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Inej breathes in the sea air. In a few minutes more the mineral tang of it will be tainted by the smoke and rotting garbage of the Ketterdam Harbor, and she means to enjoy it while it lasts.
She’s learned to enjoy being on boats — or rather, on her own boat. Being on this passenger ferry from the Shu Han mainland is something less pleasant, but that may only be the company, which is mostly petty merchants and the agents of greater merchants, all in their high-collared suits, clutching their hats against the wind as they look down their noses at her worn sailor’s clothes. (And probably at her Suli face, as well, but they’ll tell themselves it’s the clothes.)
They should appreciate what she’s giving them, in her white linen shirt and her blue canvas trousers: the chance to see her at all. As Ketterdam grows to fill the horizon, she ducks below to exchange her shipboard wear for the uniform of the Wraith. After that, she makes sure none of them see her. Not that she’s afraid of them, or has any particular mission — she just likes to stay in practice.
Normally, of course, she’d sail in on her own boat, but her namesake the Wraith is drydocked for repairs. Inej could have stayed to kick her heels for two days while they finished, but instead she’s given Specht instructions to bring the ship to meet her in Ketterdam.
Also, she knows Kaz watches berth twenty-two in Fifth Harbor. He may watch the ferry, too, but not to look for her. She doesn’t mind the opportunity to surprise him a little.
Instead of the gangplank, she slips over the side of the ferry as it comes in, hitting the shadowed side of the dock with hardly a sound and merging into the crowd who’ve come to greet the ship, milling with them for a moment before she changes direction and heads west for the Barrel. She’ll visit Wylan and Jesper, of course, and probably stay with them in their lovely comfortable house on the Geldcanal, but first, she’ll see Kaz.
The docks are what they’ve always been, crowded and noisy, with vendors hawking fresh bread and fruit to travelers who’ve lived on salt fish and ship’s biscuit for weeks, and touts promising the best entertainment in the world to anyone who wants to follow them, and buskers with their hats on the ground, performing for coins and the amazement of children.
She slips by all of them unmoved. Or she does until she passes the busker with the street organ. He’s a dirty-faced man with a fraying silk cloth over his instrument and only a middling voice, but he has a little crowd, and when Inej catches the words of the song, she has to join them.
When the shark bites, with his teeth, dear, the singer blares in his rather flat voice, scarlet billows start to spread.
But Kaz Brekker’s got his gloves on,
So there’s not a trace of red.
He has a song! Half a dozen sinister nicknames, a threatening reputation, and now Dirtyhands has a song of his own. Inej wonders if he paid someone to write it, or if this organ-grinder is an especially clever advertisement for the Crow Club.
Oh the shark has nasty teeth, dear,
Still we prize him for his skin
But there’s nothing good in Brekker,
Only violence, vice, and sin.
Perhaps not then. Though it’s not exactly out of line with Kaz’s carefully-cultivated legend. Still, she thinks he might have chosen a singer with a little more irony, or a melody less repetitive.
Oh the shark bites when he’s hungry
And he stops when he is fed
But the bastard of the Barrel
Won’t stop biting ’til he’s dead.
A chill goes through her. She glances quickly at the people around her, but they’re taking it placidly, and a few are even smiling. She scans them for tattoos, for signs of some upstart gang that might be gunning for Kaz, but she finds nothing. They’re just people. Citizens of Ketterdam. The singer slows his cranking and breathes in deeply to raise his voice for the conclusion.
Well the shark will end up slaughtered
Dead and butchered on the deck
And tomorrow, you’ll see Brekker
With a rope around his neck.
There’s applause. Someone whistles, and coins patter down onto the cloth. Inej slips into the shadows and runs.
She doesn’t knock on the door at the Van Eck house; she goes over the wall into the garden and in through the window of Wylan’s study. He’s sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, and when she opens the casement, he looks up, as if he’d been waiting for her.
“Inej,” he says. There are dark circles under his eyes. “Inej, I’m trying. I sent invitations to everyone I could think of, every member of the Merchant Council, to meet me. To talk it over. Get a pardon. Get a — a stay.”
A stay of execution. So it’s true. They’re going to hang him.
How can it be true? Kaz is — Kaz. He broke into the Ice Court and then back out. He destroyed Jan Van Eck and Pekka Rollins in the same afternoon, made the plague and the tides serve his will, and he’s only grown since then. He’s the dragon curled around Ketterdam. They can’t just —
“Inej, they all turned me down. None of them will come. I don’t know what to do.”
“Where’s Jesper?” They’ll break him out. She knows they keep the ones sentenced to death at the Stadwatch headquarters. It’s a fortress, but it’s not worse than the Ice Court. The three of them can break him out.
“In Ravka.” His white face and his pale brows over his shadowed eyes make Wylan look like a man wearing a porcelain mask. “I asked him to go and train at the Little Palace. And he finally went. And now — “ He swallows. “I sent him a message. As soon as Kaz was arrested.”
Why didn’t you send me a message? she wants to demand, but she knows it isn’t fair; they have no way of knowing where she and the Wraith will be.
“What’s the charge?” If it’s one of those stupid Kerch charges like interfering in the market —
“Murder,” Wylan says, and of course it is. Kaz, Kaz, you villain, you bastard, you murderer. How could you let them get you?
“That acid,” she says. “The one that gets you into safes.” She doesn’t know what they’ll do with it, but she’ll figure something out. They’ll figure something out.
Wylan puts his hands through his hair. “Inej. I can show you the blueprints. But — you should just go and see. Go and see him.”
They take her knapsack. They bring out a Materialki, and he taps each of her knives in turn, making her put them in a box. Then they lead her down a hallway, and down stairs, more hallways, more stairs. She counts the steps. She could find her way back with him. But there are so many of them, in every room, and they all look up as she goes past, and so many of them have guns. There’s another staircase, and she can feel it in the air, how deep they are, below the canals and sewers. And Wylan’s acid won’t eat through water.
There will be a way. Kaz will be thinking of a way.
She stands at a heavy door. The guard presses a button, and a heavy bolt slams back somewhere, but there’s no sign of the lock. The guard nods, and she passes through it to another heavy door, which also has no visible lock. The first door closes behind her, and its bolt is shot with a resounding clang. Then the second door echos it, and when Inej pushes on it, it swings slowly open.
She doesn’t know what she expected she’d see. Kaz pacing up and down and raging at the indignity of being arrested like a common criminal, his cane beating the stone floor? Kaz sitting cooly in a chair, scheming one last scheme? An empty cell he’d just have escaped? But not Kaz lying on the little prison cot with his eyes closed, his hands folded over his chest as if he were practicing for death.
She doesn’t expect the way he startles when she says his name, either. But it’s when he sits up that her blood goes cold. When he sits up, there’s a desperate flash of hope, and then his face shutters over. The flash of hope is how she knows that all this is real, not a scheme or a trick.
He doesn’t stand. He puts his legs over the side of the cot, and his elbows on his knees and he looks at her.
“Sorry I can’t offer you a seat.”
The cot is the only furniture in the room; there’s a pitcher and a wash basin on the floor, and a pot that fits under the bed, and nothing else. The room is badly lit, with dull bone lights giving dull yellow illumination from the corners, and Kaz’s bitter brown eyes are dull and hollow. His cheeks are hollow, too. He shifts awkwardly, and Inej realizes what’s missing from the room, besides any trace of human comfort or dignity.
“They took your cane.”
“It is a weapon.” At least they’ve let him keep his own clothes, his gloves, but the razor-sharp creases are gone from his trousers, and his shirt collar is limp and dingy, shadowed by days and days of wear.
“They couldn’t give you a stick? Something?”
“I don’t have very far left to walk,” he says dryly, and she presses her back against the door as if she could escape the horror of seeing him here.
“What happened?”
He could take her question several ways. He sucks in a breath and sighs it out, turning his face away. “A boy named Bronck joined the Dregs about a year ago.” His voice is as harsh as ever, but she doesn’t think that she’s imagining the hoarse note in it. She wonders if he talks to himself, down here. “Did odd jobs. A tout for the club, mostly, but he was a fair enough bartender in a pinch. Only a middling fighter. Some stupid girl fell in love with him, and they made plans. Running away, little house in the country, a dozen babies.” He waves a dismissive hand, drops it. “Whatever people like that dream of. Unfortunately for all of us, the girl was already married. To Sergeant Freiderick Hoyt.”
“Oh no.”
“Bronck was an idiot, obviously, but not a complete idiot. He gave her up when he found out. But that wasn’t enough for Officer Hoyt. He put it about that Bronck was wanted for something or other — I don’t even remember what it was. So then he came after him.” Kaz looks down at his knees. He doesn’t seem to know quite how to sit, without his cane to rest his hands on, or his uncomfortable office chair to lean back in. “At the Slat.”
“Oh no. Oh, Kaz.”
Kaz shrugs. “He was mine. He was loyal. What’s a boss worth, if he won’t protect his own? I told Hoyt I’d take care of Bronck myself, that I’d dump him on a boat to Novya Zem that night, steerage class; all he had to do was lose him in the crowd. But the idiot pulled a gun. And then — but I’m sure you prefer I spared you the bloody details.”
She does prefer. She wants to shake him. Just give the boy up. It was the Stadwatch. But he couldn’t have. Not a loyal member of the Dregs. Not one of his own. Another boss, one like Per Heskell, who showed a more human face to his gang, might have gotten away with it. But Kaz rules in cold absolutes, an accountant of loyalty. He’d had to make a choice about how he’d die, who would kill him. This is the death he chose.
Perhaps he thought Wylan could save him from this one. Perhaps it just seemed cleaner than watching the Dregs sink away underneath his feet like sand at high tide.
“But didn’t you have a plan? You can’t have killed a stadwatch officer and then not made a plan.”
“Of course I had a plan,” he hisses, jumping to his feet, pacing with uneven, furious steps to the wall. “I had a dozen plans. To put it on someone else — a dead man for choice but a live one if I had to. To threaten the arresting officers. To bribe the judges. To fake my own death and leave the country.“
That one shocks her. He must have been desperate. Kaz may claim to love money, but more than anything else, he loves Ketterdam. If he is its dragon, it’s his treasure.
“But I made mistakes.” He returns slowly to the cot, and stares bitterly at the opposing wall as if Inej weren’t there. “I made stupid, stupid mistakes. I relied on the wrong people. Should have known. Should have disposed of them. I let too much information get around. I forgot how much the Tides —” His rough voice breaks. “I was so stupid. Can you believe it, Inej? I forgot how much some people hate me.”
“Oh, Kaz.” His hair is messy, and she wants to stroke it back from his face. She goes to him and kneels down beside him, as close as she dares. His breathing is uneven and she waits for it to calm; it doesn’t. “What should we do?”
“Everything there is to do, I should have done a month ago. It’s too late now.”
“If we got out of the Ice Court —“
“The Ice Court was a prison. It had a life, an inhale and an exhale we could use. This isn’t a prison. There’s no routine. No motion. It’s just a — temporary grave.”
“But we have to fight.”
“Why?” he says. “What good would that do?”
“You told me — you told me we would fight—“
“What are you talking about? Never told you anything.”
“Yes, you did; you told me on Black Veil; you said we would always come for each other, that we would fight —“
“Oh, that,” he says. “That was just something I said because I thought you’d like it.”
She averts her face, and says a small prayer to all the Saints. She hardly knows for what.
“Oh, yes, prayer. Helpful as always in this circumstance. Why did you come here, Inej?”
She clenches her teeth so hard they hurt. “To see you.”
“You can see me tomorrow morning, like everybody else in Ketterdam.”
“To talk to you.” To hear your plan, to help you. To save you.
He shrugs and lies back down on the cot, staring at the ceiling. “So talk. What do you have to say to a dead man?”
She swallows, staring at his stony profile. The skull is so clear beneath the skin. What does she have to say to him? What can she bear to say to this horrible man and his cold and calculating heart? “That I pray for you. That you saved me. That you made me dangerous.” He can’t really die tomorrow. The city will fall in on itself first. But what if he does? She swallows hard. “And that I always wanted you to love me, but I was afraid the only parts you would love would be the parts you made.”
He blinks, staring upwards at nothing, and then rolls over to face the wall. “I never made you anything. Except maybe angry. What made you dangerous is the same thing that made me dangerous. You should go.”
“What if I don’t?” she says, looking at the back of his head. Her eyes are hot; her chest feels like it’s being crushed. “What if I just stay here? What if I don’t care if you only said it because you thought I’d like it; what if I want to fight?”
He laughs. It makes his shoulders shake. “You’re so stubborn, Wraith.” The laugh subsides, and Inej may never forgive herself if she cries now. Then there’s a small sound, like he’s licked his lips, and a cough. His back expands with a deep breath. “Can I touch you?”
She’s shocked. Shocked is almost too mild a word. “All — all right,” she says, but she hardly knows she’s saying it, and there’s no picture in her head of what he means by that, touch you.
Unless there’s a burning, where her neck meets her shoulder, when he says it. Unless she’s thinking of the way he touched her with his lips, the last time he told her he might go to his death.
If that’s what she’s expecting, it isn’t what she gets. He whirls on the cot, jerking upright; his hands are rough as they seize her. He closes his arms around her waist so tightly she loses her breath, and he yanks her violently against him, her back to his front.
It should be the Wraith’s instincts that this calls awake, to twist and break his nose with her elbow. But instead — maybe because what he’s done, exactly, is to drag her into his lap — it’s the instincts of Tante Heleen’s little lynx which rule her, and she goes still and unresisting in his arms. He tightens his grip on her. And he rocks, just slightly. Back and forth, with his face buried in her hair.
“Inej,” he says. His voice is high and choked, and he holds her suffocatingly close, like a child holding a soft toy. “Inej, I don’t want to die.”
“You won’t,” she says wildly, gasping for air, fighting to come back to her body. “The Saints won’t let you.”
The Saints have let so many people die that this can’t be true, and she knows it. But at the same time the cruelty of killing him seems unbearable, more than any Saint could ever allow. Her heart is beating so hard; he holds her like he’s drowning and she can feel the heat of his uneven breath, the warmth of his shaking body through his clothes. Her cold-blooded Ketterdam dragon, how can he die? This frightened young man, how can they kill him?
“I wish — I wish — “
He throws her off his lap. She lands easily, because she knows how to fall, but the shock of it stings her and she looks up into his face, which is contorted with suppressing something, tears or terror or something else.
“You were — stiff,” he says, like it explains it.
“You put me in your lap,” she says, which is an explanation. From her point of view. But he seems to understand. He laughs, a high and hysterical bark of a laugh, and covers his face with his hands.
“Ah, you really will be better off without me, won’t you?”
“No,” she says. “No, I won’t. How could I be?”
“I called you a ghost,” he says, speaking into the palms of his gloves. “A wraith. My Wraith. And when I’m dead, Inej. Maybe I can be yours.” His voice cracks, and he drops his hands. His eyes are wet and his nose is running, but he shows her his dry, ironical smile. “To sneak in beside you and give you no peace. Like you never gave me.”
“You don’t know how much I wish I could give you peace.”
“Do you think you could do it?” he asks desperately. “Kill me with your hands? Now?” His arms are around himself, like he’s cold, and her heart is breaking. “I don’t want anyone else to touch me.”
She could do it. She won’t.
He knows she won’t. He says, “Will you do me a favor, then?”
“What favor?”
“Be there, tomorrow morning.”
“Of course.” She owes him that. But he’s not finished.
“When they cut me down. And take me to the reaper’s barge.” There’s sweat on his forehead, beading at the roots of his hair. “Follow them. Make sure — “ He breathes in deeply. “Make sure I’m really dead.”
She might have anyway. Just to make sure it wasn’t another trick. “All right.”
“Thank you,” he sighs. Something taut in his face slackens, and she doesn’t understand. But she’ll do it.
“I could — I could bring Wylan. We could bury you properly.”
“Does ‘no mourners, no funerals,’ mean nothing to you?” he says lightly.
I will mourn for you whether you like it or not. “Once you asked me to say something nice over your body if they hanged you.”
He reflects. “I suppose I did.” Traces of another smile, both more ironical and more sincere, touch his mouth. “That might be nice. Give me something to look forward to.”
A clang echoes from down the hall, and he says, “My hosts think you’ve outstayed your welcome, I think.”
She wants to scream and she wants to cry and she wants to kill whoever’d come in here to try to make her leave him. She wants to drag him out of here in her arms.
She rises to her feet. She kisses her fingers and she holds them out.
He could take it as a salute. He could touch her fingers with his gloved ones. But instead he looks up at her, and slowly inclines his head until her fingers touch his lips.
She thinks sometimes she invented the touch of his mouth on her skin. It’s clear enough that her mind can’t be trusted since somehow this man, of all the men in the world, is the one she wants. So why should she trust her memory to report that once, a heartless bastard trembled as he kissed her throat? But she remembers it. It was just like this. A shaky breath and the lightest touch of his parted lips.
And then he straightens up, and just looks at her. And keeps looking, as the guards come and take her away and the heavy doors with their hidden bolts lock shut behind her.
They escort her back, through the corridors and up the stairs. Her knives are returned to her with a performance of bored politeness. As she tucks them carefully back where they belong, she looks around her at the men of the stadwatch, their purple uniforms, the guards’ guns.
I could kill you all, she thinks suddenly, looking at them in their uniforms. You’re no different than the Dregs or the Dime Lions. Your bosses tell you who they want taken out, and off you go. And if you pursue your own little personal vendettas, who can stop you? What are you doing now, but putting out a hit on Kaz Brekker just to show that you’re still the most powerful gang in town?
And she could kill them. She could kill quite a lot of them, many more than they realize.
But not enough to save Kaz.
Inej doesn’t sleep that night. She walks the rooftops of the city, thinking wildly, if I had my ship. If I had my ship, I’d load the cannons and I’d fire on this town and I’d take him. But she doesn’t have her ship, so she paces beside rain gutters and tests old tile with her rubber-soled shoes, and she prays.
Save him. Save him. Save him. Don’t let him die. Split open the earth and let him come back out to me.
But when the sun comes up, there’s a throng by the public gate of the gallows yard, and only one name on the hangman’s list.
Inej has never been to a hanging. Accounts of them are part of the air the underworld breathes; she knows all the stories of how they hanged old Max Dyvil and little Vil Spuyten. She knows there are people who come to every hanging, and some executions which gather crowds. But it’s one thing to know that vendors sell peanuts by the gallows, and another thing to hear the competing prices called.
She waits for Wylan. She knows he’ll come, and he does, in his sober suit. When he comes close, she sees that though it’s hard to see, black on black, he’s wearing a mourning band around his arm, and she’s absurdly grateful for the gesture.
Wylan’s not as adept as she is with crowds — no one is — but he’s light and agile, and she quickly draws him with her to the front as the public gates open. She wants to be close. She wants to see Kaz, and she wants him to know they’re there. (He always knows when she’s there, doesn’t he?)
Wylan’s hand is tight on hers. “Do you think he’ll be happy to have drawn such a big crowd, anyway?”
“Don’t,” Inej says.
“I’m sorry.” He looks at his shoes. “I just thought it would be what Jesper would say.”
Probably it is what Jesper would say. What will Jesper say when he comes back from Ravka? How will she explain to him that she couldn’t save Kaz?
There has to be a way. She looks frantically around the yard, with gates on each end, one to the prison and one to the street, and the high, high gallows in the middle. The walls are high, but she could climb them. Could Kaz? Not with this crowd, which turned out to see him die, and all the Stadwatch after them. If there were a distraction —
“If we blew a hole in the wall,” she whispers. “If you put an explosive in the wall, and then there was a distraction for the crowd, and we got him and went out through the wall while they were distracted —”
“I did think about it,” Wylan says, his hands shoved into his pockets. “But it’s a three-man job, at least. And most likely they’d just shoot him if they thought someone was trying to break him out.”
He looks green. Inej, too, feels like she might be sick, her stomach twisting painfully and her throat burning with bile. It gets worse when a Stadwatch officer blows a bugle, and another strikes a drum, and the gate on the prison side of the yard swings open.
She can’t see him, over the heads of the crowd. Most of the onlookers speak to one another — there he is — still got those gloves — think he’ll cry? But she can hear a few of them jeering. Someone is mocking his limp. She hates everyone in this city; every single person.
When his feet start up the gallows steps, the crowd hushes itself, waiting for last-minute pleas, final confessions. And Inej sees him, freshly shaved, with his hair tidily brushed and his face as still as if he were dead already. He’s done something to press his clothes a little; from a distance he still cuts the same dapper, menacing figure he always has.
His guards stop him in front of the hangman. The custom is to give the man a tip, to make sure he drops you cleanly and lets you die quick, of a broken neck, and not the long, painful struggle of strangulation. Kaz reaches for his pocket, and stops. “Oh, Bram,” he says, his voice carrying. “No amount of cash would make you do this kindly, would it? Not when you know I’m the one who found out about your after-hours jobs.”
There’s something like a laugh that moves over the crowd. Inej doesn’t know whether to curse him for dragging this out or beg the Saints to let him keep talking, talking, talking until he talks his way out of this.
The hangman slaps him. It’s a heavy blow, and Kaz staggers a little, but he rights himself. “That’s not in the brief, now, is it?” he chides.
The hangman seems about to answer back, but one of the guards takes Kaz by the shoulder and pushes him to the noose. That brings the hangman back to business, and he settles the rope around Kaz’s neck. Kaz inclines his head as the noose is tightened.
“Any last words?” the lead guard says, and Kaz looks out over the crowd.
I’m here, Kaz. I’m here.
What will she do? What will she do if he dies?
There’s a commotion by the gate.
Hope rises in Inej’s throat — the Dregs, they’ve come to take him — but no, it’s not the public gate; it’s the prison gate. Whoever it is, they came through official channels. The guards turn, uncertain. Is it the Merchant Council, or the Council of Tides? But Kaz said the Tides hated him, and the Merchant Council wouldn’t speak to Wylan.
Angry voices carry through the noise of the crowd; Inej can’t make out the words, but she hears a Fjerdan accent. “What is it? What are they saying?”
The crowd murmurs, information passing. A man six feet closer to the gate says, “Some high-ranking Fjerdan diplomat. Says he’s got proof Brekker committed capital crimes in Fjerda. Blasphemy or whatnot.” He laughs. “They want to don’t want us to have the honor of hanging him. They want to do it themselves.”
The crowd gets noisier. Kaz is theirs, and they don’t want to share. She looks up at him. Is this a last-minute payoff to a scheme he didn’t dare mention? But he looks blank, confused.
“No,” another voice says, with a different accent, much louder. “This man is wanted in connection with the death of the Shu citizen Kuwei Yul-Bo, and we demand that he be extradited to us for questioning.”
Inej looks at Wylan. Wylan looks at her. Both their mouths open.
“Fjerda did not come unprepared,” the Fjerdan diplomat says. “We will take the blasphemer by force if necessary.”
“Shu Han is not concerned with who kills him; it’s of no matter to us. But he must be questioned first. We have brought our interrogators.”
“He’s a Kerch criminal,” someone in the crowd yells. “He’s ours to hang if we want to!” There’s a roar, all the good Kerch citizens agreeing.
“By force, if necessary,” the Fjerdan repeats, loud and menacing.
“The Ravkan crown,” begins a third voice.
“Only to interrogate him — ”
“An international diplomatic incident — “
“He’s ours!” someone else in the crowd yells, and there are people surging around them, ready to run off the foreigners who want to hang their criminal.
A shot rings out.
The throng heaves, screaming, away from a fallen body, and then another shot rings out, and someone else in the crowd goes down, and there is screaming, the guards on the gallows with their weapons drawn, not knowing who or where to shoot, and the mob pushing and shoving for the public gate, desperate to get out of the line of fire, and Jesper says, “Miss me, sweetheart?” at Wylan’s elbow, and Inej, thank the Saints, knows exactly what to do.
The first knife arcs into the hangman’s knee, and as he screams, the second is in her hand, her sharpest blade slashing the rope above Kaz’s head as he stares at her in wide-eyed bewilderment. Behind her, there is a very small explosion, and more screaming, and he’s still just staring. Her brilliant, scheming monster, so very slow on the uptake.
“We’ve got you,” she says, and pulls him down into chaos.
It doesn’t take them long to get to the airship, even with Kaz moving like a sleepwalker any time Inej and Jesper aren’t physically dragging him with them. If Inej hadn’t once had to train her ear to Kuwei’s voice, she never would have recognized him, he looks so dignified. The Fjerdan introduces himself as Hanne, but Nina says, ”He answers to Prince Rasmus,” which does a lot to explain how they got themselves and Kuwei enough paperwork to walk through the Stadwatch’s front door. Though it doesn’t explain why the airship has a double eagle on its nose.
“Afraid you owe a lot of people a lot of favors now,” Jesper says. “But I reckoned you could live with it.”
Kaz, who’s been bundled into a seat but still stares blankly ahead, doesn’t answer. Nina elbows him.
“What? You thought you were the only one who could scheme?”
“No,” he says finally. “No, I just —”
He closes his mouth and turns his face to the window.
Jesper kisses Wylan. “Sorry I didn’t answer your letter, sweetheart. But I figured if it all came out right we’d beat the post here anyway.”
“Did you really shoot those people?” Wylan asks, brow furrowed.
“I put the bullets in them, but they were already dead.”
“I’m not here just for my Ravkan accent and my impeccable acting, you know,” Nina says. Hanne’s smile is proud.
Jesper smooths the wrinkle out of Wylan’s forehead with a thumb. “And I knew I could trust you to have a little bomb or two on hand, just in case. It’s one of the things I love about you.” Wylan smiles, tired, and slumps bonelessly on his shoulder.
Inej would love to be able to put her head on Kaz’s shoulder, or her arms around his neck. If she went and sat in his lap because she felt like it, it wouldn’t feel like the Menagerie at all, would it? But he’s staring out the window, watching Ketterdam get smaller and further away.
“I’m sorry you had to leave,” she says quietly. It doesn’t seem fair. Why should the city belong to the Stadwatch, and not to him?
“I don’t care,” he says, and there he is, the ice-hearted bastard, but he’s lying so badly. “It doesn’t matter.”
She knows it does, to him. To her, leaving a place is just a season, a sunset — a simple thing that’s bound to happen. But he’s not like her. She wonders if it would be honest to tell him he can come back someday.
He’s still watching the dwindling city. His voice is hard to hear over the sound of the airship, and it’s clear it’s hard for him to speak. “I thought a lot about my last words,” he says. “The last thing I’d ever say to you.”
“What could you say to me from the gallows that you couldn’t say in your cell?”
“You would be surprised,” he says. “You would be surprised how many things I never seem to be able to say to your face. What I said on Black Veil — I did say it because I thought you’d like it. The truth is that I came for you because I’m selfish and I wanted you back, that’s all. It’s not your job, to come for me.”
“I’m a free woman, Kaz Brekker. You can’t tell me what my job is.”
“That rope was around my neck for a reason. I’ve killed so many people I’ve lost count. I lost count on purpose.”
Now it’s her turn to be quiet. Ketterdam is fading into the haze of the horizon. “Fire doesn’t put out fire. Blood doesn’t wipe out blood.”
Harshly he says, “Are you going to tell me love does?”
“No,” she says, because it doesn’t. “I don’t know if anything does.”
He takes off his gloves and looks down at his naked hands. “I’ve done so many things. Just to survive. And if I wasn’t going to survive. Then what was the point of any of them? All that, for nothing. Why would you want me to love you, Inej? I thought I might figure out how to say it, with the rope around my neck. But it didn’t seem like it could be anything but an insult. A dead murderer’s love.”
She holds out her hand. Very slowly, he takes it. “You are a murderer,” she says. “And so am I. But you’re alive. I don’t know what wipes out blood. But if you’re alive, you might find out. You have always been good at finding things out.”
His grip on her hand gets a little tighter. “Better when you help me.”
“I will help you,” she says, and she doesn’t know how. But she means with all her heart to do it.