Chapter Text
The first time it happened—really happened—Inej couldn’t have been more than eight.
The Suli were faithful people, but they were not stupid, and they were not blind. They knew that not everyone had a soulmate—saarahkt, they called them, shared blood—and they knew just as well the signs of those who did. A child would burst into tears for no reason, a woman would buckle to the ground on even dirt, and everyone around would dissolve into whispers. She’s saarahkt, they’d say, and the gossip would spread like wildfire.
It wasn’t uncommon to be saarahkt, not by any stretch of the word. Inej’s parents were: her mother had sliced her hand open on a fabric knife at fifteen, and her father’s answering shout could be heard across the entire caravan. Her grandparents were all saarahkt, and their parents before them. Inej was not worried that the saints wouldn’t favor her, like they didn’t her aunt, or her teacher, or the man in the back of the caravan whose room was full of empty bottles and whose breath smelled sharp, like the medicine that wrinkled her nose. Why would she be? She was only eight, after all. She had all the time in the world to feel another’s pain.
And on a cold winter’s night, wrapped safely in her blankets as a blizzard raged on outside, feel it she did.
At first, she thought it was the heat of her sister’s body pressed against her that awakened her with sweat on her brow, uncomfortable warmth beneath her skin. She huffed and shoved her sister away, who replied only with a loud snore. But still the heat persisted, angry, and simmering, and painful. She threw off the colorful blankets, splayed her body out, angled herself towards a crack in the window that let the icy air seep in. And yet she could feel her temperature going up, could feel the very blood in her veins starting to rise. To boil.
She threw herself off of the small mattress and pushed the window open with clammy hands. Her cousins shivered and stirred as the winter wind blew fat snowflakes onto the wooden floors, but Inej paid them no mind. She undid the neck of her nightgown and shoved her head out of the window and into the blizzard, hoping, praying, for an ounce of relief.
Nothing.
Strong hands—hot hands, burning hands—pulled her away from the window, still gulping in air. Through her blurry vision—when had it gone blurry?—Inej could see her father’s concerned face, hear the words from his moving lips as if through a delay.
“Inej,” he was saying, though it hardly reached her. “What are you doing?”
The heat fogged her brain, made it impossible to think. When she tried to answer, tried to form a sentence to convey the fire coursing through her from her stomach, her throat, the splay of his fingers over her shoulders, she could only just choke out, “Help.”
Her father’s face fell. “Inej?” He asked, but she could not answer him. Inej’s mother came rushing up behind him, fingers deftly tying the knot of her robe. And her sister was sat up behind her, and her cousins were watching wide-eyed and confused, and the Saints were hovering right over her head, orchestrating this moment, this feeling, this burn.
A gust of snow burst in through the window, and surrounded by frightened family, Inej hit the floor.
——
She got worse before she got better. The fire tore through her for days, the heat unbearable at times, the pain blinding. All the women gathered around her small, suffering form and tried to diagnose her. But when her hands scratched at her skin, there were no rashes, no pox. When she grasped at her throat and choked, they found no redness inside, no swollen tonsils like her sister had had a few years ago. Her pain had no source—her sickness had no solution. They soon declared that this could only mean one thing.
Inej was not dying—she was saarahkt.
Inej tried to be happy, once the false fever broke and she started to return to herself. Family came round with gifts, friends muttered their jealousy that she had gotten hers so quickly, and with so much attention. Inej knew better than to be rude; she nodded along, accepted it all gratefully. She was saarahkt. Gratitude was all she should ever know.
But when she was alone, she admitted it to herself. She was terrified.
This pain—this terrible, ripping heat—was the first message her saarahkt had ever sent her. What if that was what he had to give when they met? The gentle cut her mother had sent her father’s way was matched by the softness of the words, the tenderness of their embraces. Passionate lovers found one another through burns; sweet ones through toothaches, through growing pains and runner’s coughs. No saarahkt she’d ever heard of had given their match the kind of agony she had felt, the kind that still ran through her like a shiver when she drifted too close to the fire, ate soup fresh from the stove. None of them shared veins that screamed, a heart that twisted, blood that burned. What if, when she found the boy who gave her the fever, he was just as determined to turn her to ash?
But her family told her she was blessed, and her friends told her she was lucky. Life in the caravan continued on with another saarahkt in the midst, another attraction for the circus. And she trusted her faith; she trusted her saints. She knew that they would never truly steer her wrong.
And so she grew. She lived. She awoke at nine, ten, eleven, twelve with scrapes and bruises she had not had before she went to sleep, and each time, she took a moment to think about what they meant. She ran her fingers over the mottled marks of another in the early light of dawn and told herself: you are special. You are saarahkt. It is a blessing.
Sometimes, she even believed herself.
——
Inej was fourteen when her luck ran out.
Looking back on it as an older, wiser woman, Inej would know exactly what had happened: two large men, an unattended young girl. A skein of rope, tying her hands together, leading her like cattle to the ship. A long, terrifying journey, with a longer, even more frightening destination. But at fourteen, blindfolded and alone in the bowels of that slaver’s vessel, she had no idea what was going on.
She knew they were at sea—the rocking of the floor and the permanent dampness of the wood were obvious indicators. She knew that, technically, there were others there with her. She felt presences around her, heard the occasional sniff or shuffle or sob. The men, when they came down with water and a rare morsel of food, always took longer than they would have if she were the only mouth to fill. She knew she was taken; she knew she was lost; she knew she was terrified.
Perhaps she could have confided in the other lost souls around her, but no one ever spoke a word. The trust between them extended only to the understanding not to touch one another, and to pretend you didn’t hear when one of you began to cry. They were silent, all of them, banished to loneliness even with compatriots on all sides. Inej didn’t understand, but she didn’t push it. She didn’t understand anything, anymore.
It could have been day or night, winter or summer, real life or the doorstep of the saints, when Inej felt her leg split in two.
She screamed—how could she not? She felt the bones in her leg splintering, puncturing her skin, slicing through her muscle and viscera like steel blades. It made everything else, every other little ache—her hunger, her chafed wrists, her ever-present gnawing fear—disappear like a rock dropped into dark water, like they had never even been there at all.
Inej screamed, and didn’t stop screaming, even as the captives around her found their voices for the first time in weeks. They shushed her, shouted at her, asked one another what the hell was going on, but Inej could not respond. She was blinded by pain, choked by agony, until all that could rip from her was the agonized noises of an animal caught in a trap. She had never felt less human.
If she thought she had known pain before, she was wrong. Every other sensation paled in comparison to this. A burn would have felt pleasant, lemon in a paper cut as dismissible as a moth’s wings brushing against her fingertip. Even the fire that had overtaken her all those years ago seemed eons away from what she was feeling now. That was familiar, even in its intensity, and that was ending. This was infinite.
A hand clamped down over her mouth, one of her captors or of the children just as trapped as she was, and her screams fell into agonized whimpers, choked-off sobs. She could feel tears streaming down her face, hot and damning. And perhaps worse, as she was shoved onto her side and made to sob into the ground, as the rough hands left her even more alone than before, as the voices around her fell into silence and only her cries echoed off of the damp, rotting walls, she could feel her Saints watching her. She felt them now, just as before, focusing down on her like a beam of light, watching her writhe, knowing they had intended this all along. And for the first time in her life, she wished that she could stop believing.
Over the coming days, the pain eased, but it did not disappear—it never would. When her blindfold was finally removed, she half-expected to find her leg a mangled mess, bent in five places and more blood-red than brown. But, of course, it was as straight and smooth as always, and Inej could not muster up a prayer of thanks.
She stumbled, walking up the steps of the Menagerie that first time. Her still-aching leg tripped her up on the uneven stones, and before she could so much as huff in frustration, the breath was punched out of her by peacock-painted hands.
Once she righted herself, she ascended them with relearned grace, pain etched in every step. And she never stumbled again.
——
The next year of her life, she nearly forgot she was saarakht. The effects didn’t matter anymore—she was in pain every hour of the day, here. And there was no such thing as love within these walls, anyways.
Her days were spent flirting, speaking forced Suli proverbs in fake, plastic silks. Her nights were spent on her knees, on her back, wearing even less. The days blurred together, and she was thankful for it—the details weren’t so sharp, after a while. The men weren’t so intentional, and they certainly were never her saarahkt.
(Saints above, she prayed that none of these men were her match. She would watch them carefully, sometimes, flinching when they stubbed their toe on the bedpost or scraped their arm ripping off their shirts, terrified that she may feel their pain on her own skin, and that she really would be theirs.)
Her leg still ached, but so did the rest of her. She learned to walk without a limp, to pretend she felt no pain, just as she had never felt joy. It no longer mattered if she was blessed, if she would ever find her match or not. Those were the worries of a life before this one, whose memories she would often turn over in her head at night, fragile and gleaming as a pearl, and wonder how they could ever have been hers.
It was one of those dull, blurry days when she saw a man unlike the rest. He was young, likely only just older than her. He did not stare at the girls here with hunger nor wonder—he was neither the common predator of a man, nor was he one of the ones that paid to behave like prey, that forced these women to act as though they were in charge, as though they wanted it, and they made the decision to invite these men up to their rooms with no knife at their throats.
(Those were Inej’s least favorites, she thought. The ones who forced her to act as though that her hands were not shackled, who pretended not to hear the rattling of chains as she beckoned them to her bedroom, tears shining in her eyes.)
Instead, this man watched the customers and caged alike, with a cold sort of detachment in his dark eyes, like he couldn’t care less who may approach him or why. He was not clothed in nothing more than his breeches, like some of the men here, nor did he hide his face with a mask of the Komedie Brute. His clothes were plain and practical, every inch of skin covered, a far cry from the men reaching out for a touch, a brush of skin against skin. He’d even kept on his overcoat, his hat, and his thick winter’s gloves—though Inej, who admittedly hadn’t seen the outside world in quite some time, could have sworn it was spring.
There were no men who had requested her tonight. Inej knew she was meant to instead be seducing the undecided clientele, to bring in more profit for Heleen, lest she wake up the next morning being dragged out of bed by her hair for such misbehavior. But when the man started for Heleen’s office, she couldn’t bring herself to care. She followed him.
The conversation he had with Heleen was brief. Later, she’d only be able to recall a few words—Dregs. Clientele. Yours. Mine. The deal is the deal—but tonight, it didn’t matter. She felt her spirit sparkle with opportunity: what he wanted, she had. What she needed, he may be able to provide. It was a stupid, useless hope, that this man could bring her freedom, that he may be different from any of the rest. But Inej could not hold down the glimmering any more than she could stop the throbbing in her leg. And for once, she didn’t want to.
She cut through the crowd, her vision narrowed down only to this man as he headed willfully for the door. He was a negative space in this insanity of noise, a single spot of indifference in a place that had robbed her of anything of the sport. He did not need to find her attractive—he did not need to find her blessed. He simply needed to find her.
She caught him at the hallway’s edge, half-melted in the shadows. Before she could stop herself, or even think to, she reached out and grabbed him, her nails digging desperately into his skin.
Amidst all the noise of the night, the city, the past year of her life, she looked straight into his flint-black eyes and whispered, “I can help you.”
A split second passed before he wrenched his hand away. A split second where Inej believed she may have made the right choice, where she believed she may have gotten through to him, gotten out of here. A split second where she could feel something sharp in the skin of her wrist, five crescent moons of carved-out pain.
Then, wordlessly, the man turned and stalked away.
That night, curled up in her bed with a large man snoring loudly at her side, Inej cried for the first time since the agony on the ship. She cried for the days she would spend stuck here, with her only opportunity wasted. She cried for her family, who would never find her, and for her saints, who had left her here, who had shown a tiny shred of hope and let it bloom, then yanked it away only once she had remembered what it was like to have something fill the hollow hole in her chest.
And she cried because she still felt the phantom pain of fingernails digging into her skin. Running her hand over the skin of her wrist, she mimicked the motion over and over. Her nails fit perfectly in the indents that were never hers—the pain matched exquisitely.
She had watched him, as he left. She had seen the cane he gripped tightly on his right, and the limp he favored on his left. She knew it from when she had had it herself—she knew precisely where he felt his pain. She felt it herself, even now.
She had found him. After a year of nothing but hopelessness and false love, she had found her match. Her shared blood—her saarahkt. The Saints had finally remembered that she was meant to be blessed, and had put the reminder right in front of her before he took one look at her and turned away. She doubted she’d ever find him again. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to. After all, he had seen her desperation—felt her pain—and had left her there. Perhaps her worst fears were right, as a child. Perhaps he was always going to burn her in the end.
The man next to her sweated and snored. Inej curled into herself, head to her knees, and tried to feel nothing at all.
——
When Inej rose the next morning, called on by Tante Heleen, she was as empty as her bed. The latter fact she was thankful for. The former, she considered her final blessing.
She felt nothing as she donned her laughable silks once more. There was no tether holding her to herself, no gravity weighing her feet to the floor or faith stretching her hands to the heavens. She felt no shame when the worn clasps were done up, no fear when she started towards Heleen’s office and the beating that was sure to come. For the first time in a year, as she descended the rickety, whiskey-stained stairs, she did not even feel pain.
She knocked on Heleen’s door with a hand that was not her own, and the rap of her knuckles against wood was miles away.
“Come in,” Heleen’s voice called, a smug note in the words. Inej wondered, distantly, if that meant she intended to kill her this time.
As hollow as she knew how to be, she pushed open the door.
A tailored black coat. Black gloves stretched over crescent-moon nail marks. A crow’s head cane supporting his bad leg, the one that Inej knew was trembling minutely under his trousers—hers used to do the same, until she’d forced herself to understand that there was nothing truly wrong with her.
Suddenly, as sudden as a fever comes on and a pair of hands sweep a naïve little girl away from her entire world, everything Inej knew she could feel came rushing back to her.
The pain overwhelmed her so sharply she gasped, but the man did not flinch. He held her gaze, even with her body on full display in her flimsy excuse for a gown, his dark eyes unreadable except for one thing—determination.
Hope—stupid, unbearable, faithful hope—filled her up to the tip of her skull. And oh, Inej felt like she was flying. Because the pain was back, but this time, it meant something. Because every ache and twinge and torrent of agony was finally given meaning. Because her saarahkt had been found, and then lost, and then he came back. He came back to Inej, and she knew that her Saints were real, after all. Real, and watching.
He tilted his head when she met her gaze, and for a brief second, Inej felt fear: perhaps this man did intend to use her. Perhaps he went to Heleen for a private session, or to buy her permanently, keep her dressed up and shackled in his own home, never share her with another soul. But then—
“I have an offer,” he said to her, as a businessman may speak to his equal. And he began to explain.
——
Out on the street, Inej cannot find a place to look. The last cold snap of winter is over, and baby green leaves have begun to sprout on the few trees around. The women walk freely, and the men laugh without hunger or malice. If she wanted to, she could take off running down the cobbles and find a new version of herself by sundown, ache in her leg be damned.
But the man turns to look at her with those flint-dark eyes, and Inej knows she wants to stay.
”My name is Kaz Brekker,” he tells her. He peels off his coat and offers it to her with clinical hands, and all she can think is, you will love this man.
He doesn’t know, she is sure—many of the Kerch, she remembers, do not even believe in saarahkt, and this man is certainly Kerch. Even if he does believe, he doesn’t extend to her any strong notice, any particular care. There is absolutely nothing about him that may betray any sign of love. He watches at her with respect, yes, but no compassion. He is cold, and distant, and professional. And he doesn’t know.
But Inej cannot bring herself to care. Not now, when she is freer than she has been in ages. Not when she has finally found someone with pain to match her own. Saints above, not when she is accepting his coat and wrapping it tightly around herself, finally taking her body back for herself. Finally reclaiming her feelings, pain and all, as hers.
”Inej Ghafa,” she says to this clever, ignorant man. This man she will share her blood with, who she always has.
He does respond, just turns on his heel and heads down the road. But she knows she is meant to follow, and she does not let her phantom limp slip her up.
This time, when she starts towards her future, she doesn’t stumble. She doesn’t even think to.