Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
Dangerous. She wanted to clutch the word to her. She was fairly sure this boy was demented or just hopelessly deluded, but she liked that word, and unless she was mistaken, he was offering to let her walk out of this house tonight.
“This isn’t … it isn’t a trick, is it?” Her voice was smaller than she wanted it to be.
The shadow of something dark moved across Kaz’s face. “If it were a trick, I’d promise you safety. I’d offer you happiness. I don’t know if that exists in the Barrel, but you’ll find none of it with me.”
For some reason, those words had comforted her. Better terrible truths than kind lies.
“All right,” she said. “How do we begin?”
“Let’s start by getting out of here and finding you some proper clothes. Oh, and Inej,” he said as he led her out of the salon, “don’t ever sneak up on me again.”
* * *
The truth was she’d tried to sneak up on Kaz plenty of times since then. She’d never managed it. It was as if once Kaz had seen her, he’d understood how to keep seeing her.
She’d trusted Kaz Brekker that night. She’d become the dangerous girl he’d sensed lurking inside her. But she’d made the mistake of continuing to trust him, of believing in the legend he’d built around himself. That myth had brought her here to this sweltering darkness, balanced between life and death like the last leaf clinging to an autumn branch. In the end, Kaz Brekker was a just a boy, and she’d let him lead her to this fate.
She couldn’t even blame him. She’d let herself be led because she hadn’t known where she’d wanted to go. The heart is an arrow. Four million kruge, freedom, a chance to return home. She’d said she wanted these things. But in her heart, she couldn’t bear the thought of returning to her parents. Could she tell her mother and father the truth? Would they understand all she’d done to survive, not just at the Menagerie, but every day since? Could she lay her head in her mother’s lap and be forgiven? What would they see when they looked at her?
Climb, Inej. But where was there to go? What life was waiting for her after all she’d suffered? Her back ached. Her hands were bleeding. The muscles in her legs shook with invisible tremors, and her skin felt like it was ready to peel away from her body. Every breath of black air seared her lungs. She couldn’t breathe deeply. She couldn’t even focus on that gray patch of sky. The sweat kept beading down her forehead and stinging her eyes. If she gave up, she’d be giving up for all of them—for Jesper and Wylan, for Nina and her Fjerdan, for Kaz. She couldn’t do that.
It isn’t up to you any longer, little lynx, Tante Heleen’s voice crooned in her head. How long have you been holding on to nothing?
The heat of the incinerator wrapped around Inej like a living thing, a desert dragon in his den, hiding from the ice, waiting for her. She knew her body’s limits and knew she had no more to give. She’d made a bad wager. It was as simple as that. The autumn leaf might cling to its branch, but it was already dead. The only question was when it would fall.
Let go, Inej. Her father had taught her to climb, to trust the rope, the swing, and finally, to trust in her own skill, to believe that if she leapt, she would reach the other side. Would he be waiting for her there? She thought of her knives, hidden away aboard the Ferolind—maybe they could go to some other girl who dreamed of being dangerous. She whispered their names: Petyr, Marya, Anastasia, Vladimir, Lizabeta, Sankta Alina, martyred before she could turn eighteen. Let go, Inej. Should she jump now or simply wait for her body to give out?
Inej felt wetness on her cheeks. Was she crying? Now? After everything she’d done and had done to her?
Then she heard it, a soft patter, a gentle drum that had no real rhythm. She felt it on her cheeks and face. She heard the hiss as it struck the coals below. Rain. Cool and forgiving. Inej tilted her head back. Somewhere, she heard bells ringing the three-quarter hour, but she didn’t care. She only heard the music of the rain as it washed away the sweat and soot, the coal smoke of Ketterdam, the face paint of the Menagerie, as it bathed the jute strands of the rope, and hardened the rubber on her suffering feet. It felt like a blessing, though she knew Kaz would just call it weather.
She had to move now, quickly, before the stones grew slick and the rain became an enemy. She forced her muscles to flex, her fingers to seek, and pulled herself up one foot, then another, again and again, murmuring prayers of gratitude to her Saints. Here was the rhythm that had eluded her before, buried in the whispered cadence of their names.
But even as she gave thanks, she knew that the rain was not enough. She wanted a storm—thunder, wind, a deluge. She wanted it to crash through Ketterdam’s pleasure houses, lifting roofs and tearing doors off their hinges. She wanted it to raise the seas, take hold of every slaving ship, shatter their masts, and smash their hulls against unforgiving shores. I want to call that storm, she thought. And four million kruge might be enough to do it. Enough for her own ship—something small and fierce and laden with firepower. Something like her. She would hunt the slavers and their buyers. They would learn to fear her, and they would know her by her name. The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true. She clung to the wall, but it was purpose she grasped at long last, and that carried her upward.
She was not a lynx or a spider or even the Wraith. She was Inej Ghafa, and her future was waiting above.
26
KAZ
Kaz sped through the upper cells, sparing brief seconds for a glance through each grate. Bo Yul-Bayur would not be here. And he didn’t have much time.
Part of him felt unhinged. He had no cane. His feet were bare. He was in strange clothes, his hands pale and ungloved. He didn’t feel like himself at all. No, that wasn’t quite true. He felt like the Kaz he’d been in the weeks after Jordie had died, like a wild animal, fighting to survive.
Kaz spotted a Shu prisoner lurking at the back of one of the cells.
“Sesh-uyeh,” Kaz whispered. But if the man recognized the code word, he didn’t acknowledge it. “Yul-Bayur?” Nothing. The man started shouting at him in Shu, and Kaz hurried away, past the rest of the cells, then slipped out to the landing and charged down to the next level as fast as he could manage. He knew he was being reckless, selfish, but wasn’t that why they called him Dirtyhands? No job too risky. No deed too low. Dirtyhands would see the rough work done.
He wasn’t sure what was driving him. It was possible Pekka Rollins wasn’t here. It was possible he was dead. But Kaz didn’t believe it. I’d know. Somehow I’d know. “Your death belongs to me,” he whispered.
* * *
The swim back from the Reaper’s Barge had been Kaz’s rebirth. The child he’d been had died of firepox. The fever had burned away every gentle thing inside him.
Survival wasn’t nearly as hard as he’d thought once he left decency behind. The first rule was to find someone smaller and weaker and take what he had. Though—small and weak as Kaz was—that was no easy task. He shuffled up from the harbor, keeping to the alleys, heading toward the neighborhood where the Hertzoons had lived. When he spotted a sweetshop, he waited outside, then waylaid a chubby little schoolboy lagging behind his friends. Kaz knocked him down, emptied his pockets, and took his bag of licorice.
“Give me your trousers,” he’d said.
“They’re too big for you,” the boy had cried.
Kaz bit him. The boy gave up his trousers. Kaz rolled them in a ball and threw them in the canal, then ran as fast as his weak legs would take him. He didn’t want the trousers; he just wanted the boy to wait before he went wailing for help. He knew the schoolboy would huddle in that alley for a long while, weighing the shame of appearing half-dressed in the street with the need to get home and tell what had happened.
Kaz stopped running when he reached the darkest alley he could find in the Barrel. He crammed all the licorice into his mouth at once, swallowing it in painful gulps, and promptly vomited it up. He took the money and bought a hot roll of white bread. He was barefoot and filthy. The baker g
When he felt a bit stronger, a bit less shaky, he walked to East Stave. He found the dingiest gambling den, one with no sign and just a single lonely barker out front.
“I want a job,” he said at the door.
“Don’t have any, nub.”
“I’m good with numbers.”
The man laughed. “Can you clean a pisspot?”
“Yes.”
“Well, too bad. We already have a boy who cleans the pisspots.”
Kaz waited all night until he saw a boy about his age leave the premises. He followed him for two blocks, then hit him in the head with a rock. He sat down on the boy’s legs and pulled off his shoes, then slashed the soles of his feet with a piece of broken bottle. The boy would recover, but he wouldn’t be working anytime soon. Touching the bare flesh of his ankles had filled Kaz with revulsion. He kept seeing the white bodies of the Reaper’s Barge, feeling the ripe bloat of Jordie’s skin beneath his hands.
The next evening, he returned to the den.
“I want a job,” he said. And he had one.
From there he’d worked and scraped and saved. He’d trailed the professional thieves of the Barrel and learned how to pick pockets and how to cut the laces on a lady’s purse. He did his first stint in jail, and then a second. He quickly earned a reputation for being willing to take any job a man needed done, and the name Dirtyhands soon followed. He was an unskilled fighter, but a tenacious one.
“You have no finesse,” a gambler at the Silver Garter once said to him. “No technique.”
“Sure I do,” Kaz had responded. “I practice the art of ‘pull his shirt over his head and punch till you see blood.’”
He still went by Kaz, as he always had, but he stole the name Brekker off a piece of machinery he’d seen on the docks. Rietveld, his family name, was abandoned, cut away like a rotten limb. It was a country name, his last tie to Jordie and his father and the boy he’d been. But he didn’t want Jakob Hertzoon to see him coming.
He found out that the con Hertzoon had run on him and Jordie was a common one. The coffeehouse and the house on Zelverstraat had been nothing more than stage sets, used to fleece fools from the country. Filip with his mechanical dogs had been the roper, used to draw Jordie in, while Margit, Saskia, and the clerks at the trade office had all been shills in on the scam. Even one of the bank officers had to have been in on it, passing information to Hertzoon about their customers and tipping him off to newcomers from the country opening accounts. Hertzoon had probably been running the con on multiple marks at once. Jordie’s little fortune wasn’t enough to justify such a setup.
But the cruelest discovery was Kaz’s gift for cards. It might have made him and Jordie rich. Once he learned a game, it took him mere hours to master it, and then he simply couldn’t be beaten. He could remember every hand that had been played, each bet that was made. He could keep track of the deal for up to five decks. And if there was something he couldn’t recall, he made up for it by cheating. He’d never lost his love for sleight of hand, and he graduated from palming coins to cards, cups, wallets, and watches. A good magician wasn’t much different from a proper thief. Before long, he was banned from play in every gambling hall on East Stave.
In each place he went, in each bar and flophouse and brothel and squat, he asked after Jakob Hertzoon, but if anyone knew the name, they refused to admit it.
Then, one day, Kaz was crossing a bridge over East Stave when he saw a man with florid cheeks and tufty sideburns entering a gin shop. He wasn’t wearing staid mercher black any longer, but garish striped trousers and a maroon paisley vest. His velvet coat was bottle green.
Kaz pushed through the crowd, mind buzzing, heart racing, unsure of what he meant to do, but at the door to the shop, a giant bruiser in a bowler hat stopped him with one meaty hand.
“Shop’s closed.”
“I can see it’s open.” Kaz’s voice sounded wrong to him—reedy, unfamiliar.
“You’ll have to wait.”
“I need to see Jakob Hertzoon.”
“Who?”
Kaz felt like he was about to climb out of his skin. He pointed through the window. “Jakob fucking Hertzoon. I want to talk to him.”
The bruiser had looked at Kaz as if he were deranged. “Get your head straight, lad,” he’d said. “That ain’t no Hertzoon. That’s Pekka Rollins. Want to get anywhere in the Barrel, you’d best learn his name.”
Kaz knew Pekka Rollins’ name. Everyone did. He’d just never seen the man.
At that moment, Rollins turned toward the window. Kaz waited for acknowledgment—a smirk, a sneer, some spark of recognition. But Rollins’ eyes passed right over him. One more mark. One more cull. Why would he remember?
Kaz had been courted by any number of gangs who liked his way with his fists and the cards. He’d always said no. He’d come to the Barrel to find Hertzoon and punish him, not to join some makeshift family. But learning that his real target was Pekka Rollins changed everything. That night, he lay awake on the floor of the squat he’d holed up in and thought of what he wanted, of what would finally make things right for Jordie. Pekka Rollins had taken everything from Kaz. If Kaz intended to do the same to Rollins, he would need to become his equal and then his better, and he couldn’t do it alone. He needed a gang, and not just any gang, but one that needed him. The next day he’d walked into the Slat and asked Per Haskell if he could use another soldier. He’d known even then, though: He’d start as a grunt, but the Dregs would become his army.
* * *
Had all of those steps brought him here tonight? To these dark corridors? It was hardly the vengeance he’d dreamed of.
The rows of cells stretched on and on, infinite, impossible. There was no way he would find Rollins in time. But it was only impossible until it wasn’t, until he sighted that big frame, that florid face through the grate in an iron door. It was only impossible until he was standing in front of Pekka Rollins’ cell.
He was on his side, sleeping. Someone had given him a bad beating. Kaz watched the rise and fall of his chest.
How many times had Kaz seen Pekka since that first glimpse in the gin shop? Never once had there been a flicker of recognition. Kaz wasn’t a boy any longer; there was no reason Pekka should be able to see the child he’d swindled in his features. But it made him furious every time their paths had crossed. It wasn’t right. Pekka’s face—Hertzoon’s face—was indelible in Kaz’s mind, carved there by a jagged blade.
Kaz hung back now, feeling the delicate weight of his lockpicks like an insect cradled in his palm. Wasn’t this what he wanted? To see Pekka brought low, humiliated, miserable and hopeless, the best of his crew dead on pikes. Maybe this could be enough. Maybe all he needed now was for Pekka to know exactly who he was, exactly what he’d done. He could stage a little trial of his own, pass sentence, and mete it out, too.
The Elderclock began to chime the three-quarter-hour. He should go. There wasn’t much time left to get to the basement. Nina would be waiting for him. They all would.
But he needed this. He’d fought for this. It wasn’t the way he’d imagined, but maybe it made no difference. If Pekka Rollins was put to death by some nameless Fjerdan executioner, then none of this would matter. Kaz would have four million kruge, but Jordie would never have his revenge.
The lock on the door gave up easily to Kaz’s picks.
Pekka’s eyes opened, and he smiled. He hadn’t been sleeping at all.
“Hello, Brekker,” Rollins said. “Come to gloat?”
“Not exactly,” Kaz replied.
He let the door slam shut behind him.
PART FIVE
THE ICE DOES NOT FORGIVE
27
JESPER
EIGHT BELLS
Where the hell is Kaz? Jesper bounced from foot to foot in front of the incinerator, the dim clang of alarm bells filling his ears, rattling his thoughts. Yellow Protocol? Red Protocol? He couldn’t remember which wa
Inej had secured a rope to the roof and dropped down a line for them to climb. Jesper had sent the rest of the rope up with Wylan and Matthias, along with a pair of shears he’d located in the laundry, and a crude grappling hook he’d fashioned from the metal slats of a washboard. Then he’d cleaned the spatter of rain and moisture from the floor of the refuse room, and made sure there were no scraps of rope or other signs of their presence. There was nothing left to do but wait—and panic when the alarm started to ring.
He heard people shouting to each other, a hail of stomping boots through the ceiling above. Any minute, some intuitive guards might venture down to the basement. If they found Jesper by the incinerator, the route to the roof would be obvious. He’d be damning not only himself but the others as well.
Come on, Kaz. I’m waiting on you. They all were. Nina had come charging into the room only minutes before, gasping for breath.
“Go!” she’d cried. “What are you waiting for?”
“You!” Jesper shot back. But when he asked her where Kaz was, Nina’s face had crumpled.
“I hoped he was with you.”
She’d vanished up the rope, grunting with effort, leaving Jesper standing below, frozen with indecision. Had the guards captured Kaz? Was he somewhere in the prison fighting for his life?
He’s Kaz Brekker. Even if they locked him up, Kaz could escape any cell, any pair of shackles. Jesper could leave the rope for him, pray the rain and the cooling incinerator was enough to keep the bottom of it from burning away. But if he just kept standing here like a podge, he’d give away their escape route, and they’d all be doomed. There was nothing to do but climb.
Jesper grabbed the rope just as Kaz hurtled through the door. His shirt was covered in blood, his dark hair a wild mess.
“Hurry,” he said without preamble.