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Kaz Brekker has never been a religious man. He blasphemes with every second breath, and he'll sooner call greed his guidance than Ghezen or any other god. Boys who the Barrel chewed up and spat out rarely get along with organised religion. The only time Kaz has stepped into a church is for a con. The only time Kaz has considered building a church was as a way to launder money.
No, Kaz Brekker has never been a religious man. Any person on the street can tell you that Dirtyhands is as unholy as they come. Fewer people know that the opposite is true of the Wraith, but enough do. If you ask around the Barrel, you'll stumble across some Dregs who'll rob you blind, but not before telling you that the Wraith prays to her Saints, and that she believes in them with the quiet grace of the truly pious.
Kaz knows this, because he'd watched a pigeon try it. He knows he's no believer - not in anything he can't hold, anyway. And Inej has her Saints, both the ones in the heavens and the ones she keeps sharp and close to hand. Of all the crows, she's the one who prays and truly means it. It used to annoy Kaz, that she'd been so misguided, so naive. And then he'd come to see it as just another aspect of her strength. She'd held onto her beliefs despite the world trying its hardest to prove its evil nature, and while Kaz doesn't understand it, and probably never will, he can acknowledge that it requires bravery to believe like that. A foolish bravery, yes, but a bravery still.
He sighs, and sets down his ledgers. It's near dawn, and he's far from accomplishing all he wanted to tonight. He keeps being distracted by thoughts of Inej, sailing the seas, perhaps to return home any day soon.
It's a short walk down to the harbour. It's longer for Kaz, slowed by his leg. He stands there and he breathes in the stench of the rot and the salt, and he scans the entrance of the harbour for sails.
From a distance, white sails can look a little like bird wings, like the ship may just be a gull fluttering near the horizon. Then the ship draws closer to harbour, like a bird coming into roost, and it resolves into the truth of its nature, wood and canvas and tar.
The tide is low at this hour. Kaz knows, from his memorisation of the patterns of the sea, that it'll begin to rise again soon, just as dawn breaks across the sky.
He watches for a few minutes more, and then returns to the slats. The numbers come more easily, now, flowing from his mind onto the page in crisp, sharp lines. They always do, after he visits the harbour. It's become almost a ritual, to walk down and scan the waters for the Wraith, though not so much of a ritual that others would see any patterns. Just in case, he takes a different path down every time.
If there's anything Kaz has ever believed in, it's this: that the Wraith will return. He doesn't know when, or how, or why she will return, but he knows she will, with fervour equal to that of the most religious. It may have been months since Inej has written to him, but he still holds true that she is good, like how followers of other religions hold true that the world is good. Even if nothing else is good, he can trust that Inej will be.
Inej would not like to be thought of like a Saint, but Kaz can't help it, and he takes a little delight in the fact that it is in itself a sacrilege that she would disapprove of. Still, he has made the sea into his touchstone, made her laughter into the memory that bears him ever on, made her sigh the scale he uses to weigh good and bad. He casts his omens with the winds, these days, with the salt and the rot of the harbour. She will return when the breeze is right, he thinks, like a crow coming home to roost.
He would lay half the world at her feet, he thinks, mocking himself, but she would never take it. What she wants from him is instead his best attempt at politeness, the slightest mark of good left on the world, the touch of his bare hand against her bare cheek. Those are more impossible things than the world. No other religion would require those exacting, painful measures of him.
But Inej does, and so he will try, half-hating that he would do this for anyone, half-glad that she's here to make him want to be more.
Kaz puts away his legers, and falls into his bed. Through the window, open a slight crack, he imagines the smell of salt.
When he wakes, Inej is sitting in his window. Kaz sits up, remembering his thoughts from the previous night, and curses himself. In the window, lit by the morning sun, Inej could never be mistaken for a saint. Instead, she is just herself, sun-tanned and smiling, hair a long rope down her back, and Kaz loves her.
"Wraith," he says, "What business?" When she laughs, he adds, on reflex, "Inej."
"I'm home," she says, and turns to face him. There's a new scar on her face, half-faded to silver already, small and just below her left eye. She's imperfect, and so he can reach out with his unholy hands, bare, and take her wrist.
"Kaz," she says, and her breath shakes a little, but so does his. "I missed you."
There's warm blood beating beneath his fingertips, and she is realer than any Saint could ever be, so he tilts forward to press a kiss to her cheek. She tastes like salt and sea breeze.
He has to let go of her hand, then, to centre himself, and she looks a little disappointed, because she too is only human.
"You came in with the tide," he says, and her smile widens. Behind her, the sunlight streams in, the sky above Ketterdam for once unclouded. The wisps of her hair that have fallen loose from her braid sway in the gentle breeze. Kaz imagines that it smells like the harbour, like salt and tar and Inej.