Chapter Text
Inej was thirteen years old when her daemon settled.
It was an ordinary day, really. They had just arrived near Os Kervo and the camp was bustling with activity, a familiar routine of what she liked to think of as controlled chaos. Her mother and aunts were gathered around the cookpots, chattering and chopping vegetables for supper. The tent they would perform in for the following weeks was being set up in a field on the outskirts of the city, and she could hear her father’s voice yelling instructions, the noise of equipment being shuffled around by her uncles and cousins. She felt her lips tug into a smile when an argument erupted, as it always inevitably had when a dozen men and heavy things in need of lifting were involved, and shuffled to the side as the youngest kids ran past, shouting at the top of their lungs, playing whatever game they had just invented. Their daemons were shifting and changing shapes all around them, running next to their owners as dogs, rabbits and cats, only to soar into the sky as birds a few seconds later. The air was warm and balmy, but the heatwave that had swept through Ravka over the previous weeks had finally broken. Inej turned her face west, letting the gentle breeze that brought with it the smell of the ocean brush over her cheeks. Seagulls were calling to each other high in the sky turned pink and gold by the setting sun.
Ajit was chirping happily on her shoulder in the form of a sparrow. He was always some bird or another those days, which worked for them both - when she was on the high wire, he could be right there with her without weighing her down, and she didn’t have to leave him on the ground, saving them both the discomfort of stretching their bond too far. Inej ran her fingers along the soft feathers on his back and walked towards the tent, maneuvering through the gaggle of children. Ajit joined the commotion for a few seconds, mixing in with the other daemons to playfully nibble on their ears and feet, eliciting another fit of laughter from her cousins. She shook her head at his antics.
“I thought we were too old for that stuff now,” she said as he landed back on her shoulder, this time as a nightingale. “Your words, not mine.”
He shrugged - or at least tried, which in his current form involved briefly raising his wings and lowering them in a sharp movement. “We’ve been stuck in a caravan all day. I need to stretch.”
Inej understood the feeling. It had been a few days since she’d last had a chance to practice on the wire, and she was itching for it, for the familiar feeling of balancing on a barely visible line in front of an awestruck audience, the freedom that came with being suspended halfway between the ground and sky, the thrill of knowing that one wrong move would send her plummeting into the net - and the certainty she carried in her heart that the fall wouldn’t come, that she was in control. Up there, the world was her kingdom, and she was its queen. Fearless. Invincible.
She stopped in her tracks and took in the sight in front of her: the tent nearly ready, the scaffolding of the high wire already in place. She saw her father and his falcon daemon near the tiered rows of benches that the audience would sit on. The sun was almost gone now, the night approaching fast, and she knew he was eager to finish working before it got completely dark.
“Papa!” she called out, quickly crossing the distance between them. “How can I help?”
He smiled at her, making the lines in the corners of his eyes deeper. “There’s not much left to do. You can help your uncle with the props.” He gestured to where his brother was loudly cursing everybody and their mother over a box filled to the brim with one-wheel bicycles, juggling balls, blindfolds and all the other knicknacks they used to make their performances more exciting, more daring, more unpredictable. If they wanted to lure in their audiences, they had to keep raising the stakes and inventing new tricks. Inej was old enough to understand that the entertainment they provided was often the only thing standing between them and the city officials denying them the right to camp within city limits. The public wanted a spectacle, and as long as they delivered, the sneering and outward contempt were kept to a minimum.
They were never completely gone, though.
Inej hurried to save her uncle before he could wish a plague upon every single continent. Together, they managed to haul all the props into the tent, box by box, and when they were all stacked neatly in one corner, hidden from view behind a curtain, Inej wiped her hands on her trousers and turned around to find Ajit nestled between the ears of her uncle’s large sheepdog daemon. He’d changed his shape again, this time to a bird the size of a pigeon, its feathers, legs and beak jet black, with yellow eyes. The light of one of the lamps caught on his plumage, and the feathers glimmered different colors: deep blue, purple, red, as if they were covered in a layer of iridescent paint. He shifted from one foot to the other, as if adjusting to the shape, and Inej felt an unfamiliar tug in her chest, a kind of slight and bittersweet flutter. One second and it was gone, but it left her with a strange certainty that something had irrevocably changed.
“Is this it?” she asked Ajit as they left the tent and made their way to where the rest of the camp was gathering for dinner, the aroma of spices and fresh bread hanging in the air like a beacon. He hopped off her shoulder and soared into the air, as if trying out his new wings.
“I think so,” he replied, hovering in the air to her left, then circled over her head a few times before landing in her outstretched palm. “I think I like it.”
She ruffled his feathers and smiled when he let out an indignant sound. “I think I like it too,” she agreed. It was strange to think that he’d never change his shape again, but if that was the form he was meant to settle in, Inej didn’t mind at all.
There was a celebration that night, like there always was when one of the members of the camp came of age. Her parents enveloped her in a rib-crushing hug, and she laughed, even though she could barely breathe with her mother pressed against her so tightly, like she never wanted to let go. Her uncles broke into a song, their voices carrying high over the fields. Her father’s face was beaming with pride.
“That’s a fine shape,” he told her, looking at Ajit chasing his own daemon high in the night air, the two shapes barely visible against the dark sky. “A fine shape, my love.”
When she went to sleep that night, much later than usual, Ajit nestled against her heart, her face almost hurt from smiling.
***
The first time Inej saw Kaz Brekker, his daemon was nowhere in sight.
He was just a boy, not much older than she was, dressed impeccably in a suit that reminded her of the rich merchants that snuck away from their respectable wives and jobs to seek forbidden pleasures of the Menagerie. And yet there was something about him that made it obvious he wasn’t a merchant at all, something austere and rough and dark that unsettled her, especially against the obnoxiously colorful backdrop of Tante Heleen’s parlor. She watched from the shadows as he took a wad of cash out of his pocket and held it out to Heleen in one gloved hand, the other clutching a cane with a crow’s head on top. From what Inej had overheard, he was after information, the kind of sensitive little secrets that men let spill all too easily when drunk on wine and pleasure. Heleen accepted the payment and swiftly counted the money, and just like that, the transaction was finished. Kaz Brekker definitely wasn’t the type for small talk, and he didn’t seem to notice or care for Heleen’s saccharine sweet charm that she used to wrap clients and investors around her pinky.
Heleen left the room, her peacock deamon by her side, and then Kaz Brekker passed by the nook where Inej and Ajit had hidden to listen in on the conversation.
“I can help you,” she said, barely a murmur, a whisper of a whisper.
He didn’t react, just kept walking towards the door. She could hear his uneven gait and the steady rhythm of his cane against the hardwood floors.
The second time she saw him, this time face to face, he offered her freedom - or the closest someone like her could get in a place like Ketterdam. His voice was rough, his words even rougher, but she preferred it that way. Better terrible truths than kind lies, and if he was giving her a chance to exchange one misery for another, at least he was being upfront about it. She wouldn’t find safety or happiness with him, he said. But she would be on her feet, a soldier, a weapon, instead of a pretty little thing with bells tied to her ankles, trapped in a glass cage, an object to be used.
She looked him in the eye, a stern and severe boy, his daemon still hidden from view, his face a collection of sharp edges that she knew she would cut herself on, and took the deal.
***
Kaz Brekker had no daemon, people in the Barrel whispered.
He'd sold his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal life.
He kept his daemon locked in a safe so nobody could use her against him.
He was a demon, a ghost, a malevolent spirit, something out of a children’s story. Something other and soulless, to be avoided and feared from a distance.
Inej didn’t believe those stories.
It wasn’t that Kaz Brekker didn’t live up to the reputation that preceded him in the dark alleys and less than reputable establishments of Ketterdam. He was just as ruthless and violent as people painted him. During her first month with the Dregs, Inej had seen him threaten and blackmail criminals and honest citizens alike. She’d seen him in a fight, thrashing like a feral animal, leaving a trail of blood and broken bones in his wake. She’d seen him slit throats and cut fingers, set fires and steal anything from jurda shipments to rare paintings. When he talked to her - to anyone, really, including his own gang members - he was brusque at best, barking orders or explaining his next scheme as briefly as humanly possible, clearly annoyed by questions or any sign of doubt. He could be cruel (especially, she quickly noticed, when his bad leg was acting up), and most of the time it seemed like he couldn’t care less about anything but bringing in more profit by whatever means necessary.
And yet, there were glimpses - rare as they may have been - of something else, something that Inej didn’t think a boogeyman he was made out to be would be capable of.
He caught her outside his window a few weeks after she’d joined the Dregs. She was still getting familiar with the rooftops of Ketterdam and she spent her days memorizing the confusing maze of streets, something she knew she needed to do if she wanted to be an effective spider for the gang. She enjoyed being up there, too - it wasn’t the same as walking on the wire, but after a year in the Menagerie, where she couldn’t take a step without being watched by one of Heleen’s enforcers, she relished the ability to move unseen, unnoticed by anyone other than the crows that gathered on the roof of the Slat. She stopped outside the attic window to feed them, pulling crumbs out of her pocket, Ajit swooping and soaring among the birds. She could almost see the harbor from where she was standing. Inej didn’t believe any part of the Barrel could smell good, but the stench of the streets didn’t reach all the way up the building, so she allowed herself to inhale deeply. Sometimes, in quiet moments like that, she almost felt like herself again - her old self, before the ship, before Heleen, before the nights at the Menagerie that chipped away pieces of her that she knew she’d never get back.
“Spying on me, Wraith?”
She jerked, startled by Kaz’s rough voice coming from the window. He used a name he’d invented for her, the beginnings of a myth that he wanted to build around his new spider. She didn’t like it, but she knew that hardly mattered to him. Kaz was looking at her, his face twisted into his usual scowl (she’d come to realize that was just his resting face). His voice was stone against stone, but he didn’t really seem as annoyed as his words suggested.
Before she could respond - and she wasn’t sure what she was going to say since the question was clearly rhetorical - Kaz turned around and limped back to his desk. “Might as well come inside if you’re going to lurk outside and feed the pests,” he threw over his shoulder. The invitation surprised her, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Ajit freeze mid-air, falling a few feet before righting himself, clearly just as puzzled as she was. Kaz had never given her any inclination that he wanted company before. He didn’t seem to need anyone but himself and his schemes to keep him warm at night. And his daemon, Inej added in her head, because she was still certain that the elusive creature must exist, despite Kaz’s apparent satisfaction with the way the absence of his daemon added fuel to the fire of his reputation.
She slipped into the room before he could change his mind, and perched on the windowsill, taking in the sparsely furnished room. Kaz was already buried in his work, hunched over a ledger of some kind, paying her no mind. For a second, she thought she must have imagined him speaking to her at all. She turned around to look out the window. From this angle, only the crows and the rooftop of the building opposite the Slat were visible, but if she craned her neck, she could watch the sky change colors as the sun began to set.
They’d been sitting in silence for some time, Inej wasn’t sure how long, Ajit still playing among the crows, when she felt Kaz’s eyes on her. She didn’t turn around, but the skin on her arms tingled and she felt herself tense at the sensation. At the Menagerie, she was stared at all the time - by Heleen, by her enforcers, by the hungry eyes of her clients. Kaz’s gaze was difficult to bear, even across the room. Sometimes Inej felt she’d be happy to just disappear, melt into the wall or the night air, so that no one would ever look at her again.
A few minutes passed, and she felt herself slowly relax, even if she still couldn’t manage much more than shallow breaths. She was used to the staring being followed by touch, appraising her, undressing her, forcing her down on the bed. None of that came, she heard no movement behind her, and when she risked a glance at Kaz, he darted his eyes away from her, back to the ledger.
“No one is going to try anything with you here,” he said, and she froze. He had no way of knowing what was going on inside her head, the panic that had risen in her throat, choking her. Maybe he was a demon after all. “And if they do, you can protect yourself now”, he continued, referring to the knife he had given her earlier in the week, the one she carried hidden in her boot. His voice wasn’t soothing - she wasn’t sure Kaz’s voice was even capable of that - but as he looked at her again, she swallowed and nodded, the panic receding, allowing her lungs to expand once more.
He didn’t say anything else, and she slipped back onto the roof some time later, leaving him to his work. But, she decided, climbing down the side of the building to her own window, if Kaz Brekker really was an evil spirit, then she supposed there were far worse evils in the world.
The following night, and every night after that, his window was propped open, and she had a feeling it wasn’t because he enjoyed the fresh air.
***
Kaz had started teaching her to pick locks - a necessity, he insisted, if she was going to steal the kind of secrets that he required in order to establish himself as a major player in the Barrel.
The lessons took place in his office, Inej perched on the edge of his desk as he explained different lock mechanisms to her, his deft fingers taking them apart so she could see every detail. He was a good teacher when he wanted to be - he was never exactly nice, but he seemed endlessly patient as she fumbled with the lockpicks, a small kindness, one of those that she’d started cataloguing in her mind.
“Gently,” he’d tell her whenever she jammed in the lockpicks too hard. “A lock can’t be rushed.”
It really couldn’t, as Inej learned over the next several weeks. The lessons didn’t happen on a regular schedule since Kaz was busy, always in a rush to get to some meeting or watch over the proceedings at the Crow Club, searching the gambling parlors for cheaters and card counters. But every few days, she’d find him in his office with a new set of locks spread out on his desk, courtesy of a locksmith he knew, and they’d spend a couple hours hunched over the intricate mechanisms. Inej made good progress with the simpler locks, but the more complicated ones stumped her, a fact that seemed to make Kaz more annoyed at himself than her. She tried her best, never one to back down from the challenge, and sometimes, when she finally cracked a particularly challenging lock after dozens of tries, she could see what could almost be mistaken for a smile on his lips.
She wasn’t going to admit it, but that brought her much more satisfaction than the open lock in front of her.
Ajit hopped around on Kaz’s desk during their lessons, his yellow eyes taking in every detail. He made sure to give Kaz a wide berth, even though the boy’s hands were always covered and there was no exposed skin for her deamon to accidentally graze other than Kaz’s face and neck. Kaz always followed the bird with his eyes, watched as Ajit played with the locks and tried to open them with his claws and beak, or settled on Inej’s shoulder to clean his feathers.
“Can you tell your winged rat not to damage the equipment?” he snapped once when Ajit, bored and restless from sitting inside for too long, tried to lift one of the locks in the air and promptly failed, the object clattering to the ground with a deafening thud.
Inej shot Ajit a sharp look, and he had the decency to look sheepish - as much as a bird could, anyway - before settling on her shoulder.
“I’m not a rat,” he huffed to Kaz, clearly insulted.
“Could’ve fooled me,” Kaz replied, standing up and circling the desk to pick up the lock from where it’d landed on the floor.
“I’m sorry for him,” Inej said, gently rattling the lockpicks in a Schuyler 520, the newest lock on the market. “He’s just antsy. We both are. It’s the weather.”
Kerch winters were unforgivably cold, and the rooftops were covered in half-frozen snow, making climbing dangerous even for the Wraith. She still went out on missions whenever Kaz sent her, but over the previous weeks he’d had few assignments for her. Deep down, she suspected it had less to do with business being quiet - trade never slept in Ketterdam, no matter how biting the cold - and more with her usual routes being slippery enough to make her normally sure feet cautious. Sometimes, she thought she was being ridiculous. Kaz didn’t give a damn about her, and if he didn’t want her to plummet to her death, it was only because he’d have to find himself a new spider and all of her training would go to waste. But there were moments, usually in the quiet warmth of his room while the wind was howling outside, when she let herself believe for a moment that he actually cared.
Whatever the true reason for her sudden downtime was, Ajit didn’t take well to being cooped up inside the Slat, and boredom brought out the worst in him. He flew off Inej’s shoulder now, this time to rummage through a stack of papers on Kaz’s desk. She half expected another biting remark as Kaz settled in his chair and glanced at her deamon making an absolute mess of the pile - she could’ve sworn Ajit was doing it on purpose to rile up Kaz, despite her exasperation - but the boy just turned to her and looked at the lock in her hands.
“Not like that,” he said, and his gloved hands touched hers to adjust her grip. “Relax your fingers.”
Kaz only ever touched her during their lessons, and it was always as brief as possible, just to position her fingers correctly on the lockpicks. He never took off his gloves, something that made even more rumors about him circle the streets of the Barrel, and Inej had never dared to ask why. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t get an answer anyway. And given her own apprehension when it came to touch, she supposed she was the last person to judge. She’d gotten used to his gloved fingers brushing hers, the contact always short and light, never squeezing too hard. She wasn’t entirely sure if it was for Kaz’s benefit or hers.
She changed the placement of her fingers as instructed, and a minute later the lock clicked open.
She was sure she didn’t imagine the way Kaz’s lips curved into a flicker of a smile.
***
When the snow finally thawed and spring crawled into the narrow alleys and dirty streets of the Barrel, Inej was free to roam the roofs again. She was happy to stretch her muscles after weeks of little activity, and she raced Ajit from roof to roof as they made their way to the Financial District. He flew beside her, matching her pace, clearly overjoyed to finally be out in the open air. It was still chilly outside, but they both welcomed the cold breeze like an old friend.
Inej felt the burn in her arms as she scaled an ivy-covered wall to get to the rooftop of the next house. From here, six floors up, she could see East Stave, already full of tourists despite the less than ideal weather. It wasn’t as busy yet as it would get in the summer, but the gambling halls would be full by nightfall.
She had to climb down to the ground to cross the river, and as she briskly walked across the bridge to the other side, she let her eyes roam over the crowd. She could immediately pick out the richest men and women in the crowd, their clothes simple but tailored perfectly and made of quality fabrics, the men’s watches and women’s jewellery understated but clearly expensive. Truly rich people didn’t flaunt their wealth, Kaz had told her. It was the poor who tried to seem like more than they were that brandished flashy jewellery and donned frilly dresses and pretentious suits.
She didn’t even realize when it’d happened, but she’d started looking at the world the way Kaz did: finding targets in the crowd, people she could steal from or steer towards the Crow Club to let the cards do the stealing for her. She shook her head and quickened her pace. She wondered, for a brief second, what her father would say if he could see her, with her knives and a brand new set of lockpicks Kaz had gifted her, scheming in the shadows like a criminal.
She decided she didn’t want to know the answer.
***
She slipped through the open attic window of the Slat and saw Kaz at his desk, as always buried in his work. Ajit flew in after her and landed on Kaz’s desk to examine the notebooks and papers spread all over the surface. He and Kaz seemed to be playing some kind of game that consisted of Ajit trying to annoy the boy and succeeding. Inej didn’t understand why her daemon was so insistent on riling Kaz up. Sometimes it was hard to believe that they were one entity, two halves of one whole, if they could have such different views on something - namely, on how much of a nuisance they wanted to be for the Bastard of the Barrel.
“Try not to stain the books with your dirty feet, rat,” Kaz said as soon as Ajit landed softly on the edge of the desk, not looking up from whatever he was reading.
“Whatever you say, Dirtyhands,” her daemon shot back without hesitation, and in that moment Inej was sure Kaz was just going to snap the bird’s neck like a twig. She was going to die right there because her soul was clearly an idiot.
Did that make her an idiot by extension? She wasn’t sure.
Kaz didn’t reply, but she saw something cross his face, there and then gone. He’d looked almost fond. Maybe she’d had too much fresh air for one day. She was definitely seeing things.
As soon as she was sure Kaz wasn’t going to murder her daemon, Inej turned to look out the window, her hand reaching into her pocket for the seeds and crumbs she kept there for the crows. They were all waiting, skinny and ruffled after the long winter, and they ate straight from her hand. She felt herself smile as their beaks brushed against her palm, surprisingly gentle.
She looked back to Kaz, and she was startled by two realizations.
One, how much alike he and her daemon looked hunched over the day’s numbers like that, a little black bird and a skinny boy in a dark suit, their feud momentarily forgotten as Ajit pointed at something in one of the columns, and Kaz murmured something back, too quiet for her to hear.
Two, that there was now a dark shape sitting on Kaz’s shoulder, having apparently just crawled out from under his collar or maybe his shirt pocket.
It took her a second to register that the shape in question was in fact a spider - similar to the orb weavers that wove their webs in the nooks and crannies of her parents caravan, but slightly bigger and jet black, a stark contrast with Kaz’s crisp white shirt.
Inej never believed the stories about the Bastard of the Barrel not having a deamon, but she’d gotten used to the peculiar sight of a boy walking around without one, and she nearly toppled from the windowsill to the floor, her acrobat’s instincts saving her at the last moment.
Kaz looked up from the books. His bitter coffee eyes met her own, and she knew that he could see her seeing him - all of him - for the first time.
The spider crawled down his arm, settling next to Ajit on the desk. If her daemon was as shocked as she was, he didn’t let it show, hopping enthusiastically from one foot to the other as he and Kaz got into another competition of razor sharp wit. Inej kept her eyes fixed on the spider daemon, and she was pretty sure the daemon was looking right back at her. Neither one of them moved.
A few minutes passed, and suddenly the spider was off the desk and crawling towards the windowsill.
Inej felt rather than saw Kaz tense like a tightly coiled spring as his daemon climbed the wall until she was next to Inej’s face, a black spot against the grayish-white paint. It was almost as if he expected Inej to scream, or cry, or smack his deamon away. His face was impassive, but his hands were curled into fists so tightly that she was surprised the leather of his gloves didn’t split open over his knuckles.
Inej was afraid of many things, but spiders weren’t one of them.
She leaned slightly forward, towards Kaz’s deamon frozen on the wall. “Hello,” she said gently, “nice to finally meet you”.
She didn’t think she imagined the way Kaz’s breath hitched ever so slightly in his throat as he visibly relaxed.
She learned the daemon’s name was Eris, and that her voice was quiet and as soft as Kaz’s was gravelly rough.
When she climbed through Kaz’s window two days later, Eris was sitting on his shoulder and his gloves were off, his pale hands on full display, no blood stains or claws as far as she could tell. He didn’t say anything to greet her, but Eris climbed towards the window to murmur a hello to Inej, and Ajit circled the room a few times before he and Inej both noticed something new - a small perch on Kaz’s desk for her daemon to sit on.
“So the rat can finally stop jumping all over my desk like a wind-up toy,” Kaz grumbled, apparently sensing their stunned silence.
“Don’t mind him,” Eris said, her voice as silky soft as the web she was weaving in the corner by the window. “He’s grumpy because the Razorgulls got the jump on that sugar shipment.”
Inej couldn’t help the laugh that escaped her throat at the look of betrayal on Kaz’s face.
No one commented on it, but somehow it became a routine: Inej at Kaz’s window, feeding the crows he pretended to hate, a small black spider next to her, Kaz at his desk, a bird with iridescent feathers carefully preening himself on the perch.