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Inej's knives sing. She can hear them, and Jesper's guns too. Kaz's cane, on bad days.
She's not truly Grisha, but something in that shape. Her father, the rope and the tent and the ties had whispered to him. They'd never frayed unexpectedly, and he'd known when to stop before they gave.
Inej had been fifteen, and Kaz had handed her her first knife, and she had set her hand on it, and it had said blood.
She'd named it after a Saint. It makes it easier to deal with.
"Higher," say her knives in a fight. They sing, and sing, and sing. His heart. Her blood. Aim there.
She never does.
Inej fights to incapacitate. She fights to escape, not to kill. Her knives are for fruit and for the simple latches on windows and for scaring people off.
Jesper's guns are quieter. He always hits his aim, they croon.
Kaz's cane is an anguished wordless scream for vengeance.
The throat, the throat, sings the knife she's holding now. Inej ignores it, pulling it from the path it desires to slice her challenger's arm, sending them stumbling back, bloody but alive.
"It must be easier just to kill them," Kaz had said, years ago now.
Inej had looked him steadily in the eye. More people should bleed, hummed the largest of the knives at her hips.
"It would be," Inej says. She doesn't tell him how much easier it would be. It's a choice, every single time. The default is not, for her, to leave alive. The knives sing and hunger and guide her hands. Their default is death.
Each and every time, Inej refuses it. People die anyway. Sometimes it's the only way. But she refuses to let the knives hurt anyone they want. That's not her choice.