed a bit, then wheezed when Kaz pressed harder in response. “I just meant — you’re here. Why are you here?” He remembered the meetup now that the shock was starting to dissipate: He’d come to this backalley berth to chat with Geels about some potential trade or other; nothing official, nothing important, nothing that warranted bringing a third or even a second. They’d been talking, and then there was a gunshot. Jesper fired off a round toward its source without a moment’s hesitation — and thank the Saints for that, because a second later, he hit the ground. He didn’t know where the gunman had come from. He didn’t know if his shot back had connected. One thing he knew for certain, though, was that he’d come here alone. He stared up at Kaz now, frustrated and confused in equal measure. “Did you follow me?”
“I had reason to believe your intel was shoddy.”
“I can handle my own jobs.”
“Clearly, you can’t.”
Which, alright, fair, but still. Jesper tried to sit up and was rewarded with an indescribable burst of pain in his stomach, one that punched a groan from his lungs and sent him falling back hard against the ground. “This is an embarrassing place to die,” he said to the mast of a ship behind Kaz’s head.
“You’re not going to die.”
It sort of felt like he might. Everything was warm, far warmer than it had any right to be this far on in the year, and there was sweat on his brow and blood on his lips and a looming sense of dread at the back of his brain that settled right around the place where he’d knocked his skull on the cobblestones. Jesper’s arm started to lift up of its own volition, and he realized distantly that he was reaching for Kaz’s face, which was really a very stupid thing to do. Kaz smacked his hand away. Probably for the best.
“You need to get up,” Kaz said. It was an ultimatum.
Or what? Jesper thought. You’ll leave me here in a puddle of my own blood? “Ground’s pretty nice,” he countered aloud, and Kaz smacked him again. Jesper groaned. “Okay, rude.”
“You’re bleeding out in the street, and as you might have noticed, I don’t currently have a Healer at my beck and call.” Kaz spoke curtly, clearly. “There’s nothing I can do to help you here. Get up.”
As much as Jesper would have liked to, he doubted he could so much as roll onto his side right now without a considerable amount of assistance. He waved his hand vaguely toward where the pain resided in an effort to convey this.
“Yes,” Kaz said, his voice flat, “you’ve been shot. I’m well aware.”
Jesper tried to roll his eyes, but it was difficult to tell which way he was looking with all of these black spots blooming in his field of vision. “Hurts to move,” he said. “Quite a bit, actually.”
“How unfortunate.” Kaz clearly couldn’t have cared less about all this. Why else would his voice be so perfectly, mechanically even? “It’ll hurt quite a bit more to die.”
Jesper felt himself being jostled — very rude, frankly, after Jesper had just told him how uncomfortable moving was at the moment — and let out a little grumbling sound. Why couldn’t it have been Inej who found him like this? She’d’ve been much nicer about it. Sure, it was Jesper’s own damn fault he caught that bullet, but Inej would’ve been a bit gentler, at least.
Now he was being forced upright. Jesper groaned rather unceremoniously and coughed, hard, scrunching his face into a grimace when the pain flared in response. “Can’t we call a medik or something? Have them come here?”
“No.” Kaz spoke with a finality that made it clear there was no room for debate on the matter. He drew in a breath that was oddly jittery and draped Jesper’s left arm across his shoulders; there was hardly any time to adjust before they were up on their feet.
“Careful, careful, trauma patient here,” Jesper said, toddling along like an infant as he tried to keep up with Kaz’s hurried gait. Kaz didn’t humor him with a reply.
The buildings all blurred into one blob of reddish-brownish-grayish-black as they moved. The ground felt like it was twisting and sliding beneath Jesper’s feet with each step. He could taste the salt fading from the air the further inland they walked, but other than that, he had no real sense of which way they were going. His head swam; his body ached; his limbs felt less like his own appendages and more like lead pipes he’d been instructed to lug around behind him.
Kaz’s voice faded back into his periphery after a while, but it took a moment for Jesper’s brain to pick apart the words and ascribe them any sort of meaning. “Keep moving.” It was a demand, not a request.
“I am!”
“I’m dragging you. That’s very different from you moving of your own accord.”
“Forgive me if the bullet in my gut fucks a bit with my faculties.”
“Stop complaining.” If there was one thing which Kaz Brekker never found to be in short supply, it was the audacity. Before Jesper could complain again (much louder this time), Kaz added, “And keep pressure on that wound.”
“Fine.” Jesper lifted his hand (rather petulantly) to where the blood seemed most concentrated through his shirt — but when he pressed down, a burst of white went off behind his eyes like a flashbang. He lurched without meaning to, stumbling into a barrel propped up against a wall, and he threw his weight onto it as the pain threatened to swallow him whole. Rather than trying to catch him, Kaz stumbled as well, propping himself up against the opposite wall of the alley and squeezing his eyes shut tight.
“We don’t have time for this,” Kaz rasped. He had the crow’s head of his cane in a death grip. “You don’t have time for this. If you want to die on these streets, fine. But make a damned decision before I leave you here for the rats.”
Only Kaz could make him feel like a podge for dying. Jesper gave his head a hard shake, willing the cogs inside it to fall back into place. When enough of them were turning, he shuffled back in Kaz’s direction and let himself lean on Kaz hard as they set off yet again. There were precisely ten seconds of peace before Kaz began to speak.
“You shouldn’t have taken that job on your own,” he said, and great, here came everyone’s favorite show, The Jesper Can’t Do Anything Right Hour. It was a marvel people hadn’t lined up to buy tickets.
“I had it handled,” Jesper said. “Or... I thought I did.” Kaz scoffed; Jesper bristled. “It was s’posed to be a milk run!”
Kaz grunted a bit as he maneuvered Jesper up over a curb. “I wasn’t aware it was customary to be mortally wounded on milk runs,” he said.
“Oh, shove off,” Jesper grumbled. “Go ask Geels’s lackey why he was stalking about with a gun for a run-of-the-mill meetup. Maybe he’ll have something to say about it.”
“That’d be difficult,” said Kaz, “seeing as he’s dead.”
Jesper’s head cocked to the side; had he heard that right? He couldn’t have. “Dead?”
“Yes.”
“Did I kill him?”
“Almost.”
“What’s that mean?”
Despite how hard he was breathing, Kaz spoke like this was nothing more than a chat over tea. “The shot you took connected, but he might have lived if somebody was fast enough to get him help.”
“So?”
“So I made sure there would have been no point in getting him help at all.”
Huh. That was awfully nice of him, to go and wrap up a job Jesper had so utterly failed to get right. Jesper was fairly certain he was supposed to say something in response to that, but the words crumbled into nothing as they hit his tongue. There was a fog in his brain like the mist that rolled over the fields back home, early in the morning on those summer days that were sweet-smelling and sticky. He wondered for a moment why he couldn’t see anything before realizing that his eyelids had fallen shut; forcing them back open seemed to direct his attention away from keeping himself upright, and now his neck ached as his chin lolled against his chest. He really was falling to pieces; it was rather embarrassing, honestly.
“Dammit, Jes, keep talking.” The rasp in Kaz’s voice was even sharper than usual, cutting through the fog.
Talking. Right. He could do that. He was great at talking. He glanced to his left and saw Kaz’s ashen face there, staring straight ahead with those sharp, angry eyes of his. “You’ve got freckles,” Jesper muttered, and those weren’t really the words he was planning to say, but oh well.
Kaz’s step stuttered. “What?”
“Freckles,” Jesper repeated. “Under your eye. On your nose.” There was no response — Kaz really was awful at conversation — so Jesper kept on talking. “Got some up above your eyebrow, too. Two of them. One’s bigger than the other.”
“And you’re mentioning them because?”
Jesper shrugged. He realized he was tap-tap-tapping his fingers on Kaz’s shoulder; then he realized Kaz’s shoulder had gone awfully stiff, so he stopped. “My Da’s got freckles. It’s all that time he spends out in the fields.” He tried to sigh, but his lungs couldn’t fill very far without it hurting. “Have you ever seen a field, Kaz? A real one, where you can see the horizon at the end.”
There was a silence that stretched just long enough for Jesper to wonder if he had even said that out loud; then Kaz said, “Yes. I have.”
“Really?”
Another pause. “I own an orchard in Lij.”
“An orchard?” Jesper said. “Like, with apples? Loads of funny little trees?”
“That’s what an orchard is, yes.” Considering how badly Kaz had wanted Jesper to keep talking not one minute ago, he sounded as though he’d prefer to be having any chat other than this one. Not that Jesper could blame him — he’d rather have been sound asleep just then than hashing out Kaz’s shares in the fruit trade.
“Didn’t know you liked apples,” Jesper said dumbly.
“I do.”
And the quiet returned. The only sounds were of feet dragging across damp stone, the arrhythmic crack of Kaz’s cane, and their shared ragged breathing. Again, Jesper found himself wondering why Kaz seemed so thoroughly winded; carrying him couldn’t have been easy, but it also couldn’t have been all that laborious — Jesper was built rather like a wiry stalk of jurda, more bone than boy. And, as previously noted, Jesper was the one between the two of them who had been maybe-possibly-mortally wounded.
“I thought I told you to keep talking,” Kaz said.
“You’re not exactly an engaging conversation partner,” said Jesper, sounding far more defensive than he would have liked. He cut another glance to his left, hedged his bets on whether his next question was the right one to ask, and decided to ask it despite knowing his bets were nearly always shit. “Do you need to take a break?”
Kaz actually stopped walking for a second at that. “Has the blood loss gotten to you already?” he asked, swallowing hard as he resumed his lopsided stride. “You’re the one who’s been shot, not me.”
“No, I just — you don’t look too good. Not that you don’t look good. You look great. I mean — you seem sick.” Saints, maybe the blood loss was getting to him.
“I’m fine,” Kaz growled through clenched teeth. “I’d be better if you’d hurry up.”
“Been shot, remember?”
“The Saints and all their mothers. Two more minutes, and you can have a lovely little lie down. Move.” Kaz sounded about at the end of his rope, and considering how short that rope was even on a good day, Jesper figured it would be in his best interests to try and hobble on a bit faster.
“Where’re we going?” Jesper asked after what felt like another twelve years of shambling. He nodded his head back over his shoulder toward a street they had just passed. “Slat’s that way.”
“It’s also ten minutes’ walk from here. You’re going to a Healer.”
A Healer? For a little gunshot wound? No way, Jesper couldn’t afford that. He could hardly afford to replace the jacket he’d gotten all bloodied up from catching that stupid bullet in the first place. Jesper tried to stop moving, but Kaz was stronger than he let on; he just kept dragging, forcing Jesper to stumble along with him. “I haven’t really got the, er... assets for a Healer right now,” he said, wincing with the effort it was starting to take to push the words past his lips. “Can’t we patch this up at home?”
“Sure,” Kaz said, “if you’d like to die halfway through the procedure.” He shifted his weight and cursed under his breath. “For once in your life, you don’t need to worry about the funds. Just get to that door.”
Jesper squinted up the street; when his eyes focused enough to make out a semi-clear picture, he saw what seemed to be a specialty Healer’s clinic tucked neatly between a boarding house and a bar. Nowhere did the signage indicate that said specialty was in idiot boys who’d gone and gotten themselves shot, but he figured it was better than nothing. He kept on moving.
How far away was this Saintsforsaken clinic? Jesper could’ve sworn he’d walked far enough to make it inside by now, but he was still being pulled along, listening to the click of Kaz’s cane with every other lurching step. The pain was reaching a crescendo; Jesper wasn’t sure he’d even be able to reach the door. His eyes screwed shut as he waited for the worst of it to pass — and when he opened them again, he found he was finally off the street.
The two of them stood in a sparsely decorated room. It was quiet in here, gently lit by lamps that hung at neat intervals along the walls; more of those floating black smudges hung around them like inverse sunspots. A woman sat behind a sleek wooden desk that was worn a bit at the corners, flipping through a ledger and checking its contents with the younger girl beside her. She didn’t look up as they came inside.
“We need a Healer,” Kaz said to the room at large. “Now.”
“This isn’t an emergency medik’s,” said the woman behind the desk, hardly bothering to spare the two of them a glance. She sniffed. Nudged her spectacles further up her nose. “We have one Healer currently on site. He’s tending to a mother in labor.”
“And if you don’t send for him, I’ll tear you apart so completely that he’ll never be able to stitch you back together.” Judging by just the tone of his voice (those black spots were clouding most of Jesper’s vision now), Kaz was about five seconds away from making good on that promise. Even with a bullet in his stomach, Jesper wouldn’t have swapped places with the woman behind the counter if you paid him. When she still didn’t respond, Kaz said, “You’re testing my patience. I have very little of it to spare right now. Are you going to cooperate, or should I start carving?”
The woman blanched. Then she turned to the girl at her right. “Fetch Marek,” she said. “Quickly. You two, follow me.”
They staggered after her as she bustled down a white-tiled hallway, turning into a room that looked poorly kept but clean enough. There was a bed with red sheets and a single pillow at the center of the room, and while Jesper would’ve liked to collapse onto it facedown, Kaz helped to lower him, surprisingly gentle, onto his back.
“Marek will be with you in just a few minutes,” the woman said from the doorway. Kaz, who had dropped heavily into a chair in the corner, didn’t seem to accept this as an answer.
“Any more than sixty seconds, and you’ll be the one in need of emergency care,” he said. His hands shook around the head of his cane, but his tone was sharp as ever.
“Of — of course, sir.” The door snapped shut, and for a moment, they were alone.
“You could’ve asked nicely,” Jesper said to the ceiling.
“You could shut your mouth,” Kaz shot back.
Somehow, out of all the things Kaz had said to him today, this was what made Jesper pause. He let his head tip to the side, watching Kaz’s face swim in and out of view between the little black floaties. “You’re worried about me,” he said.
Rather than giving some snide remark in return, Kaz just glared at him. Jesper was dangerously close to opening his trap to say something more; graciously, the door chose that moment to swing back open.
“I came as quickly as I could,” said the man who stepped inside. He was tall, with short brown hair and a sharply set chin. His accent was clearly Ravkan. He looked scared out of his mind.
“Could’ve been quicker,” Kaz said, glancing at his pocket watch.
“Right. My apologies. Um.” The Healer was wringing his hands, casting nervous glances in Kaz’s direction; clearly, whoever fetched him had let him know just how essential it was that he do this job right. He seemed to steel himself before stepping up to the bed. “Lift your shirt for me,” he said to Jesper.
“Your wish is my command.” Jesper did his best to flash the Healer a grin, shimmying his ruined shirt up his torso.
“I will stay the bleeding first,” said Marek. He raised his hands in an odd sort of shape over Jesper’s stomach; it didn’t feel like anything was changing, but there was certainly a lot less blood leaving his body now than there was a few moments ago. “Can you sit upright?”
The way Jesper groaned when he tried to move was evidently answer enough; Marek slipped a hand under his back instead, pressing carefully on the skin.
“Anything interesting back there?” Jesper asked.
“There’s no exit wound,” Marek said, dragging his palm methodically from spot to spot. “The bullet is still inside.”
“Then remove it,” said Kaz.
“Nah, keep feeling around,” Jesper said with a wink. “Maybe you’ll find something interesting.” He wanted to see whether or not he’d made the Healer blush, but another wave of throbbing pain chose that exact moment to strike, rendering his flirtation unfortunately ineffective.
“It is lodged very deeply,” Marek said. It seemed had elected to ignore Jesper altogether. “This would require more dexterity than I possess.”
Just my luck. “Kaz?” Jesper said, only partly joking. “Wanna give it a go?”
One look at Kaz told him that wasn’t going to be happening. He was white as a sheet in the lamplight, and those freckles of his stood out in sharp relief across his nose.
“Alright, you know what? Get out of here,” Jesper said to the Healer, forcing himself to breathe through the stab of pain that came with propping himself up just slightly on his elbows. “We’ve got it.”
Marek’s brows drew together. “But —”
“Just for a minute. I, uh, need to have a chat with the boss.”
“Your injury is rather severe —”
“And it’ll just keep getting worse the longer we argue, won’t it?” Jesper said, drumming his fingers erratically on the bed beneath him. “Stand outside the door. Go for a walk. Just one minute. We’ll call for you.”
Kaz was watching him with that calculating look of his, the one that meant he was trying to figure you out. “Give us the room,” he said, not taking his eyes off Jesper.
“I — alright.” Marek didn’t seem thrilled about this, but he did look rather relieved to be out of Kaz’s immediate vicinity, and he didn’t complain as he let the door swing closed behind him.
“You don’t need to flirt with the Healer to make him do his job,” Kaz said once the latch clicked shut. “Bribes and threats are much more effective.”
“Just trying to increase my odds,” Jesper reasoned.
“Of what?”
“You know. Living.”
“Of course you’re going to live.” There was an edge to Kaz’s voice like he was actively trying to will the statement into reality.
“You sound awfully certain.”
Instead of expanding at all on that notion, Kaz said, “Don’t make me regret letting him leave.”
“I won’t,” Jesper said, trying his damndest to sit up just a little bit more. “Okay, maybe I will. No promises. Just — fuck.” He let his head fall back, drawing in as much of a breath as he could. “I’m gonna trust you with something big. And you probably already know it, smarmy little genius that you are, but pretend for my sake that it’s a surprise, alright?”
Kaz just watched him. Jesper cleared his throat.
He could do this. He could absolutely do this. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t so much as siphoned a stain from his trousers in the last ten years; he could make this work.
Making sure he was adequately propped up, he held both hands over the wound. Marek had stopped the bleeding, which was nice, but it was still a miserable sight, all red and hot and angry. Jesper could keep it together, though. He had to; there was no way he’d embarrass himself in front of Kaz again today.
A deep breath. Another. Jesper closed his eyes. He knew without looking where the bullet was lodged; the question was how to draw it out. He imagined his hand was a lodestone, pulling the bullet toward it, which was probably very stupid, but it was the best he could come up with under this much pressure. Come on, come on, come on, he thought, as if it could hear him telepathically. Do not blow this for me. He kept his eyes shut, refusing to look, willing this stupid little lump of metal to get the hell out of him, praying he’d be able to do just this one thing right —
Plink.
Jesper opened his eyes, and there was the bullet, resting innocently on the white tile floor. A little pool of red had gathered around it. How was it that something so small could cause so much damage? Jesper slumped back against his pillow, exhilarated but exhausted, and draped an arm across his eyes.
“You’re a Fabrikator,” Kaz said plainly, and oh, oh right, there had been an audience to that whole ordeal.
“I’m also a gunshot victim, so maybe we can table this discussion?”
Kaz inclined his head slightly in what seemed to be agreement; then he rapped his cane hard against the leg of the bed, sending a resounding echo through the room that made Jesper’s head spin. There came a series of hurried footsteps from down the hall in response, and the door creaked back open. Marek re-entered the room as if it were an execution floor.
“Bullet’s gone,” Jesper said brightly. “Get to work.”
“Um, right,” said Marek, his eyes cutting back and forth between the round on the floor and the young man on the bed. He glanced over at Kaz, whose silent gaze spurred him from his stupor and sent him back to Jesper’s bedside.
The rest of the procedure was fairly uneventful. Marek was clearly too terrified for flirting to be any fun, so Jesper just laid back and let him do his job. Jesper’s gut went from burning to throbbing to itching something terrible; then, for the first time since that damned shot made contact, the pain receded, a storm wind finally rolling away across the fields. Jesper filled his lungs gratefully and let out a sigh that hurt far less than it would have twenty seconds before.
“The wound is closed,” Marek said, wringing his hands again now that they were free of their duties. “It will still ache as your body finishes the healing process, but you’re in no danger of dying. I recommend remaining on bed rest until you feel fully recovered.”
“Good,” Kaz said curtly. “You can leave. You’ll see payment by this time tomorrow.”
“We typically charge on the day of treatment —”
Kaz arched an eyebrow. “Do I need to repeat myself?”
“Um. No, sir.”
“Then you can leave.”
Marek gave Kaz a nod that almost bordered on a stiff little bow; then he left the room. Jesper had precisely twelve seconds this time to enjoy the peace and quiet before the realization hit him.
“Oh, Saints,” he said, his heart leaping into his throat. He sat bolt upright and regretted it instantly as his stomach throbbed in protest. “My guns.”
“What about them?”
“I left them.” He couldn’t believe he’d let something as stupid as a single shot to the gut distract him like that. His precious guns were probably lying on the cobblestones somewhere by the harbor, getting kicked about by pigeons. Or maybe somebody had snatched them up to keep for themselves. Maybe they were on a counter at some second-rate pawn shop. Maybe —
“Here,” Kaz said, and now they were in his lap.
“What — you —”
“I put them in my bag.” Kaz said this like it should’ve been obvious, like he wasn’t a master of sleight of hand even when he didn’t need to be and like Jesper hadn’t been half blind with agony whenever Kaz had scooped them up. “You were clearly indisposed.”
Jesper picked them up, his expression hovering somewhere between disbelief and reverence. He twirled them each twice around his hands and slid them back into their holsters, almost feeling more relieved for their safety than his own. “Suppose I should get up now,” he said, letting his legs hang off the side of the bed. He gave himself until the count of three before pressing himself to his feet — and immediately doubled over, catching himself on the bed rail with a groan. “Oof, okay, he wasn’t joking about that whole aching thing.”
“Can you walk?” Kaz asked, rising from his seat as well.
“Maybe.” Jesper tried to take a single step forward and amended his answer. “No.” Saints, this was beyond embarrassing. Kaz had brought him all the way here, and Jesper couldn’t even get himself back out the door.
“Here,” Kaz said again. Jesper glanced at him, and his eyes went wide in surprise; Kaz was holding out his cane.
“I — are you sure?” Somehow, this felt like a massive breach of privacy. Kaz’s cane was his weapon; it was his armor; it was another limb. Jesper could hardly picture him without it. “You just hauled my ass halfway across Ketterdam —”
“And I’m not hauling your ass back to the Slat,” Kaz said, the cane still held out between them. “I’ll manage ten minutes without it.”
“But —”
“If you don’t take it,” Kaz said, “I will personally knock you unconscious and drag you back by the ankles.”
Jesper put one hand up in surrender and reached for the cane with the other. “Understood, boss.” He did his best not to show on his face how odd it felt to be holding this, feeling the metal of the crow’s head made tacky by his own dried blood. When he set it on the ground and gave it an assessing lean, he found that it helped quite a lot, actually. He looked up at Kaz, who of course was looking at him, and flashed him a smile. Some of the color had returned to Kaz’s face; it seemed to wash the freckles away, camouflaging them in the pink of his cheeks. Jesper almost mourned the loss, but there would be other chances to catch a glimpse of them. He was sure of it. “Ready?”
Kaz nodded, just once, and made for the door. “After you.”
Together, they headed out into the sunlight and limped their way home.