Chapter Text
He didn’t spend his time pining after her.
He built up the Crow Club and worked to open a new one. He made threats of violence and made good on them when necessary. He created opportunity and money where there had been none.
If he made sure to keep track of the weather on the seas, if he found himself staring at the windowsill in his office from time to time, if he walked the pier every night before heading back to the Slat, then it was only to keep track of business or to work out some plan in his head or to know how best to dupe the tourists that were disembarking.
His days were filled with commerce and cruelty, his mind too crowded with profits and planning to think of much else.
At night, though, his body betrayed him.
His dreams were filled with glimpses of Inej - her dark hair falling across her face, her eyes staring up at him in the moonlight, her hand sliding beneath his own. It was never the entirety of her - only fleeting slivers of memories, as though he were seeing her through the gaps in a fence.
He would wake, sweating and breathless and embittered, and think - at least let me have all of her in my dreams. He might never know the feel of her in his arms in his waking life, but to never know it in his dreams, too, was a more desperate, hopeless kind of ache.
On those nights, he could almost accept that the gods existed beyond some faithful’s imagination. He could believe they were real and had finally found a punishment cruel enough for the bastard of a boy called Dirtyhands.
She sat down to write the first letter two weeks after she had departed from her berth in Ketterdam. In the morning she would say goodbye to her parents and the Ravka shoreline.
She sat in the captain’s cabin, her lamp turned down low to keep from bothering the sleeping form of her parents a few feet away. She stared at the piece of paper before her, hand poised above the emptiness, and hesitated.
How should she start? Dear Kaz? Hello, Kaz? Perhaps forego a greeting at all and just begin. She smiled. That’s what Kaz would do, his mind too quick and emotions too bothersome a thing to bother with formal greetings.
She shook her head at herself, scoffing at the useless, ridiculous thoughts chasing one another in her brain.
She wrote his name at the top of the sheet and stopped. Wondered how to begin.
It wasn’t as though she and Kaz had never spoken casually, but it had always began and couched in terms of a job - where they were headed, what they were doing, why he needed a certain bit of information. He was never one to ask how her day had been or what she had planned for the night. Although perhaps he’d never needed, then - her days and nights had almost always involved being with him.
She set her pen down and rolled her shoulders, easing the tension from her body. She sighed quietly, then started when she heard her father speak.
“Think of all the times you almost turned to him to speak something on your mind. Imagine all the things you wanted to say. Write those things down.”
She turned her head to face him, a shy, almost embarrassed look on her face.
“How do you know who I’m writing to?”
Her father sat up and laughed as he shook his head at her, a soft look coming into his eyes.
“Who else, Inej, if not the boy who brought us to you?”
Even now, those words - the simple truth behind them - still threw her off balance.
Or perhaps righted a world that had been long knocked askew.
She slipped off the chair and walked silently over to the bed, sat next to him and laid her head on his shoulder. He wrapped his arm around her and she sank into his warmth, into a dream that she’d had a thousand times over, a dream that was no longer just a dream.
“You could come back with us, Inej,” her father murmured after a long moment. “There’s still a place for you among the caravans. You would have a full belly and an open road once again.”
Sorrow burrowed into her chest.
“But never an easy heart,” she replied quietly.
True to her word, she sent letters as often as she could.
He felt a pleasant wave of surprise every time he recognized her slight, trailing script on the front of an envelope - not that she kept her word, which he never doubted, but at the simple fact that they’d been spoken at all. They were reminders of goodness in his violence soaked world. They were evidence that she was not just a distant memory or a last, fading dream.
He never wrote back; his letters would only ever arrive at places she had already departed from. Instead, he built new images of her, hoarded the words he would never say in return.
I bought a hat at the last port - a proper pirate hat.
Of course, he pictured himself saying. Can’t be a proper pirate without a proper pirate hat.
The sea is more beautiful than I could’ve imagined. Deadlier, too.
It’s a fitting place for you then, his dream self would rasp, easy and unafraid in a way he never was in his waking hours. You both have that in common.
She never signed her letters with goodbye. Instead, she found other ways to remind him that she was gone -
I miss feeding the crows at your windowsill.
I miss the sound of the harbor late at night.
I miss how the moonlight reflected off the rooftops.
He only ever had one imagined reply to that, words he didn’t think he’d ever have the courage to speak aloud -
I miss you.
She stared at herself in the mirror. Reflected back at her was a slight slip of a girl, hands clean, hair tied neatly back into a long plait.
She blinked and her hands red and dripping, her clothes soaked in someone else’s suffering. She wished the sight would make her fingers shake, but they laid still at either side of her. She wished that she could feel sick at the memory of slavers slumping forward, quietly, one by one. Instead, she felt at peace; in the quiet aftermath of the slaughter, they could have been penitents kneeling in prayer, were simply reeds bowing in the wind.
A rustle of sheets on her bed drew her from her morbid thoughts. A Suli girl, brown skinned and thin, sat up looking at her. Up close and out of the moonlit night, she was even younger than Inej had initially thought - younger than Inej herself had been when she’d been taken.
Inej walked over to her, a canteen of water in her hands. She sat at the edge of the bed and held the water out. The girl waited for a long moment before slowly edging her hand forward and taking the water. Inej stared at her - the wild, black tangle of her hair, the wide brown eyes. It felt like looking into a mirror that faced the past.
She waited until the girl was done drinking.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Kripa,” the girl replied, her voice no louder than a sigh.
Inej nearly laughed at that.
A girl named for mercy, found in a place where Inej had shown none.
She guessed the gods were trying to send her a message, wondered if it was a joke or a warning or a reminder.
“My parents are dead.”
It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway. Better ugly truths than pretty lies.
“We went to the place your Caravan had been. The slavers left none alive.”
Kripa closed her eyes, her face collapsing into lines of sorrow. When she opened them, it seemed as though she had aged another fifty years in a moment’s passing.
“What did you do to the slavers?”
Inej looked at the Kripa, her gaze unshakable and unrepentant. She could feel the slavers’ blood as it splashed across her face, could hear the quiet thunk of her saints as she buried them in necks and chests and eye sockets.
“I left none alive.”
Kripa was quiet for a long moment before she nodded. Tears streamed down her face, but her eyes were far away and unseeing.
“Good.”
He read her note for a third time in a row, the two lines chasing themselves endless through his mind.
I should be back in Ketterdem in two weeks, gods willing.
He needed to send a runner to the harbor. He needed to pay some sad street urchin good coin to wait at her berth. He needed to compile all the information he’d gathered on the slavers and the pleasure houses while she’d been away these last six months.
He needed to do something other than stare at the second sentence on the paper.
It was slanted and trailing, a creeping ink blot at the end of it. The ink thin with haste, then gathered with hesitation.
It should not cause his heart to knock in his chest. It should not settle heavily in his veins.
It should not exist for monsters like him.
He reached out and trailed his fingers over the words. Needed to convince himself that he hadn’t dreamt them up. At his touch, he felt them slide up his arms and settle into the cracks of his heart.
I miss you.