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The tea soothes Inej’s nerves. She takes a deep breath, letting the smell fill her lungs. It takes her back to days making tea with her mother in the spot right between afternoon and evening, laughing when Inej accidentally picked up salt instead of sugar, sipping out of cups passed down from generation to generation. Inej inhales, and wishes she didn’t have to exhale, if only to grasp onto the nostalgia for a second more. But her lungs demand air, and so she lets out the breath, raising the cup to her lips.
The sharp tap of a cane sounds, and Inej does not look up as Kaz approaches her, waiting for him to initiate conversation. “I want to show you something.” Of course. She’d been stabbed less than a week before, and the first time Kaz comes to meet her, he starts with the job.
Now she looks up. “I am well, thank you for asking. How are you?” Perhaps she should have given up on making Kaz learn manners long back, but by now, it is habit to force him to act human.
His lips curl into a smile. “Splendid.” He awkwardly sets himself down next to her, leaning his back to the hull of the ship, wincing as his leg buckled.
“Is your leg bad?” Inej asks, because at least one of them has to be kind.
“It’s fine,” Kaz dismisses, refusing to accept that his leg must be troubling him more than usual thanks to the uneasy sway of the Ferolind and the increasing chill in the air as they approached Fjerda. “Here.”
A map is spread out in front of her, depicting the Ice Court — specifically, the prison sector. It is something Inej has been thinking about for a while now.
“I’ve seen it.” Inej ran her fingers from the basement to the roof, examining the drawing nevertheless. “Six storeys up a chimney.” Someone else might be scared of the climb, but Inej is not someone else. She was the Wraith, and she could make any climb necessary. The more pressing issue was not inner fear — it was her injury.
“Can you do it?” Kaz asks, straight forward.
Inej raises her eyebrows. “Is there another option?”
“No.”
“So if I say I can’t make that climb, will you tell Specht to turn the boat around and take us back to Ketterdam?” It was a useless question, and they both knew it. Inej would never admit she couldn’t make the climb, and Kaz would never let go of the biggest job in his life.
Still, he replies. “I’ll find another option. I don’t know what, but I’m not giving up that haul.”
Inej sighs. Of course he answers like that. “You know I can do it, Kaz, and you know I’m not going to refuse." She couldn’t. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t refuse Kaz. She tells herself that if she wanted to, she would be able to — but then, what did it say about her when she never did want to? “So why ask?” Inej presses.
“I want to make sure you know what you’ll be dealing with and that you're studying the plans,” Kaz rasps, as if they were preparing for an exam.
So Inej questions, “Will there be a test?”
“Yes,” Kaz says. “If you fail, we’ll all end up stuck inside a Fjerdan prison.”
“Mmm,” Inej vocalized, sipping on the cooling tea. “And I’ll end up dead.” She closed her eyes, letting the call of gulls and the smell of sea salt wash over her. She raises another concern that has been troubling her mind. “I’m worried about the escape route to the harbor. I don’t like that there’s only one way out.”
“Me neither,” Kaz admits. “But that’s why the Fjerdans built it that way.” When thinking about protecting something, most people thought about reducing the number of ways to get in. The Fjerdans didn’t. They realized that the less ways to get out meant higher chances of catching anyone who got inside in the first place. Which was why they would need a quick escape. And a reliable one.
“Do you trust Specht?” she asks, prompting a glance from Kaz.
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
“Not at all, but if the Ferolind isn’t waiting for us at the harbor…” Inej trails off, letting him complete the sentence. It would all be over.
“I trust him enough,” Kaz says.
There was only one way Kaz could ever trust someone. “He owes you?”
Kaz nods, looking around, before continuing. “The navy threw him out for insubordination, and refused him his pension. He has a sister to support near Belendt. I got him his money.”
A story like dozens of others in the Barrel. Neglected and desperate for pay. Most of them would die in a turf war or of starvation. Kaz had given Specht money, a job he liked, and hope. “That was good of you.”
Kaz narrows his eyes, not reacting well to the thought of being a good person. “I’m not some character out of a children’s story who plays harmless pranks and gives to the poor,” he scorns. “There was money to be made and information to be had. Specht knows the navy’s routes like the back of his hand.”
“Never something for nothing, Kaz,” she sighs. “I know. Still, if the Ferolind is intercepted, we’ll have no way out of Djerholm.”
“I’ll get us out. You know that,” Kaz says. She did. He had gotten her out of every cage and offered her a chance at life. But Kaz would not care for her gratitude.
So Inej simply says, “I hear Pekka Rollins was the one gunning for us in the harbor.”
“So?” Kaz scoffs.
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you go after him, Kaz.”
“He’s just another boss, one more Barrel thug.” Kaz says the words as if he believes them, and someone else might have believed them too. But she was the Wraith, and it was her job to observe and know.
“No, he isn’t,” she says. “When you go after the other gangs, it’s business. But with Pekka Rollins, it’s personal.”
Kaz stays silent for a moment. Then, “Pekka Rollins killed my brother.”
Calling it a shock would be an understatement. “You had a brother?” Inej asks. And underneath it, the real question: What happened to him?
Kaz answers neither, opting to mutter, “I had a lot of things.”
It is not much, but all Inej can offer is, “I’m sorry.”
She hopes he hears her say the rest. I’m sorry you lost someone to care for you. I’m sorry he was stolen from you. I’m sorry you had to become like this.
“Kaz–” Inej starts, then stops. A deep breath, and she says, “I’ll pray for him. For peace in this world if not in this one.”
Kaz turns his head, and Inej startles to realize how close together they were, shoulders touching as they lean against the hull. His eyes were a dark brown, hidden behind some secret pain. “I don’t want your prayers,” he says.
“What do you want, then?” Inej can guess at his answer. Money. Power. Revenge. All the obvious choices for a boy who seemed to care for nothing.
Sure enough, he shrugs and turns away, hiding once more behind a mask of indifference.“To die buried under the weight of my own gold.”
Inej sighs. Had she really hoped for him to continue opening up? She wonders if to Kaz, vulnerability is a sin he must make penance for by pretending nothing mattered. “Then I’ll pray you get all you ask for.”
“More prayers,” he said. “And what do you want, Wraith?”
The old answers come easily to mind. Home. Family. To wreak havoc upon every slaver stealing people. But another answer whispers in the back of her mind, You, Kaz. You.
It stings, a barb in her heart, because it was impossible. And Inej wants it even though it stings, but she knows she cannot have it. The heart was an arrow, but what good would an arrow be if it was injured?
She was the Wraith, and it was her duty to stay silent and stay away. So all Inej says is, “To turn my back on Ketterdam and never hear that name again.” It would mean never seeing her friends again, never seeing Kaz again; but perhaps it would be worth it. Inej convinces herself that it would be.
“Your share of thirty million kruge can grant that wish,” Kaz rasps, pushing himself up with his cane’s support. “So save your prayers for good weather and stupid guards. Just leave me out of it.” He limps away.
She watches as she sips at her neglected, cold cup.
Inej smells the tea, and it feels like the past. Inej smells the sea, and it feels like the future. Inej wonders, idly, what the present would smell like and ignores the thought that it was the scent of Kaz’s cologne and bitter, black coffee.