Chapter Text
1 Kaz
The Crows made a lot of enemies. Kaz made it his business to keep a step ahead of them. To learn their secrets in case one of them decided to move against them.
Of course, this only worked with enemies he knew he’d made, the people he’d crossed, never the pawns he put to the sidelines, never the nameless people of the lower ranks he decided to sacrifice. Knowing where he’d come from, born out of darkness, sickness, and drowning at nine years old; was it any wonder that someone else would grow up to become just as ruthless and cruel as him? Was it really so unlikely that another person would lull themselves to sleep each night with thoughts of vengeance on their mind and his name on their lips, the same way he’d done for all these years with Pekka Rollins name on his?
He didn’t remember the woman’s name. He didn’t remember her face. They’d met more than once, she claimed. Now she stood tall against the night. She had light hair and wore a simple black mask. Her clear blue eyes burned into what was left of his soul.
“Where is she?” Kaz growled, his breath hung in white puffs in the chill air. He’d run all the way up to this little jetty near the Sweet Reef. His sides ached, his cane was the only thing that kept his bad leg from trembling. The water in front of them was a dark scrying mirror. It had gone quiet. They were far from the bustle of Ketterdam. Far away from his people.
The woman held a lantern in front of her. The only source of light. Behind her on the jetty, a tall rectangular shape stood in relief against the moonlight.
Dirtyhands’ fingers itched for a gun, a throat to squeeze. He couldn’t kill her yet, needed answers first.
“Where is Inej?”
The woman’s mouth stretched crooked, and it took him a second to recognize it as a smile. Her eyes stayed cold.
“My husband told me if you want to destroy someone you have to go for the heart.”
He knew he’d heard these words before. His pulse was going too fast, his lungs smarted. He’d walked into her trap and Kaz needed his wits to make sure Inej and he walked out of it alive. He should’ve picked her up from the harbor the minute his spies had laid eyes on the Wraith. Damn his pride. Damn this insistent fear of losing her.
“I have to say it wasn’t easy to find the right place to cut. Imagine my surprise when I understood that the infamous Dirtyhands has a heart after all.”
Dread plummeted into his stomach like cold lead.
“I put your heart in a box, Mister Brekker. How fast can you swim?” and with that she pulled a lever behind her. The tall box splashed into the still sea – Tall as a coffin, he thought, heart skipping a beat.
He didn’t hear her laughter or her taunts. He threw aside his cane and plunged. The cold was enough to steal his breath.
No time for drowning, he thought, when icy dead hands started to reach for him.
Kaz kicked his legs. Felt the current the sinking coffin made and followed. Jordie embraced him around his shoulder from behind, clamped his hands around his neck.
No time for drowning. No time for the dead. Inej, he thought, Inej was sinking.
His joints ached under the cold. Pain seized his leg, shot all the way up to his spine. Brought him clarity enough to reach. Kaz’s hands found the metal casing of the box. He held on. Let it drag him down. How deep were the waters?
His lungs began to hurt. He should’ve started carrying around baleen years ago. Another mistake.
“Let go, little brother,” Jordie whispered into his ear. Kaz didn’t know if his eyes were open or closed. Jordie’s pale face loomed in front of him. Bloated features, with corpse-fluid strained lips.
“Let go. I’ve been waiting.”
Jordie’s fingers were colder than the water. They seemed to reach into his chest and twist something there.
The iron coffin jolted as it hit the seabed. A plume of debris rose up. Harbor dirt and seaweed, hands and legs of the dead brushing against him. Cold pruned flesh, soft with salt, rubbed against him. Closer and-
His clamped fingers vibrated.
Inej. She was throwing fists against the box. Kicking her legs.
There was a high pitch in Kaz’s ears. He couldn’t see. Blindly he reached for the iron coffin. There were bars on eye level. His index finger brushed against Inej’s cheek. Skin gave away under his gloved fingertip.
He recoiled. Air bubbled out of his mouth, precious and wasted. The noise of bursting bubbles rattled him, pulled him back enough to let him recall the lock picks inside his mouth.
Kaz clamped his legs against the side of the coffin, stuck his feet deep into mud, so he wouldn’t drift away. He rolled off his gloves. Let the dead have them. If Inej died tonight the dead could have him too, Kaz Rietveld, Kaz Brekker, Dirtyhands, the Bastard of the Barrel. None of them wanted to get up for air and live if it meant leaving her behind.
He almost lost his grip on his lock picks when he finally jammed them into the keyhole.
The rest was easy. The rest was hard.
#
He came through with Inej’s pounding fists against his sternum and a whispered mantra of: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Kaz.”
Her cold wet fingers clamped his nose and chin. Her lips pressed against his opened mouth, cold and dead. Breathing for him.
A gust of body-temperature sea water burst from his mouth. He coughed and convulsed, scrambled away from her, feet unable to find purchase on the wet ground. His body spasmed. He puked up seawater and what little he had in his stomach. A gurgle was heard, before he could speak again: “Get away from me,” his voice was a croak.
She heard him. Without making a sound she got up. Kaz could feel the shift of air without having to look. He wouldn’t have seen her anyway. The jetty was dark, moon temporarily hidden behind clouds and the edges of his awareness twinned in night, in panic.
The roar inside his ears got louder. He pulled his hands to his head. Gasped and let them fall away when his own clammy fingers made contact with his skin.
“Jordie,” he couldn’t hear his own voice, only felt how his tongue formed the words against his teeth, “Leave me alone.”
For a while, Kaz’s world narrowed down to retching and trembling. His body knew what it had to do to starve off the cold, to prevent secondary drowning by expelling every last drop of seawater that had gotten into his lungs. Keep breathing. His mind on the other hand was back on the Reaper’s Barge. Floating, floating, sinking, drowning before he could ever reach Ketterdam.
Inej slapped him. Back of her hand against his cheekbone.
“Kaz, we need to get out of here.”
Had she called his name before?
It was hard to focus on her face. Her hair was plastered against her skin, like that of a corpse. He stared at her moving mouth without understanding another word. He tried to silence his heartbeat, the voice of his brother in his mind, and the high roar of panic. He was crashing, about to scrape the barrel of his adrenalin high. The analytical part of his brain was preparing for this by evening out his breathing and pulling his shoulders up.
He was a survivor.
“-catch an early death if we stay in our wet clothes. Can you get up?”
Inej held out his cane. It took him two tries to rise. His body was weak, felt far out of reach, like he was looking at himself from above. She didn’t try to help him up. Kaz didn’t know what he’d do to her if she were to touch him now.
The water that was dripping down from her body was the only sound Inej made as she kept pace with his stiff gait. It was like walking next to another harbor ghost.
“Sit down,” she said once they reached a dark alley.
He didn’t react. If he sat, he didn’t know if he’d be able to get up again without her help.
“I’ll be right back.”
Dirtyhands was still vacating the premises, and without him he was missing his resolve, but Kaz Brekker was coming back to himself in increments. The one that relied on her to do what was necessary when he could not. How easily he trusted her to get them out of here. Weak men let others do the thinking for them. Kaz found he was too exhausted to care.
He couldn’t tell how long he waited, ten minutes, an hour, half a lifetime. Jordie’s ghost felt close. If Kaz turned around he’d see him lean next to his shoulder against the cold alley wall.
Inej jumped down from the roof to his right. Always graceful, always strong. She came up and held out a bundle in front of him. So he took it. He produced the mask and cloak of the Gray Imp of the Komedie Brute.
“Put it on,” Inej said, and he followed suit.
“We’re close enough to the Lid to be recognized,” she explained as she pulled on her own mask. He glimpsed the deep frown between her brows before she pulled down the veil of the Lost Bride over her eyes. Kaz tried to take in their whereabouts, but the gray roofs and stones seemed interchangeable to every city he’d ever visited. Confronted with his own carelessness a remote unease trickled down his spine. Ketterdam was his home, his harbor, and his domain. Tonight, it had reverted back to nothing but his brother’s wet grave.
“We need to move.”
The walk into the nearest suitable East Stave tavern was a blur. Inej chose a den they wouldn’t normally frequent. Dingy and dirty but dingy and dirty enough to get them a room without being asked any questions about why two trembling tourists were dripping canal water onto the floor.
Inej told him to unmask. Told him to sit close to the fireplace, so he sat. He pushed off the blanket she put around his shoulders, couldn’t bear the weight and friction against his soaked back. Inej lit a fire, before she started walking around behind him.
Kaz concentrated on not-shivering, breathing, on not-drowning. The waves went higher, and he was tired to the bone. Let him lay in the shoals among shipwrecks.
“You should get undressed. Your lips have turned blue.”
He jerked. When had he closed his eyes? Inej had pulled a blanket tight around her body like a towel. Her arms and shoulders were bare. The straps of her underthings could be seen. The rest of her clothes had been hung up behind them in the shoddy bathroom.
“Talk to me.”
“I want her dead. I’ll find out who she is, and I’ll kill everyone she ever cared about right in front of her eyes. I’ll make her believe she alone caused their demise. I’d feed her poison that summons their ghosts. I want to put her in a coffin and set her against the tides so her body can shipwreck against stones while she hallucinates hellscapes of her own mind’s invention.”
He was still shivering. He wanted to crawl into the fire, sleep among the coals. Maybe then he’d feel warm again. His wet clothes were glued to his body. If he stayed still enough his own limbs didn’t feel like that of a drowned man.
“I get that, and you will, but right now you need to get undressed, or you’ll die of lung fever before we can have our revenge.”
“Our revenge?”
“She got my saints.”
They shared a look and Kaz found his own hatred mirrored in her gaze. It frightened him to see so much of himself in her, it excited him too.
“We’ll get them back.”
“She hurt you.”
The Kaz of two hours ago would’ve denied any weakness, especially in front of her, he needed to appear infallible. He stared at his bare hands instead and let out a noncommittal hum.
“Your clothes,” Inej repeated, and when he didn’t move continued with: “I won’t look. You have your own blanket. It’s safe.”
“Nowhere in this Saint-forsaken city is safe,” Kaz said, surprised by his own vitriol.
Inej walked into the bathroom, shut the door behind her, and he was too tired to feel glad to be free of her gaze.
He knew she was right. Autumn had come early this year, with icy winds and dark gray skies. Peeling away his waistcoat, shirt, and undershirt was like peeling away the last layer of protection. Kaz avoided touching his own skin where he could and schooled his face into a blank façade.
Hobbling around to hang his clothes over furniture and in front of the fireplace helped bring back his circulation. It was routine. Didn’t require much thought. Only clad in his undergarments, he huddled into the ruddy blanket he had dismissed before. Stretched out his bad leg when he sat back down by the fire.
It took him a moment to realize that the prickle on his cheeks wasn’t drying seawater. It felt too hot for that even as he stared directly into the fireplace. He touched his fingertips against his face, shivered, let out a wet rattle of a breath. Tears.
When was the last time Dirtyhands had cried? And what for? His dead brother, his inability to function as a normal human being?
Inej came back into the room as Kaz wiped at his face with the corner of his blanket. She hovered a moment behind him before she sat down next to him on the floor in a heap.
“I didn’t think I’d get to you in time,” he confessed.
“I’m here.”
“I couldn’t see anything. There were-” but he couldn’t continue. There were hundreds of corpses pulling me under. His madness couldn’t be put into words. It was his and his alone.
“You found me, Kaz. The heart’s an arrow. Yours aimed and landed true.” Her dark eyes glinted like pools of tar against the fire. She was beautiful. Her hair in a tangle of seaweed. Bags under her eyes. With or without her silver saints she was radiant.
Sankta Inej, he thought, you’ve never been further away from me than in this room.
He hardened his heart. There had been a distance between him and the rest of the world since the day Jordie died. Tonight, the distance had grown larger.
“You’re back now. You’re okay,” she sounded scared. No that wasn’t right. She sounded afraid for him. How much of what Inej had said to him since she pulled him ashore had he missed? How many times had she called his name and not gotten a response?
Kaz’s jaw worked, ready to take aim and throw words at her like weapons. Damn her. She’d saved his life and unlike some mercher he’d repay his debts.
“I thought you had run out of air when I reached you. But I was wrong about that. I felt your body go limp when I touched you to pull you up.”
He had fainted, he realized, just like in that prisoner wagon that had taken them out to the Ice Court.
“I’ve never seen you look at me like that when you came through. Like you didn’t recognize me at all.”
“It’s not you, Inej,” he could feel himself blush, with shame, with anger. He didn’t know.
“I understand that,” she replied indignantly. Kaz didn’t discriminate in matters of physical intimacy. A stranger’s touch made him reel and flinch as much as a friend’s when it came without a warning.
Last autumn when she’d come back to him for the first time, with new laugh lines around her eyes and smelling like the open sea, they had tried. There had been some progress, though Kaz wasn’t inclined to call it that. On some mornings he’d come down the stairs of the Van Eck residence without gloves on to have breakfast with her, Jesper, and Wylan. Other times he’d discard them sitting at his desk to write in his ledgers, while Inej sat on his windowsill. Her patience with him had seemed infinite. He’d held her hand a few times without retching. Managed to curl his body around hers for a couple of short instances without making her disappear.
Right before she had gone back to hunt slavers for the season, he’d cupped her face in his hands and wished he were a different man, whose mind and body didn’t need walls to protect itself. Brick by brick, he had thought as he had pressed his lips against hers for an instance. Brick by brick, he had repeated to himself as he had watched her ship disappear, he would tear it all down for her.
Now he only tasted dirty harbor water on his tongue. Only smelled rot and mildew as their clothes dried.
“Will you be alright?”
He didn’t answer. Inej let out a small sigh. Not even knocking on Death’s door could stop her exasperation with him. On another day it would’ve made him smile.
“If you were Jesper I’d hug you. If you were Nina, I’d go downstairs and get us something hot to eat. But you’re Kaz Brekker and I don’t know what you need if you never tell me.”
“I don’t need anything from you, Inej,” he lied.
Inej leaned her back against the leg of his chair. Her side brushed up against his throbbing knee. Blanket against blanket. It was all he could do not to jump out of his seat.
“You said you needed me. You want me to stay in Ketterdam for the winter, with you,” she made it sound so factual, like another strategic secret she’d uncovered and was delaying to him, “Has that changed?”
“No, never.”
She turned around to face him.
“Then let me help you for once. I’ve never seen you like this.”
Kaz hung his head, flexed his jaw. Harden your heart. But he couldn’t. He was weak and exhausted and the weight of years he had shouldered alone was pressing down on him, heavier than ever before.
“I don’t know how,” he confessed, feeling like a boy, sounding like a drowning man gasping for air.
“That’s okay. That’s what you have people who care about you for. It’s our job to figure out how to help you, not yours.”
He had never thought of it that way. Friendship was an exchange of favors. All his friends worked for him, after all. Inej made it sound like she and the Crows would dole them out for free unasked. He had never considered that they would. Inej always found new ways to surprise him.
“So will you let me help you?”
“The deal is the deal,” he murmured.
She didn’t shake hands with him. He wouldn’t have been able to, but she pushed against his leg with her back almost imperceptibly.
“The deal is the deal,” she agreed.