Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She should maybe have waited longer before getting out of the trunk, but from the inside she had no idea of whether it was safe or not and she couldn’t cower forever in fear. Either she got out on her own or she would be found eventually. Still, when Alina pushed up the trunk’s lid and peered through the gap to see the three people standing in front of it, she gritted her teeth and bit back a curse. There was nothing to do but to get out all the way, because they obviously knew she was there and were waiting for her. As she threw her legs over the edge of the trunk and lightly dropped to the ground, raising her hands fingers spread to show they were empty, she examined them. They weren’t Grisha, was her first, immediate observation—a good thing, but it didn’t necessarily ensure that they meant her well. There were two men and one woman. The woman, who stood in the middle, was small and dark, wearing black clothes strapped with buckles everywhere. On her right was a lanky brown-skinned man, maybe Zemeni. His posture was nonchalant, in the same way that his top hat rested tilted on his head, and just as nonchalantly he curled a hand around the pearl handle of one of the two pistols that hung at his sides. The other man, standing left of the woman, was pale and narrow-faced, dressed all in black, his hair slicked back and his blue eyes studying Alina coolly, gloved hands holding an elaborately carved cane.

Since they’d been waiting for her, it meant that they’d known she was in the trunk, and although they hadn’t forcibly pulled her out of it, they were also standing in her way and the Zemeni man looked ready to use his gun. Did they know who she was or was she to them a mere stowaway, whose presence they’d only just noticed?

“I mean no trouble,” she said, bringing her hands down in a gesture of appeasement. “I’ll be on my way.”

“We just want to talk,” the narrow-faced man said. He spoke in heavily accented Ravkan, his grammar impeccable but the words rough in his mouth, like gravel rolling underfoot, though Alina didn’t know enough about the world at large to identify his accent precisely. It wasn’t Shu or Fjerdan, and that was all she could ascertain. “We have a safe way across the Fold, something other than the skiff. We could benefit each other.”

“I’d rather be on my own, thank you,” Alina said stiffly. They knew who she was, they had to. They wouldn’t assume that a random girl who’d hidden in their trunk could benefit them. “I’m not interested in being a captive again.”

She threw up her hands, flashing light at them, and then darted left, away from the man with the pistols, but tripped on something and met the ground hard. Her chin took the brunt of the fall, making her teeth snap painfully. She groaned, rubbing her sore jaw and blinking away the stars that danced in front of her eyes. She heard a click and felt something hard press against the back of her head. She swallowed, pulling her hands from under her to make them visible. She couldn’t cast light faster than the man could shoot her, and ultimately, one was a lot more likely to cause damage than the other. She was the Sun Summoner, a living Saint if you were to believe the folk tales of her childhood, but a simple bullet would end her life as swiftly as it would anyone else’s.

“Let’s have a talk now, shall we?” said a male voice, smoother than the other one, its accent less harsh.

Slowly, painfully aware of each movement and of each breath, Alina rose to her knees. She cast a look at her surroundings, which she’d neglected to do earlier, focused as she was on the immediate threat the people posed. They were in a woodsy area, away from the path that she could see lying on her right behind the trees. No one was on the path, not that she could be sure that a passerby would side with her. She was on her own and couldn’t fight her way out of this situation. If they hadn’t known who she was before, they certainly did now, and they wouldn’t fall for the same trick again.

Once she was upright, she glanced nervously at the man with the cane, awaiting instructions. Without him having to say it, she understood on instinct that he was the one in charge out of the three.

“Sit there,” the man instructed, jerking his pointy chin at a rotting fallen log.

She complied, the other man’s gun still against the back of her head. Once she was sitting, the Zemeni shooter stepped away from her, though he still held her in check with his gun.

“Is that how you talk, where you’re from?” she asked, her voice a little breathless with fear but doing her best to pour all the heat of her anger into her glare. “By threatening people with guns?”

The man laughed, the sound rich with amusement—not as though he was mocking her, but as though he genuinely found her comment funny. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “But don’t worry, we’re not in this to kill you. Getting shot really hurt, though, even when it’s nowhere vital, so I’d avoid it if I were you.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” she said tightly. “What do you want with me?”

“My name is Kaz Brekker,” said the man with the cane, “and these are my associates: Jesper Fahey and Inej Ghafa. We come from Ketterdam.”

So this was what his accent was, then; he was Kerch. Knowing they’d come from Ketterdam didn’t make Alina feel any better. Now that she had more time to examine Kaz Brekker, she remembered that she’d seen him before, at the Little Palace, wearing a guard’s uniform—he and the small woman, Inej Ghafa. She hadn’t seen Fahey, but he had probably been somewhere around. The three of them had come all the way from Kerch, illegally crossed the Fold at the risk of their lives, infiltrated the Little Palace disguised as guards and had approached her pretending they would escort her to dinner. She might have been an orphan from a backward little town on the border, but she could put two and two together. They hadn’t gone through all this to help her out of the goodness of their hearts.

“You’ve come to capture me,” she said. “You were there at the party.”

“And then you went right into our trunk,” Fahey said laughingly. “If that’s not fate, then I don’t know how to call it.”

“You say that you have a safe way across the Fold,” Alina said, bringing her chin up. “That’s all well and good, but what happens to me once we’re on the other side? You sell me as a slave in Ketterdam so I can do party tricks for the rich Kerch merchers?”

“Slavery is illegal in Kerch,” Brekker said evenly, Alina’s anger rolling off him.

“Well, I hear indentures aren’t much better."

She was focused on Kaz Brekker but she saw Inej Ghafa twitch at his side. The young woman had remained silent so far, which Alina had interpreted as subservience—was she an indentured servant? Alina wasn’t sure how this could benefit her, but it was a thing to take note of.

“You really think you’ll do better alone, with the Black General and all of the Second Army on your heels? You might be the Sun Summoner—” There was faint derision in the way he said Alina’s title. “—but how well do you think you can hold your own against an army of trained Grisha? They will stop at nothing to find you. You’re on your own, on foot, conspicuous. They’re looking for a lone half-Shu girl, not for a group, and we’re good at escaping notice.”

“So, what, you’ll be my bodyguards?” Alina said, scoffing. The early morning was chilly and her fingers were getting numb, but she stopped herself from balling her hands into fists, afraid that it would make her seem nervous. She was nervous, but she didn’t need to give them the satisfaction of seeing it. “You all look pretty young, so excuse me if I’m not all that impressed.”

“We’re resourceful,” Brekker said. “As you said, we did infiltrate the Little Palace.”

“This doesn’t answer the question of what you’re going to do with me after we’ve crossed the Fold. If our association is so beneficial to me, then what are you getting out of it? You don’t seem the type to take charity cases.”

Brekker opened his mouth, but was interrupted by Ghafa saying, “Kaz, a word please,” in a voice that was soft but clearly demanding attention. Her Ravkan was lilting, but effortless, which made sense, as the way she looked and her name both pointed to her being Suli. Brekker glanced sideways at her, looking annoyed but inquisitive. “I want to talk to you about something,” Ghafa said.

“All right.” To Alina, Brekker said, “Excuse us for a moment,” and then the three thieves huddled together and started to talk in low voices.

They were speaking Kerch, a language from which Alina only knew a few phrases, like ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘how much for this?, none of it helpful with understanding their rapid conversation. Instead she watched their body language, the way Fahey and Ghafa both leaned toward Brekker rather than the reverse, but also the intent way Ghafa was speaking to Brekker, as though trying to convince him of something. Her silence that Alina had taken for subservience must have been something else, because she wasn’t deferential in the way she spoke to him. Alina wished she could understand what she was saying, because she had a feeling that Ghafa was speaking in her defense and she wanted to know why the woman would take her side.

Unfortunately, no amount of focusing on the conversation could clear it for her. As she watched them, her chin stinging where she’d hit it in her fall, her stomach growling mournfully for her missed dinner, it occurred to her that since the trio was engrossed in their conversation, she should make the most of it. She let her hands drift to her sides so she could push herself off the log, shifted her feet on the forest ground, but a dry leave cracked under the sole of her foot and both of Jesper Fahey’s guns swiveled toward her.

“Nuh huh,” he said. “We’re not finished talking.”

“So I am your prisoner. Be honest about it, at least.”

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Brekker said. Dead leaves shuffled under his feet as he shifted his weight, leaning a bit more heavily on his cane—the cane that he’d probably used to trip her up. “You asked what we would get out of our arrangement: well, to put it bluntly, we’re in it for the money. We can’t go back to Ketterdam empty-handed, not after everything we’ve done to get here. You changed from the black kefta you were wearing at the party, but did you keep any of the jewels?” He pointed at Alina’s right hand. “You kept that ring, at least.”

Alina bit down on her lower lip. She had her necklace and hair jewelry stuffed in the pocket of the coat she’d stolen, but she’d meant to sell them to cover for her traveling expenses. How could she be sure, if she gave the jewels to those thieves, that they wouldn’t take them and sell her in Ketterdam anyway? She couldn’t trust them. But Ketterdam was far away and here and now was when Alina needed to decide what to do. Brekker was right about one thing: not being alone would make her less conspicuous, and they must be resourceful to have gotten as far as they had. If she gave them the jewels and acted like she agreed to trust them, then at least they would be less likely to treat her as a captive and she could give them the slip later.

“I kept the jewels,” she admitted, then thrust her hand in her pocket to retrieve them. The gold chain from the hair jewelry had tangled with the necklace, but she couldn’t be bothered to try and untangle it. They could do it themselves.

“Give it to Jesper,” Brekker said. “The ring, too.”

Alina pulled the ring Genya had given her from her finger with a pang of regret, then threw the jewels at Fahey. She’d pettily hoped that he would have to fumble to catch them, but he swiftly put away one of his guns and caught the jewels mid-air with his left hand.

“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Fahey murmured, putting down the jewels on his lap to examine them. “That’s real gold, nice, and look at those stones! They’ll pay a pretty kruge.”

“How much do you think?” Brekker asked.

“I’d say 25,000 for the hair thing, 30,000 to 35,000 for each of the stones on the necklace, 10,000 for the pearls. If we bargain well, we could get up to 150,000 total.”

“That’s enough, right?” Ghafa said, her focus entirely on Brekker. “Kaz?”

“I can take a smaller share,” Fahey said to Brekker. “Or no share at all. You know I’ll gamble it all away anyway. At this point, I just want to get out of this Saints-forsaken country.”

“Jesper,” Ghafa said quietly, to which Fahey replied something in Kerch with a small crooked smile.

“What about the ring?” Brekker asked, his narrow face giving away nothing.

“There’s something odd about the ring.” Fahey brought the ring up to his eyes, squinting at it. “I think it’s pure iridium and that’s unusual in Ravka. Who gave it to you?” he asked Alina.

“A friend,” she replied defensively. “Why?”

“Was this friend Grisha? A Fabrikator, maybe?”

“She’s a Taylor. Why, what’s wrong with the ring?”

“Nothing is wrong with the ring exactly, it’s just a very unique metal.”

“And a Durast would probably be able to sense it at a distance,” Brekker said, nodding to himself as though he’d realized something. “This ring is a beacon.”

“You mean Gen—my friend gave it to me on purpose so they’d be able to track me? That’s absurd! She didn’t know I would run away. I didn’t know I would run away until… until the party.”

Genya wouldn’t, would she? She had been Alina’s best friend at the palace, her first friend, and her presence had made the radical flip of Alina’s entire existence so much more bearable. But she’d also said to Alina—be careful of powerful men. Was this a general warning or something more specific?

“You’re very valuable to them and they can’t afford to lose you, either through capture or from you running away. It was most likely a precaution,” Brekker said matter-of-factly, as if this made it better. “All right, the jewels are adequate payment. We’ll keep you safe until we’ve all crossed the Fold, and then you’ll be free to go wherever you please. Do we have a deal?”

Alina’s stomach churned from the idea that Genya might have deliberately given her that ring as an invisible leash, probably on Aleksander’s orders—if this was true, what else might have she done? Had she been spying on Alina?

“So?” Brekker insisted.

She was trapped between a hammer and a hard place. “Fine,” she said. “We have a deal.”

Brekker walked toward her and Alina recoiled when he got closer, wary of what he was about to do. He held a hand out to her, looking straight down into her eyes, his gaze colder than the permanent snow on top of the Elbjen. She felt examined, dissected. Up close, he looked even younger than she’d assumed, close to her own age, but his eyes were old. She took his hand hesitantly; the leather of his gloves was smooth and warm.

“The deal is the deal,” he said, shaking her hand.

The words sounded awkward in Ravkan, but the phrase felt formal, so she repeated it. “The deal is the deal.”

And so it was.

—-

When Kaz and Alina Starkov released each other’s hand, Jesper saw Inej let out a small, almost imperceptible sigh of relief. He felt it too—Kaz, the bastard, had let both of them guess on what he would do until the very last moment. Not that Jesper cared too much about whether they would capture Alina Starkov or make a deal with her, but Inej cared, and Jesper didn’t want this to be the thing that made her break off from them. In a foreign country, with an army of Grisha hounding them, they would need the three of them working together to make it back alive. They were getting out of this job with less than a fourth of the money they’d been aiming for and Jesper didn’t want to lose a friend to it too.

Jesper put his gun back in its holster, as it seemed like bad form to keep threatening someone who was basically paying them to protect her. “What’s our next move, boss?” he asked Kaz.

“We need to sell the ring as soon as possible. We would get more for it in Ketterdam, but we can’t afford to give the Grisha a way to track us. Ryevost is the closest city of good size and our best shot at making a decent deal. We should also ditch the carriage, it’s too conspicuous. We’ll ride on horseback to Ryevost. How’s your riding?” Kaz asked Alina.

“Passable,” she said with a grimace.

“You’ll ride with Jesper, then.”

Jesper and Inej made quick work of unhooking the horses from the carriage while Kaz went back to the road, keeping on the lookout. Alina stayed sitting on her rotten log, obviously uncertain of what her role was now—not a prisoner anymore, not really part of the team. Jesper jumped on one of the horses, leaving the other one to Inej. The horses were both unsaddled, which wasn’t ideal, but Ryevost wasn’t too far and they could get saddles there. Riding up to Alina, Jesper leaned down, offering her his hand.

“My lady,” he said, grinning at her.

He felt vindicated when she smiled, her first smile since she’d gotten out of the trunk. “I didn’t quite picture my knight in shining armor like this,” she said.

Jesper raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t picture him as a handsome Zemeni sharpshooter? What tales have you been listening to?”

She chuckled and accepted his hand, letting him haul her up on top of the horse behind him. He made sure that she was holding securely onto him before he led his horse back to the road, where Kaz and Inej were already waiting for them. Kaz was the one holding the reins of their horse, which was a surprise. Jesper hadn’t known that Kaz could ride, as he’d grown up in the Barrel where horses were scarce, though he shouldn’t be surprised that Kaz had undisclosed talents. A man of many mysteries, Kaz Brekker was.

“Sorry about this, by the way,” Jesper said as his horse ambled behind Kaz and Inej’s, patting the handle of the gun on his right side. “It was nothing personal.”

“Do you always do everything he says?” Alina asked. She had put both of her hands on his waist but didn’t lean closer, as though she was reluctant to hold him tight. How cute.

“Who, Kaz? Most of the time, yes. This has served me well so far.”

“Better than making decision for yourself?”

Jesper laughed. Was he playing mind games with a living Saint, now? Those were truly interesting times. “I’ll stop you right there,” he said. “I may be pretty, but I’m not dumb, and if you’re trying to sow discord between us, let me tell you that you’re coming on a bit too strong.”

The hands that she had around his waist contracted in a brief spasm. “How do I know I can trust you?” she asked, her voice brittle.

Despite himself, he felt a surge of sympathy for her. “I understand why you would feel that way, but Kaz and you shook on it. He’s Kerch, breaking a deal is blasphemy to them.”

“He doesn’t strike me as a very religious person.”

She had a point. Truth to be told, Jesper was surprised that Kaz had accepted to settle for so little money, and he’d bet that it was Inej’s insistence that had done the trick. Whatever he said, he didn’t want to lose her any more than Jesper did. Jesper had only been able to get a terse summation of what happened to him and Inej at the Little Palace—the Black General had snatched Alina before they could ‘escort her to dinner’, Inej had killed an Inferni who’d been about to burn Kaz to a crisp, they’d both gotten out by the skin of their teeth. There hadn’t really been a moment to ask Inej how she felt about her first kill, but Jesper made a mental note to do it later.

“Ghafa… Inej defended me, right?” Alina asked after a moment of silence. “I don’t speak Kerch, but that’s what it looked like to me. Why would she do that?”

Jesper weighed on how much he should say, but then Inej would probably make her devotion obvious very soon. “What do you think? Why would anyone who doesn’t know you want to defend you?”

“She’s a believer?”

“All of her knives are named after Saints. I bet you’ll have one named after you as soon as she gets a new one.”

“Oh,” Alina said in a soft, considering voice. “What about you? Do you believe too?”

“I think you’re a Grisha who can make nice light shows. Fancy, but this doesn’t make me want to drop to my knees and worship. I guess I would maybe feel differently if I’d grown up Ravkan with a giant shadow wound full of monsters in the middle of my country, but as it is, I’ll remain firmly agnostic on the matter. No offense.”

“It’s fine. I think I prefer that—less pressure.”

“Kaz is still on the fence about whether you’re the real deal or just a very skilled con artist.” Jesper stifled a yawn, tears of exhaustion pooling at the corners of his eyes. Was he talking too much to someone who had been the mark not too long ago? Possibly. “I could tell you to trust Kaz not to stab you in the back, but that’d just be words to you. Same if I tell you to trust me, even though I’m way nicer than him. But to Inej, you’re a miracle. She hasn’t had a lot of those in her life and she deserves more. She’s a good person who got dealt a shit hand.”

“And you’re not a good person?”

Jesper gave the question some serious thought. Maybe Alina was trying to provoke him, or to test him, but it was a good question. When did you stop being good and started being bad? Was it a matter of actions or intentions? “I’m a nice person,” he said, “but this isn’t the same as good.”

“What about Kaz Brekker?” She said Kaz’s name weirdly, and it took Jesper a moment to get that she was trying to imitate Kaz’s accent.

He chuckled. “Kaz Brekker,” he said, imitating her, a Ravkan trying to pronounce the name the Kerch way, “is neither nice or good.”

“Then why do you follow his lead?”

Now was another good question. Why, indeed? Was it because Jesper was drawn to risk? Because he liked lost causes and always wanted what he couldn’t get? “Because he makes sure I make good money.” Money that burned in his hands as quickly as if he were an Inferni that could summon fire on command. “And things aren’t ever boring around him. Simple as that.”

He looked ahead at the back of Kaz’s head, at the narrow line of his shoulders. Last night he’d been in obvious pain from walking around without his cane most of the previous day. For him to be unable to conceal it, the pain must have been pretty bad. Riding would probably do his leg no favor, but neither would walking, and Kaz had been right in saying that the carriage was conspicuous. If Jesper had been Corporalki, he could have helped with the pain, but his thing was metal, not people, so he was useless in this situation and Kaz wasn’t the type of person to draw comfort from others coddling him. So Jesper worried, about him, about Inej, but in the privacy of his own mind—like the hopeless idiot he was.

“Kaz will get us across the Fold,” he said, figuring he should be trying to reassure Alina lest she decided to bolt for the hills. “That I can promise you.”

“That’s a lot of faith you’re putting in him,” Alina said dryly. “How can you be sure he’s worth it?”

“But that’s the fun thing about faith, right—you can never be sure. Isn’t it how it works, Sankta Alina?”

Alina snorted inelegantly. “I don’t think I’m very good at faith. I never had a reason to be.”

“Fair enough."

They reached Ryevost about an hour later. For a city of ‘good size’, it didn’t look very impressive to Jesper, though maybe his perspective was skewed from the years he’d spent in Ketterdam. The forest opened up and looming mountains appeared, sudden like a slap in the face, their peaks wrapped in fog. The city crawled up at the bottom in a tight cluster of stone houses with slate-gray roofs, spots of yellows, oranges and reds coloring them, with a stone wall wrapped around it. From the edge of the forest to the outskirts of the town, the road was paved, and Jesper could see groups of tiny people in blue and red and purple flocking on both sides of the road where it entered the city.

Kaz had stopped his horse and Jesper made his trot up to it. “Looks like we’ve been beaten there,” he said.

“We’ll have to split up,” Kaz said, frowning eyes fixed on the city ahead of them. “Alina can’t go in there or she’ll be spotted. I’ll take the ring to sell it. Jesper, you get us saddles for the horses. Steal them if you can, or use the rest of our coin to buy them. Inej, you wait here with Alina. Does this road only go through Ryevost?” he asked Alina.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve never been here, but I’m… I used to be a cartographer.”

“All right, so we’ll have to backtrack through the woods in case more Grisha are coming, and catch up with the road to Kribirsk.”

“Is that where we’re going?” Alina asked. “We’re going to Kribirsk? It’ll be crawling with Grisha.”

“This is where our ride awaits us. We have no other choice,” Kaz said.

They were too far from the Fold to be able to see it, but Jesper could almost feel it, a shadowed menace somewhere in the west, darkening each of their footsteps. How did Ravkans got on daily with that monstrosity ever present in the background? Kaz seemed confident that he could work Arken’s train and Jesper trusted Kaz with something that, jokes aside, really was akin to faith. Still, his memories of crossing the Fold were hair-rising enough that he wasn’t looking forward to the return trip.

“Be careful,” he told Kaz. “They’ll be looking for the ring and that’ll make you a target.”

Kaz tore himself from his contemplation of the city to look at Jesper. The full force of his attention was always inebriating and Jesper, who’d been fighting sleep for the better part of the last hour, now felt buzzing with awareness. “I’m always careful,” Kaz said. “You better be too.”

Jesper brought his fingers to the tip of his hat. “’Course I will, boss.”

Chapter Text

Inej and Sankta Alina led the horses away from the path and settled there to wait, Inej sitting with her back against a tree trunk, facing the road, and Sankta Alina on a moss-covered stump, her hands buried in her sleeves to protect them from the cold. Inej’s attention was half on the road, anxiously waiting for Kaz and Jesper to come back, and half on the young woman. She looked barely any older than Inej herself, and the tip of her nose was red from the temperature, her forehead furrowed in worry. She looked frightened, uncertain, human—but wasn’t it the case for all the Saints? Wasn’t it part of the miracle, that they were vulnerable, fallible humans, who suffered and doubted, and yet carried holy power in them? Inej had come to Ravka looking for hope, she could admit it to herself even if she wouldn’t admit it to Kaz and Jesper. If she closed her eyes, she could still hear the thump of her knife hitting the back of that Inferni’s skull, the sound of her own damnation. But then, in an astonishing turn of event, Alina Starkov had climbed in their trunk. Jesper had joked about fate, but it wasn’t a joke at all to Inej. It seemed like a sign, like Inej’s salvation being dangled in front of her. It told Inej that she’d been right when she’d seen Kaz for the first time at the Menagerie and had taken her bet that following him would lead her out of the pit.

“They’ll be back soon,” she told Alina, at a loss for something to say. How did you make small talk to a living Saint?

“And then what? What’s there in Kribirsk?” Restlessly, Sankta Alina rubbed her hands together. The cold smothered all the sounds and even the birds were quiet. “How are we getting across the Fold?”

“The way we came—in a train. A smuggler called the Collector worked it out.”

“A train?” Sankta Alina’s eyebrows shot up. “And it’s a safe travel?”

“As safe as crossing the Fold will ever be,” Inej said. “But don’t worry—my knives are yours, Sankta Alina. I’ll keep you safe.”

“Thank you, but… You don’t have to call me this. ‘Sankta Alina.’” The young woman grimaced. “It doesn’t really feel like me, you know? Just ‘Alina’ is fine.”

“As you wish, Alina." It felt wrong to use a Saint’s given name to address her casually, but what did Inej know? She’d never met a Saint before and San—Alina was still a person who Inej didn’t want to make uncomfortable.

Shuffling footsteps made Inej quiet and draw one of her knives, but it was only Jesper, stooped under the weight of the two saddles he carried on his shoulders.

“Is that a knife or are you really happy to see me?” he said, wriggling his eyebrows.

“Funny,” she said. She kept her knife in her hand, because his sudden arrival had rattled her and she wanted to be ready in case the next one wasn’t as friendly.

Jesper went to the horses, patted one on the muzzle and proceeded to buckle a saddle on it. He worked with sure, practiced gestures and Inej wondered whether he missed the farm, sometimes. Ketterdam was such a stifling city, she knew she missed open spaces. Traveling in Ravka had brought on an onslaught of childhood memories that tugged at her heart.

“Who did you seduce to get those?” she asked.

He threw her a mock outraged look over his shoulder. “I bought it. With coin! I didn’t set out to sleep with all the stable boys in Ravka.”

“Oh, so you did sleep with the one at the Little Palace.”

“Well, yes.” Even half-turned away from her as he was, Inej couldn’t miss Jesper’s smug smile. “He was very good with his hands, let me tell you this. And his mouth. And—” He hunched his shoulders to protect his face when she threw a dry dead branch at him. “All right, all right, I’ll shut up. A gentleman does not kiss and tell.”

“Yeah, you’ve said enough.” In only a few words, Jesper had painted a vivid enough picture of him and the stable boy that it brought warmth to her cheeks. It was ridiculous that she, who knew everything there was to know about sex, should feel embarrassed about this, but the furtive images that flashed in her mind made her want to squirm. “He looked a bit like Kaz.”

“What?” Jesper had moved on to the other horse and Inej couldn’t see his face anymore.

“The stable boy. He looked like Kaz, didn’t he? If Kaz knew how to smile.”

“Can’t say I’ve noticed,” Jesper said, but even if Inej couldn’t see his expression, she was utterly unconvinced by his tone of voice.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Alina said, startling Inej, “but if we’re working together, can we speak in a language we all understand? No offence, but it makes me a bit nervous when you speak Kerch.”

“My apologies,” Inej said, ashamed that she hadn’t thought of it herself. It was unspeakably rude of them to be speaking in front of Alina in a language she didn’t understand now that they’d reached an agreement with her. “We were just—”

“Talking about the stable boy I slept with at the Little Palace,” Jesper said in Ravkan. “I can tell you more about it, if you’d like to, though I’m not sure I know the Ravkan for everything we—”

“No, that’s all right,” Alina said quickly. “I just meant, as a rule for the rest of our travel, we should stick to Ravkan.”

“Of course,” Jesper said, nodding in exaggerated seriousness. “Transparency all the way.”

It was luck, really, that Inej’s eyes swept over the thick undergrowth behind Alina just in time to see the shape of a head diving down. She hadn’t heard any footsteps indicating that someone had come up to them, but still she sprang to her feet, wrist bent back and poised for knife throwing. “Who’s there?” she shouted.

At the same time, Jesper let go of the saddle he’d been adjusting and pulled out both of his guns in less time it took Inej to finish her question. “Show yourself!” he commanded. “Hands where I can see them!”

A young man with hair cropped very short rose from behind the bushes, holding up his hands. He wasn’t wearing a kefta but a long woolen coat and a dark gray uniform with a blue collar—the uniform of the First Army. From the bag that hanged at his side, the butt of a rifle poked out.

“Who are you?” Jesper asked. “Were you following us?”

“Wait!” Alina cried out, stepping in front of the man in uniform. “I know him! He’s my friend!”

Jesper raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is that so? Why are you lurking around, friend?”

“I should ask you who you are!” the man retorted, jutting his chin out. “What are you doing with my friend? Alina, get behind me.”

“It’s all right, Mal,” Alina said in a soothing voice to her friend. “I’m not their prisoner. Why don’t we all calm down and talk?”

She looked at Inej, who put away her knife, even if it went against all of her instincts to do so. Jesper was still clinging to his guns, his jaw clenched, and when Inej gave him an insistent look, he said, “Yeah, no, I’m good like this.”

“Jesper, please,” Inej said.

She held his eyes until he sighed, giving both of his guns a twirl and sheathing them back into their holsters. “Of course, when you look at me with those eyes,” he murmured. “All right, let’s talk. Hello, my name is Jesper. I like guns, gambling, and I don’t like it when people are sneaking on me and my friends. What’s your name?”

“Malyen Oretsev,” the man mumbled, his face still scrunched in distrust. “Mal.”

“He grew up with me,” Alina said. Turning to her friend, she asked, “How did you find us?”

“I’ve been tracking you since the Little Palace. A lot happened. I…” He leaned closer to Alina, lowering his voice, though not enough that Inej couldn’t hear him. “Alina, what are you doing with them? Who are they?”

“They’re—” Alina cast a look toward Inej and Jesper, as though weighing what she should say. “We struck a deal. They’re like my bodyguards.”

“I can be your bodyguard, now that I’ve found you. We can watch out for each other, just the two of us.”

He looked Alina straight in the eye as he spoke and Inej could see that Alina was swayed by his proposal. She looked at him as though no one else was in the woods with them, as though she wanted to cling to him and let him sweep her away, and Inej recognized the feeling behind that look. It was a weakness that she couldn’t allow herself—and yet.

She shared a glance with Jesper. “We should wait for Kaz to be back before we make any decision. He should be here soon.”

“Yeah, let’s wait for Kaz,” Jesper said.

“Kaz is their leader,” Alina explained to Mal. “All right, we’ll wait for him.”

Inej looked back toward the city of Ryevost, or what she could see of it behind the veil of trees, willing Kaz to come back quickly. He couldn’t have been caught by the Grisha, could he? A nugget of fear bloomed at the pit of her stomach but she mentally stomped on it. Kaz wouldn’t let himself be caught by the Grisha, even if the Black General himself was in Ryevost. He would be back as soon as he could.

—-

In Ketterdam, Kaz would have known the exact place to get the best price for the iridium ring—he would have gone to Rik Endeman, a crooked pawnbroker in East Stave. But he didn’t know Ryevost, and although the city wasn’t nearly as big as Ketterdam, it was sizeable enough that it would take him a while to get his bearings and find a place to sell the ring. He couldn’t do that when a Durast on the look for the ring might be standing around any corner. If he got caught with the ring on him, it wouldn’t take long for the Grisha to figure out that he wasn’t alone and go after the others. Inej and Jesper could defend themselves against most threats, but not against so many Grisha. So Kaz hid the ring in a wall between two stones, digging into the crumbling mortar and then covering the hole with moss, before setting off to explore the city.

Grisha were everywhere and it was impossible to completely avoid them, so Kaz didn’t try too hard. A few of them might have seen his face at the Little Palace, so he pulled his hat down on his eyes and lifted the collar of his coat, which didn’t look out of place in the morning’s crisp cold. Only the Inferni killed by Inej had seen him limp, so Kaz leaned heavily into his cane and let his gait become as lopsided as it would get, confident in the knowledge that people didn’t usually see a cripple as a potential threat. It wasn’t a hard act to put on, as his leg wasn’t very cooperative today; the streets of Ryevost sloped hard where the city climbed the side of the mountain, making walking them up a struggle. Kaz missed Ketterdam’s flatness.

An exhausting hour later, he had spotted a small pawnshop with a dirty window and a façade of flaking yellow. Reviewing his mental map of the city, he took the shortest route he could manage back to the place where he’d hidden the ring. Ryevost was a maze of hidden passages and narrow shortcuts, allowing him to avoid the bigger streets where the Grisha might linger. When he reached his destination, he cautiously looked around the corner to check whether the way was clear, and retreated back quickly when he caught sight of the colorful kefta and the man in black. Holding himself flat against a stone wall, the cold seeping through the woolen fabric of his coat, Kaz mouthed a curse. He’d seen two Grisha, one wearing a red cape and the other a blue one—maybe a Fabrikator—with the Black General himself. It couldn’t be a coincidence if they were here, right where he’d hidden the iridium ring. Kaz risked another look to take stock of what they were doing. The Grisha in blue was talking animatedly to General Kirigan, waving broadly at the street around him. Though Kaz was too far away to overhear what they were saying, he could read frustration in the Grisha’s body language. He must be able to sense that the ring was near, but not its exact location. This was Kaz’s chance to get it back. Given the opportunity to thoroughly search the street, they would probably find the ring. It wouldn’t give them Alina’s precise position, but they would know she was close by and it would lose Kaz and the others the ring, when they were in dire need of some funds to make it all the way back to Ketterdam. But what if the Grisha and the General got drawn away by another lead on Alina’s whereabouts?

Kaz backtracked to a little plaza, far away enough from the Grisha that they wouldn’t be on him immediately, but close enough that they would get wind of what was happening. Walking backward out of the street, Kaz let himself fall down as though he’d been knocked over. He threw his arms up to protect his face, letting go at the same time of his cane, which clattered onto the cobblestones. For good measure, he yelped as he fell, and soon enough a small crowd had gathered around him.

“Saints, are you all right, young man?”

A stout older woman who wore a cap trimmed with fur helped Kaz up with surprisingly strong arms. Kaz’s right leg buckled as he tried to regain his footing—unintentional, but at least it helped sell his story. A man brushed the dust off his coat, while another put his cane back in his hand.

“Thank you,” Kaz said.

“Did someone push you?” asked the woman who’d gotten him up. “I swear, people have no manners left these days!”

“Not exactly,” Kaz said, pitching his voice higher to make himself sound younger. “I bumped into—you won’t believe me, but I think she was the Sun Summoner.”

“The Sun Summoner? Why would you say that?”

“She—she flashed light at me—that’s what made me stumble backward. She was a half-Shu girl, young, looking panicked.”

“The Sun Summoner, here in Ryevost? Impossible!”

“But maybe that’s why there is Second Army all over the city! My neighbor told me even the Black General is here!”

“Where was she? In that street over there?”

The words ‘the Sun Summoner’ drew even more attention than Kaz’s fall had. People looked around frantically, a growing murmur rippling through the crowd. The woman had let go of Kaz’s elbow and all of them had forgotten about him, their whole focus on the street where Kaz said he’d seen the Sun Summoner. Slipping away, Kaz dove into another street and took a few turns until he found a tavern. He went inside and settled at a round table, ordering tea for himself. He would wait there for a bit to give his rumor time to reach the ears of the General and his Grisha lackeys. The people in Ryevost didn’t know that Alina Starkov was half-Shu, but General Kirigan and the Grisha did, so this detail would lend credence to the rumor.

Kaz took a sip of his tea, burning his tongue. It was too strong and too sweet at the same time. A faintness passed over him, blurring his vision of the little candle flame in the middle of the table, and he vigorously rubbed a gloved hand over his face. This wasn’t the moment for sleepiness; he still needed to get the ring back, sell it and hope the Grisha wouldn’t catch up with him before he did, get back to the others and then put as much distance between them and Ryevost as they could in half a day. He needed to stay alert, so he drank more of his scalding tea. He waited like this for the better part of a half hour before he saw movement outside of the open door of the tavern, blue and red and black, some shouted orders echoing in its wake. He waited a little longer, finishing his tea, before he stood up and left.

Speed was now of the essence, so he hurried his pace as much as his aching leg let him and made the best of his sense of direction to get to the ring and then back to the pawnshop. Grisha ran past him and he made a minimal pause to gawk at them like everyone else around him, just so he wouldn’t stand out. As he walked, the words ‘Sun Summoner’ and ‘Shu’ followed him like a flock of famished birds. It seemed like his ruse was working and Kaz allowed himself a moment of self-satisfaction at the result. At the pawnshop, he got a piss poor price for the ring, as the pawnbroker either couldn’t tell its real value or was a better swindler than he looked. Either way, there was no time to waste with bargaining. Kaz had to get rid of the ring as quickly as possible and the sell was just for a bit of coins until they were out of Ravka, anyway; the real grab would be when they would sell the rest of the jewels in Ketterdam.

By the time he made it back to where the others were waiting for him in the woods, all the Grisha swarming around had put him on edge and he was eager to get going. Once he got there, however, he realized that they were in a bit of a situation.

“Malyen Oretsev.” Kaz repeated the name, studying the young man who was apparently Alina’s childhood friend. His gaze was defiant but he held himself stiffly and was tight-jawed from hidden pain—he was probably injured but unwilling to show it. He was covering it well, but Kaz was an expert at concealing pain. “What’s your job in the army?”

“I’m a tracker.”

That explained how he’d gotten so close without Inej and Jesper noticing him. “We made a deal with Alina,” Kaz said. “To protect her until she reaches West Ravka.”

“We don’t need your protection,” Malyen Oretsev said. “Alina and I can make it out on our own.”

Kaz gritted his teeth. It was fine if those two lovebirds wanted to traipse the country on their own with the Black General after them, and the Saints help them on how to cross the Fold, but then Alina would probably want her jewels back and that wouldn’t do. Kaz would not go back to Ketterdam empty-handed. And also—he glanced at Inej, at her worried furrowed brow, and wondered what she would do if Alina broke off from them. Would she go back with Jesper and him or would she follow her Saint to protect her? It bothered him that he had to wonder.

“You do whatever you want,” he said, even though he emphatically didn’t want them to do what they wanted, “but we have a safe passage across the Fold, so it might be worth considering, don’t you think?”

“A safe passage across the Fold? Really?”

“Well, how do you think we got here? We left Ketterdam about a month ago—you know that’s not long enough to go all the way around through Fjerda.”

“Mal,” Alina said pulling onto his sleeve. “Maybe it’s better to stick with them until we cross the Fold.”

“Alina,” her friend said, giving her a betrayed look.

“There’s safety in number, and they were competent enough to infiltrate the Little Palace. If it were just the two of us, we would never be able to let our guard down and you—” Her voice dropped to a murmur. “You’re injured, aren’t you?”

“I’m fine.”

“I know how you look when you’re not fine.”

Kaz sighed and turned away from the two friends, letting them debate the matter between themselves. The important thing was that Alina wanted to stay with them, whatever her reasons; she would find a way to convince her friend. A good tracker might be useful, though Malyen Oretsev also looked like he could make trouble for them if he got into his head that he needed to defend Alina from the Ketterdam thieves. But this was a headache for later, so Kaz pushed the worry at the back of his mind.

“Did you manage to sell the ring?” Jesper asked him. “Grisha didn’t get in your way?”

Kaz got the purse of coins from the inside of his coat and dropped it in Jesper’s palm, letting him count the money. “I handled the Grisha. But the Black General himself is there so we need to get out of here as soon as we can.”

“That’s not a lot,” Jesper said with a grimace, having finished counting already.

“You’re welcome to go back and negotiate a new deal,” Kaz said. He looked over his shoulder to check on Alina and her friend, and saw that they were still engrossed in an animated murmured conversation. He caught Inej looking at them too and said, “Don’t worry. They’re staying.”

“I know.”

He wanted to ask her what she would have done if Alina had wanted to leave with her friend. The question burned his tongue but he didn’t dare ask it. After all, this was none of his business. If he got the money to pay back Heleen, then Inej was free to do whatever she wanted and follow whoever she wanted. If what she wanted was to run after something as nebulous as salvation, then so be it. Paying back her indenture didn’t mean that Kaz owned her. So he didn’t ask, and instead turned again toward Alina and Mal. It looked like they’d finally reached a decision—Alina was smiling up at Mal, clutching his arm, and he smiled back bashfully. They looked too entranced by each other to remember that people were waiting for their answer, so Kaz cleared his throat and asked, “So, what’s it going to be? Because we need to leave now—the Black General is in Ryevost and when he finds the ring, which he will soon, he’ll know for sure that you’re around.”

Alina shook herself out of her contemplation. “Right, yes. We’re coming with you. At least until we’ve crossed the Fold, and then we’ll go our own way.”

“All right,” Kaz said. “We have two horses and there are five of us. We can’t risk going back to Ryevost to steal a horse, so—”

“I can walk,” Mal said.

“No, Mal, you’re hurt,” Alina protested. “I’ll walk.”

“No, no, you should—”

“All right, all right,” Jesper cut in, raising his hands in a gesture of appeasement, “I’ll walk, okay? But Kaz is right, we’ve been wasting too much time already.”

“We’ll take turns,” Kaz said. Jesper cast him a look, as though he were about to dispute the decision. Fortunately, he was smart enough to hold his tongue. “At least until we can get another horse. Now, let’s go.”

Chapter Text

The trek through the woods was grueling, even though the terrain was mostly flat. The cold was bitter and only Mal was properly dressed for it, they were all exhausted from the previous day and night’s events, and they had to be careful that the horses wouldn’t hurt themselves as they made their way through the forest growth away from the path—although, since one of them was always walking by the horses, they wouldn’t have been going very fast anyway. The threat of the Grisha and Alek—no, General Kirigan—looming at their backs was a constant weight on Alina’s mind. If he caught up with them, what would he do? Would he try to charm Alina with honeyed words again or would he drop the mask and capture her? Would he kill Mal? Of course he would—he needed Alina, but he had absolutely no use for Mal. That last thought stifled any hint of regret that she might have felt about fleeing the Little Palace and it made her push further, stomping on her exhaustion and discomfort.

When it wasn’t either of their turns walking, Alina rode behind Mal, her arms looped around his waist and the side of her face against his broad back. This was very different from what riding with Jesper had been, both more comfortable and more embarrassing. She’d known Mal for so long; as kids they’d hugged almost every day, had run through the fields holding hands, had bumped shoulders and tussled and rolled together in the grass. They weren’t kids anymore and nothing made Alina more aware of it than being so close to him that the warmth of his body heated her cheek and his musky smell invaded her nose. He must not have bathed in days, though the cold meant that he wasn’t sweating much and the smell wasn’t unpleasant. Quite the opposite, actually—the thought made Alina’s face heat to the point that for a moment she couldn’t feel the cold anymore.

“You said you wrote me letters,” she murmured into his back. “How many letters?”

The sound of her voice was muffled by his coat, and yet he somehow heard her. “I wrote you every day,” he said. “I swear I did. And I sent all the letters to the Little Palace. I don’t know why you didn’t get them.”

Alina had stayed at the Little Palace for months, so this meant Mal had written her dozens of letters. Mail got lost sometimes, but it didn’t make sense that none of those letters had made it to the Palace—unless someone had intercepted them, of course. Alina was hating more and more the picture this painted of Genya.

“I think I let the wool be pulled over my eyes at the Little Palace,” she said. “There were people I thought I could trust, and now I realize I shouldn’t have.”

She expected him to ask about General Kirigan and the sort of relationship him and Alina had—when they’d talked earlier, she’d slipped up and called him ‘Aleksander’—but instead Mal said, “You were alone. You had to trust someone. But… are you sure you can trust them?”

He didn’t need to point his finger or his chin for Alina to know he was talking about the thieves from Kerch. Jesper and Inej were at the front and riding the other horse while Brekker doggedly limped next to them. He’d insisted on walking, which Inej and Jesper clearly objected to, though they hadn’t said it out loud. Alina had thought earlier that his cane was for show, because it was a beautiful object, clearly meant to draw attention to itself, and she didn’t remember him limping when he’d acted as a guard at the Little Palace. By now, it was clear that he really needed it. Inej and Jesper never commented on his limp, never asked him in how much pain he was or offered him help to get down or on the horse. The three of them were as different as could be, but there was such a synergy between them that it made Alina wonder what their story was. How had they come to working together and why had they taken so many risks to come here in East Ravka? Though she’d never had much of it, Alina couldn’t imagine undertaking something so dangerous for money. So how could she trust people whose motivations she didn’t understand?

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think we can rely on them at least until the Fold. After that we’ll have to be on our guard in case they try to break their promise.”

“I don’t like this,” Mal said, in the tone he used when he’d already resigned himself to following her lead.

“I know. Thank you for staying by my side anyway.”

“There’s nowhere else I would rather be.”

The sentiment was nothing that Mal hadn’t expressed a hundred times, but maybe because they’d been apart for months, maybe because of their position, the words made Alina blush again. She was happy, she realized, here in the woods, in the cold, riding a stolen horse with the most dangerous people in the country looking for them and three no less dangerous people guarding their backs. The pomp of the Little Palace that had so dazzled her felt like no more than a game of smoke and mirror now, illusory and insubstantial. Being with Mal, having her arms around him—this was real. It would have been meaningless to thank him again with words so she didn’t, but only pressed a little closer to him.

By the time twilight draped itself over their heads, lowering the temperature by a good few degrees, Alina felt a lot less happy with her life. Her buttocks were killing her and the ride had stiffened the muscles in her legs. When she got down the horse, she would have fallen on her face if Inej hadn’t caught her, her legs as useless as two wooden sticks.

“Sit here,” Inej said in a quiet, diffident voice, leading Alina to a gnarly root that stuck out of the ground. “Jesper and I will make a fire.”

Alina thanked her with a nod. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with Inej’s obvious worship, though the young woman kept it understated. Despite having grown used to her powers and the responsibility they carried, it was humbling to witness the proofs of Inej’s devotion, especially since Inej didn’t live in Ravka anymore, which meant that it wasn’t hope to see the Fold disappear that moved her. This was faith, sincere and unadulterated. To Inej, you’re a miracle, Jesper had said. Many other people must be feeling the same as Inej and the weight of their expectations was huge and frightening.

“I’ll help with the fire,” Mal said, but Alina tugged on his hand until he sat down next to her.

“How bad is it?” she asked him.

“How bad is what?”

She raised an unimpressed eyebrow at him. “Your injury. Or injuries. I see the way you’re moving, the way you pinch your mouth. Don’t pretend with me.”

He sighed. “One is an old injury. The other is just a scratch, some trouble at the Little Palace.”

He’d lowered his voice to talk, as if he didn’t want the others to know he was injured. Alina thought that at least Brekker knew, as he’d given Mal a thorough up and down look and he didn’t seem to be a man who missed much. But if it made Mal feel better to think he’d successfully hidden it, then Alina would let him have this.

“You’ll have to show me,” she said. “I can make the poultice that Ana Kuya used to make. I’ll add cloves for the pain.”

“All right, but not now. It’s too cold. I get goosebumps just thinking about taking off my shirt.”

“That’s fair,” Alina said, shivering at the idea of the cold biting air on her skin.

Inej and Jesper had a good fire going and they gestured at Alina and Mal to get closer. Mal got up and reached down to help Alina to her feet, then they went to the fire and sat down with Inej and Jesper. Brekker was a little further away, though not far enough that he wouldn’t feel the heat of the fire, sitting with his back against a tree. His cane was between his legs, held in place by his knees, both of his hands curled around the crow head. Alina envied his thick leather gloves, as her own fingers felt like little lumps of icy flesh. Even rubbing her hands together wouldn’t wake up any feeling in them, so she brought them closer to the fire, until the flames could almost lick the tips of her fingers. Mal, Inej and Jesper did the same and for a long moment no one talk as they savored the heat. Alina glanced back at Brekker, who was staring at the fire as though hypnotized by the flames, and she wondered why he wouldn’t come and sit with them.

“Why a crow?” she asked, more to force him to interact than because she was truly devoured by curiosity.

Though he’d seemed deep in thought, Brekker replied without missing a beat, “It’s the symbol of our gang, the Dregs.” He looked up at her, his eyes hidden behind the twin reflections of the fire. “And I like crows. They remember.”

“Remember what?” Alina asked, intrigued in spite of herself.

“They remember human faces. They remember who wronged them, but also who helped them.”

His eyes flickered away, as if he thought he’d said too much. Both Inej and Jesper were looking at him with an attentiveness that gave Alina the feeling that this tidbit about crows meant more to them than to her, though she was too tired to try and figure it out.

“So you’re all part of… a gang,” Mal said, the distaste he felt at the notion ill-concealed in his voice. Mal had never been very good at hiding what he thought. “A gang from Ketterdam.”

“An astute deduction,” Jesper said, his tone mocking but lightly enough that Mal didn’t seem to take offense. His stomach rumbled loudly and he grimaced. “Saints, I’m famished. I don’t suppose we have any food left? If there was still light, I would go hunt something, but I’ll just trip over my own feet in that darkness.”

“You know how to hunt?” Alina asked, surprised.

“I know I look cultured and everything, but I haven’t always lived in Ketterdam. I used to live in a farm, and sometimes we went hunting, me and my Da. I’m a wicked shot,” he said, patting a lump at his side where one of his guns was concealed under his jacket.

“I think it would have been nice to live in a farm,” Alina said wistfully. This was how she’d always imagined peace, some quiet place in the country far from the war and the army. She glanced at Mal, imagining him with a fork rather than a rifle.

“It’s nice, I guess, but it’s boring too,” Jesper said offhandedly, but without his usual humor. The side of his mouth was crooked in a small, self-depreciating smile. “And boring has never really agreed with me. So, you said you two are childhood friends, right? What’s the story here?”

“Why do you want to know?” Mal asked warily.

“We’re camping in the woods—” As if on purpose, an owl hooted in the distance. “—and it’s so cold that I can feel it actually shave off years of my life. What’s there to do but make small talk? We don’t know each other but we’ll be travelling together for a while. We might as well be friendly.”

Mal looked sheepish, obviously uncertain how to reply, so Alina saved him from having to apologize by saying, “We grew up together in an orphanage in Keramzin—that’s a small village in the south, close to the border.”

“Ah. I bet that wasn’t easy, growing up there looking like you do.”

“No,” Alina said wryly. “It wasn’t.”

They chatted for a little longer, amicably enough. Jesper shared funny anecdotes about his childhood at the farm and Inej talked about traveling with her parents as an acrobat. Neither of them explained how they’d gone from this to a life as criminals in Ketterdam. Eventually, even Mal got out of his sullen silence and told them how Alina used to defend him from bullies at the orphanage. Brekker was the only one who didn’t join in the conversation, though Alina would bet that he was aware of every word that was being said. It was a strange atmosphere of levity that was a little too careful to be entirely casual. Alina was starting to like Inej and Jesper in spite of herself, but she forced herself not too relax too much. Inej looked sincere, but Jesper was a charmer and even now he might be working at making them lower their guards.

When the fire started to fizzle out, Brekker said, the sound of his voice startling after he’d been silent for so long, “We should go to sleep. The earlier we leave tomorrow morning, the better it’ll be.”

He sank down against his tree, shoulders hunched, eyes closed, clearly meaning to go to sleep right here and then. Jesper wrapped his hands together and rubbed them, telling Inej, “It’s cold as hell here, we should cuddle.” Inej lifted an eyebrow at him and he added, “No, really, we’ll freeze to death otherwise. You know I’ll be a perfect gentleman.”

She snorted, but didn’t protest when she lay down on the ground next to the fire and Jesper settled behind her with an arm around her middle. Alina and Mal looked at each other. “He’s right,” Alina said hesitantly. “It’s really cold and we should—it would be better if we—”

“Yes. I mean, if you don’t mind it,” he said.

“I’m the one offering.”

“All right then,” he said, opening his arms. “Come here.”

Mimicking Inej’s position on the other side of the fire, Alina lay on her side, her head cushioned on her forearm and her back set against Mal’s chest. His body warmth engulfed her as he carefully draped himself around her. She could feel the vibrations of his heartbeat through her back and she sighed, tired enough that it felt soothing rather than embarrassing.

“Kaz, you should join us,” Jesper said.

Brekker opened an eye, his mouth pursing. “No, thanks."

“Forget your dignity and come join us, you’ll be freezing over there on your own. I swear I’ll still respect you in the morning.”

“I’m fine.”

Alina’s eyelids had been drooping, but she forced them open to follow the argument. Jesper rose on an elbow, all his humor gone, exasperation straining his features. “Why are you being so stubborn about this? I know you’re not the cuddly type, but this is just practical. Are you really going to let yourself die out of pride?”

“I’m not going to die.”

“People do die from exposure,” Alina said, but snapped her mouth shut when Brekker addressed her a withering look.

“See? Listen to the Ravkan girl.”

“Jesper, shut up and go to sleep,” Brekker snapped, his hands tightening around the crow head of his cane. The tendons in his neck were pulled taut, as if he were fighting against something.

Jesper opened his mouth to reply, but Inej pulled on his arm to force him down. “Jesper, leave him alone.”

“What? I thought you’d agree with me on this!”

Inej twisted around and said something to Jesper, too low for Alina to hear. Jesper grumbled a few indistinct words, maybe in Kerch, and shot another look at Brekker, but he settled back down behind Inej. Brekker had closed his eyes again and his face, pale in the flickering darkness, expressed nothing that Alina could read.

“Those people are weird,” Mal whispered in Alina’s ear. She let out a little huff of breath to signal her agreement and snuggled back against him. Whatever was going on between the Ketterdam thieves, this was none of her business and they would have to handle it between themselves.

—-

To the others, traveling through the woods in such relentless cold must have been an ordeal, especially to Kaz and Jesper, who were unused to that kind of harsh weather. Ketterdam’s weather was sullen and rainy, but usually mild, and Novyi Zem was warm and dry. But to Inej traveling just felt nostalgic, like walking behind the carts as her family traveled to another town, her mother and brother beside her, her father’s back as her line of horizon, like singing around the campfire at night or waking up to a different landscape every day. Movement soothed her, got her out of her head despite all the added time to think; she hadn’t realized until now how much staying in the same place for years had calcified her heart, like a bird tied to its perch with a leash for so long it forgot it could fly.

Alina and Mal bore the hardship of travel well, as they must be used to journeying for long distances through the winters with the First Army. Mal seemed to be injured, but Alina ground plants to make a poultice for him and he probably wouldn’t want the rest of them to point it out. Jesper complained constantly and listed all the things he would do once they were back in Ketterdam: luxuriate in a hot bath, sleep in his bed for an indecent amount of time, drink all he could get his hands on, gamble until his eyes crossed. Kaz, for his part, was entirely silent, locked in a tight-jawed determination to keep walking the exact same amount as the others despite it being obviously agony for him. The second night, he refused again Jesper’s offer to huddle with them, and got up the next morning moving even more stiffly than before. It exasperated Jesper to no ends, so in retaliation he gave Kaz the cold shoulder, a tactic that would have had no chance to ever work on Kaz if making him yield had been Jesper’s purpose. Of course, the reason Jesper made a show of his annoyance was to cover up his worry, because this was a sentiment that Kaz would fiercely reject. Inej worried too, quietly, observing him from the corner of her eye, but she could also see how much he tensed up at the suggestion of snuggling close with them to sleep. This wasn’t pride—though Kaz had it in spades, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to risk himself for it. It wasn’t embarrassment either, but something stronger, more tangled. If they pushed too hard, Kaz was liable to snap. They could handle his anger, but not whatever else he was hiding from them.

After two days of walking, the woods didn’t stop so much as the trees became scarcer until they entered scruffy plains, relying on Mal’s truly impressive sense of direction to get them back on the road to Kribirsk. A more barren country meant less cover for them, especially at night, when they really couldn’t do without a fire, so they started taking watch in shifts so no one would get the drop on them while they slept. When they stopped on the third night, Alina offered to use her power to warm their hands. She did Mal first, then Jesper; when she got to Inej, awe caught the breath in Inej’s throat as she watched the light bloom out of Alina’s palms, illuminating both of their faces, its soft warmth gently enveloping Inej’s hands.

“This is wonderful,” Inej said, which made Alina smile brightly.

Finally, Alina went to Kaz with the same offer, but when she asked him to take off his gloves, he said, “I’m all right. You can save your light for someone else.” It seemed like he’d accepted that Alina was a Sun Summoner, though he’d yet to acknowledge it explicitly.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Alina said. “In fact, the more I use it, the better I feel.”

“I’m sorry to decline, then.”

“Look at him being stubborn,” Jesper whispered to Inej as they both gathered wood for a fire. “I want to punch him in the teeth. He’ll never make it to Kribirsk like this. We’re at least a couple of days away and that’s if everything goes well.”

“We’ll stop in a village on the way,” Inej said. “When we find the road, there should be a few of them.”

“Can’t you talk to him and tell him he’s being an idiot?”

“What makes you think he’ll listen to me?”

“You have better chance than I do, at least.”

Crouching down, Jesper started building the campfire, placing small twigs and dry leaves in the middle of the firepit Inej had previously dug and then crisscrossing bigger sticks over them. Though his tone had been light, Inej could detect something else underneath it. Did he think that Kaz listened to her more than to him? Kaz scolded Jesper often, but he wouldn’t trust just anyone in a job as dangerous as this one. If she tried to tell Jesper this, though, he’d just try to pass his bitterness as a joke.

“I don’t think he’ll listen to me about this,” she said. “He isn’t just being stubborn.”

“Well, if he keels over, we’re leaving him behind,” Jesper grumbled, and Inej concealed a smile at how unconvincing that threat was. If it came down to it, he would carry Kaz on his own shoulders and they both knew it.

After a dinner of roots and the meat on the skinny rabbits that Jesper had hunted for them, they decided on the watches by rolling a pair of dice Jesper had brought with him from Ketterdam. Inej got first watch, which suited her well, and Jesper got second. Kaz got fourth watch; middle-night watches were the worst ones, but of course he didn’t complain. Inej would have offered to switch with him if she thought he would accept—but of course he wouldn’t, so she didn’t.

Sitting by the fire as everyone slept and tending to it to make sure it wouldn’t die, Inej let herself enjoy the quiet and the time to herself. The only vegetation around was puny knee-high scrub, which meant that they were exposed to the cold biting wind and to the sight of anyone who would come near, but also that she would be able to hear someone coming from far away. Dark clouds rolled in the sky and hid the moon, so that all she could see of her companions was what the red-orange glow of the smoldering embers allowed her to see. Alina and Mal were curled around each other like two petals in a rose bud and Jesper was right next to her, the top of his head resting against her hip. Kaz, as usual, was lying on his own on the other side of the fire, his arms crossed over his chest with his hands wedged in his armpits, his chin tucked against his chest, painfully knotted from the cold.

She, Jesper and Kaz had left Ketterdam over a month ago now, embarking on the most dangerous job they’d ever taken in the hope that it would make them rich. They were now camping in an empty plain of Ravka with a living Saint and her childhood friend, hoping that the Grisha wouldn’t catch up to them. What twist of fate had led them here? And where would it lead them next? If Kaz could pay off Inej’s indenture, then it opened up possibilities that she’d barely dared to dream. She wouldn’t need to work for Kaz anymore. Looking at Alina’s face, half-hidden behind the veil of her hair, Inej thought that maybe her knives would be put to better use in something other than crime. This was an idea that had been nagging at her for the past few days, half-hope, half-unease. She looked at Jesper against her, then over at Kaz, and imagined telling them goodbye after they’d crossed the Fold, letting them go back to Ketterdam without her. This was a heavy thought.

She woke up Jesper when her watch ended and they switched positions, him sitting up and her lying down close enough that she could feel his body heat. She curled in on herself, wrapping her cape around her body and burying her hands in the crooks of her elbows, so that the only exposed part of her was her face, which was protected from the wind by Jesper’s thigh. She fell asleep quickly, deeply, so heavily weighted by exhaustion that she didn’t dream, and it felt like no time at all had passed when she was half-awaken by Jesper lying behind her at the end of his watch. Though his body warmed her back, the fact that he’d moved left her front unprotected. The wind had picked up and it gnawed at her nose and cheeks. She shuddered and made a sound of discomfort, curling in a bit tighter.

“You should turn around,” Jesper whispered, mindful of the sleeping people around them. “You’ll be warmer that way.”

After a moment of hesitation, Inej rolled over to her other side, facing Jesper. He put his arms around her back and pulled her closer, so that she had her nose pressed against his chest. She was warmer that way, but the position was also a lot more intimate and she was now startingly awake. It had only been a few nights, but she’d gotten used to sleeping so close to Jesper. Past the first awkward moment, it had been quite all right. She didn’t like people being so close to her and touching her, especially not men, so it had surprised her how easily her body, which reacted more instinctively than her mind, had accepted Jesper’s closeness. She’d known she trusted him, but not that much, that completely. Knowing that someone had your back on a job wasn’t the same as letting them touch you, or at least it wasn’t to Inej. As she turned toward Jesper her heart started pounding, but she still wasn’t afraid.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

His hands were careful as they met across her back, and he was holding her close but not so tightly that she couldn’t push off easily if she wanted to. This would have been enough to ease any lingering discomfort she might have, but it still didn’t slow down her heart. It was beating hard, but steadily, sending vibrations through her whole ribcage, like the rumble of a faraway storm. With her nose in his jacket, all she could smell was him, which didn’t help with her flustered feeling. This was why she pulled away a little—not because she was uneasy, but because this was stirring something in her that she didn’t know how to address. With a little more distance between them, she could see Jesper’s face looking down at her in the low pulsing light of the fire’s embers. She would have thought that he would be smiling, lightly making fun of her, but instead his expression was uncharacteristically serious.

Inej could hear shuffling behind her, Alina standing up and walking away, probably to go pee behind a bush. The only people left around them must all be sleeping. Jesper was still looking at her in that attentive, sober way, and the air between them was getting heated from their breaths. He wouldn’t move, she realized; he wouldn’t do anything unless she took the initiative. She’d never had that freedom with a man before and it was that thought that made her finally tip her head up so their lips could meet.

She’d been kissed before but had never been the one to start it, so after the first soft press of their mouths, she had a moment of wondering where she should go from here. Jesper starting kissing back then, unhurriedly, half-opening his mouth and gently nibbling her lower lip. The cold tip of his nose bumped against hers. One of his hands drew slow circles on her back. They traded a few more kisses, their tongues brushing lightly but not getting any deeper, until they stopped at the same time in tacit understanding. Inej should have been embarrassed, maybe, but all she felt was sleepy and warm.

“All right?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said, a stupid impulse.

“Don’t worry about it, love,” he said, then smiled cheekily. “It was hardly a hardship.”

She nudged him hard in the ribs and he let out a little ‘oomph’, laughing noiselessly. “We should sleep,” she said, fighting the urge to smile at the sight of him laughing. “It’s another long day tomorrow.”

“You’re right. Sleep. Most important thing on my mind right now.”

Inej opened her mouth but the soft footsteps of Alina coming back to the fire made her reconsider. She didn’t want Alina to know that they were awake and draw attention to them. She addressed Jesper what she hoped was a stern look, then closed her eyes. Jesper moved his arm so she could rest her cheek on it and she fell asleep like that, almost as comfortable as in a bed.

Chapter Text

Waking up with Inej in his arms the next morning, Jesper had a moment of panic as he wondered if he’d ruined his entire relationship with her. Had he pushed her too hard? Had he opened the door to complications that they didn’t need at the moment? Good, reliable friends were a scarce resource in the Barrel and he couldn’t afford to lose even one of them. As she stretched next to him, working out the cricks from a night on the hard cold ground, she gave him a quick, sweet smile. Reassuring, but also not inviting conversation or an open acknowledgement of what had happened. Jesper relaxed; if he’d overstepped, Inej would have no problem letting him know by way of her many knives, and he was fine with keeping to the status quo. What was happening between Alina and Mal was more romance than their odd party on its way to hell could bear, so Jesper didn’t want to question whatever burst of tenderness had made Inej and him kiss.

There was a stream nearby and they took the horses there to drink, taking advantage of the clear running water to clean up a bit, hands and faces mostly, as it was too cold to think about undressing and getting wet. Kaz took place next to Jesper, kneeling on the bank of the stream. Blades of grass hardened with frost cracked under his knees. He’d taken off his gloves to plunge his hands in the water and Jesper looked at them, naked in front of his eyes for the first time. They were pale, obviously seeing very little of the sun, long-fingered and entirely normal-looking.

“What?” Kaz snapped, catching his look.

“Oh, nothing. I just thought there’d be at least claws, that’s all,” Jesper said lightly. “I have to admit I’m a little disappointed. Another myth going to the waste.”

He’d expected Kaz to snort in amusement, maybe the hint of a smirk, the only way Kaz ever reacted to one of his jokes. But Kaz didn’t even do that much; he cupped water in his hands and splashed it on his face without even a glance at Jesper. Disconcerted, Jesper rolled up his sleeves and dipped his hands in the stream. The water was cold enough to be painful and Jesper grimaced at the thought of it coming into contact with his face. Kaz had finished his wash in the time it took Jesper to work up the courage to splash his face. He heaved himself up with an audible groan, a hand clenching around his thigh. This was more pain than he usually showed to anyone, but when Jesper opened his mouth in worry, he was silenced by a glare from Kaz.

“Kaz’s in a weird mood,” he said later to Inej as they were getting ready to leave.

“He’s in pain. It can’t be doing much for his mood.”

“There’s that, but—” But what? Kaz wasn’t a cheerful individual on a good day and right now he must be feeling too poorly to have room for anything else than enduring. Jesper wasn’t such a baby that he couldn’t handle Kaz not reacting to a joke. “Yeah, you’re right. Hopefully we’ll find a village on our way today.”

“Alina says she remembers one that should be about five or six miles from here.”

“Good, good.”

Kaz didn’t make it six miles, or even five miles. He’d been walking at the same stubborn, halting pace for the past few days, clearly suffering but not letting it slow him down, until he apparently couldn’t anymore and then he simply dropped. From the top of the horse that Jesper was riding with Inej, he’d been keeping an eye on Kaz as he walked alongside them, and he saw it happen. Kaz didn’t pause or waver; he just took a step, like all the times before, but his leg didn’t support him and he collapsed on himself like a building whose foundations had crumbled. Jesper stopped his horse and jumped off of it. Alina and Mal had been riding a little ahead, going faster than them since they weren’t trying as much to keep pace with Kaz, and Inej called for them before she slid down the horse too.

“Kaz, are you all right?” Jesper shouted as he dropped to his knees next to his friend.

Kaz wasn’t unconscious, but his jaw was clenched so hard that he couldn’t talk. Jesper put his hands on Kaz’s shoulders, feeling the muscles go hard as rock. Sweat pearled on Kaz’s temples despite the cold.

“Can you stand up?” Jesper asked.

Kaz didn’t respond, but a muscle jumped in his cheek as he gritted his teeth harder. He was breathing harshly through his nose, each breath pushed out of him like a bullet fired. Inej had materialized on his other side, her hands joining Jesper’s on Kaz’s shoulders. Together, the three of them managed to get Kaz upright, but when Kaz tried to take a step his right leg buckled again and he sagged against Jesper, who wrapped his arm more securely around him, feeling him shake minutely.

“It’s fine, we’ll get you on the horse,” Jesper said. “Lean against me.”

Kaz was already leaning against him and Jesper had the feeling that it was entirely out of necessity. He was stiff as a board, not just because of pain but as though every part of his body was trying to get away from Jesper without moving, even with Jesper entirely folded around him. Alina and Mal had made their way back to them and Alina’s head poked from over Mal’s shoulder. “What happened?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Kaz can’t walk anymore,” Jesper said, to which Kaz hissed between his teeth, though he didn’t deny it. “Can you ride?”

“No choice,” Kaz bit out, and there was nothing Jesper could reply to this.

He and Inej helped Kaz onto the horse, and the fact that he let them was a testimony to how bad he must be feeling. Kaz never needed help to do anything, would probably never accept it if offered under normal circumstances. Inej joined him on the horse, taking hold of the reins and sending a look down at Jesper, her smile rueful—they’d known something like this would happen eventually, but there was no satisfaction in being right. Kaz sat on the horse with his back ramrod straight, doing his best not to lean into Inej. Jesper bit back the urge to ask him again if he was all right. He wasn’t, and it would only anger him to have it pointed out.

“Where to?” Inej asked Alina, who pointed at a direction.

“Best I can tell without a compass,” she said. “There’s a village called Lyrov that is big enough to make it on most official maps.”

“We can get food there. Our supplies are getting really low and we still have a way to go before Kribirsk,” Mal said, with only a quick glance at Kaz. Jesper appreciated the effort to spare Kaz’s pride by pretending they wouldn’t be stopping mainly for him. Mal had made no mystery of the fact that he disapproved the life choices of Jesper and his friends, so this was unexpected friendliness coming from him.

“We should get new clothes too,” Inej said. “By now your descriptions must have widely circulated, and maybe ours too. If they caught Arken, then he probably talked.”

“Who’s Arken?” Alina asked.

Inej and Jesper shared a look. “He’s the one who got us across the Fold,” Jesper said. “The train was his, he used it to smuggle out Grisha—called himself ‘The Conductor.’ Turns out that somewhere along the way he went behind our backs and made a deal with General Zlatan to kill you. I guess he made too much profit out of the Fold and couldn’t afford you ruining it. Same with Zlatan, so the two of them were a match made by the Saints.”

“Kill me?” Alina repeated, her forehead wrinkling in confusion. “No one tried to kill me. I wasn’t—” Horror swept over her face like a wave crashing onto the shore. Her hand flew to her mouth, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh no, Marie! Marie was acting as my stand-in for the fete, Genya Tailored her to look like me and if that man tried to kill me then she—”

Inej gave Jesper a reproachful look, then said soothingly to Alina, “She might be all right. Maybe they caught him before he could hurt her.”

Alina was clinging to Mal’s shoulders. “I have to know if she’s fine. I have to know if she—because of me, she—”

“We can’t go back!” Kaz said, his pain-tight voice surprising everyone. “We’ve gotten that far already.”

“No, of course not,” Alina said in a calmer voice, wiping the tear stains on her cheeks. “That would be stupid. But maybe in Kribirsk we can ask around and—”

“If she’s dead or hurt,” Inej said gently, “I doubt that they would let anyone outside of the Palace hear about it. You can’t do anything but keep that hope locked in your heart and let it go for now.”

She must be speaking from experience, as she didn’t know anything of her family’s fate, but you wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at her expression. Alina visibly deflated and Mal gripped one of her hands that was on his shoulder in silent support.

“Let’s go,” Jesper said. He cast another worried look at Kaz’s strained face. “To Lyrov, then.”

Lyrov turned out to be closer than Jesper had dared to hope. They progressed at a glacial pace—Jesper wouldn’t have complained about Inej and Kaz riding faster and leaving him temporarily behind, but it would have jostled Kaz too much. Nevertheless, not even two hours had passed before Jesper caught sight of the first houses. The village was small, but spread out along a narrow river, a handful of squat wooden houses scattered like breadcrumbs in the barren frozen landscape. Jesper and Inej went ahead, leaving Kaz and the horses to Mal and Alina, so they could scout the village for what the inhabitants knew of the events in Os Alta. They didn’t know much, too far from the capital and the main roads and too small to matter. They were friendly and open to chatting with two strangers, entertained by the novelty of it. The villagers mistook Jesper and Inej for a couple and after a quick glance at each other, they silently decided to play along with it.

“Do you have an inn?” Jesper asked without hope. “One of our friends is hurt and it would do him good to sleep in a bed. We’re heading to Adena, so we still have a long way to go.”

“No inn here,” said an old wrinkled man who was chewing on the tip of a clay smoking pipe. “We don’t get much in the way of travelers. But head down the street to the corner house over there. The widow has some free beds since her children have enrolled—two in the First Army, and the third in the Second Army.”

“Thank you, sir. Have a wonderful day.”

The widow’s name was Marinka Khalski and she’d obviously missed having young people to fuss over. She cooed over Kaz and his crippled leg, which would have been funny had Jesper missed the murderous glint in his friend’s eyes. Marinka Khalski—Marinka, she insisted they called her—was a nice little lady who was very generous to offer them hospitality when she didn’t have much to her name, so Jesper did his best to step in when he could see Kaz losing patience. The house only had one room and a woodshed tucked behind it, but there were two beds in addition to the widow’s own. Alina and Mal were offered one to share, and Inej and Jesper the other one. Kaz was welcomed into the widow’s bed, which made him so obviously uncomfortable that Jesper feared this would offend the old woman and offered to switch.

“For now you’ll have the luxury of it to yourself,” he said. “And then tonight you can share with Inej.”

Kaz visibly tensed, diverting his eyes. “It’s fine. One bed is as good as the other.”

They settled Kaz in the widow’s bed and she got him a pillow to support his bad leg. “So young,” she said mournfully. She was a tiny thing, but surprisingly sprite for her age, with a head of wispy white hair and twinkly blue eyes. “How did such a young man end up like this?”

“A careless fall,” Kaz said. “From a roof that I was repairing.”

Even he must be aware of the great favor the woman was doing them, because he would have snapped—or worse—at anyone who would dare pity him, yet his tone was mild as he answered her. Of course, he wasn’t telling her that he hadn’t been on that roof to repair anything, but on his way from a robbery.

“We’ll need to leave tomorrow,” he told them while Marinka was busy puttering with her pans. They were sitting around his bed like at a convalescent’s bed. His face had regained some colors and he looked less pinched around the mouth, so the pain must have lessened now that he was able to rest his leg. “We can’t stay here long.”

“Shouldn’t we stay a little longer?” Alina asked. “I mean, you—” She shut up in the face of Kaz’s scowl.

“If they can track us here, what do you think will happen to the nice widow who is housing us?” Kaz said, pinning her with his cold gaze. “I doubt that Ravka is any nicer about treason than Kerch is.”

Alina gaped at him. “Treason? Don’t you think it’s a little—”

“Given who you are,” Kaz said, lowering his voice to a barely perceptible murmur, “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration at all.”

Alina exchanged a helpless look with Mal, as though looking for him to contradict Kaz, but Mal grimaced. “All right,” she said, a note of acidity in her voice. “Point taken.”

“There’s also a risk that the authorities will find Arken’s train if we take too long,” Inej said. “But you also can’t keep going the way you have,” she told Kaz, raising an eyebrow as if daring him to say any different. “We should try and see if we can get a different mode of transportation.”

“I’ll ask around,” Jesper said. “Just an additional horse would be great, because then we would be able to travel a lot faster.”

That evening was one of the quietest, but also one of the nicest Jesper had spent in a while. It wasn’t an evening spent gambling, or partying, or heisting, or anything he’d done for fun those past few years. There was nothing exciting about sitting around a table in Marinka’s stuffy, smoky house and eating her spicy stew. But Jesper hadn’t eaten homemade food in a very long time, hadn’t been doted on for even longer—not since home, in fact. Marinka pegged Alina and Mal as a couple too, despite their protests to the contrary, and kept giving them, as well as to Inej and Jesper, a series of marital advices, some of them so explicit that they made even Jesper himself blush. He was no stranger to sex, but little grandmas should never enquire about the state of his penis.

Kaz stayed in bed the whole time with his bowl of stew, still in the room with them but too far away to take part in the conversation, though not far enough that he couldn’t hear everything. For some reason, this embarrassed Jesper immensely. He kept wanting to turn to Kaz and tell him not to get the wrong idea, that Marinka had just made an assumption they’d judged wise not to disprove. That there was nothing between him and Inej except for friendship, even though—that wasn’t exactly true, was it? But Kaz couldn’t know about that and Jesper felt a strange anxiety at the idea of him knowing, the kind that was akin to ants crawling under his skin. From the way Inej glanced at Kaz too, it looked like she was feeling similarly.

They went to bed so early it was indecent, as soon as the sky started to darken, because this was Marinka’s habit and she was their hostess, so they had to abide by her rules. Sleeping in a bed with Inej was a wholly different experience from sleeping next to her in the woods. Out there, the cold had made it necessary to cuddle. It was a matter of survival, not of desire. A bed was a different matter, a more intimate place. This one was narrow, just big enough for two, and it dipped in the middle, making them slide against each other even though they’d settled on opposite sides with a few respectable inches between them. Inej slept on her stomach, hands folded under her body, while Jesper lay on his side with his back against her. The mattress moved with her deep breathing and the covers trapped and mingled the heat of their bodies. Alina and Mal were sleeping in the bed next to them, both of them breathing noisily enough that it almost counted as snoring. Kaz and Marinka were further away; Kaz wouldn’t be able to see Jesper and Inej unless he sat up, and yet Jesper fell asleep with the odd conviction that his friend was watching.

—-

Jesper found them better than an additional horse—he found a cart, an old, rickety one with no cover, which would probably fall apart if they tried to drive it too fast but would still allow them to go faster than when one of them had to walk. Privately, though he wouldn’t admit it to the others, Kaz was relieved that he wouldn’t have to walk or ride anymore. The past couple of days were lost to him in a haze of constant agony and it was astonishing how much more clear-headed he felt when he woke up after a night of sound rest. It was a good thing, because when they would reach Kribirsk he would need all of his mind to avoid the Second Army and maneuver Arken’s train—but clear-mindedness had its downsides too. There were things he would rather not think about and pain had a way of making it impossible to focus on anything else.

Inej procured them new clothes that she collected from all around the village, which allowed Mal to get out of his First Army uniform and Kaz, Inej and Jesper to blend better with the locals. Kaz had never seen Inej in a dress before, and even though it was the sort of dress that was made to keep warm rather than to flatter, it made him pause for a moment, the time for his vision of her to adjust to something more… feminine.

“Nice,” Jesper said, giving Inej a once-over, to which she rolled her eyes.

“Don’t start,” she said.

Mal was helping Alina tie the strings of her skirt and they were talking softly to each other, while Jesper kept teasing Inej about wearing a dress. Kaz turned away from them, pretending to fiddle with the buttons of his skewed collar. His heart beat staccato and sweat broke out over his face from the heat of the fire in Marinka’s chimney. He rested a hand on top of a chair’s back, shifting his weight away from his bad leg, and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his new shirt.

He’d hoped his actions would go unnoticed, but no such luck. “Are you all right, young man?” Marinka asked solicitously, at his side in an instant. “You’re welcome to stay a little longer with me. Give that leg of yours some time to rest.”

Kaz’s gloved fingers scratched against the varnish of the wooden chair. She was being nice, empathetic. Some people managed it just fine; it wasn’t Marinka’s fault if it felt the same to him as bone grinding against bone. “My leg is fine. Thank you,” he added after a slight awkward pause. She gave him a doubtful look and he amended, “As fine as it can be. It’s been that way for years and I’m used to it by now.”

“We just think we get used to pain,” she said, raising her hands and showing him her swollen and deformed finger joints that shaped her fingers like hooks. “I know what it’s like. My hands have been that way for decades, long before I could be called an old woman. I used to try to ignore the ache, but it never made it go away.”

“We have to leave anyway,” Kaz said, releasing the chair. “We’re expected in Adena and we’re already late on schedule.” He turned toward the others, effectively cutting the conversation short, and asked, “Is everyone ready?”

His question was met with a chorus of affirmative answers and Kaz headed outside. The cold air bit his cheeks, but it was welcome after the stifling heat inside. Kaz closed his eyes and threw his head back. The rumble of the others’ voices came up behind him so he opened his eyes and shook himself, readying for the trip that was coming. Having the cart was a good thing on a practical level, but it also meant closer quarters than he was comfortable with.

Jesper had harnessed their horses to the cart and took the reins first, then alternated with Inej and Mal. Though it was cold, the weather was sunny and Marinka had given them blankets, as well bread rolls and dry meat. The swaying motion of the cart became a lull after a while and Kaz found himself unexpectedly napping. He’d only intended to close his eyes for a moment but when he opened them again, the sun had moved in the sky and they’d switched drivers. Jesper was holding the reins, sitting with Mal next to him, the two of them talking in low tones with surprising friendliness. Kaz pushed himself in a straighter position and rubbed his face, trying to shake off the sense of fuzzy unreality that came with waking up from a deep sleep in the middle of the day. A blanket slid off his shoulders, which he was pretty sure hadn’t been there earlier. He looked up and his eyes met Inej’s, who was sitting with her arms around her knees. Next to her, Alina was curled into a ball and covered with another blanket.

“Thank you,” Kaz said to Inej, trusting that she would know he meant for the blanket. He flexed his fingers and shook his legs, trying to bring back feeling to them; despite the gloves and the blanket, the cold and the lack of moving had made them numb.

“Did you have a good sleep?” she asked.

“Good enough. How long was I out?”

“An hour or so. We’re getting close to the crossing. We’ll be there by midday, I think.”

“Good,” Kaz said, making quick mental calculations. “We can be in Kribirsk by tomorrow, then. We’ll have to be careful; the Second Army and General Kirigan will have moved quicker than we have and they’ll know we need to go there to cross the Fold.”

“Probably,” Inej said. Her dark eyes searched his face for something, long enough for him to find the scrutiny uncomfortable. “How’s your leg?” she asked.

He stifled a groan. “Not you too. I’ve had enough of Marinka trying to mother me.”

“I’m not trying to mother you,” Inej said, her mouth pursing in her telltale sign of annoyance. “I need to know how you’re feeling to factor this into our traveling time. We can’t have a repeat of what happened yesterday.”

Kaz worked his jaw, wanting to protest, but he couldn’t deny that she was right, even if he didn’t like it. By collapsing yesterday he’d made the whole group lose almost an entire day. “It’s better,” he answered truthfully. “It’s hurting a little worse than usual, but not having to walk today will help.”

She nodded, her expression softening into almost a smile, then her eyes drifted to the landscape around them. They’d entered less barren country, and the vast expanses of woodless plains were now divided into patches of land that were obviously fields, with tiny villages spotting them. Kaz’s attention wasn’t on the landscape, though, but on Inej herself. The monotony of traveling in the cart and not having to watch where he stepped or worry about anything else gave him an excuse to observe. No one else was paying attention to him. He could let his eyes linger on the curve of her jaw, the fullness of her mouth. He remembered her in the flickering light of the fire two nights ago as she and Jesper kissed, the way Jesper’s hands had looked on her back. He’d blearily woken up from a dream he couldn’t remember now and had turned toward them instinctively, catching them in the middle of a kiss. They weren’t aware he’d seen them and he saw no reason of letting them know. He wasn’t their keeper and they could do whatever they wanted with themselves.

“What?” Inej asked him. He should have known that she would feel it when someone stared for too long. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” he said in the most pathetic lie he’d ever told. Thankfully, Inej merely raised an eyebrow at him and didn’t push further.

As Inej and he had anticipated, it was midday when they reached the Sokol River where it split in two and gave birth to the Obol River. There, a ferry allowed travelers to cross to the other side in exchange for a few coins. A little girl in a bright red dress collected the fee, while a man with a bushy beard and arms like tree trunks rowed the flat barge—probably the girl’s father, if the attentive way he looked at her when she dealt with travelers was any indication. Alina wrapped a scarf over her hair and kept her head down while Jesper turned on the charm and chatted exuberantly at the girl and the boatman to draw their attention away from Alina, tipping both of them generously. With their cart and horses, there wasn’t any room on the barge to welcome other passengers, which meant less chances for idle people to wonder who they were. The boatman focused on rowing with the kind of serene boredom that came with doing a habitual task that still demanded focus. The crossing was uneventful and none of them talked, as Kaz had instructed them beforehand, because the less the boatman could register of them, the better it was if he got interrogated later on.

They made good time in the afternoon and then slept for the night on the side of the road in the cart, which was marginally better than on the ground, especially with the blankets. Kaz slept next to the end of the cart, bundled in his blanket, with Inej and Jesper on his other side. If there was any more kissing happening during the night, at least he slept too deeply to be aware of it. As soon as they arrived in Kribirsk the next day, Kaz sent Alina and Mal book them a room in an inn with the instruction to stay in there until they were back. As expected, the Grisha were everywhere in the city and it would be best not to give them opportunities to recognize Alina. Meanwhile, Kaz, Jesper and Inej went to check on Arken’s train, but as soon as they got to the area, it was clear that something was wrong.

“Too many Grisha around here,” Jesper mumbled. They’d taken cover under an abandoned cart, the three of them lying side to side on their stomachs. “Not a good sign.”

“They’re forming a cordon,” Inej said. “They must have found the train.”

“Let’s try and get closer.”

Kaz heard Jesper bite back a protest, but he’d already started crawling on his elbows and knees in the tall grass and ignored it. Shuffling sounds let him know that Inej and Jesper were doing the same, however reluctantly. The growl of the ever-present storm wrecking the Fold almost covered the sound of his pounding heart. If the Grisha had found the train, then it would be near impossible to get to it. Kaz didn’t like the word ‘impossible’ as a matter of principle, but at least it would be a major obstacle. The gears in his brain were already reeling as he sifted through different options, half-formed plans examined and discarded in a few seconds, until he stopped and flattened against the ground—he was dangerously close to the Grisha now, and it was only because of the permanent twilight caused by the Fold that they hadn’t been caught yet. He squinted, trying to make sense of what he was seeing of the train in-between the Grisha guards. The shape didn’t match what he remembered of it and it looked—

Inej gasped. “They blew it up,” she said in a breath. “They must be guarding the remains so no one will try and figure out how it worked.”

“Is it too soon to appreciate the irony?” Jesper asked in a low murmur.

Kaz clenched his fists hard, his knuckles digging into the hard ground, and didn’t reply.

Chapter Text

The wait was nerve-wracking. In the tiny room that she had rented with Mal using half of the coins from the sell of the iridium ring, Alina paced between the window and the door about a hundred times. Mal was sitting on one of the beds, watching her—not knowing whether Kaz meant for all of them to stay the night or just for her and Mal to hole up here for the time being, they’d asked for a room with two beds. The two narrow beds framed the only window, and there was also a table, a hardback chair and a corner washstand. From the window, Alina had an unencumbered view of the Fold’s shimmering darkness beyond the sea of roofs, the highest point being the glass dome of the Kribirsk Archives. Because of the Fold, the time of the day was hard to tell and she didn’t have a watch. How long had the others been gone? One hour? Longer?

“What do you think is taking them so long?” Mal asked. He’s started cleaning his rifle and was now scrubbing the bore. Alina knew how to do this in theory, but she couldn’t do it as unthinkingly as Mal did, as if his hands were moving on their own. “You think they ditched us?”

“What? No!” Alina replied, stopping halfway between the window and the door. “They wouldn’t—”

But what wouldn’t they do, really? They’d come to Ravka to kidnap her. The horses that had taken them all the way from Os Alta to Kribirsk were stolen from the Little Palace. They’d disguised as guards to sneak in. What did Alina know about what they would or wouldn’t do? She swallowed a sour taste in her mouth. She really was such a fool, even after everything that had happened at the Little Palace, after Kirigan, after Genya. She’d sworn that she would be on her guard but she’d let herself be lulled into a false sense of safety by Inej’s quiet devotion, Jesper’s exuberant friendliness and Kaz’s physical fragility. Cold nights and hardships brought people together whether they wanted it or not.

“We’ll wait a little longer,” she said finally, “and if they’re not back then we’ll—”

The door flew open so suddenly that Mal and Alina both startled. Mal dropped his rifle and pulled out a knife, jumping to his feet. Alina cast her hands forward with a flash of light and the people who’d come in hunched and groaned.

“Alina, it’s us, it’s us! Stop that light for Saints’ sake!”

It was Jesper’s voice, so Alina immediately dropped her light. In front of her stood Jesper, blinking owlishly, his entire face scrunched up in pain. “I think I may never see from my right eye again,” he complained.

“Sorry,” Alina said, even knowing that he must be exaggerating. “I thought you were—”

“Anyone could have seen this,” Kaz said, scowling—probably in part because his eyes were red and watery, but also because he was annoyed with her. “Inej, close the door.”

Inej had been walking at the back, and with Jesper and Kaz being taller she must have been shielded from the worst of the light, because she wasn’t blinking or squinting. She closed the door and stood in front of it, as though guarding the entrance. Kaz walked to the window and looked down at the street below.

“What took you so long? Did you find the train?” Alina asked, at once relieved that the thieves hadn’t left them and irritated at Kaz’s cagey behavior. She felt silly for having worried, but not entirely confident yet that a betrayal wasn’t forthcoming.

“We wanted to make sure we hadn’t been followed here,” Kaz said. His shoulders relaxed and he stepped away from the window. “I think we’re in the clear. And yes, we’ve found the train.”

“Oh. Good. So when are we—”

“But we won’t be crossing the Fold with it.”

“What?” Alina exchanged a look with Mal, who had lowered his knife but hadn’t put it away, then looked toward Inej, hoping for clarification.

“The Grisha blew up the train,” Inej said, her face dark.

“This whole country is cursed!” Jesper said, flopping down on the empty bed. “What are we going to do now?”

“There’s no other way than taking the skiff,” Alina said hollowly. The gears in her mind were reeling on empty, stuck on Inej’s declaration—The Grisha blew up the train. Their safe passage, their whole reason for traveling to Kribirsk, simply gone.

“They’ll be watching it like hawks,” Mal said. “It’ll be impossible to get on it and there’s no other way.”

“Unless,” Kaz said, turning his cold blue eyes toward Alina, “we cross it on foot under the light of Sankta Alina.”

“What?” Jesper squawked.

“Kaz, this is crazy,” Inej said—so neither of them knew about that plan, though Alina wasn’t sure whether it was a good or a bad sign.

“This is the only way,” he said, eyes flicking to his friends before they focused again on Alina. “The train has been destroyed, the skiff is a no go. People don’t cross the Fold on foot because there’s no way to orient yourself and you can’t be sure you’ll find the other side, but if we find Arken’s tracks then we can follow them to the other—”

“People don’t cross the Fold on foot because it’s full of monsters!” Jesper exclaimed. “And it’ll take us ten times longer to cross it on foot than with the train. Saints, I can’t believe I have to point this out.”

“Not to mention that the tracks don’t go all the way to this side,” Inej said. “What if we walk in circles trying to find them?”

“I calculated the distance from how much time passed between leaving the tracks and getting out of the Fold. I can find the tracks. As for the monsters—” He looked at Alina again. “That’s where your light comes in handy.”

“So I’m not a con artist, after all?” she asked him challengingly.

His mouth puckered, but he conceded the point with a nod. “I’ve observed you and I can’t see any trick. You’re the real deal—not a Saint, because I don’t believe in that sort of thing, but I’ll admit you’re a light-summoning Grisha.”

“Thank you for your endorsement.”

“Will you do it?”

On the other side of the room, Mal clenched his fists and burst into action. In a few snapping movements he put his rifle back together and shoved it into his bag, gathering his coat and scarf that had been lying across the bed.

“We’re leaving,” he said, glaring at Kaz. “The deal was that you help us cross the Fold safely. This isn’t safe; this is Alina risking her life to help you flee the country. Whatever you do, you’ll do it without us.” He was already at the door when he realized that Alina hadn’t moved to join him. “Alina?”

“Where will you go if you can’t cross the Fold?” Kaz asked, as if he could read her inner questioning as clearly as words on a page. When she didn’t reply right away, he pushed in, “General Kirigan will turn around every stone in this country to find you. You’ll put everyone who helps you in danger. And you won’t be any safer outside of Ravka—Fjerda would be a death sentence for you and Shu Han would be the same for Mal.”

He was right, of course, and Alina hated him for being right. In Fjerda, she would live in constant fear of the drüskelle. She’d briefly caressed the idea of crossing the border to Shu Han, a place where for the first time in her life her face wouldn’t get her side-eyed, but the truth was that even if she managed to somehow smuggle Mal in, her Shu was atrocious and she would never be able to pass for a native. Unless they crossed the Fold, they were screwed, and she couldn’t think of any other way to do it than what Kaz suggested. No horse would let itself be taken into the Fold so they would have to walk, and it would be the most nightmarish hike that anyone could imagine.

“We don’t have a choice,” she gently told Mal. “There is no other way.”

“But we could—” he said and then let his sentence die there, because he couldn’t think of a way to end it. He looked at her helplessly, the strap from his back sliding down his shoulder.

With a deep sigh that she dredged up from the bottom of her stomach, Alina asked, “When are we leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning right before dawn breaks,” Kaz said. “We need to leave from the point where the train stopped so I can be sure to find the tracks again and the Grisha are guarding that spot. They’re probably hoping to catch us there. Before dawn is the moment when they’ll be the less on their guards.”

“What if they see us get in?”

“They won’t follow us. They would be insane to do so.”

Alina almost burst out laughing at his pronouncement. You always were someone else’s madman, and tonight they would be the most insane of all Ravka.

—-

Needless to say, no one got much sleep at all that night. They took turns napping on the two beds, none of them bothering getting under the covers. The ones who stayed awake didn’t talk much; Jesper managed to coax Mal into a game of dice and eventually Inej joined them, after she’d finished lovingly sharpening her knives for so long that they could probably cut a breath of wind. Alina was too nervous to play, sometimes sitting on the chair and staring into nothing, sometimes leaping to her feet in a burst of energy and pacing the room. As for Kaz, he stood for hours in front of the window looking at the Fold in the distance, with such an intent look on his face that Jesper wondered whether that strange darkness wasn’t whispering to him.

Mostly, Jesper tried not to think about it. Worrying about things in advance was how people bore holes into their own stomachs. There would be ample time for unutterable terror when they were actually crossing the Fold. Gambling took his mind off things, the adrenaline that coursed through his veins when he played washing over his worries. Of course, they didn’t have enough money to gamble with it, so instead they used nuts that they’d bought from the bar downstairs—but no matter, a win was a win. If Jesper had enjoyed gambling for the sake of money, he would have stopped long ago.

So it was all fun and games until Kaz said, “It’s time” in the same tone a judge used to announce an execution. Jesper swallowed back the urge to say, ‘can’t we wait a little longer?’ None of the others protested. They just looked at each other, a little dazed at the scope of what they were about to do.

“No mourners,” Jesper said in Kerch to give himself heart.

“No funerals,” Kaz and Inej replied at the same time—Kaz in Kerch, Inej in Ravkan.

“What was that?” Mal asked, frowning suspiciously. “That sounded like bad luck.”

“On the contrary,” Kaz said, pulling on the wrist part of his leather gloves, as though adjusting them. “In the Barrel, it’s a way of wishing one another ‘good luck.’ It means that no one is dying today.”

They slipped out of the inn and crept their way around the streets of Kribirsk with all the stealth they used on a job—this early in the morning curfew was still in effect and it wouldn’t do to be caught by the city watch right before they managed to make their escape. They’d traded the colorful peasant clothes that Marinka had given them for more somber colors and communicated exclusively with hand gestures. Jesper had feared that Mal and Alina would blunder the whole way, but they managed to move almost as soundlessly as him, Kaz and Inej; he’d have to tell them to consider reconverting to a life of crime.

The first time Jesper had seen the Fold, he’d been running from people shooting at him and hadn’t had time to form any solid first impression. This time, as they approached it silently, he was struck by how noisy it was. In the frigid pre-dawn, with the rest of the world sleepy and quiet, the Fold groaned and rumbled, intermittent flashes of lighting breaking through the writhing darkness. It looked like a living thing trying to break free of a cage and the thought made a shudder slither down Jesper’s spine. He really had too much imagination for his own good. As they got closer to where the Grisha were guarding Arken’s train, they had to get even more careful. About a hundred yards away from the spot, Kaz signaled them to crouch down in the grass. The Grisha had installed braziers around the train to give themselves light, which made it easy for Jesper to count them: there were about ten of them, three facing directly where Jesper and his friends were hiding in the grass. Though their postures had the slouch of people who had been standing for a long time, they looked attentive enough, heads moving from left to right as they scanned the area. There was nothing around to hide them except grass and it was unlikely that the Grisha wouldn’t see them cross that empty space even if they were as silent as shadows. If they tried to cross further away from the train, though, they would risk missing the tracks and wandering the Fold for days—to call it a bleak prospect was massively understating it.

Fortunately, Kaz had planned for this. “You ready?” he asked in a barely there murmur that was almost entirely covered by the Fold’s growling. “We need to time this just right.”

He looked at them one after the other and they nodded grimly. Jesper pulled out both of his guns and balanced on his toes. Taking a deep breath, Kaz slipped a hand inside his bag and sprang to his feet like a devil jumping out of a box.

“Hey!” shouted one of the Grisha, who wore a blue kefta with the flame embroidery of the Inferni. “Who’s there? Hands in the air and stay where you are!”

Kaz raised only one hand, the one holding the light bomb he’d taken out of his bag. The Inferni man joined his hands together, ready to cast fire, but Kaz was already throwing his bomb. Having anticipated it, Jesper threw an arm in front of his eyes and didn’t waste time dashing in direction of the Fold. The stomping feet of his friends surrounded him; behind him, fire roared, the heat of the flames licking his back. Jesper threw a look over his shoulder, spotted the Inferni, then took a shot. He didn’t look back to see whether it had hit but heard a very satisfying yelp.

“Scatter!” Kaz commanded, and the group spread out to make less easy targets of themselves. The Grisha were good long-range fighters, but even the Heartrenders needed to aim, and any second they wasted deciding who to target was a second won for Jesper and the others.

Grass whipping his legs, Jesper accelerated, all of his might focused on reaching the roaring darkness in front of him. At the corner of his eyes, he was aware of his friends’ movements. He widened his strides, pushed harder against the ground. A gust of wind slashed through the grass right next to him; his heart pounded and his chest hurt, but he couldn’t tell whether this was a Heartrender at work or just the exertion. He was almost there, he just needed to push a little further, just a few more seconds and he’d be—

Something pushed at his back—probably wind, because he didn’t think that any of the Grisha had gotten close enough to physically touch him. As he stumbled, he used the momentum to dive into the Fold, arms thrown forward. He landed head first on the other side, curling into a roll. He scrambled on his feet immediately, out of breath, his guns at the ready, looking around for the others. Inej was a little further on his right, Kaz on his left. Mal and Alina broke through the shadow wall at that moment and converged at once toward each other. Jesper turned around to face where they’d come from, pointing his guns in that direction. He could hear garbled shouting voices, but it was impossible to tell what they were saying. Would they be crazy enough to follow them? They’d given Alina Inej’s headscarf to wear, so it was unlikely that the Grisha had recognized her. Even if they guessed it might have been her, would that assumption be enough to make them go inside?

“Let’s go,” Kaz said. The others had already flocked around him, Jesper being the only idiot who was still gaping at the border with the other side. “Jesper! We need to get further inside—they may be daring enough to just check the edge.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.” Jesper almost sheathed back his guns, but then thought better of it. The real unpleasantness was only just starting, after all.

“Shall I cast some light?” Alina asked with a breathlessness to her voice that Jesper understood too well.

“Not yet,” Kaz said. “If the Grisha can see it, they’ll know for sure that it’s you.”

“Are you going to still be able to find your way?” Jesper asked nervously. “Not that I doubt you, but, um, this really isn’t the moment to get lost.”

“I know the direction. There are poles with bits of metal hanging along the tracks. Keep an eye out for them and stay behind me. I’ll make sure the way is clear.”

“And how are you going to—”

As way of response, Kaz held out his cane and drew a half-circle on the ground in front of it. “Canes can have more than one use,” he said, his voice tinged with smugness.

They followed Kaz in a line, walking so close that they sometimes stepped on each other’s heels or bumped into each other’s backs. Jesper kept holding his guns, Mal had his rifle out and Inej two of her knives. It wasn’t entirely dark inside the Fold, as the flashes of lightning they’d be able to see from the outside cast sudden white light over patches of darkness. The light was quickly swallowed back by the shadow, only ever giving out enough lighting to make out the ruins of whatever had stood on that land before the Fold devoured it. Skeletal trees that looked like the claws of a bird of prey; crumbling walls in the shape of a dying predator’s rotting teeth; abandoned carts lying on their sides like gutted corpses. The reminders that this had once been a place with living people were scattered everywhere, broken and twisted. It was like walking inside someone’s demented nightmare, and maybe it would have been better if the darkness had been total and they hadn’t been able to see any of it—although, on second thought, Jesper didn’t think he’d liked it more if their surroundings had been left completely to his imagination.

“How far until the tracks?” Inej murmured; she was walking behind Jesper, close enough that he could feel the warm puffs of her breaths when she talked.

“Not much farther,” Kaz said. “Tell me if you can see one of the poles. Then we’ll be able to make light.”

This was easier said than done. The darkness and its intermittent flashes of light had a way of playing tricks on the mind. Was that just a tree over there or was there a Volcra perched in it? Was there someone standing next to that building or was it one of the columns marking the spot of a long-gone gate? Jesper had no idea how Kaz kept a sense of what direction they were going in that disorienting décor, but faith was a choice as much as anything else. Jesper had trusted Kaz to lead him on the most dangerous heist either of them had ever tried, so he should trust him to get them out of it.

“There!” Alina exclaimed-whispered. Jesper wasn’t too proud to admit to himself that she’d made him jump, even though she hadn’t spoken very loudly. “I see a pole! Isn’t that a pole?”

They all looked in the direction she was pointing at. It was warmer inside the Fold, maybe because the darkness smothered the cold, or maybe it was Jesper’s nerves making him sweat. A drop of perspiration tickled his temple on its way down and he wiped it with the back of his hand, squinting as he tried to make out the pole Alina said she’d seen. It took another flash of lighting to see it, a long thin shadow that ended in horizontal blades of metal. Jesper was standing so close to Kaz that he could feel his shoulders sag. Kaz hadn’t been entirely confident he was going the right way, then. Well, wasn’t that a comforting thought.

Still carefully following Kaz like a group of baby chicks lining behind their mother, they pattered their way to the pole and there, finally found Arken’s tracks. Relief was palpable from everyone in the group—it would take them hours to walk to the other side, but at least they were sure now that they wouldn’t get lost.

“You can make light now,” Kaz said.

Alina swirled both of her hands and a ball of light bloomed between her cupped palms, then rose above their heads. Alina kept her hands up, as though she was physically holding it up there.

“Isn’t the light going to attract the Volcra?” Jesper asked, casting nervous looks around for movement.

“Fire would, but this is sunlight,” Mal explained in Alina’s stead, as her face was tight in concentration. “They’re afraid of sunlight.”

“All right.” It didn’t make much sense to Jesper, but they would know better than he did. Until a month ago, the Fold had been to him the kind of semi-mythical thing that happened in other countries.

“How long can you keep it up?” Inej asked. “I know you said it doesn’t tire you, but—”

“I don’t know,” Alina said. “I’ve never done it for longer than an hour. I just have to focus.”

Jesper swallowed a sarcastic comment about how very not reassuring this was. Sarcasm would maybe make him feel better for a second, but if it flustered Alina then they might lose their light when they’d only just started on their journey. By now, it seemed obvious that the Grisha weren’t going to follow them into the Fold. That would have been a relief, except that they probably weren’t bothering because they thought the intruders were already under a death sentence. They were not entirely wrong about that. Jesper’s eyes followed the metal tracks, which gleamed under Alina’s light, until they disappeared into the darkness, like a road that ended at the edge of a cliff. This was where they were going, beyond the edge of that cliff, hoping against hope that they wouldn’t die from the fall. Madness, absolute madness. Why had Jesper agreed to that trip to Ravka? He would never had thought so before, but there was indeed something like too much excitement.

Kaz started walking along the tracks and there was no other choice than to follow him. No grass or vegetation of any sort grew in the Fold and in the process of building the tracks the terrain had been flattened, so this was an easy walk, if an extraordinarily stressful one. As they went further into the Fold, Jesper thought he could catch movement at the corner of his eye. At first, he tried to tell himself that it was only his imagination. This place was just messing with him. There was no grotesquely deformed shape flying in the sky and landing on top of a crumbling wall. Jesper forced himself to look over Kaz’s shoulder and stare at the tracks ahead.

He’d only just managed to calm himself down when he heard Inej whisper, “Can you see that? Over there.”

Of course, Jesper couldn’t ignore that ominous murmur and his eyes slid to the right in spite of himself. It wasn’t just one Volcra perched on a wall now, but half-a-dozen of them, crouched on top of ruins, trees or columns with their wings folded behind them, as still as statues but impossible to mistake for anything but what they were.

“Kaz?” Jesper whispered, unable to keep the trembling out of his voice. “I think they’re watching us.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kaz replied. “As long as we have Alina’s light, they won’t come at us.”

From somewhere behind Jesper, Alina sucked in a breath, though her light didn’t waver. He didn’t envy her the pressure she must be feeling right now. They kept walking, but at a slightly faster pace, under the warm glow of Alina’s light and to the rhythmic tap tap of Kaz’s cane. In normal circumstances, they would have taken breaks to rest or eat, but this wasn’t the sort of place that made you want to stop and enjoy the scenery, so none of them suggested it. Sometimes they passed bread rolls or a water flask among them, but they never stopped walking. Whenever Jesper checked on their surroundings he could see that more Volcra had flocked over, maybe following them. The others must have noticed it too but no one brought it up.

It was easy to lose track of time, with no sun in the sky to mark the passage of it. Jesper was tempted several times to ask Kaz to check his watch but always changed his mind. They probably still had a long way to go and he wouldn’t be able to stand knowing how many hours they had left of this. With each new step he thought, we’re almost there, we just have to keep going for a little longer. When his legs started to ache, he figured they must have been walking for a few hours. Were they halfway through it? A little more or a little less?

Everything can become dull when you do it long enough. After a while of no Volcra attack, Jesper’s sense of danger started to ebb and he got lost into the lull of walking. When Alina stumbled, everything happened almost too fast for him to follow, even though he’d always prided himself on his quick reaction time.

“Alina!” Mal exclaimed. “Are you—”

The light vanished. They all ground to a halt and Jesper’s heart leaped, his sweaty hands clenching his guns.

“Alina?” Kaz said, half a question, half an order.

“I’m all right, I’m all right! Give me a moment, I’ll—”

The Volcra shrieked and the flapping of too many wings followed their cry. They must have been waiting for an opportunity like this. Because of the sudden change in lighting, Jesper couldn’t see much, but still he raised his guns and started shooting. Inej’s knives whistled as they flew and Mal started shooting too with his rifle. Jesper felt air move over his head and something hit his shoulder.

“Jesper!”

The shock was such that he fell back and hit the tracks, the metal rail punching him right between his shoulder blades. He lay there for a moment, choking on a kicked off breath, disoriented. He’d dropped one of his guns. Rifle shots and Volcra’s screeches sounded very far away behind the roar of his blood pounding in his ears.

“Jesper! Jesper, can you hear me?”

This was Kaz—even if Jesper hadn’t recognized his voice, there was no mistaking the bossiness of that tone, as if he were commanding rather than asking. “Yeah, yeah, I’m—” Hands pawed at his chest and shoulders, then dragged him up and against a pole. “I’m fine, I—ow.”

Pain radiated through his shoulder and it felt worryingly wet under his clothes. Damn Volcra claw must have gotten in him. Kaz’s gloved hand pressed against the wound, too hard. His ragged breathing sounded too loud in Jesper’s ears.

“You’re bleeding a lot,” Kaz said. He didn’t sound panicked, would even sound composed to most people, but by now Jesper knew him well enough to hear the edge in his tone. If Kaz was getting scared, then the situation must be truly dire. “I should—”

Light shot out from a height and the Volcra screamed in agony. Jesper blinked, trying to ease the blinding pain from the light until he could clearly see his friends—Kaz kneeling next to him, Inej and Mal framing Alina as she held light over their heads. The Volcra had backed away, but they were still hovering close.

“Why aren’t they leaving?” Inej shouted.

“They must be too excited!” Mal replied. He looked over his shoulder at Jesper, then back at the Volcra and took a shot. “They’re smelling blood.”

Jesper shared a look with Kaz, whose eyes were so wide that a perfect circle of white rounded his irises. His shoulders heaved with a deep breath and he set his jaw hard enough that Jesper heard the teeth grind. Jesper had the delirious thought of ‘He’s going to leave me behind. I’m a burden and Kaz has never made an unpractical decision in his life.’

Kaz’s shoulders dropped and he said, “I’m sewing him. Keep them at bay!”

Chapter Text

It was fortunate that both he and Inej kept sewing supply on themselves. You never knew when you would get hurt, and he and Inej each had their own reasons for not wanting to let people get close enough to sew a wound. Kaz got thread and a needle from his bag and resisted the urge to turn around and check how the others were doing. Alina’s light was still up and he could hear the bangs of Mal’s rifle shots, so those two were doing all right, but Inej always fought in almost total silence. He couldn’t afford to lose focus now, though—Inej would do what she always did and survive.

The next step was to take off his gloves and Kaz would have vastly preferred joining the fight, even if he had to bludgeon the Volcra with his cane. His hands were shaking as he pulled on the leather fingers and he bit the inside of his cheek, irritated with himself.

“Wait,” Jesper said, and for a mad second Kaz thought that his friend could read his mind and see all his fears in stark relief. “You’re actually going through with this. You’re going to sew my wound, right there in the middle of a Volcra showdown. That needle—” He pointed at the needle that Kaz was holding. “—is going into my skin.”

“Don’t start whining,” Kaz said. In the background, a Volcra screamed in pain, probably from one of Inej’s knives. “I have to stop the bleeding and there’s no other way. Or would you rather we leave you behind as a distraction for the Volcra?”

He’d meant it offhandedly, but Jesper’s eyes widened and he shut up so fast his teeth clicked, as though he thought that Kaz would actually leave him behind if he kept talking. Stupid, but at least now Kaz could work in peace. He unbuttoned Jesper’s clothes and freed his shoulder, pulling at bloody fabric that was sticking to the wound as Jesper hissed in pain. Blood gushed freely from a puncture hole under Jesper’s collarbone, making it hard to see, so Kaz tore a band from Jesper’s already ruined shirt. Jesper made a garbled sound of protest that Kaz ignored.

“Keep still,” he murmured, as much for himself as for Jesper.

He wiped blood with the piece of Jesper’s shirt, the metallic tang of it filling his nose. He didn’t mind blood, had seen more than his fair share of it, his and other people’s. This wasn’t what made him want to throw up. He tried to swallow, his mouth dry but his face wet. When he finally touched Jesper’s clammy skin with his ungloved fingers to press the edges of the wound together, he couldn’t help a full-bodied heave.

“Kaz?” Jesper said uncertainly.

Jesper would see, there was no hiding from him with the light that Alina shed on them, he would be able to realize Kaz’s weakness, his pathetic feet of clay. But no matter, Kaz couldn’t stall any longer. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, maybe only a few minutes even though it felt like more, but the others were fighting and he had to work quickly. Jesper grunted when the needle first pierced his skin; when it came out, he made a retching sound and turned his face away.

“This is so gross,” he moaned.

Don’t be a baby, Kaz wanted to say, but he couldn’t talk. His ears were ringing so loudly that it drowned the sounds of the fight against the Volcra. For all he knew, it might have stopped already. Cold sweat covered his entire body and his stomach had turned itself inside out like a sock. He would not throw up or faint. He was almost done, the wound deep but not long. Kaz cut the rest of the thread with his teeth, tasting metal on his tongue, cleaned the rest of the blood with the soiled fabric and threw it away.

“Get dressed,” he told Jesper, his own voice no more than an echo at the end of a very long tunnel.

As he got up, his vision went white for a moment but it passed after he blinked a few times. Checking on the others, he saw that they had indeed stopped fighting, though both Inej and Mal were still armed and scrutinizing the area for another attack. Kaz’s eyes lingered on Inej, running up and down her body, but she looked unhurt, only breathing hard and holding herself taut like a bent bowstring.

“Anyone else is hurt?” Kaz asked as he put his gloves back on. Feeling the soft inside of the leather on his skin was such a heady relief that something inside him shriveled.

“We’re all right,” Inej said. “Jesper?”

“I’m fine,” Jesper said, having stood up too. “Did you chase all the Volcra?”

“They’re still here,” Alina said, her face washed white with her intense light. “If I falter again, they’ll pounce.”

Kaz got out his watch to check the time. By now, they were nearing midday in the outside world. “We have about four or five hours left of walking if we keep a good pace. Can you do it, Alina?”

“If I say I can’t do it, will you turn us around and call it a day?” she asked. “Whether I can do it or not, we have no other choice. The only way out is through.”

She was right and he shouldn’t have asked such an inane question. If she couldn’t do it, they might as well shoot themselves here and now, spare themselves getting torn apart by Volcra claws. Speaking of shooting—Kaz saw Jesper’s handguns lying on the ground and bent down to pick them up.

“Here,” he said to Jesper, handing them out to him. Their fingers brushed in the process and Kaz’s retracted instinctively. “You might need them still.”

“Thanks,” Jesper said. His eyes were trying to catch Kaz’s, but Kaz wouldn’t let them make contact. “Really, thank—”

“Let’s go,” Kaz said, turning away from him. They didn’t have time for this; whatever gratitude Jesper thought he owed him could wait until they were out of danger.

They resumed their journey in grimmer resolution. The Volcra had clearly been made bolder by the fight, because a group of them kept circling around their little party like vultures. Sometimes Kaz lost sight of them, but the flapping of wings always served as a bleak reminder that they were never far, that they were there waiting for another opportunity. The thought made him walk faster every time he had it, straining his already aching leg. The others didn’t talk, but their silence was chockfull with tension. Kaz could hear the ruffling of their steps, quickening when he did, their breathing, too loud and rasping. The hours blended into each other. Kaz had meant to be keeping count of the poles, but after their little skirmish with the Volcra he’d temporarily forgotten to do it and he wasn’t sure how many he’d missed. Sometimes he looked at his watch to check on their progression, but he had no other way to tell when they would get close to the end of the Fold—when they’d traveled in Arken’s train there had been no window to the outside. The number of ruins around them had diminished as they progressed, which matched what Kaz knew of Ravkan’s history and geography; at the time the Fold was created, Novokribirsk didn’t exist and the area had been rather empty. This would have normally meant less Volcra around, but unfortunately their group of insistent stalkers wouldn’t be deterred.

“How close are we to the other side?” Jesper asked suddenly. “I swear to the Saints, if we’re not almost there I’ll just sit down and wait for the Volcra to eat me.”

“Are you hurting?” Inej asked. “If you are, maybe we could take a short—”

“No break,” Kaz said curtly. If they stopped, he wasn’t sure he would be able to get back up. “We’re not too far.”

“How long?”

“About an hour. Alina, how are you doing?”

“Fine,” she said in a tone that didn’t invite further questioning.

Kaz’s fingers twitched as he contained the itch to look at his watch again, knowing it was just compulsion at this point. By his estimation, it would be nighttime when they made it out, which would help them escape unnoticed.

“What the—”

A shot from Mal’s rifle, a shriek, the flap-flap-flap of a Volcra’s leather wings. When Kaz whirled around, he saw that Mal, Inej and Jesper had gathered in a circle around Alina, their faces turned up to the absent sky.

“One of them just swooped down on us,” Inej said, her eyes making a sweep of the space above them. “They’re getting more daring.”

“We’ll keep walking like this, with Alina in the middle,” Kaz said. “Keep your eyes open.”

Having to watch out for another attack meant that they had to go more slowly. Kaz held up his cane like a stick, figuring it was more useful to him as a weapon right now. His limp became more pronounced as he shifted his weight to his good leg, but they shouldn’t have much further to go. His blood pounded under the surface of his skin, down to his fingertips. A shadow flicked at the corner of his eye and he swung his cane, meeting something solid. A piercing yowl stabbed his eardrums and claws slashed the air in front of his face, so close he felt it whip his skin. He whacked the monster with his cane again, making sure that the crow’s beak hit it, and then he pulled the cane back to himself and felt it tear through the Volcra’s flesh. With another cry of pain and rage, the monster flew away.

Kaz looked ahead, peering at the darkness and trying to divine if the outside world was over there, hidden behind its veil. How far were they? “Run,” he told the others. “Run as fast as you can.”

This was a gamble, one that might very well kill them. If they were too far from the border to the outside, the Volcra would catch up and have an easy pick of them. But when he said to run, no one hesitated; they all took off like a shot, running inside the narrow corridor of the two metal rails. Soon, Kaz was trailing at the back of the group, but not enough that he would force them to slow down. He ground his teeth and pressed on, pushing his muscles, his tendons to their limits, ignoring the painful rattling up his bad leg from his foot kicking the ground.

When they emerged outside, it was so dark that for a moment Kaz didn’t realize that they’d left the Fold. It was the air that clued him in, its sharpness, the smell of pine and smoke.

“Stop!” Kaz yelled, almost losing his balance with how suddenly he stopped in his tracks. “There are mines over there!”

Mal collided into Jesper and Inej threw out an arm to catch Alina before she could step further into the minefield. Alina’s light was snuffed out like a candle and a night’s darkness fell upon them.

“How are we going to cross the field?” Jesper asked. “I remember that last time I just ran through it and I was fine, but I don’t know if I can be this lucky again. I know we have a living Saint with us—”

“I can only cast light,” Alina said. “I don’t control mines.”

“I think I remember where Arken stepped,” Kaz said with more confidence than he felt. “I’ll take point. Can I have some light?”

“All right,” said Alina, but Kaz stopped her with a cutting motion of his cane.

“Not you. Someone might see us and if they realize who you are—” He let his sentence die there, heavy with implied consequences.

“I have a lantern,” Mal said, taking it out of his bag and lighting a candle to place inside.

“Walk right behind me,” Kaz said.

With the help of Mal’s yellow, flickering light, Kaz examined the expanse of grass in front of him. He could roughly remember where Arken had walked, but if the man had crossed the minefield often, there should be traces of it in the grass where the repeated passage of feet had kept it from growing as much as the rest. After a long moment of careful consideration, Kaz took a breath and started walking, sweeping his cane in light touches to feel for the mines. They didn’t have very far to cross, but it felt too long after the ordeal they’d just been through and Kaz held his breath for most of it. He only released it once they’d walked past Arken’s sign.

Kaz exhaled, his breath forming a wispy cloud, and he leaned heavily on his cane. The crow’s beak was bloody and he wiped it with a gloved hand. “We’re in the clear,” he said. “It’s fine.”

“Oh, thank the Saints!” Jesper exclaimed.

Both he and Alina sat down heavily, while Mal leaned on his rifle, the butt set against the hard ground. Inej joined her hands against her chest and her lips moved in a silent prayer. They’d made it. No one had died today.

—-

The next morning found them bleary-eyed, sitting around a fire half a mile away from where they’d exited the Fold, concealed in a crease of the terrain. None of them had slept despite their exhaustion. Alina had dozed off for a little while against Mal’s shoulder but the rest of them had stared at the fire, each deep in their own thoughts. Inej didn’t know what the others were thinking about but her thoughts were turned toward the future rather than toward their crossing of the Fold. Now that they’d done it, this was time for their group to break in two and for Inej to decide what half she should follow. Was her destiny to serve their days’ Saint or to go back to murky Ketterdam with a bunch of thieves? When she put it that way, it felt like it should be an easy choice. The rawest sort of necessity had made her choose a life of crime and she wondered every day what her parents would think if they could see what she’d become. Why would she let her redemption slip away from her?

“We should get going,” Alina said, blinking at the pale morning sky. “And, uh—this is where we should go our separate ways. We were only supposed to travel together until we crossed the Fold.”

“This was the deal,” Kaz said, his eyes still on the fire. It was unlike him to act the coward, but Inej had a strong feeling that he was avoiding looking at her.

“Thank you for everything,” Alina said.

“You don’t have to thank us. We wouldn’t have been able to cross the Fold without you.”

This obviously took Alina by surprise and she exchanged a look with Mal, then said, “Well, goodbye, then. Unless—” When her eyes shifted to Inej, her gaze questioning, a sudden tension took hold of the group as Jesper and Kaz both looked at her too. “Would you come with us, Inej?” Alina asked. “We’d be glad to have you.”

“I, uh—”

Even though she’d meant to ask Alina this very thing, the ‘yes’ that was on her tongue wouldn’t pass her lips. She looked toward Kaz and Jesper—Jesper and her had shared a kiss a few days ago, but they’d been content to let it rest between them and she didn’t know what it meant to him, or even what it meant to her. As for Kaz… He had taken her out of the lustrous hell that she’d ended up in, had led her not into the light, but into a darkness where she could be her own person; in return, she’d shadowed each of his steps, had watched over him and had found in it a contentment that went beyond mere gratitude. But Kaz was Kaz, a fortress in the guise of a man, and she wouldn’t waste her life fighting a battle if there was no hope to win it. She deserved certainties and protecting Alina would give her that.

“What do you think?” she found herself asking Kaz and Jesper and as she did, she realized that she wanted them to hold her back. If they didn’t, it would break her heart, but all breaks mended eventually.

“You’re not playing fair,” Jesper protested. “If you’re asking if we want you to go, well—” He threw a look at Kaz. “—I certainly don’t want you to go, but I can’t tell you what to do with your life.”

“I want to go where I’m the most needed,” Inej said carefully. With Alina and Mal watching them, she felt self-conscious, as though they were having a private conversation in public.

“We need you,” Jesper said quickly. “We wouldn’t have made it this far without you. Kaz, come on, say something,” he said to Kaz, elbowing him in the side.

“We do,” Kaz said quietly, looking at her from under the rim of his hat.

“Really?” she said, daring him to say more.

His chest heaved as he took a breath and then seemed to hold it, glancing to the side at Mal and Alina, who’d both turned away, understanding the need for at least a pretense of privacy. “I do,” he said, releasing the words with his breath. “Need you.”

Her cheeks grew warm, even though she’d wanted him to say something like this, maybe because she couldn’t believe he would even concede that much. She cleared her throat, trying to compose herself enough that she could pretend the exchange hadn’t meant as much as it did. “All right,” she said. “Then I’m sorry, Alina, I think I’ll go back to Ketterdam.”

“As you want,” Alina said with a small, too understanding smile. “I wish all of you a safe trip back.”

“Same,” Mal said. “Good luck to you.”

“And to you too, friend,” Jesper said, bumping a fist against Mal’s shoulder.

The goodbyes dragged on for a little longer. Alina and Mal didn’t say where they were heading and maybe it was better this way—if they got caught by Grisha, they couldn’t betray what they didn’t know. Inej watched Alina and Mal walk up a hillock and then disappear down the other side with a fleeting sense of loss for what could have been, but when she looked back at her friends, Jesper was smiling at her and her heart swelled with warmth. It was so easy to make Jesper happy, so why weren’t there more people trying it?

The walk back to Novokribirsk was a slow one, as they did it carrying their various aches like weights of lead. They weren’t sure whether the Grisha guards on the East side had communicated with their colleagues from the West about the identity of the five crazy people who’d entered the Fold on foot, so they rented a room in a drab little inn held by a man whose eyes were milky with cataract. They took a room with two beds and neither of them bothered to undress before they collapsed on them, Inej and Jesper on the one closer to the door and Kaz on the other bed. Tomorrow they would set off for Os Kervo, where they would have to find a boat to take them back to Ketterdam, but it was almost unbearable to think now of the journey they had left.

Inej let her legs hang out of the bed for a moment, closing her eyes and waiting for her aching back muscles to relax one by one. Then, with a sigh, she forced herself to open her eyes and sit up long enough to pull off her shoes. Looking in the direction of Kaz’s bed, she was surprised to see that his head was turned toward them. He’d taken off his coat and hat and had hung them on the bed post, with his cane leaning against the wall. His fingers were laced over his stomach and he just looked at her, something indefinable and sad in his eyes. Behind Inej, Jesper made a sound of frustration and sat up too.

“Hey, Kaz,” he said. “Why don’t you come and join us?”

This broke the spell. Kaz tore his eyes away from Inej to look at the ceiling, frowning. “Will you let this go? I’m not at risk of dying of hypothermia here. There isn’t room for three in your bed.”

“Sometimes closeness is the point.” What was Jesper playing at? Inej turned to look at him, mouthing ‘what are you doing?’ but he ignored her in favor of poking at Kaz again. “What is it that really makes you hesitate?” he asked. It sounded like provocation, but Inej couldn’t make sense of it.

“Why do you need me here anyway?” Kaz snapped. “Wouldn’t I get in the way?”

“What do you mean?” Inej asked, though she had an awful inkling of what he meant.

Kaz exhaled loudly through his nose. “This isn’t any of my business,” he said in a monotone. “It’s just that I saw you the other day. Kissing. When we were camping.”

Inej and Jesper exchanged a look and she read in him the same flutter of panic that she felt. She opened her mouth to—what, to deny it? Kaz would see right through such a bold lie. To say that it didn’t mean anything? She didn’t want to hurt Jesper that way and wasn’t even sure it was true.

Jesper recovered from his shock and his mouth stretched into a smile. In a low, playful voice, he said, “And what about it bothers you? Is it that you’d want to kiss Inej yourself?”

Inej sent an elbow in his stomach. “Cut it out,” she hissed between her teeth.

Kaz sat up in his bed and threw his legs out of it in one fluid motion, his feet hitting the floor loudly. “Why don’t you get to the point, Jesper?” he asked, venomous.

“Is it that you want to kiss me?” Jesper asked with an odd breathlessness. He was leaning his chest against the back of Inej’s shoulder and she could feel his heart thunder right under the surface.

“Is it about what you saw when we were in the Fold?” Kaz asked, his hands clenching around his knees. “Are you going to use it against me?”

“No!” Jesper exclaimed, so forcefully he lurched forward with it, almost toppling over Inej. “I wouldn’t do that. Kaz, you have to know I wouldn’t. I just want to understand what the problem is. We went through the worst place in the world together, twice. Can’t you trust us with this?”

“What are you two talking about?” Inej asked, looking from one to the other, not caring much for the feeling that the conversation was escaping her. “What’s this about?”

“Well, Jesper, tell her, see if you figured everything out,” Kaz said. He sounded furious but there was something thorny about it, as if it covered another strong, less easily admittable emotion. “Go on, please.”

“I don’t… Oh, Saints, why do you make everything so hard? I swear, talking to you sometimes is like wrestling with a bear that just woke up from its nap. It’s just that, when you were sewing me, it looked like you were going to faint on the spot. I know it’s not the blood or the sewing—you’ve sewn some of your own wounds before. Why was it so hard for you to touch me?”

Kaz looked away, leaning more heavily with his elbows on his knees, and Inej’s instinct was to shut up Jesper, to let Kaz curl around his wound and keep it out of sight. But she found herself holding her breath instead, expectantly, curious to see how much Kaz would be willing to share with them.

“I can’t—” Kaz started, then cut himself off. “It’s an affliction I’ve had since I was a kid. Touching is hard. Skin-to-skin touch is—” He shuddered. “There’s nothing very interesting about it, but you can see why I wouldn’t want this to be widely known in the Barrel.”

“Oh,” Jesper said, deflating from the tension he’d been vibrating with. “We won’t say anything, of course.”

“Of course,” Inej echoed immediately. She suspected there was a lot more story behind this affliction, but they’d pushed as much as Kaz could take right now.

“But does that mean that—” Suddenly, Inej was very aware of the way Jesper’s hand had curled around her wrist, the thumb brushing lightly against her pulse point. “—that you’ve never had sex? Never kissed anyone?”

“What do you think?” Kaz bit out.

Inej had never seen him blush before. It looked like this: two red spots blotching his pale cheeks, the tips of his ears turning crimson. She felt torn between the desire to tease him and the urge to reassure him that it was nothing to be ashamed of. Sex didn’t mean a thing; she’d had enough of it to know that.

“That’s too bad,” Jesper said, running a knuckle up and down Inej’s arm. She twisted her neck to shoot him a doubtful look and he looked back earnestly, mouthing the question, ‘do you trust me?’ She did, of course, and she nodded, but she didn’t expect him to follow this up with a quick kiss to her lips that muffled the sound of surprise she made.

“I’ll give you some privacy,” Kaz said, standing up and reaching for his cane.

“Wait!” Jesper said. “You don’t have to go.”

“What?” Inej and Kaz said at the same time.

“You said that you can’t touch,” Jesper said, and he was getting a little flustered too, embarrassed in a way Inej had never seen in him, who liked to flaunt shamelessness like a flag. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t want to, does it?”

“What I want is irrelevant,” Kaz said, his controlled voice betraying nothing.

“There’s pleasure in other senses,” Jesper forged on. His eyebrows did a little suggestive dance. “Like sight. And hearing.”

“Are you truly suggesting… You can’t be suggesting using Inej for a peep show!”

“What if I want to?” Inej said, surprising herself.

“You can’t seriously want this,” Kaz told her incredulously.

“Who says I can’t? How can you know better than me what I want?”

“That’s not what I—”

“I notice you never said that you didn’t want this,” Jesper pointed out with a smug smile. There had been a slight edge of hesitation in his voice before but it had disappeared now, maybe because he felt bolstered by Inej’s support of his idea.

“This is crazy,” Kaz said as he sat back down on the bed, though he kept his cane in his hands, protectively wrapping them around the crow’s head. “Well? How do you see this working?”

“All right,” Jesper said, clearing his throat, licking his lips. “Make yourself comfortable.”

“I’m perfectly comfortable.”

“And then… tell us what you want us to do and we’ll do it.”

“Anything at all?” Kaz asked.

His eyes glinted in the cold daylight that poured from the window and his composure was smooth and impenetrable, not a crack in sight, just like when he negotiated a deal with another gang in the Barrel. He had the same intensity about him too, a refusal to back down and a determination to get the upper hand.

“Except if Inej says no, of course,” Jesper amended, and Inej shaped her lips in the hint of a grateful smile.

“What about you?” she asked. “Won’t you give yourself the possibility of saying no?”

“I’m willing to try anything once,” Jesper said with a rakish smile that she should have slapped off his face, but which instead made her want to kiss him. “What’s your first command, boss?” he asked Kaz.

“You could start with kissing.”

“That I can do,” Jesper said eagerly, rising on his knees and then leaning over Inej.

“Not like that,” Kaz interrupted him.

“Huh?”

“Lie down on your back.” Jesper complied, keeping his head turned toward Kaz in askance. “Inej, straddle him.”

Jesper chuckled as Inej threw a leg over his hips, a hand at the center of his chest to keep herself balanced. On her knees, she hesitated for a moment on where to sit down. He was looking up at her, delighted and flushed, his hair tousled, and the warmth of his pleasure lit up a similar fire at the pit of her stomach, but it felt like more than she could handle to sit on his crotch and possibly feel him get hard, so she settled on top of his thighs.

“Kiss him, Inej. Jesper, put your hands on her hips and don’t move unless I tell you otherwise.” Kaz’s voice had gotten lower as he spoke, both in pitch and in volume, until it became almost unrecognizable. It made her shiver.

“You’re a cruel master,” Jesper complained as he rested his hands on Inej’s hips, his touch feather-like.

“I don’t remember saying you could talk.”

Jesper’s mouth snapped shut and Inej leaned forward until their lips could meet, one of her hands on his uninjured shoulder and the other propped on the bed next to his wounded one. She started with the same gentle, unhurried pace they’d used last time, brushing their lips together again and again, increasing the pressure each time until they had become slick. Jesper breathed against her mouth, making small muffled sounds, and opened his lips, allowing Inej to push her tongue inside and lick his teeth.

“Slide your hands up to her waist, Jesper. Hold her more firmly.” The caress of Jesper’s hands on her sides made Inej’s breathing hitch; as their kiss deepened, his fingers dug into the flesh of her lower back. “Inej, open his waistcoat and his shirt.”

Inej and Jesper separated, looking at each other breathlessly. Strands of Inej’s hair had escaped from her braid and grazed the side of his face. With clumsy fingers that didn’t feel like her own anymore, Inej made slow work of the buttons of Jesper’s waistcoat and shirt. Opening his shirt, she could see the sewn wound on his shoulder, red sore-looking flesh threaded through with black. She pursed her lips at it, hit by the absurd desire to kiss it better even though she knew that the best she could do was to leave it alone.

“Touch him. Touch his skin.”

Inej’s fingertips brushed over Jesper’s stomach. His skin quivered and he huffed a laugh. “You’re tickling me,” he said, his voice halted with laughter.

She curved her finger to scratch a nail down his abdomen to his belt buckle and he bit his lower lip. She pressed her open palm against his stomach, savoring the feeling of warm skin and moving belly muscles. She could hear Kaz’s breathing speed up. She was astonished at how comfortable she felt sitting on top of Jesper, her hand on his bare skin, how unafraid of the turn this might take, even knowing that Kaz was watching them—or rather, with Kaz watching being full part of the appeal. Speaking of—

“What should I do now? Kaz?”

No response from Kaz, so Inej diverted her eyes from Jesper to check on him. He’d set his cane next to him against the bed and his hands were clutching the edge of the mattress, his face spotted with red again, his breathing stuttering.

When Jesper snorted, Inej felt his muscles jump under her hand. “I see this is working for you too,” he said.

“Shut up,” Kaz said tightly.

“You don’t need to be shy about it, this was entirely the point. C’mon, Kaz, touch yourself. You know you want to.”

“With you watching me?” Kaz said bitingly, his flush darkening.

“You’ve been watching us make out. This is part of the fun. You’ve jerked off before, right?”

“Of course!”

“Then go on.”

It looked for a moment as though Kaz would scoff at the demand and put an end to their bizarre show, but then he pinched the tip of his right glove’s middle finger and slowly pulled the glove off his hand, keeping his eyes on Inej and Jesper as if checking their reaction. He unbuckled his belt one-handed, his other hand curled next to him on the bed. He didn’t get himself out of his pants, but instead plunged his hand inside. Jesper sucked in a breath; Inej still had a hand on his chest and she was drawing absentminded patterns on his skin as they both stared at Kaz, at the bulge of his hand moving up and down, pale knuckles emerging sometimes from the opening. His mouth thinned until his lips disappeared as they curled over his teeth and his eyelids fluttered. When he came, he was almost entirely silent, curling in on himself in a spasm. With a long exhale, he took his hand out of his pants, looked at his fingers with a grimace of disgust and got a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe it.

“Enjoyed the show?” he asked.

“It wasn’t much of a show,” Jesper said, but the way his chest heaved belied his words.

Kaz threw a pillow at him, which actually hit the wall above their bed, and then settled back on his own bed, sinking down against the headboard and closing his eyes. “Do whatever you want, I’m going to sleep now.”

“What, already? So you’re that kind of guy, huh.” When Kaz didn’t answer, Jesper asked Inej, “What do you want to do?”

The excitement and nascent arousal that had been keeping her awake were starting to fade and Inej felt the exhaustion of the past day and night land back on her shoulders. “I wouldn’t say no to sleep. But won’t you—” She glanced down at his crotch, where the outline of his dick was visible through his pants—maybe not entirely hard, but at least half-way there.

He took her hand and kissed her fingers. “I’ll be fine. Sleep does sound good. I feel like I’ve been awake forever and a day.”

She moved off of him and he opened his arms so she could fit herself against him, both of them turned on their sides in Kaz’s direction. He probably wasn’t asleep yet but his breathing was regular and she enjoyed looking at his still, vulnerable-looking face.

“Good night, Kaz,” she said, even though they were a few hours away from sundown. “Sweet dreams.”

The corner of his mouth curved up. “Sleep already,” he said. “We have a long way to go before we’re back home.”

Home, she thought as she closed her eyes. She was a wanderer at heart and knew that her home wasn’t gray, rain-slick Ketterdam. As every Suli, she believed that home wasn’t a place, but the people you flocked to.