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The Mark
“Well ain’t you two just the cutest couple!”
The table between Kaz and Inej shudders and threatens to buckle as a woman throws onto the bench beside Inej. She hoists her ample breast up as she settles in beside Inej, who edges further into the cramped little space between the bench and the brick wall, eyeing the woman with mild antipathy. Kaz throws a quick glance over her - middle aged, rosy cheeks, hair tied back in an unfussy tail. She looks like every other woman in this backwater farming town. Not a threat.
Kaz isn’t quite sure what’s so cute about the pair of them. Inej has been stone faced and silent for the entire meal, picking at her peas and corn, making sure to fix him with a pointedly disdainful glance every so often. Kaz has diligently eaten every last pea, corn kernel, and bite of overcooked meat without comment, mostly because he knows it will annoy Inej when he can hardly be counted on to eat a meal a day back in the Barrel.
He supposes the woman thinks they’re cute because they’re the only people under a mid-century in this entire pub.
Sure enough, the woman enthuses, “Why, it’s so exciting to see young faces in here! It’s been so long since I’ve seen anyone other than Lieke and Luuk over there, I almost forgot what other people looked like! And what with news of the robbery out in Belendt two days ago and all that hubbub we were so sure folks across the country would be hiding in their beds…”
Inej glares at Kaz while the woman chatters on, seemingly oblivious to the fact that neither of them have said anything yet. Kaz bites his lip to hide a smile. Ah yes, the robbery. Terrible business that. A priceless De Armiene piece stolen from under the noses of the supposed best security the Museum voor Zeldzaam Kunst had to offer, and nobody has an idea where it could have disappeared to.
He surreptitiously checks Jordie’s pocket watch. Nobody has an idea where it could have disappeared to, that is, until about twenty minutes from now when it will be spotted in the back of a cart along a busy stretch of road just outside Ketterdam, assuming Anika has done her job. And he and Inej are here, eating dinner in a pub that smells like mildew and recooked grease, visible as far away as possible.
“Now you must excuse me!” the woman interrupts herself suddenly. “In my excitement I forgot to introduce myself! I’m Rosaline. And you are?”
Kaz smiles at her, since Inej isn’t going to. “Tomas,” he introduces himself. “And my wife, Liesel.”
(“Liesel?” Inej had argued with him earlier that night. “I’m Suli, Kaz! I look Suli!” When he’d not bothered to reply, she’d continued, “Why do we even need fake names? Isn’t the whole point that Dirtyhands and the Wraith are placed as far from the stupid picture as possible?”
“Yes,” he’d replied, “and Dirtyhands and the Wraith don’t just splash their names around carelessly. And,” he went on brusquely when Inej opened her mouth, “Liesel doesn’t fit and that’s also the point. Anyone we speak to should know something isn’t quite right, even if they’re not sure what.”)
Between the name, the bone-deep damp of Kerch farmland, and the formless, itchy dress he’d tossed her way right before they headed to the pub, Kaz is quite sure Inej will be dreaming about what he looks like with a knife between his eyes.
“You two are just so sweet,” Rosaline sighs, dewy eyed. “You must tell us how you met. It’s been forever and a day since we’ve heard a proper romantic tale.”
Kaz smiles again and shifts his cane as he sits up straighter. The glint of the lantern light against the metal catches Rosaline’s eyes and he sees a furrow appear between her brow before it smoothes clear again. She’ll remember the crow’s head later, and wonder why it feels familiar
He opens his mouth to answer Rosaline - a dance night in their local town hall, or something equally unmemorable - but Inej beats him to it. “It’s not all that romantic, actually,” she says. There’s a little smile playing on her face that makes Kaz nervous. She sighs wistfully. “I still remember it as though it was yesterday. You see, Tomas here has a debilitating fear of chickens.”
Kaz frowns. Inej gives him a poisonous smile. “And I heard him on my way to the fields one day, a paddock over from mine, calling for help. I run over immediately to see what’s wrong, naturally, because I can hear that the voice sounds so frightened. And what do I find? Tomas, surrounded by a crowd of clucking, brooding hens, looking for all the world like they’re a pack of wolves.”
The little furrow has reappeared between Rosaline’s brows. “Oh,” she says.
Kaz sighs inwardly. He supposes if it alleviates Inej’s annoyance with him, he can bear it. “They have very sharp beaks,” he manages, which is true.
“And they’re very bad tempered,” Inej adds. “I had to shoo them all back into their coop, and collect the eggs that morning. Of course, for Tomas it was love at first rescue. I needed a bit more convincing. But here we are!’ she finishes. “Marital bliss.”
Rosaline smiles, a little less winningly now, and repeats, “Marital bliss!”
“My wife is very kind,” Kaz says, “because she didn’t mention I’m even more scared of flies.”
It's a terrible lie but Inej grins at him, and he thinks that the teasing edge to her expression is just a little softer. Perhaps he’ll be able to sleep tonight after all.
The Merchant
The mercher wet his pants a while back, and the acrid scent has long since permeated the air, which makes the little room feel even smaller than it really is. Kaz is bored, and tired, and he wants to be done with this so that he and Inej can leave and find some hutspot down by the Staves.
Inej has Sankt Petyr pressed against the vulnerable underside of the mercher’s throat, forcing his head up as she examines him dispassionately. He’s slumped against the floor and she’s crouched over him, just about done with him. They have the information they need, mostly courtesy of Kaz and his bloodied crow’s head.
Inej had caught scent of a ship docked in the Harbour five days ago with an underbelly filled with children. This man, Van Meher, owned the berth but not the ship or the rest of the cargo. She’d passed the information to Kaz days before docking herself, and he’d sniffed the man out and waited until he’d watched him take a sizeable bribe to not look too closely at the cargo schedule. Then he’d dragged Van Meher by the hair into the Warehouse District and waited for The Wraith to glide home.
Once Inej arrived, it had been almost disappointing how quickly he broke. He couldn’t give them the location of the children, but he could give them a name, and that’s almost better. A location is singular. Names lead to more names, tangled webs that are never as cleanly woven as they think.
Van Meher seems to know Inej is done with him, because his eyes, wild and white in a face cast in red, swing desperately around the room. They catch on Kaz, now standing in the corner of the room with his thumb stroking over the beak of his crow’s head. It smears the blood a little further.
“Are you going to let your whore do this?” he spits at Kaz, his throat swallowing compulsively against the cool press of the knife. His voice is hoarse, from yelling and from fear. “You let her control you like this?”
Less brave so much as utterly stupid.
Inej looks over her shoulder at him. Unlike Van Meher, she looks pristine. Untouchable.
“I don’t let her do anything,” Kaz says blandly. “Did you know when we first met, she held a knife to my throat? Rather like now, coincidentally.” Inej raises an eyebrow at the lie, and lets the knife press hard enough that a line of red appears on the mercher’s neck. He holds Van Meher’s frightened gaze. He says low and rasping, “She told me to do as she said, or she’d slit my throat. She said she’d make it hurt. She said she’d draw it out for days.”
Van Meher doesn’t have any dignity left to lose, but he makes a particularly pathetic picture sprawled across the ground as he is, unable to even look at Inej. “She made me beg for my life,” Kaz murmurs, “just so I could live another day.” He raises an eyebrow. “Do you want to try begging, Mr Van Meher?”
“You always were dramatic, Kaz,” Inej says, and slits Van Meher’s throat.
The Pirate Prince
When Nikolai appears beside her at the railing the day before The Wraith is set to dock in Ketterdam, Inej has to repress a sigh.
“Captain Ghafa, I simply must ask you,” Nikolai says in that booming voice which deliberately carries across the deck.
“Must you?” Inej says evenly, and Nikolai grins wider.
She does appreciate Nikolai, to her own surprise given he’s a Ravkan noble, a cohort she’s primed to dislike for any number of reasons. He’s funny and easy going and seems to enjoy getting his hands dirty, which is a quality she can respect. He’s perhaps too confident in tossing orders around her ship, but on the whole he’s leagues more likeable than she’d expected when he first caught up to her outside the Little Palace and asked to hitch a ride back to Ketterdam. But he is, and she thinks most people would back her up on this, a lot.
“I must,” he repeats. “Captain Ghafa, I must know how the Sankta of the Seas made an acquaintance with the Bastard of the Barrel.”
Inej almost drops her spyglass into the waves lapping at the side of the ship. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t that.
“I would have asked him but I wasn’t all that keen on losing a hand,” Nikolai continues cheerfully. “They’re very nice hands. Look great with a few rings.”
Inej casts a doubtful glance at Nikolai’s hands, which are frequently gloved. It’s an odd commonality with Kaz.
“Where did you hear I was an acquaintance with the Bastard of the Barrel?” she asks, turning the spyglass over in her hands.
Nikolai tilts his head a little. “There’s a whisper on the air,” he replies, watching her.
If anyone were to look for it, it wouldn’t be hard to unearth the connections between herself and Kaz. The Barrel knows their faces and their history well. But the Barrel knows it owes absolutely nothing to those that prod and stare from the outside. Nothing about their relationship is a secret, exactly, it’s just also not… common knowledge.
She knows Nikolai has had dealings with Kaz in the past, though she’s never quite managed to get the details of their relationship out of Kaz. The man hadn’t mentioned anything about Kaz when he’d first asked for passage to Ketterdam, and the fact that he’s doing so only a day out from port raises a mild sense of wariness in Inej, like hair raising on the back of her neck.
She might like Nikolai, but that doesn’t mean she trusts him. She doesn’t know what he wants with Kaz, doesn’t know what he already has, but she sees no reason to make it easy for him.
“We’ve met in passing a few times,” she answers.
If anything, Nikolai only looks amused. “Is that so,” he says.
Inej sets her jaw stubbornly. “In fact, now that you mention it, I don’t believe I’ve heard the name Bastard of the Barrel before just now.”
Nikolai’s eyebrows jump up. “You’ve never heard of him?”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
Nikolai studies her with his lively hazel eyes. He looks fascinated, like she’s a new invention he’s working on, and she gets the oddest feeling that she’s just confirmed a suspicion of his. “I do respect those that protect their own,” he says, and holds up his hands before she can answer. “I know, I know - you have no idea what I’m talking about.”
“Not a clue,” she confirms, and he whistles as he walks away.
The Mother
Marya Hendriks knows nothing about the criminal nature of the four young adults sitting around the table next to her, and that’s how Wylan wants it to remain.
It’s a fact that Inej is none too pleased about, and she’d been sure to let Wylan know when they’d first discussed it.
“Your mother should know your past,” she’d told him. It had been her first return to Ketterdam since setting sail on the Wraith for the first time, and she’d let the full weight of her disapproval show in the heaviness of her brow, the directness of her stare. They’d been sitting in his cathedral-like living room at the time, and she’d not missed that it was in that same room she’d shared her history with her own parents, six months earlier.
“I know,” he’d said, eyes wide with guilt, “but - I can’t have her thinking I’m violent, Inej. Not everything that happened with him.”
“It will hurt her to know you’ve lied to her.”
“I know. I know. I’ll tell her. Just… not yet.”
So Marya Hendriks knows nothing of their casual and not-so-casual crime, and Inej disapproves, but she won’t say anything because as far as she’s concerned, Wylan can make his own decisions and if his decision is to dig his own grave then so be it.
What does make things complicated, however, is that Colm Fahey has never been amazing at reading the room.
It’s one of his trips to Ketterdam, a rare eclipse in which Inej and Colm are both present at the same time, when he sets his spoon on his napkin, leans forward as he looks at Inej and Kaz where they sit across the kitchen bench, and says gruffly, “I wanted to say that you two’ve come a long way from the Dregs an’ the Barrel, and I‘m proud.”
At the other end of the bench, Wylan stiffens dramatically and Jesper shakes his head at his dad. Colm continues, “Takes bravery to leave a life like that, and I wanted you t’know that.”
Inej wasn’t aware that Colm thought the days of the Dregs were behind them, and wonders why both Jesper and Wylan insist on lying to their parents.
Marya lifts her head away from the drawing she’s etching into her napkin and blinks, slowly. “The Dregs,” she says softly, her voice half question and half memory. A little fear leaks into her tone when she says, “They were…”
“A coffee shop, Ms Hendriks,” Kaz says calmly. Inej looks over at him to see him meeting Marya’s gaze evenly. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever understand how he lies like that, fluid and fluent. Even now, she only ever treats lying as a distasteful necessity. “On the corner of West Stave, the edge of the Barrel. Wylan would take you there, but it’s not the nicest location.”
“It’s where we met,” Inej chimes in, “working.”
“It can be difficult to find a way into better employment as Ghezen urges,” Kaz says. “We appreciate your kind words, Colm.”
“Thank you, Colm,” Inej says, catching his slate grey eyes meaningfully with her own. She thinks Jesper stamps on his foot, because he doesn’t say anything else.
She notices, however, that Marya frowns throughout the rest of the breakfast, and as she and Kaz leave later that morning, she hears Marya quietly say to Wylan, “I don’t think the Dregs are a coffee shop, Wylan.” And she wonders if the time for that conversation has finally come.
The Littlest Crew Member
“Inej!”
She hears the little whisper, shy and scared, feels the tug on her pants, but she doesn’t look away from Kaz just yet. She won’t look away until his silhouette fades into nothingness as the ship gets further and further from port. She might not look away until Ketterdam fades away altogether.
Another tug on her pant leg. Another whisper, more insistent. “Inej! ”
Kaz is barely visible now, gone for another season. She looks down at Cait, her littlest crew member, who is staring up at her with wide brown eyes.
(“Temporary crew member,” she said sternly, not budging in the face of Cait’s wobbly lip. Cait was the only child from their last run who has no home to return to, which means she’ll be going to an orphanage recommended by Nikolai and Zoya, located in the south of Ravka. She’d wanted to stay onboard of course. But Inej can’t, she won’t. She’s only seven years old.)
Inej tweaks one of Cait’s blonde curls and says, “Hmmm?”
Cait looks unusually serious. She whispers, “Inej, that was Dirtyhands.”
Inej blinks. “Yes,” she says, “I suppose it was.”
“You shouldn’t talk to him,” Cait urges her. She has a handful of Inej’s pants still grasped between her little hands, unable to let go. She says with all the sincerity in the world, “He’ll take your heart and eat it.”
Inej pauses. She fights back a smile. Then she kneels so she and Cait are at eye level. “Is that really true?” she asks and when Cait nods fervently she says, “Thank you for telling me.”
“He’s a demon,” Cait blurts.
“Oh yes,” Inej nods. “A very nasty one.” She wonders if it’s better or worse for Kaz’s reputation when she goes on, “Did you know that we met when he crawled out from under Goedmenbridge, right in front of me?”
Cait’s mouth drops open silently and Inej nods again. “He tried to trick me, you see. He told me he wouldn’t let me pass if I didn’t give him all my money. It was very scary.”
“What did you do?” Cait asks.
“Well…” Inej replies. “I told him that if he let me pass, I would knit him a pair of nice fuzzy gloves made of pink and blue wool, and then he could finally throw away his smelly old black ones. But when he let me pass, I ran, and I was too fast for him to catch me.” Her mouth twitches again at Cait’s saucer round eyes. “That’s all he wanted at the harbour. He dreams about pink and blue gloves with little baubles on the back.”
“That doesn’t sound so scary,” Cait mumbles.
Inej smiles properly, though it snags a little in regret. In only her seven years, Cait has already faced far scarier demons than Kaz. “He’s not, if you’re very brave,” she says. “Do you think we can find the perfect pair of gloves when we get to Os Kervo?”
+1. Each Other
“When I first met you, I didn’t know if you were real at first.”
Kaz’s whisper is barely audible against the pillow. He’s already watching Inej, tracing his eyes over the line of her nose and her lips and her eyelashes, so he sees when she turns her head towards him.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, equally quiet. In the silence that fills his attic room, their whispers on the bed fill the space.
“I thought you might be a ghost,” he says. “You moved so silently. I thought you couldn’t exist.”
“I exist, Kaz.”
He swallows. “Sometimes I still think I must have made you up.”
Inej extends a hand and traces a gentle finger along the curve of his nose. Even the soft movement feels fond, and he files it away as another piece of evidence that she couldn’t possibly be real. How could someone like her feel such a way about a creature like him?
“I thought the same thing about you,” Inej says. He blinks. “I thought…” Her breath shudders. “I thought that was going to be my life. And I thought that nothing you were offering me could possibly be true.”
“I’m real, Inej.”
Her eyes crinkle as she smiles. “I know that,” she whispers. “I’m so glad you are.”