Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it’s drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and I know it’s not cheap.”

Mark Z. Danielewski

~*~*~*~

Inej gets herself to Ravka before she gets too big to travel.

She’d tried to pretend it wasn’t happening for as long as possible, wearing loose clothing and putting extra holes in her belt, but the night she’d felt the child move for the first time she’d decided enough was enough. She left Ketterdam the next day. Fled, really, like the coward she is.

She is grown enough to fight her own battles, Saints only know, but she can’t bring herself to be brave about this. For this, she wants her Mama.

She wears her loosest tunic but her mother still knows, instantly, in that way that mothers know. Ishani Ghafa places her hands on either side of Inej’s rounded middle and sighs. Her expression is one part love to one part disappointment - perhaps not at her daughter’s condition in itself so much as her obvious distress.

It is a luxury to run to her mother, one Inej thought she might never have again at one point in her life. She knows that the way her mother’s hands smooth back her hair, wipe the tears from her cheeks, are a gift she owes to Kaz as surely as she owes the thing growing inside to him, and she hates him all the more for it.

So many years, so many battles fought and won, such carefully mapped progress to reach the point where she could spend her time ashore in his bed and be none the worse for it, where he could love her as a man loves a woman and not drown. All unravelled so quickly. The warmth in his eyes had vanished the instant she’d told him. The way he’d snatched his hand out of hers had hurt worse than a knife to the gut. Inej had thought her decision made, then. With his feelings on the matter eminently clear, there wasn’t anything else to talk about. She would have it taken care of, and go on with her life.

Kaz had not offered any assistance along those lines. Had not broached the subject at all, in fact, but Inej knew well enough what to do. Any whore in Ketterdam knows, any unfortunate girl caught out, any mother with too many mouths to feed already. There were plenty of resources, in the Barrel, if you knew where to go. Corporalnik if you could afford it, and if you couldn’t then any midwife would turn her hand to it for a favour or what little extra coin you could give under the table, out of sight of the men, in places where women whispered women’s secrets and did women’s work.

And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet.

Inej went back and forth, paralysed by indecision. Just a little longer, she’d thought, no need to rush. She’d debated with herself, and then wavered, and then avoided, and then without warning she’d recalled her crew and gone to sea for several months, where she’d pursued every sniff of a slaver relentlessly, thrown herself into the thickest of the fighting and hoped the violence would make the decision for her. But the thing inside stuck fast, claws hooked in her, stubborn, Brekker, and she’d emptied her stomach over the side of the ship every morning while Specht watched her like a hawk, eyebrows drawn tightly together.

When she’d returned to Ketterdam, Kaz had said nothing and would not be drawn on the subject no matter how many times she tried. He’d seemed furious with her but when she’d asked, equally furious, if he wanted her to leave he’d said no and the rage in his eyes had been so intense that, for the first time in many years, she’d dropped the argument. So she’d stayed, and they’d circled each other like wounded animals, slept in the same bed with their backs stubbornly turned, while he ignored her and she ignored her swelling belly. Until it had moved inside her and she couldn’t ignore it any longer, and then she’d done what she thought she never would again.

She ran home.

.

Her final months are hard, even in the comfort and familiarity of the caravan, where her mother fusses over her and her father forages the winter berries she so craves and chucks her under the chin, as though she is still a child and not growing a child herself. As she gets bigger, her centre of gravity shifts and the innate balance on which she has always been able to rely is lost. She may just as well have cut off one of her limbs, she mourns it just as acutely.

For the first time in a very long time, Inej’s body is no longer her own. The wound inside herself that she has spent all her adult life stitching together splits open. She bleeds internally.

Her moods swing violently. Sometimes she feels almost herself, almost normal. Sometimes she sits next to her mother before the warm glow of the fire, rubbing her hands over her growing bump, talking of motherhood and futures and names. Other times, her fingers itch to take one of her knives and carve it out of herself. In these times, she cannot think of it as a baby, only something that has invaded her without her knowledge or her consent. She escapes the thing wriggling in her belly the way she used to escape the men at the Menagerie, by going somewhere else. She loses whole days lying in her bed, outside of herself, and comes back to find her mother holding her hand or stroking her hair, weeping silently.

Inej prays, in those times, and finds that even her Saints give no comfort. She cries to herself, then, and wonders bitterly why, after all the misery she has endured in her life, this has been inflicted on her too.

She’d been warned, of course, that the bitter white powder she swallowed to prevent conception wasn’t entirely foolproof, but it had never failed her in so many years that she’d come to be sure it never would. She’d wondered briefly if she’d been given a bad batch, had half a mind to slit the throat of the apotheker who’d sold it to her, but in the end she supposes luck and the law of averages had simply caught up with her.

Inej is no blushing maiden, nor has she ever been in the entire time Kaz has known her. She’s always known this was a possibility, from the first moment she went to his bed. A risk she’d assessed and accepted and assumed she would deal with if the time ever came.

She hadn’t anticipated how she would actually react. Had never dreamed that she might choose, in the end, to keep the child, and be tormented over whether she’d made the right choice. She hadn’t known that she would be alone.

Kaz Brekker keeps to any deal he strikes, and he has welded himself to her for ten years with every intention of dying before he let her go, by his own admission. Inej had believed him with all her stupid, sentimental heart. That he would forsake her like this, when she needs him most, she could not have imagined.

Even after all these years, every now and then, Kaz Brekker occasionally manages to catch her by surprise.

.

He arrives at the caravan on a cold spring morning when Inej is near her time, so huge that she can no longer put on her shoes without assistance. She moves slowly, now, heavy and more unbalanced than ever, and she is coming slowly down the steps of her parents wagon, being careful not to slip, when she looks up and sees him limping through the camp towards her.

The shock of seeing him there is so complete that for a moment she cannot process it. She simply stares. Which means she sees the look that comes over his face the moment his eyes catch on her.

He hasn’t seen her in months, and there’s no hiding her condition under loose clothing now. Even under the heavy coat she wears, the shape of her belly is clear, unmistakable as she rests a hand lightly on top of it. He casts his eyes over her, and it’s not revulsion on his face, exactly, but something perhaps analogous to it, an odd sort of discomfort as his eyes slide off her again to some point over her shoulder.

She no longer has the energy to be angry. Like everything else now, it just hurts.

“Inej,” the familiar rasp of his voice carves into her when he speaks. A long pause. “Are you well?”

“As well as can be expected,” she says coldly, and he can’t quite mask a flinch. Good, she thinks with a savage kind of pleasure. “What are you doing here?”

He looks back at her then, eyes flicking down to her middle and back up again. “It’s almost time, isn’t it? I came to be with you.”

He says it as though it is the most obvious thing in the world, like she’s the unreasonable one for asking, and she wonders that he doesn’t choke on the words. Perhaps she does have the energy to be angry after all.

“Well, nice as it is that you’ve finally decided to acknowledge the situation, you’ve had a wasted trip.” For all her months of longing for him, in that moment Inej can hardly recall a time when she wanted to see him less. “I don’t need you.”

He scowls at her. “It’s my child.”

“It’s my child,” she snaps, and for the very first time, she knows that it’s true. She has an odd feeling, a rush of what she supposes might be motherly instinct, and she rubs her hands over her belly, cradling the weight of it in her hands. His eyes track the movement, and then dart away again.

Damn Kaz Brekker and whatever saintsforsaken idea he took into his head that brought him here. He does not belong here, but she does. This is her country, her people, her home. Her baby can belong here, too. Here or anywhere else Inej chooses to be. She is a spy and an assassin and a pirate. She is the Wraith, she is the Sankta of the Sea. She can be a mother, too.

“Inej—”

“Do whatever you want, Kaz,” she interrupts, and shoulders past him. “You always do.”

He doesn’t try to follow her, and she doesn’t look back. She trudges through the wet grass as quickly as she is able, grinding her teeth, unsure whether to scream or cry.

She has taken to walking circuits around the wagons twice a day. In truth she does not feel much like walking these days. She is beyond exhausted most of the time, and she aches all over. Her legs hurt, her back hurts, her breasts hurt, and she has started to experience dull, cramping pains in her abdomen. Her mother tells her, though, that the walking is good for her, and will hurry the child along. More than anything, Inej is ready to get this thing out of her.

So, she walks. And fumes. And walks and walks and walks.

It is only when she’s sweating under her coat, hair sticking to the back of her neck, that she realises she might have pushed herself a bit too far. She’s out of breath, too, and her feet ache, and her jaw aches from where she’s been grinding her teeth, and her belly is so heavy, and this whole situation is so stupid—

Kaz is beside her, offering his arm. When had he got there? She doesn’t know, and the thought chills her. For a moment, she thinks of taking out one of the many knives she still carries on her person and stabbing him with it. Shaking her head, she takes another step forward, but she really is very tired and her parents' wagon is all the way over on the other side of the camp. He holds his arm out to her again. Furious, she takes it, though she does derive some satisfaction from digging her fingers in as hard as she can and watching as his jaw clenches.

.

Her parents are as pleased by Kaz’s arrival as Inej herself is, which is to say, not at all. Her father in particular is more furious than Inej has ever seen him, and he spends a decently long time shouting at Kaz, cursing him for his immorality and his faithlessness, calling him unworthy and a scoundrel and a pig.

Inej sits on the wagon steps with her mother hovering nearby and watches as Kaz absorbs his dressing down stoically, both hands folded neatly atop his cane. His Suli isn’t perfect, but he’s picked up enough over the years that she judges he probably grasps the bulk of what is being said to him. A few times, her father gets a little too close to Kaz, jabs a finger in his face, and Inej tenses, moves her hand to the blade strapped to her thigh. She may not be agile on her feet at the moment, but her aim is undiminished. If that cane moves a fraction of an inch, Inej’s knife will get there before he has time to swing it. But Kaz remains unmoving and, seemingly, unmoved.

Inej feels no particular need to advocate for him and no particular desire to have him with her at this point, but she recognises the expression on his face, the set of his shoulders. He’s set himself on a course of action, and if he cannot achieve it through diplomacy then violence will follow. If he’d caught her even a few weeks earlier, she might have made a good attempt at carving his liver from his body before sending him on his way. As it stands, she’s too exhausted now for bloodshed.

“Papa,” she says quietly, and her father stops mid-rant to turn to her, softening immediately. She says nothing further, but he reads her expression well enough. Relents.

Inej sleeps in her parents’ wagon but they will not permit Kaz to do the same, not that she wants them to. Ordinarily, he might be given a bed roll and a tarp and relegated to sleep outdoors but even spring in Ravka is far too cold for that, and so some of Inej’s cousins shuffle around to make a wagon available for him. A wagon to a single person is an unbelievable luxury in the caravan, and he doesn’t deserve it, but at least it keeps him out of Inej’s way. She shuts herself in her parent’s wagon and sets about ignoring him.

.

Kaz turns out to have been just in the nick of time, because her pains begin in earnest a day and a night after his arrival. She suffers them with gritted teeth for a full morning before she allows her mother to usher her gently to the birthing place.

The tent has been erected and ready for some weeks now, in the trees a distance from the caravan. Made of the same bright silk as the circus tent, the floor well rushed and matted against the damp. A large bed in the centre with rope to pull on while she labours, and plenty of space for the women to gather.

And gather they will, they already are, as Inej paces the grass outside the tent, rubbing her lower back and pausing every so often to squat and grind her teeth when a pain comes. It feels such a strange thing to do, but nobody looks at her strangely. All the women of the caravan are here, from the elderly to the girl-children still at the breast, bound to their mothers with slings of cloth. They are shaking out bedsheets, and lighting candles, praying and singing. They are setting pots of water to boil on three large fires banked up between the trees, and raking over coals which will be removed once glowing red-hot to braziers inside the tent for warmth. All of this activity for Inej’s sake, a well-practised dance ready to spring into action the moment word went round that the time was near.

If Inej had never been taken, she would have seen this dozens of times over by now, would have attended her aunts and cousins and friends, just as they will attend her now. The business of childbirth would be no mystery to her, and she would have gone to her own birthing bed armed with that knowledge and experience. It might have been a comfort. She might not have been so afraid.

Because she is afraid, now. She has no knowledge of birth save for what her mother has told her, and her memories of a few Menagerie girls who’d managed to hide their pregnancies long enough that there was nothing to be done but carry to term. They had been sold over and over to men with a fancy for that sort of thing, before giving birth in screaming isolation under Heleen’s beady eye and the care of the old medik she kept on retainer, only to have their children snatched from their arms and sold on again for a profit.

For a moment Inej thinks she is vanishing. She could be standing back in the parlour of the Menagerie, the sense memory is so strong, but she realises that someone has lit incense. The cloying, sweet smell of it catches in the back of her throat and she sinks to her knees and vomits onto the grass. Her mother makes a sound of alarm, and there are women hurrying towards her with water and cloths, and Inej is crying and all she can do is say the incense, the incense, over and over through her tears. It’s enough, though. The call is taken up by the women like sailors calling over the lines, and the incense is whisked away from her.

“Mama,” she gasps, and grips her mother tightly by the forearms, fingernails digging in. “Promise me that no one will take my baby. Promise.”

It’s a nonsensical thing to say. Her mother can’t promise her that, Inej knows, nobody can. It’s a cruel thing to ask of a woman who’d had her own child stolen from under her nose, but the fear has gripped Inej by the guts and it will not leave her.

Ishani grips Inej back just as tightly, though. “I promise, meja,” she says, and there is fire in her voice that Inej has never heard there before. “I promise you, by my life, nobody will take your child.”

Stillness has fallen over the women, Inej is vaguely aware. If she were more in her right self, she would be humiliated by the weeping mess she has become, but all she can do is clutch at her mother like she had when she was young and the world seemed like it would end if she let go.

“You are strong, Inej,” her mother’s hand is cool against her skin as she strokes her hair back from her forehead. “So much stronger than me. You will protect your child where I could not protect you.”

The Wraith, thinks Inej, clinging to the words. Sea Captain. Spy. She clutches her mother’s hands tighter as a pain comes, and slumps forward as it subsides. “I’m scared, Mama.”

“So are we all, when our time comes,” her mother croons, cradling her face, kissing her cheeks. “My sweet daughter, my Inej. Do not be frightened, we will help you.”

.

Calm comes back to Inej in stages, as activity resumes around her and the women begin to sing again. She is allowed to pace the grass until her water comes, and then she is ushered inside the tent where she strips her heavy clothes and is given a thin linen chemise to wear instead. The relief is instant, she had not realised how uncomfortable, how restricting her clothes were until she removed them.

Inej paces until she feels like her legs can no longer hold her up, and then she gets on the bed, rocking slowly on her hands and knees. The pains come stronger, and closer together. She is aware and not aware of her surroundings. Someone places a damp cloth scented with lavender on the back of her neck, but she doesn’t know who. Someone else holds a cup of water to her lips, tells her to sip slowly, and she obeys. There is a loop of rope bound right around the bed, and she twists it in her hands and pulls when the pains come. She had thought she would do this quietly, she is the Wraith after all, but she cannot help the sounds that escape her, moans and cries that come from some deep animal place inside her.

Her whole world is reduced to pure sensation, the ebb and flow of the pains, the feel of damp cloths wiping at her face, the low murmur of female voices telling her breathe and good and nearly there. There is nothing outside the tent, nothing outside Inej and her labour and the women around her. She is no longer afraid, but strong. Her body knows how to move, how to breathe, what noises to make, and Inej lets it carry her.

The peaceful atmosphere is broken as a commotion comes from outside. Cries go up from the women tending the fires, and male voices rise over them. There is a flutter of alarm inside the tent - childbirth is women’s work, and the men do not approach. They remain inside the circle of the wagons, calling prayers to the Saints and distracting the soon-to-be father with tales of when their own offspring were young. Inej blinks out of her trance-like state, coming back to herself sluggishly as a dull stab of fear goes through her. She bitterly regrets discarding her blades with her clothing, wishes she had kept one in her hand. Some of the women inside hurry toward the entrance of the tent, but her mother remains with her, rubbing her back soothingly, and the shouting outside gets even louder—

Kaz.

She recognises the grating timbre of his voice above the cacophony, along with that of her own father’s. Kaz is demanding, in heavily-accented Suli and typically blunt fashion, to be allowed entrance to the tent. Inej feels both sagging relief and the most intense, all-consuming annoyance she has ever experienced.

The shouting builds as more women rush outside to join the fray, and Inej can hear her father using words she wasn’t even aware he knew, threatening holy retribution and bodily harm, and at one stage she thinks she hears him say he’s going to castrate Kaz, and her mother curses and gets to her feet, striding purposefully toward the entrance, and Inej has had enough—

“Kaz!” Inej yells, and silence falls sudden as a lightning strike. “Just shut up and go away!” Her voice sounds ragged even to her own ears, and her words trail off into an almighty scream as the most intense pain yet rips through her.

Her mother is back at her side in an instant, and she feels someone else pulling at her chemise, rucking it up around her hips. The mood inside the tent changes palpably, becoming heavy, expectant.

Ishani smooths Inej’s sweat-soaked hair. “It’s time, meja. You must push now.”

The next time a pain comes, Inej twists her hands in the rope and pulls, and she bears down, and she screams.

When the wave passes, she sags forward on her hands, gasping for breath. There are women rubbing her back and massaging her legs, speaking with encouraging voices, telling her good girl and rest a moment.

The shouting has not resumed, and a woman comes flustering back inside. “He is not trying to come in, but he will not leave.”

“That’s as good as you’re going to get from him,” Inej pants through gritted teeth, even as she gathers the rope again and draws her breath to push.

Inej never quite makes it back to that trance-like state she’d been in before, but she finds the rhythm of push and scream and breathe and rest and push and she sinks into it. She has no sense of how much time has passed, it seems to go on forever.

At one point she feels like her body has nothing else to give. “Mama, I can’t do it, I can’t do it,” she sobs, arms and legs trembling, sweat dripping down her neck.

“You can, meja, you will,” her mother is beside her still, and her words are chorused by the other women. “You’re so close now, my darling. A few more minutes.”

A few more minutes, Inej holds onto those words. A few minutes and it will all be over. When the pain comes again, Inej screams louder than she’s ever screamed, and she feels a gush of hot liquid and a strange slippery, slithering sensation and then it’s done, and many hands are easing her onto her back against a huge pile of pillows as a reedy cry fills the tent. The women are jubilant, and her mother is crying as she places a wet, wriggling little creature onto Inej’s chest.

Inej’s hands come up automatically to hold it to her, and its little body is slippery, marbled as it is with blood and womb grease. She can’t quite process it. How is it that just a moment ago she was labouring on her hands and knees and now this thing is here, it’s on her, and it’s a person and it’s alive.

“It’s a girl,” her mother laughs, tears streaming down her face.

A girl. A daughter. Inej has a daughter. She is a mother. A choked sound escapes from her, half laugh, half sob, and her vision goes blurry with tears.

Another commotion rises outside, and a moment later the silk flap of the tent is swept harshly aside, and then Kaz is in among them. The women shriek in outrage, but his eyes have fixed upon Inej and his face has gone the sickly, waxy shade of old tallow.

“It’s okay,” croaks Inej, unheard by all except her mother, who gets to her feet to shoo the women away from Kaz.

Inej cannot take her eyes off him as he crosses the short distance between them, and his eyes are roving, slipping from Inej, to the baby on her chest, further down and then back up. She feels strangely serene. Doesn’t care that her legs are still open, chemise around her hips, thighs coated with blood. Doesn’t care that there is sweat slick on her skin and tears on her face. She finds she can’t care about anything except her baby girl, red and angry at being born, squalling in time to the beat of her heart.

Had she been angry with Kaz before? She cannot recall.

He stops at her bedside and looks down at her for a moment, and she has never, never seen that expression on his face before.

“Kaz, look,” she says, barely above a whisper, but silence reigns now and he hears her loud and clear. “It’s a girl.”

He goes slowly to his knees beside her, one gloved hand rising to cover his mouth as he looks at the baby. She waits, for what she doesn’t quite know. For him to speak, for him to leave. After a long moment, his hand drops from his mouth, landing with a dull thump on the bloody sheet beside her hip.

“Inej,” he rasps, and his voice is strangled, like it’s an effort to get the words out. “What have we done?”

.

Now that he’s made it in, there’s no removing Kaz. He plants himself like a tree and refuses to budge, so the women give up and continue their work, skirting around him, bewildered at his continued presence.

Inej kneels on the floor to deliver the afterbirth, arms reaching across the bed to where Kaz still kneels on the other side, gripping his hands tightly. She keeps one hand in his when she is placed back onto the bed, the other hand holding onto her mother as one of the caravan elders massages her belly deeply to slow the bleeding. It’s unpleasant, but nothing compared to the birth, and Inej endures it quietly, her gaze fixed on the other side of the tent where her baby is being wiped clean with a damp cloth. When the old woman is satisfied with her bleeding, Inej is pulled gently back to her feet. She goes willingly, limbs loose, docile as a lamb. She thinks dreamily that these women could lead her right over a cliff and she would go without question, so complete is her trust, her sense of safety.

When the bloody chemise is stripped from Inej’s body, there are scandalised gasps from some of the younger women, pointed looks in Kaz’s direction. Inej’s mother waves them away.

“How do you think he got a child on her in the first place?” Ishani says, tossing the bloodied garment to one of them. “Modesty has no place in the birthing tent. Stop your twittering and do something useful.”

The soiled sheets - along with the thick mattress topper - are stripped off the bed for burning and replaced with fresh bedding while Inej is washed with more of the lavender-scented water brought in from the fires. Now that the exertion has passed and her sweat is cooled on her skin, Inej feels chilled and the hot water is heavenly, soothing. She allows her head to loll, eyes closed, luxuriating.

When Inej is clean, she is wrapped with thick padding between her legs, a fresh nightgown is slipped over her head, and she is put back into a clean bed piled high with pillows. She reaches out her arms, and her baby is brought to her - now clean, and wrapped in the same blanket that her mother had once wrapped her in. Tears come to her eyes again.

Someone has found Kaz a low stool, and he sits beside the bed now, watching her silently as she settles the child into her arms. He doesn’t ask to hold the baby, and she doesn’t offer. Now that the girl is sleeping, and not covered in blood, Inej can study her little face. She’s never really thought that babies looked like anything other than babies, not that she’d ever looked at them that closely. Not so, now. The child has Inej’s coloring, bronze skin and a thatch of thick black hair. Inej can see Kaz running strongly through her features, though, the sharp angle of the eyebrows, the upturned nose, the wide mouth. How fascinating, she thinks, to see such a blend of the two of them in another person.

The women trickle out, until only her mother remains, puttering in the background, giving them space. The tent is warm, and quiet, and Inej notes that the light filtering through the flap has turned the soft gold of early evening. She laboured the entire day.

She is so tired.

She looks at Kaz, blinking at him sleepily. He is still watching her quietly, leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees and hands clasped loosely between them. He’s regained some of his colour, no longer looks as though he may pass out at any moment. His steely composure is firmly back in place, too, face expressionless.

“She looks like you,” she tells him.

“Poor thing,” his voice betrays no emotion.

The corner of her mouth twitches, but she’s too tired to engage in any kind of banter with him. Tired in her bones, and sore. Her head feels foggy, and she is starting to remember that she is unhappy with him, but she can’t quite bring herself to feel what she should be feeling about it.

There’s always tomorrow.

She looks down at the baby again. “What shall we call her?”

It’s a relatively one sided conversation, mostly Inej suggesting names and Kaz shooting them down, though he does make a few suggestions of his own, all of which Inej hates. She doesn’t know why she even cares about his opinion, really. It’s her baby, she grew her and birthed her, she should get to name her and damn what Kaz thinks. Inej knows that if she declares she has picked a name and will not be moved, he will accept it without argument. But, she realises, she wants him to show some kind of ownership over his role in this, any kind of interest, she wants them to do this one thing together. So they continue a seemingly endless debate. Suli names, Kerch names, Ravkan names, even a few Kaelish names thrown in for good measure. Time ticks by. They agree on nothing.

“Kaz…” a thought occurs to Inej, and she looks slowly up at him, weighing her words, wondering if she really dares to ask what she’s about to ask. “What was your mother’s name?”

His eyes do not move from the baby in her arms. He is silent for so long she thinks he is not going to answer her at all. Eventually, though, he speaks. It seems to take great effort, as though he has to dredge it up from some deep place inside of himself, like so much water from a well. “Genna.”

“Genna,” she repeats softly, and looks back down at her daughter, speaking the name over and over, rolling it around in her mouth, testing the shape of it. “Genna.”

She looks back to Kaz, eyebrows raised in silent question. He looks back steadily and she does not know what he is thinking at all.

He nods once.

Inej looks back to the child, stroking a finger down her tiny cheek. “Genna Brekker.”

A long pause.

“Rietveld,” says Kaz.

~*~*~*~

Chapter Text

~*~*~*~

The jostling of the cart down the dirt track is absolutely miserable.

It’s miserable, and Inej is miserable, and her body is a wreck. She is still sore, still bleeding, and the time she has spent on the hard wooden bench in the back of this cart is not helping her. She is overly warm in her black shirt, and she slightly regrets the choice to wear it. Only slightly though, because the front of it is soaked and the dark fabric hides it well. She is leaking milk, her breasts tight and aching, but she is loath to wake Genna up to feed when she has finally settled her to sleep after hours of red-faced screaming. The silence is too welcome to interrupt, no matter her discomfort.

Inej is miserable, and hot, and exhausted. Kaz, sitting beside her idly scanning the back of a newspaper, seems impervious to all of it.

She hates him.

It’s too soon for her to travel, really, but they’d been operating on a schedule, and a tight one at that. Sail now, or wait another six months while savage summer storms swept across the middle of the True Sea. Unencumbered, Inej would not have hesitated to sail into those storms, has done so many times, in fact, in pursuit of a target or to shake off a ship giving chase. But that was with a crew of able sailors. The thought of doing the same with her newborn daughter on board, well…

She still can’t quite believe she’s here, cannot fathom out the sequence of events that led to this moment. It’s a story they’d told each other often, over too much kvas. A running joke between them, what they would do if they ever decided to leave it all behind.

She’d never dreamed they actually would.

Kaz had made all the arrangements. While Inej had been wallowing in misery in Ravka, he’d been furiously scheming in Ketterdam. When she had fallen with child, he had not asked her, had not discussed it with her, had simply set about making it happen. She had not been able to mask her astonishment when he’d told her. Or her anger.

She’d been absolutely furious with him for it, on top of all the reasons she already had to be furious with him. She’d called him every vicious name she could think of, told him she hated him, that she hoped his balls dropped off and he could go away and die for all she cared.

But she had also been exhausted, overwhelmed.

Inej had remained for three days and three nights in the birthing tent, from which Kaz had been summarily ejected as soon as she’d fallen asleep on the evening of Genna’s birth. How her mother alone had managed it when her father and a dozen women brandishing fire irons had not, Inej had not been able to glean, but Ishani Ghafa was a fierce woman when it suited her. Whatever she’d said or done, Kaz had stayed well away for the full three days of Inej’s confinement.

Those had been comforting, easy days in the warmth and diffused light of the tent. Inej had been able to rest, attended by her mother and a steady rotation of women from the caravan. Their care of her did not end with the birth of her child. With patience and good humour, they’d shown Inej how to feed her baby, how to wrap her, how to rock her to sleep. They had prayed with her, and told her stories of their own children, shared little pieces of wisdom and advice that Inej had tried hard to commit to memory. They’d brought her meals and brushed her hair and drawn her sweet-scented baths, and all the while Genna had been passed from one set of arms to another while the women rocked her and told Inej what a sweet baby she had, how precious, how beautiful, as though Inej could somehow be unaware of it.

Inej had floated through those days secure and well-loved. It was after that the reality of the situation had started to seep into her consciousness.

On the morning Inej emerged from the tent, the whole caravan had come together to pray, giving thanks to the saints for seeing Inej safely from the birthing bed and asking blessings for her child. All had proceeded as expected, until someone called out a prayer to Sankta Magda, patron saint of abandoned women. Inej had been unexpectedly stung. She’d glanced at Kaz, observing the proceedings impassively. He put no stock in religion, had scarce if any knowledge of the saints. He was seemingly unaware of the subtle but deliberate insult he’d been dealt.

Inej was aware, though, keenly so, and the first sliver of cold had settled in her gut.

With a babe in her arms, it was no longer appropriate or feasible for Inej to stay with her parents so she’d been installed in the wagon that had been cleared for Kaz instead, though her mother spent the majority of her time there with her. Kaz for his part had surrendered the bed to Inej, opting for the floor, and otherwise spent the majority of his time avoiding her mother.

It was harder, on her own. Even though her mother provided a lot of support, she had her own affairs to see to, and the women of the caravan had their own lives, their own children. It had been time for Inej to step fully into her new role as mother, a harder transition than she’d supposed it would be. Genna was fussy, colicky, tricky at the breast. It seemed to Inej that she spent the majority of the day and night with the baby attached to her, trying to get her to feed, hardly sleeping. Before long, her nipples were cracked and bleeding, and the mother’s moods were well upon her, making her wildly uneven, desolate and weepy.

And Kaz, well. Kaz had laid out his plans with infuriating calm, as logically as if he’d been explaining the details of a job. A safe place, quiet, serene. It was all arranged, he said. He spoke at length of farms and fields and wide open spaces while Inej was half out of her mind with exhaustion and barely contained panic at the reality of being wholly responsible for a child’s life.

Her parents pressed for her to remain with them, eager for their grandchild to be raised among their people. But the caravan would soon leave the forest and tour the cities for the summer, performing for crowds every day and night. There would be dust and noise and strangers all around, and her mother would not have the time she had now to care for her. Inej had quailed from that and, sensing an opening, Kaz had seized upon it, chipping away relentlessly.

Inej had choices before her. She could have remained with the caravan, but she did not like the idea of a constant bustle of strangers around Genna and, truly, there was not enough of the child Inej had been before left to settle back into that life. That Inej Ghafa was gone. Though she would always be welcomed back into the embrace of the caravan, there was no longer anything in her that could call it home.

Returning to Ketterdam had been out of the question. If the thought of strangers around Genna was uncomfortable, the idea of taking her into the lion’s den of the Barrel, within reach of the worst of their enemies, was unthinkable. Nor could she return to the sea with a child, not when it was such a harsh and dangerous life and everything inside her screamed to keep her baby safe and warm.

Then there was the matter of Kaz who, once he’d decided to be there, would not be dissuaded from it. He would not return to Ketterdam, with or without her. Whether it was Inej he’d wanted, she hadn’t been sure, but she’d birthed his child and so he would be wherever she was, and he would leave his empire burning in his wake to keep them safe.

“I’ve taken care of everything,” he’d said. “Trust me.”

Despite his lies, despite his scheming, despite all the ways he’d let her down...there was still a part of Inej that did trust him, wanted so desperately to believe him. She was untethered, unsure, and he was so certain. A fixed point, as always. An immovable object. She had looked down at the baby in her arms, and all she’d been able to think was ten years and this was what they had to show for it, at the expense of everything they’d both worked for. With her indecision, Inej had destroyed both their lives.

So it was that over several weeks, despite her parents' stringent objections and her own misgivings, Kaz had worn her down. A quiet place had seemed appealing at the time.

The Wraith sailed them to Novyi Zem, an uneventful crossing. The saints had seen fit to send calm seas and a fair wind for her daughter’s first voyage. Inej had felt vaguely renewed with the salt air in her lungs and nothing to crowd her in, and the constant rolling motion of the ship had proved soothing to the baby. It was easy to settle back into her command - she’d been wary, initially, of what going aboard with a child would be like, if it might lessen her authority somehow. She needn’t have worried. Her crew of grizzled sailors had treated Genna like some sort of mascot, observing her with great interest if not a little trepidation. The only person on the ship entirely at ease with the baby - Inej included - was Specht. Favoured uncle to four nieces back in Kerch, her first mate had bound the baby sling to himself while he steered the ship and when she’d seen it, Inej had thrown back her head and laughed for the first time in months. Kaz had scowled murderously at the sight on the rare occasions that he emerged from his cabin, but Inej had ignored him - he had no right to his temper. In her entire short life, he had not held Genna even once.

When they docked at Shriftport, it had broken what remained of Inej’s bruised heart to leave her ship, but she could not chase after slavers with an infant at her breast. She’d left Specht in command with instructions on how to reach her, and embarked on the torturous, multi-day journey into the Zemeni heartland.

They’d taken a stagecoach as far as the town of Dulcot, if the cluster of buildings along the dusty street could be defined as such, and there had obtained the services of the driver to transport them and their luggage to the property. Inej judges by the passage of the sun that they have been travelling along the steadily deteriorating road for about an hour, though it has felt like much longer to her poor, aching body.

“Almost there!” calls the driver from the front of the cart now, and Inej closes her eyes in silent thanks. “Just over that rise.”

Kaz folds his newspaper and drops it onto the bench beside him. He has brought them to the northern part of central Novyi Zem, to the wide expanse of arable land above Eames Chin. The climate, he explains, is slightly more forgiving at this latitude. Still warm, but not the savage heat that bakes the jurda fields to the south. The country they are passing through now is made up of gently rolling fields dotted with the occasional farmhouse and sparse patches of tall, striking trees with unusual white bark.

The cart jolts sharply, passing over an especially large pothole as they turn off the road and onto a narrow track, and Inej winces as pain shoots through her. Genna stirs in her arms, croaking out the first noises of discontent. Inej’s heart sinks into her stomach.

“Sorry, missus,” the driver looks over his shoulder at her, grimacing, and seems genuinely apologetic. Inej summons a tight smile to let him know he is forgiven.

In town, Kaz had introduced them as Kaz and Inej Rietveld, and she’d ground her teeth at the strangeness of the name. The greetings had been friendly, and there had been few questions. Their story is so common they barely need to explain themselves. A young family seeking a new life. They are a few among the many, they will draw no attention here.

Gradually, a cluster of buildings comes into view. A barn and some low stone walls, and a modest limewashed house shaded by a cluster of those tall trees, surrounded by empty pastures. This is to be their home.

Inej looks at it, and feels nothing.

When they reach the house, she remains seated while Kaz and the driver unload the luggage, rocking gently side-to-side, silently willing Genna to settle again and not dissolve into another fit of inconsolable screaming. She feels a pang of empathy for her baby - after days of jostling on the roads, Inej feels like screaming as well.

It’s the driver who offers to help her down from the cart when he comes back out, before Kaz has reemerged from the house. Inej doesn’t need assistance to climb down, not really, but she is stiff and awkward with the baby cradled in one arm, so she swallows her pride and takes his hand.

“A sweet little thing,” he smiles kindly down at Genna. “I remember when mine were that small. A wonderful time.”

Inej only just manages to restrain herself from striking him. She’s sure it is a wonderful time, for the men, with their intact bodies and full nights of sleep.

When Kaz comes back outside, the driver unties the spare horse tethered to the side of the wagon and Inej assumes he will switch it with the one currently in the harness, but he swings himself up onto its back instead.

“Your closest neighbours are the Meijers, about half a mile in that direction, through those trees,” he points, and Inej follows his line of sight although there is nothing to see but farmland. The driver grins. “They’re Kerch as well, should make you feel at home. There’s a zowa couple comes through town once a month, they’re due in a few days if you want some ice.”

Kaz nods, but does not say anything, so Inej smiles tightly at him again. “Thank you.”

“Call into town if you need help with anything, you’ll find people are plenty willing to give it,” he tips his hat at them. “Mister Rietveld, Missus Rietveld.” He turns the horse and trots away up the dirt track, dust kicking up behind him, leaving Kaz and Inej and Genna and—

“Is that horse ours now, then?” she asks, eyeing the heavyset creature.

“Indeed,” says Kaz, stepping forward to undo the buckles on the harness. “Unless you think good Mister Zadi is particularly careless with his property.”

She frowns at the name. “The driver?”

He gives her a long look. “His farm borders ours. I made a deal to purchase the cart with the horse, and he agreed to bring us out here.”

Kaz was out of her sight for so little time in town, it’s a wonder he was able to arrange such a thing, but she supposes she’s seen him negotiate far more delicate terms in less time. She’d been too preoccupied with her screaming baby to notice much else.

Inej is sure she’s seen stranger things in her life than Kaz Brekker - or Kaz Rietveld, or whatever the fuck his name is - turning a horse out to pasture, but at that moment she cannot summon any of them. When he’s done, she trails him into the house.

It’s surprisingly cool inside, and dark, a blissful relief from the dust and heat of the road. He leads her on a quick tour, and she pokes her head into each room with little interest, half her attention on her fussing baby. There’s not much to it, three bedrooms and a washroom upstairs. Downstairs there is a sitting room, and a study, and they come last to a large kitchen with a scrubbed wooden table in the centre.

Kaz crosses to a large sink with a hand pump and strips off his gloves, rolls up his sleeves. Inej stares. It’s the first time she’s seen his bare hands, she thinks, since the night she told him she was pregnant. They are flushed red and sweaty. Evidently black leather disagrees with the climate.

“We have water in this house?” she asks, watching him fill the basin, rinse his hands.

“There’s a spring under the property,” he says, not looking at her. “Drove the buying price to truly absurd heights but I thought it would be better, with a child.”

Inej says nothing. When he’s finished, he turns back to her and there is an uncomfortable pause.

“Did you want to see the property?”

Not really, she thinks. She wants to change her clothes. She wants to sleep. She wants to do half a hundred other things than step back out into the hot, dusty afternoon. She shifts uncomfortably in her wet shirt. In her arms, Genna grizzles unhappily. Inej shakes her head. “I have to feed her.”

“Very well,” he nods sharply.

There is another awkward pause while he stares at her. Inej stares back. She’s not sure what he’s waiting for. Kaz is in the habit of absenting himself when it comes time to feed the baby. The first time Genna had woken in the night in their shared wagon, Inej had turned away from him as she lifted her nightshirt and put the baby to her breast, feeling suddenly insecure about engaging in this strange new activity in front of him. Ever since that night, he’s made himself scarce whenever Genna begins to cry with hunger.

Inej regards Kaz warily across the kitchen, and the light spilling into the room from the window sits between them, as uncrossable as the ocean. Uncharacteristically, Kaz blinks first. He nods stiffly, takes up his cane and brushes by her on his way out, leaving her alone in the kitchen.

Sighing, Inej sits gingerly in one of the wooden chairs at the table and undoes her shirt buttons, preparing for the long process of getting Genna to feed.

.

Time passes sluggishly, days blending seamlessly into nights blending into days. Inej takes the largest bedroom while Kaz relegates himself to the one farthest away down the hall, the better to sleep through the baby’s crying, she supposes. If only she had such a luxury.

Inej wakes when Genna wakes, and sleeps when Genna sleeps, and feels like she has no time or space for anything else. She keeps mostly to the house and has no idea what Kaz does with himself, though he must be keeping busy because supplies arrive, their kitchen is gradually stocked. He comes in while she’s pacing the hall rocking the baby and tells her he’s hired staff to tend the fields, though she has no idea what grows there. He tells her he’s met the neighbour, and she nods absently and goes back to scrubbing Genna’s wrappings. Food appears before her at regular intervals during the day, and she eats it mechanically and the plates disappear, and when she goes into the kitchen there are no dirty dishes piled in the sink.

A tidemaker does indeed come through - though the Zemeni make no such distinction, grouping all grisha orders together under the name zowa - and Kaz has several huge bricks of ice made for their icebox. Inej chips little bits off and makes cold packs that she presses to her aching breasts, almost crying with relief.

It’s not the discomfort, or the exhaustion, that grinds her down so relentlessly. Inej is well used to both. She has lived a punishing life since she was fourteen years old, with little comfort to be found in any place she has dwelled. Pain was all she had known at the Menagerie, and her time with the Dregs hadn’t been much better - albeit a different kind of pain, one she had relished, even chased after. Her time on the sea taught her endurance beyond anything she’s ever known. There have been times she goes days without sleeping, sting of salt on her face, skin blistered and bleeding from constant damp or the inescapable sun.

Yes, Inej is accustomed to being in physical discomfort.

But her loneliness is terrible, a living thing in her chest that threatens to cleave her in two. She bitterly, bitterly regrets leaving the caravan. In the forests of Ravka, in her tender new-mother state, the idea of having her baby near the bustling crowds of the circus had frightened her, too similar to the circumstances in which she herself had been stolen. She’d been preoccupied with the fear of the same happening to Genna.

The fear had been terrible, but this is worse somehow, this constant isolation. She speaks to no one but Kaz, sees no one but Kaz, and he seems to have little interest in her now that he’s got her to the other side of the world and satisfied whatever madness had moved him to come for her in the first place. He spends the majority of his days ensconced in his study doing saints only know what.

The worst, though, is when Genna wakes in the night and Inej sits alone in the darkness while the baby suckles at her, too tired even to light the lamp. She cannot stop herself from weeping, then. A constant stream of tears down her face and deep, shuddering sobs that she does her best to muffle, to little success. If Kaz ever hears her from down the hall, he gives no indication.

He gives her nothing at all.

So the weeks slip by, and Genna grows bigger with every passing day as Inej only grows more desolate.

She has Genna laid out on the bed, halfway through dressing her, when the anger gets hold of her. It’s a dull sort of rage, diffusing slowly through her lethargy as self-loathing burns in her veins. The further she gets from Ravka and the fear that had gripped her there, the less her own choices make any sense to her.

Why did she come here? Why did she ever let him talk her into it? Why has she ever let him talk her into anything? He never even has to try, particularly. He just says it, and it becomes reality. Kill the card dealer, Inej. Steal the painting, Inej. Climb the fucking incinerator shaft, Inej.

Come to bed, Inej.

And she went, didn’t she? Went willingly, little fool. Look where it’s got her, because she couldn’t make a choice. Landlocked, with nobody but Kaz for company and a squealing infant sucking the life out of her every hour. She looks down at Genna, who looks so like Kaz, and hates her too.

In the next instant, she gathers her baby close to her chest, heaving breath and inhaling her sweet baby smell, praying to any saint who will listen that there is no way for a child so young to know that their mother hated them, however briefly.

.

This is the state of affairs which presents itself to Colm Fahey, when he appears on their doorstep one bright afternoon.

To say Inej is pleased to see him is an understatement. She’s always liked Jesper’s father, from the very first time she met him. He’s returned to Ketterdam a handful of times over the years to visit his son, and has maintained a paternal sort of interest in the rest of the Crows. His visits have frequently coincided with Inej’s, necessitating long dinners at the Fahey-Van Eck residence so that he can quiz them all about their lives.

It transpires that Colm has been on business up in Weddle and, having received word of Kaz and Inej and their happy news via Jesper, decided to drop in and check on them on his way home. He shakes hands briskly with Kaz as he steps over the threshold, kisses Inej on both of her cheeks, and enquires cheerfully as to the baby’s whereabouts.

Inej left Genna lying on a blanket in the sitting room when she heard Colm’s voice in the hallway, and she feels a pang of guilt. She feels guilty for everything these days. She beckons for Colm to follow her.

Once in the sitting room, as he catches sight of Genna, Colm steps forward and leans over her, hands on knees. Genna gurgles up at him, kicking her little legs out, and Colm laughs in delight. “Well, look at you,” he says, reaching down to tickle her little belly. “What a picture you make, pretty as your Ma.”

He grins at Inej as he says this, and winks, and she has the odd sensation of her stomach turning over as she twists her hands in front of her. She feels awkward and overwhelmed, doesn’t know what to do with the compliment, doesn’t know how to react to his cheerful presence. It’s been weeks since she had anything more than monosyllabic exchanges with Kaz. As Colm returns his attention to the baby, Inej glances sideways at Kaz and finds him watching the older man lean over Genna with the same unsettling intensity he used to display when rooting out card sharps in the Crow Club, and saints only know she doesn’t have the energy to deal with that.

“I’ll make some coffee,” she announces to the room, and flees to the kitchen.

She takes her time brewing the pot on the large cast iron stove, trying to remind herself how to interact with other adults, and by the time she returns to the sitting room, Colm has settled himself into an armchair, cooing baby nonsense at Genna. Kaz is still standing near the doorway, back ramrod straight, watching him like a hawk. As soon as Inej appears with the tray, he leaves. A moment later, she hears the study door click firmly shut down the hall.

Colm looks up at her. “I’m not sure he’s pleased to see me.”

Inej shrugs, not bothering to make excuses for Kaz. “You know how he is.”

They talk for a while over coffee. Inej asks after Jesper and Wylan, is assured they’re both fine. She hadn’t been aware that they knew about Genna, or even where she and Kaz were. She hasn’t thought of them at all this entire time. Another thing to feel guilty about. Colm must sense her discomfort because he changes the subject, asks after the farm - how it’s going, what they’re planning to grow - but Inej has no answers for him. She knows nothing of the farm, Kaz has never offered particulars and she’s never asked.

They settle into the safe topic of parenthood, because Inej can answer questions about her baby. About how well she feeds, and how much she sleeps, and how she’s started to smile. For the past couple of weeks, Inej has been feeling sure that Genna has begun to recognise her, to look for the sound of her voice, but with no other parents nearby to confer with, the possibility that it was just her loneliness making her see things that weren’t there had crept in. Now she quizzes Colm on it and feels a small stab of vindication when he assures her that she is likely correct.

During the course of the conversation, Colm scoops Genna up off the floor and settles her into the crook of one arm as he drinks his coffee. The sight of him sitting there, cup in one hand while he bounces a baby in his other arm, is so natural, so fatherly, that Inej wants to be sick.

Colm must misinterpret her pained look for wistfulness, because he smiles. “Ah, I remember when Jesper was this small,” he says, beaming down at Genna. “It doesn’t last for long, enjoy every minute of it.”

Inej nods at Colm's words and then promptly, humiliatingly, bursts into tears.

He is very kind about it, smiling gently and offering her the handkerchief from his breast pocket.

"I'm sorry," she gasps, wiping furiously at her face. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be," he says, pouring a fresh cup of coffee and passing it to her, and that small act of kindness almost makes her cry all over again. "Aditi was the same after Jesper was born."

She sniffles. "Really?"

He nods. "Sad, tired. Not herself. Nothing I could do would make it better."

Inej laughs wetly, and not a little bitterly. "Well, if you tried to do anything at all you'd be among the minority, I'm sure."

She expects him to laugh it off the way he had with her tears, but he sits up a little straighter, smile dropping slightly. "What do you mean?"

Inej waves a hand dismissively and shakes her head, trying to swallow the lump in her throat. She takes a sip of her coffee, grimaces slightly. She’s never particularly liked coffee, prefers any number of fragrant teas that she picks up on her travels. At least it keeps her eyes open during the day, though, after long nights of pacing the floor trying to settle Genna back to sleep.

When she glances back at Colm, he’s watching her closely with a serious, though not unkind, expression. He glances once to the doorway, where Kaz had stood like some watchful gargoyle earlier, and then back to her.

“Inej,” he says gently, shifting Genna in his arm slightly. “Is everything alright?”

Inej blinks, caught off guard. Since Genna’s birth, nobody has asked her that question. Not even her own mother. Inej has always had the sense that she was expected to step smoothly into motherhood. It feels like a personal failing to admit to struggling. She opens her mouth to tell him that yes, everything is fine and he mustn’t worry, and the truth comes spilling out of her instead.

It’s rushed, ineloquent, the words come tumbling over themselves and a part of her feels that she shouldn’t be unburdening herself to him this way, but she has no one to talk to and she is so lonely. So, she tells him. About the isolation and the exhaustion and the way she misses her ship and the easy camaraderie of her crew, and all the guilt she feels for wishing she was on the sea again instead of, well, here. She tells him how she feels nothing she does for Genna is right, how inadequate she feels, how worried she is that she won’t be able to give her daughter enough, that she won’t be enough. And Kaz is—well, Kaz—

Colm sighs heavily, and there is so much sympathy in his face that it’s almost too much to bear. “Inej, this baby—” he lifts the arm holding Genna slightly for emphasis “—is as hale and hearty as any child her age I have ever seen. Look at her. Plump and pretty and clean and well loved.”

Inej swallows again, hard, clutches at his words as if they were a lifeline in a storm-tossed sea. This is rock bottom, she thinks, truly.

“There’s no instruction book for parenting,” Colm continues, almost sternly. “You’re doing just fine, my dear. Perfectly, in fact. The fact that you’re worried about doing enough for her means that you are. As for the rest—” he breaks off then, pursing his lips and huffing a breath through his nose. “Inej, would you excuse me please?”

He hands Genna back to her, leaves the room, and a moment later she is startled to hear the study door open and shut decisively. The shock of it is enough to keep her frozen in her seat for a moment, before she shoots to her feet. She doesn’t know the last time someone that wasn’t either herself or Jesper walked into Kaz’s study without knocking but she’d bet good money that whoever that person was, if any had ever dared, got an earful at best and a beating at worst, depending on Kaz’s mood. Her only thought is to rescue Colm before he gets either.

She can hear a raised, though muffled, voice as she approaches. The walls in the house are thick, which keeps the interior cool even in the warmth of a late Zemeni spring, but also means that sound doesn’t travel all that well. Standing a few feet from the door, she realises that the raised voice belongs not to Kaz, but to Colm Fahey. She cannot hear the rough burn of Kaz’s voice at all, in fact, only Colm’s strong baritone. She can’t make out his words, but his tone is irate.

She briefly contemplates rescuing Kaz but, after a moment of contemplation, returns to the sitting room and shuts the door behind her.

Quite some time passes before the study door opens again. Inej, having put Genna down for a nap upstairs, is dozing in an armchair but she sits bolt upright at the sound. Colm appears in the doorway of the sitting room. Kaz does not.

Colm collects his hat and coat, and informs her he must be getting on, he’s on a schedule and he has rooms booked at an inn a few hours to the south. Inej sees him to the door, and he kisses her again on both cheeks and then draws her into a tight hug. It reminds Inej of the way her own father holds her, and she clutches at his middle briefly.

“You will write to me if there is anything at all you need,” says Colm, holding her by the shoulders and looking at her seriously. It’s not a question. She nods.

He looks at her a little longer, before nodding to himself. “You’ll be alright. It all gets easier, I can promise you that.”

Inej watches as he mounts his horse and trots away up the dirt track into the still bright afternoon, and feels a pang of regret. His visit, brief and unexpected as it may have been, was a welcome interlude in the monotony of her days.

This cannot continue, Inej decides, rubbing her temples as a headache builds behind her eyes. When the summer has passed and there is another window for calm seas on the crossing, she’s going to take her baby and go back to Ravka, and Kaz can do whatever the hell pleases him for it will surely be no concern of hers.

She doesn’t know what she’ll do from there, but anything has to be better than this crushing half-life.

.

When Genna wakes that night, Inej is so exhausted and emotionally wrung-out she is almost delirious with it. She can’t help it; she lies in her bed and starts to cry. It’s pathetic, truly. Usually, Inej at least manages to retrieve her child before dissolving into a weeping mess, but tonight she cannot bring herself to do even that. She thought she’d reached rock bottom earlier in the day. She was wrong. This is rock bottom. She feels heavy, defeated, paralysed with it.

As Inej sobs into her pillow, Genna’s wails rise, hungry and demanding. She is too small to understand anything other than that she wants and Inej is not there. Nobody is there.

Inej is so beside herself, she isn’t aware there is anyone else there with her until the room is filled with low light, the soft glow of the oil lamp being lit.

She jerks upright in bed, tears forgotten, hand already closing around the knife under her pillow, fear savage inside her, she’ll kill anyone who dares touch her baby—

But it’s only Kaz.

His back is to Inej, he’s standing over the cradle looking down at the baby. Genna’s cries quiet a little, now that somebody has come to her - not her mother, Inej thinks wretchedly - and for a moment nothing happens.

Then, slowly, to Inej’s astonishment, he leans down and picks Genna up, one hand under her tiny body, the other cradling her head. Inej is completely dumbfounded. He’s never, never held Genna. Never so much as touched her in all her life, as far as Inej can recall.

When he turns, the expression on his face is one of pure devastation and suddenly Inej can’t breathe. Why is he here? What is he doing? She wants to ask all of these questions. Wants to demand he put the baby down. Wants to demand he keep hold of her. She does none of these things, can only sit frozen, tangled in her bedsheets, knife in her hand and tears on her face.

Kaz is holding Genna the way that one might hold a live explosive, gingerly, away from his body, but he’s holding her. His intention becomes clear when he starts toward the bed, and Inej scoots back, settles against the headboard as he comes around to her side. When he leans down to place Genna in her arms, the motion brings him close enough that she can feel his breath on her face, and her heart squeezes painfully.

To her further surprise, instead of leaving immediately, he sits on the edge of the mattress. She might have commented on it, but Genna is already rooting, her little head turned instinctively into Inej’s chest, so she pulls her nightgown off her shoulder and shifts Genna a little closer until she finds the breast and latches on.

Calm comes over Inej, a powerful physical reaction to the act of feeding her child. Her eyes are puffy and sore, but she wipes the remainder of her tears off her cheeks and focuses on Genna, fussing with the collar of her little cotton nightgown, stroking her little cheek. She almost forgets that Kaz is there for a moment, until he speaks.

“Does it hurt?”

There is genuine curiosity in his voice. She glances up at him, but he’s watching Genna.

“Not anymore,” she says quietly.

His eyes snap up to hers. “But it did?”

Inej settles back a little further against the headboard, eyeing him warily. “For a while,” she says, shrugging one shoulder slightly. “Your body gets used to it.”

He doesn’t seem entirely satisfied with that answer, his eyes search hers for a moment more and then he looks away, and she sees the muscle in his cheek tick as he clenches his jaw.

“I can hear you crying in the night,” he says.

She doesn’t know how she’s meant to respond to that, so she says nothing.

“I’ve called myself a monster so many times,” his voice is rough, pitched low. He stares at his hands, flexing his fingers before clasping them together between his knees. “I’ve never felt like one until now.”

His words settle between them, heavy. For a long while neither of them speaks, and the only sound is the gentle suckling, snuffling sound of Genna feeding.

“You didn’t come,” Inej breaks the silence first, and her voice might be accusing if she weren’t so tired. “All those nights, you never came.”

“I didn’t think you wanted me to.”

She stares at him, waiting for more, but he volunteers nothing else. She shakes her head slightly, attention half on Genna, who has wrapped her tiny fingers around Inej’s larger one, grip tightening and relaxing rhythmically as she feeds. “Why now?”

“You were crying, she was crying. It wasn’t stopping.” The muscles in his throat work as he swallows, and he glances at them out of the corner of his eye briefly before looking forward again. His eyebrows draw together. “Colm Fahey called me a failure of a human being.”

Well. Inej is certainly not inclined to argue with that assessment. She imagines the blow will have landed, as well. As much as he might try to pretend otherwise, she knows that Colm Fahey’s good opinion means something to Kaz. It will have stung his pride, if nothing else.

Kaz clears his throat. “He said you were lonely. Are you?”

The knife is still sitting on the bed beside her thigh. He’s close enough for her to reach across and stick it right in his neck if she so pleased. She could do it. If she didn’t have her child in her arms, she honestly might.

“You’re so stupid, Kaz,” she breathes. She wants to be vicious about it, but the only thing she sounds is tired. “Honestly so stupid.”

His head snaps toward her, and he opens his mouth but she speaks before he can say anything.

“Am I lonely?” Inej gapes at him in disbelief. “In a new country, in the middle of nowhere, with no one but an infant and you for company?”

She watches him absorb her words. Even in profile, she can see the flit of his thoughts across his face. After so long studying him, trying to parse meaning out of the most miniscule expression, she can read him like a book. She knows his every tell.

“I thought it would be the right thing, for us to come here. Like we used to talk about.” He is referring, of course, to the drunken conversations they used to have, the childish fantasies of a simple life with no danger, and there is uncertainty in his voice that she has seldom heard there. She is so used to him being sure of everything, or at least doing a good enough job of faking it. “Was it not the right thing?”

“I don’t know,” she admits, head thunking against the headboard as she lets it drop back, staring at the ceiling. “But you abandoned me, Kaz. You brought me all the way out here and then you abandoned me. You may as well have stayed in Ketterdam.”

He says nothing. Inej keeps her eyes on the ceiling, grinding her teeth together furiously as she feels the sting of more tears. Possibly the absolute worst thing about being a new mother is that she cries all the fucking time. “Why did you? Why did you come to Ravka, why did you bring us here, if you—if you—” she breaks off, sucking in a shuddering breath. She can hardly speak. The lump in her throat is choking her. “If you didn’t want us.”

“I want you,” he says immediately, and the anger in his voice makes her look at him once more. “I’ve never done anything but want you, Inej.”

She shakes her head. “Genna—”

“You left me,” he snarls. “You didn’t want me.”

Inej’s mouth shuts so abruptly her teeth clack together. She stares at him, stunned.

“You left me,” he says again, and his voice is trembling with barely controlled anger. “You told me you were pregnant—” his eyes flick to Genna for the briefest of moments “—and then you left. You went to sea, and I didn’t know where you were, or how you were, or if you were ever coming back—”

“I did come back,” she interrupts.

He barks a harsh laugh, all contempt. “Yes, you came back. And then you left again, and that time you didn’t come back.”

“You wouldn’t talk to me,” she says, shaking her head, unable to believe what she is hearing. “You wouldn’t even look at me.”

“You didn’t exactly give me time to get used to the idea—”

“Saints forbid you say the words ‘Inej, I need some time to get used to the idea’, like a grown man—”

Inej cuts herself off abruptly. Her voice has started to rise, and Genna squirms in her arms, letting out a thin wail. Inej rocks her slightly, shushing gently. Rearranging her nightgown, she switches Genna to her other breast, strokes her cheek until she latches on and begins to feed again.

Kaz has gone quiet and still beside her, glaring at his hands, still clenched together in front of him. There is tension in every line of his body, and she can tell he is grinding his teeth from the way his jaw is working. There is hurt and anger rolling off him, the most emotion she’s seen him display since the night she gave birth. She can’t make sense of it.

She shakes her head again. “Why did you follow me? If you were so sure I didn’t want you?”

“She’s my child, Inej,” he says, and his voice is strangled. “You can’t keep her from me. You can’t.”

A long pause. Is that what he thinks she’s doing?

“I don’t want to,” says Inej, because she doesn’t. All she’s ever wanted was for him to be there.

Her head is spinning. She doesn’t know what to make of it all, except that it is so stupid and she is so tired, and she is so angry with him.

But she is also realising, for the first time, how angry he is with her.

She doesn’t want to let him have it, wants to rail at him and ask him what right he has to be angry when she is the one who has been suffering. But...he’s not wrong. She had left him. He’d been a stubborn, cold-hearted bastard, but she’d left him. Twice.

It’s a fear he’s alluded to only a handful of times in all the years she’s known him, a dark thing deep inside him that is convinced that anyone he comes to care for, he will eventually lose. And she had told him she was carrying his child, and then she’d left him.

For the first time, she feels a twinge of guilt for it.

He’s still a bastard, though. Her pride compels her to try for one last dig at him.

“Rietveld?” Inej asks quietly, breaking the silence, giving voice to the thing that’s been festering inside her. Another hurt to add to the pile, one that cuts deeper for the length of his deception. “All these years, Kaz, I never even knew your name.”

He has the grace to look slightly shame-faced at that, at least.

“You had the truth of it,” he says roughly, hands fisting into his pajama bottoms. “Kaz Brekker is who I am. Brekker is what’s left. It’s all that’s left.”

If that’s the truth, then she’s wasted a decade of her life. If that monster is truly all there is inside him, then what has she been doing all these years?

“Is it?” she asks gently.

He doesn’t answer. His eyes are fixed on Genna once more and the expression on his face puts her in mind of a drowning man who has sighted land in the distance but isn’t sure he has the strength to make it.

Perhaps it’s sleep deprivation that makes her do it, but slowly, hesitantly, Inej reaches out her free hand toward him, watching him carefully for any sign he might react negatively. He doesn’t move as she reaches for him, nor does he move when she places her hand on his. The first touch of his skin on hers sends shivers through her. The last time she held his bare hand was the night she told him she was pregnant. She tries not to remember the way he’d recoiled from her that night. He does not recoil from her now.

Gently, she pulls his hand toward her, and he has enough time to glance at her quizzically before she has maneuvered his hand to rest against Genna’s body, watching as the baby curls her tiny hand around her father’s finger for the very first time.

Kaz goes utterly still, and Inej waits. She has spent so long waiting for him. She can’t do it anymore. If he pulls away now, it’s done. If he won’t be in this with her, she has nothing left for him.

But he releases a shuddering breath, and his shoulders slump, and he sways almost imperceptibly toward her as he moves his thumb to stroke softly over Genna’s fingers. He never takes his eyes off his baby daughter.

“She’s—” he begins, and his voice catches. He clears his throat. “She’s so small.”

“Yes,” says Inej, because what else can she say?

He doesn’t speak again, and nor does Inej, but they sit there with Genna between them while she feeds, the three of them together in the quiet of the bedroom, dimly lit by the soft glow of the oil lamp. A small pocket of light and warmth in the night.

~*~*~*~

Chapter Text

~*~*~*~

Inej has no name for this uneasy truce that now exists between them.

It’s not peace, exactly, but perhaps...a cessation of hostilities. The space of a breath, to lick their wounds and try to pull themselves out of the hole they’ve dug.

She’d been tempted to pass the whole thing off as some sort of sleep-deprived delirium, the morning after Kaz held Genna for the first time, a wishful dream. But the same thing had happened the following night, and the night after that, and continues even now.

She never needs to get out of bed, now. When Genna begins to grizzle in her cradle, Kaz’s uneven footsteps sound in the hallway, and then he’s there to lift the baby and place her into Inej’s waiting arms. It’s so much easier to fall back asleep when she can remain in the soft nest of her blankets, pulling herself into a half-seated position to feed her baby, before passing her back to Kaz for winding.

Under careful guidance, he handles Genna stiffly but competently. With his face drawn into a tight frown of concentration, he sets her on his good knee, one hand supporting her tiny body as he leans her forward, the other patting her back. It bears little resemblance to the way Inej handles Genna after feeding, cradled against her shoulder, but Kaz has so far not displayed an inclination to hold the baby close. The fact that he is willing to hold her at all is a minor miracle, so she makes no further comment. She’d stayed awake the first several times, watching him anxiously, but if he chafed under such close supervision he did not show it. After a week or so, when she is satisfied he can handle the task safely, it is easy for her to slide back down her pillows and let sleep take her again.

More than easy, it’s almost involuntary. Once her brain has decided that her child is safe enough in Kaz’s hands, she cannot stop herself from slipping under, can never stay awake long enough to see him settle the baby back to sleep. Always, Kaz is nowhere to be found when she wakes again, but the sun is over the horizon, Genna is safely back in her cradle, and there is a cup of fragrant jasmine tea sitting on the nightstand. Her favourite. Inej is entirely mystified as she drinks it, soaking in the peace of the morning while the baby is still sleeping and the birds have just begun to sing.

She asks him where he’s getting it, once, while she is feeding Genna sleepily.

“There’s a jar of it in the pantry, it came with the first supply order,” he says, and she can see in his face that he seems to wrestle with something. “I should have told you.”

Inej raises an eyebrow. “That would have required you to speak to me.”

“Or you could have looked with your eyes,” he mutters, turning away - presumably so she can’t see the mutinous expression on his face - but he nods all the same.

Inej may have spent most of her life operating on too little sleep, but the benefits of finally getting enough rest cannot be overstated. Everything is easier. The fog in her brain clears, her moods even out, she feels more resilient. Genna's crying no longer feels like a personal indictment, simply an indicator of a need that must be met.

It’s like waking from a long, half-lucid dream. Inej has staked her life on her ability to catch details and glean secrets for so long that she is suddenly painfully aware of her recent failure to do so as she begins to truly take note of her surroundings for the first time. Barefoot, baby in her arms, she begins to methodically map the layout of the house. She memorises every possible point of ingress and egress, devises the best routes to move between spaces unseen and unheard. She learns the personality of the place. The way the sun pours in her bedroom window at dawn. The third step on the staircase that creaks sharply when trodden on. The tricky lock on the back door that leads outside from the kitchen, that means she needs to jiggle the handle just so to get it open.

She stands on the back step and surveys the land before her, sloping gently away from the house. Immediately outside is a patch of brown grass and rocky soil, overgrown with weeds. Beyond that, a small cluster of a dozen or so trees standing at evenly spaced intervals, heavy with blossom. An orchard, Inej thinks, maybe, as she breathes in the morning air.

She still feels sluggish, almost hungover, but she feels like herself. For the first time, she begins to feel confined in the house. So it is that one morning she dresses Genna in her smock and sun bonnet, binds her in the sling crosswise to her body, and determines to see where exactly it is they’ve ended up.

Crossing the small yard, she hops the wooden fence into the pasture. The heavy brown horse they’d purchased ambles over to her, and she holds a hand out, feels the warmth of its breath as it muzzles gently over her palm. She wonders if it has a name - if not, they ought to give it one. She recalls Sacha and Laksmi, the team of strong little ponies that had pulled her parents’ wagon when she was growing up. It had been Inej’s job to care for them, when she was big enough. She remembers burying her fingers into their shaggy winter coats, the fog of their breath in the cold morning air. She remembers taking them down to the river at midsummer, water up to her thighs and the strange motion of them swimming beneath her. Those ponies are gone now, long since replaced by a younger team, but the musky horse-smell makes her think of them.

Inej gives the horse a final pat and continues on her way, climbs smoothly over the fence at the opposite boundary of the pasture with one hand steadying the baby against her chest, and walks into open grassland. She doesn’t know the boundaries of their land, but she resolves to walk until she gets tired or sees something of interest.

It’s a gently undulating landscape, long steady slopes and hidden dips, shades of brown and gold. There’s so little green that she could almost believe it all dead if it weren’t for the chirp of crickets all around her in the brown grass and the rustle of birds in the thorny, shrubby little bushes. The sun is warm at her back, even at this early hour, and she shifts the fabric of the sling to ensure Genna is adequately shaded.

She is considering turning back - there is sweat beading on her skin and she is anxious of the baby overheating - when she spots Kaz, as she comes to the top of a tall rise. He is standing with Mr Zadi, the man who’d delivered them to their house, deep in conversation and, as she draws closer, she can see that they are surveying a large expanse of relatively flat ground. His posture is relaxed, leaning on his cane with one hand in his pocket, and he is nodding as the Zemeni man gestures expansively at the land before them.

Kaz seems remarkably at ease, incongruous in the surroundings only to her, and it hits her with startling force that this is something that they share, a childhood running barefoot through the long grass, playing in mud cleaner than anything coating the fetid streets of Ketterdam. Wide open spaces and the sound of the wind in the trees.

Inej shakes her head. Motherhood has made her sentimental.

Though she moves silently, Kaz turns smoothly to look at her as she reaches them. Mr Zadi looks startled but recovers quickly, giving her an easy grin.

“Ah, Missus,” he tips his hat to her, genial. “Good to see you out and about - Rietveld here said you’ve been unwell.”

Had he, indeed. Inej supposes that’s an easier thing to explain to your neighbours than the fact that you’re a useless bastard.

“Somewhat,” she slides a sideways glance at Kaz, who looks determinedly away. “I hope I’m not interrupting, Mister Zadi.”

“Koltan, please,” he says, holding out a large hand.

She takes it, shaking firmly. “Inej.”

“You’re feeling well now I hope, Inej?” He smiles when she nods in confirmation, eyes crinkling deeply at the corners. “My wife will be glad to hear it. She’s been desperate to come and see you - as soon as she heard there was a new baby. As long as you wouldn’t mind, that is.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

Koltan gives an easy laugh. “You might regret saying that.”

She looks between them. “Don’t stop on my account.”

“Not much to continue, really,” says Koltan, looking out over the fields again. “We’ve just been talking crop rotations.”

“I see,” she says, though she doesn’t, really. “What’s the verdict?”

“Standard three field rotation” says Kaz, like she ought to know what that means. He elaborates when she gives him a look. “Oilseed in the autumn, here, followed by spring barley. Next field over will be winter wheat, and then beans.”

“And the third field?”

“Left fallow this year, then we’ll rotate the following year,” supplies Koltan, squinting over the land. “It’s a solid system, I expect it to give you a good, diverse yield.”

“Oh, good,” says Inej, because it seems like the thing to say.

A shout comes from what she thinks is the direction of the road; a man standing a distance away from them. No, not a man, Inej thinks, squinting. A boy, tall and coltish and smooth featured.

Koltan raises his hand and calls something in Zemeni that she doesn’t catch, before turning back to them. “I’ve got to get on, things to see to at home. We’ll get the seed orders in, and talk about cultivating toward the end of the summer,” he says to Kaz, before tipping his hat in farewell to the both of them. “Rietvelds.”

They watch as he walks toward the boy, then as both of them gradually disappear down into one of the hidden dips in the landscape. Then it’s just Inej and Kaz and the birds and the sound of the wind.

A short, awkward pause.

“I didn’t expect to see you out here,” says Kaz, stubbornly avoiding her eyes as he grinds the tip of his cane into the dusty ground in little twisting motions.

She shrugs. “I thought it was time to see where you’ve brought us.”

“And?”

Inej chews her lip a little, trying to think of what to say. She hasn’t really seen enough to form an opinion. “Grassy.”

He makes a noise that might be amusement, a short huffing of breath through the nose, and then leans over her slightly, craning his neck to look at the baby strapped against Inej’s chest. Almost automatically, she moves the sling aside slightly so that he can see better.

“Will she be too warm out here?”

“Maybe,” admits Inej. She supposes it will take some trial and error to figure out what temperatures will be comfortable, for all of them.

Kaz walks back with her through the fields, circling around a different way than she had come, and she listens with interest as he points out the geographical markers that indicate their property lines, committing them to memory.

A thought occurs to her. “I thought you said Mister Zadi farmed next door?”

“He does, two thousand hectares.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Saints. Of what?”

“Sheep, for the most part, and a small arable enterprise.”

“So what’s he doing here?”

“Freelancing as a land agent. He’s been advising on the planting for the year,” Kaz scowls slightly, glaring at the open landscape. “And charging me through the nose for it.”

“I’m shocked you’re paying for advice.”

“Expertise costs.”

That’s true enough, but where Kaz is concerned, it’s mostly his own expertise that costs. The expertise of others he tends to obtain by force, threat or subterfuge. But he has no terrifying reputation to lean on, here, no gang at his back. And farming, she assumes, is something he sorely needs advice on.

Something tickles at the edge of her memory. “Your father grew barley, didn’t he?”

“It may surprise you to learn that the knowledge isn’t passed down in the blood.”

His tone is brittle; this is not a topic he’s open to discussing today. She rolls her eyes skywards, prays for patience. The morning is beautiful, sky a bright, brilliant blue with nary a cloud in sight. Inej feels, if not exactly well rested, certainly the least exhausted she’s felt since they arrived. She doesn’t want to fight.

The house comes back into view soon enough, slightly uphill from them as they approach it from the back. They pass a clear, shaded creek - fed by the spring beneath the property, perhaps - and walk through the small orchard.

Inej looks around at the sun filtering through the pink blossom on the trees. “What is it - apples?”

Kaz looks up at the trees, squinting. “Peaches, I think.”

“Oh,” Inej’s heart leaps. She had not tasted peaches till adulthood - they are not grown in Ravka, nor in Kerch, and the imported fruit preserved in sweet syrup is far out of reach for Suli travellers and Barrel rats. But from the first time Inej had bitten into one in a Bhez Ju market they have been a particular favourite, a small luxury she indulges when she can.

Her eyes dart to Kaz suspiciously, but he is looking forward as he walks, face as inscrutable as ever.

.

As promised, it doesn’t take long for Koltan Zadi’s wife to appear.

The very next morning, Inej is hanging Genna’s wrappings on the line to dry. Nobody had told her that having a baby involved quite so much laundry, she thinks ruefully. Still, she’s an old hat - no washer woman to give her underthings to on a ship, after all.

She is pinning up the last of the linens when she hears the distant rat-a-tat of the door knocker.

Abandoning the washing, she walks back into the house - sparing a glance for Genna, asleep in a basket on the kitchen table - and goes swiftly through to the front door.

A tall Zemeni woman is standing on the front step when Inej opens the door, a bundle under one arm and a small child in the other. She smiles when she sees Inej, eyes crinkling in a sun-worn face, and Inej judges her to be around forty, maybe a little younger.

The woman greets her in Zemeni, which Inej haltingly returns, and then reels off a stream of words that Inej only follows about half of. Her confusion must be evident on her face, because the woman switches immediately to heavily accented Kerch, to Inej’s relief and shame.

Inej has a utilitarian grasp of Zemeni, though her vocabulary is largely limited to the maritime, choice phrases that are useful when she puts into Shriftport or Weddle. Kaz is better in this regard, through many years of business associations in the country, but neither of them are what could be described as conversational, something that will need to change now that they are to make a home here. Kerch’s function as the international language of trade has saved them many times over already, and it looks as though it’s about to do so again.

“I hope Koltan told you I would be coming,” says the woman now, still smiling widely. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

“Oh, yes,” says Inej, recognition coming over her. She holds out her hand to shake. “Inej, uh, Rietveld.” She trips over the name slightly, resisting the urge to give Ghafa or even Brekker.

If the woman notices her stumble, she is kind enough not to say anything about it. She ignores Inej’s offered hand, leaning in to kiss her on both cheeks. “Well met, Inej. I am Anathi Zadi.”

In the kitchen, Anathi leans over the basket and exclaims that Genna is the most beautiful baby this side of the True Sea, and Inej preens, silently pleased to show her off. There’s something validating about the praise of another woman - another mother.

She moves around the kitchen, pulling out tea things and setting the kettle to boil on the stove, and Anathi asks questions to which Inej gives non-committal answers - where do they come from and what did they do there and what made them come out to this part of the world? She has no idea what Kaz may or may not have said to people; it’s both unusual and deeply troubling that he’s neither briefed her, nor had she thought to ask.

Anathi shares information, too. Inej learns that the Zadis’ have four children, and the boy who’d called to Koltan in the fields is their eldest son, fifteen years old this coming winter. Four-year-old Effi, their youngest and longed-for daughter, gives Inej a gap-toothed grin from behind her mother’s skirts and Inej can’t help but grin back, charmed. It’s impossible not to see Genna in her face, imagine her tiny baby at the same age.

When they are settled with tea, Anathi slides the bundle she’d arrived with across the table. Confused, Inej opens the paper it’s wrapped with, and gasps.

“Just some of Effi’s old things,” says Anathi, blowing delicately on her tea. “It’ll be nice for them to get some more wear - if you don’t have use for them, you can pass them on.”

Inej hums in acknowledgement as she sorts absently through the little pile of smocks and dresses, soft cottons, bright colours. “Thank you, this is very kind.”

Anathi waves her off. “Babies need so many things. It’s important for mothers to help each other where they can.”

The look on her face then is so full of understanding that Inej can hardly bear it, has to look away under the guise of checking to see if Genna is still sleeping. It’s amazing, she thinks, how the smallest acts of kindness mean the most. This woman, this stranger, heard that she had a new baby and thought of her long enough to pull out some old baby clothes in case she might need them. Inej is touched.

Before she waves Anathi off, Inej fills an empty jar with some of the jasmine tea and presses it into her hand. Anathi thanks her profusely - it’s not much, but she’d said she liked it, and Inej wants to thank her in some small way for the clothes.

Anathi kisses her on both cheeks again as she leaves, holds up the jar. “Next time, I'll bring you some of my chamomile and we can compare notes.”

It crosses Inej’s mind to demur, make some excuse to avoid making close connections on land, as she’s done for much of her adult life. Instead, she smiles. “Next time,” she agrees.

.

Kaz and Inej have settled somewhat into their routine, but Genna continues to be plagued by periodic episodes of colic, no matter what they try.

When it’s bad, she screams all day and all night, her little face bright red with effort and discomfort, and Inej can feel the hysteria creeping in again - not so much exhaustion, because this time the load is shared, but the unique agony of seeing her baby in pain and not being able to do a thing to relieve it. Inej has learned to distinguish between Genna’s cries, which one means she’s hungry, which means she needs to be changed. But these cries are different. These cries have a sharp, unique quality to them, a shrill tone that seems to drive right through her bones. Even Kaz, so used to pushing mercilessly through any and all discomfort, is beginning to look a little ragged round the edges.

Inej mentions it in passing to Anathi Zadi, who recommends warm baths before bed. Inej dutifully tries, to no avail. Desperate, she sits down at Kaz’s desk one morning and writes to Colm Fahey, the only other parent she has ready access to. She hopes he won’t mind; he had told her to write to him if she needed anything, after all.

Sealing the envelope, she hesitates a moment before rummaging for another leaf of writing paper. As she does so, she catches sight of a roughly folded shred of paper, glimpses the coded message in slanted letters that she recognises as Anika’s hand. It’s a newer cipher - Kaz always liked to change them at random among the Dregs - and she cannot read it. It probably wouldn’t take her too long to decode it, but she has other priorities calling for her attention. She files it away mentally to consider another time.

She focuses instead on beginning a letter to her mother. It’s difficult to contact the caravan once it’s on the move for the summer, but Inej has a rough idea of their planned touring schedule and she tries to count forward in her head, predicting where they might be in the time it takes her letter to cross the True Sea and travel inland. Adds a few weeks to be safe. She addresses the letter for Ryevost, to be held at the postal offices. She knows her parents will check for word from her.

A twinge of guilt. She ought to have written before now. Aside from a short missive to let her parents know she’d arrived safely in Novyi Zem, Inej has not contacted them. Though she started dozens of letters, she had not known what to write except that she was wretched and unhappy and a failure; she hadn't wanted to place that burden of worry on them, so she’d written nothing at all.

She shakes the guilt off, now. Ishani Ghafa was once the mother of a new baby, she knows the struggle, she will not have expected Inej to spend all her waking hours writing letters. Still, Inej fills a page with chatty news - descriptions of the house, the farm, stories of Genna and how she grows - before she comes to her question.

How does she soothe Genna’s colic, she asks. Simple. Done. But she pauses a moment, bites her lip, and then puts pen to paper again and asks all the other questions that she suddenly, desperately needs answers to but hadn’t known to ask before.

Yes, she wants to know how to ease the colic, but what if Genna gets a fever, what should Inej do then? How long should she wait to start weaning her off the breast, and how does she do that? When will her teeth start coming in, and will it hurt her greatly? If it does, what can Inej do to soothe the pain? When will Genna walk? When will she talk?

She sends the letters off and waits, and Genna has a period of relief, followed by another fit of terrible colic, followed by relief, and the cycle repeats.

Colm’s response arrives promptly, by rural Zemeni standards, and he recommends a nip of whisky on the end of a finger for the baby to suck on. Inej isn’t sure she loves that idea but thinks it potentially explains a great deal about Jesper. And even if she had been inclined to try it, Kaz absolutely will not hear of it.

It’s several weeks and a lot of sleepless nights before she gets her mother’s reply. A thick parcel arrives, and when Inej unwraps it, perplexed, there is not one letter but many. She plucks the top letter from the pile, eyes greedy for her mother’s familiar handwriting. The answers to all her questions and more, what must be twenty double-sided pages of advice and reminiscences, everything her mother knows and can remember about child rearing.

There are lists of plants and detailed instructions in their usage - Inej recalls from childhood her mother growing herbs in planters nailed to the side of the wagon, carefully drying them in the sun to keep over the winter, mixed into various pastes and tinctures. Ishani recommends angelica for fever, aloe for burns, thyme to relieve a cough. She doesn’t know how well some of these will grow in Novyi Zem, she writes, it will be up to Inej to find out. She asks if they can keep bees, for in a pinch a spoonful of honey may soothe a sore throat or protect a small wound from infection. All of this and more, carefully listed in tightly packed print.

And with this letter, a dozen others not in her mother’s hand. Names Inej recognises as she scans through them, the women of the caravan sharing their advice, their wisdom, the little things they’ve tried and had success with, this works for us it might work for you.

Inej lets out a shuddering breath. Once again she has called for help and that call has been answered with love, with kindness, with the enduring message that she is not alone.

She plucks the last item from the package, a tiny scrap of tightly wrapped brown paper, weighing nothing. Inej unwraps it and gapes at the delicate, bright orange threads she finds there. Saffron. Hideously expensive to buy, and though the Suli know the secret mountain places where the saffron crocus grows and harvest it carefully, it’s still a rare commodity among the caravans. Her mother has gifted her something even more valuable though, for here in her letter is the answer to Inej’s most pressing question: to soothe colic, saffron infused in a small measure of goat’s milk.

“Kaz,” calls Inej, keeping her eyes on the paper in her hands. “We need a goat!”

If Kaz is at all thrown by this request, he gives no outward indication of it. A goat is duly obtained and Inej follows her mother’s instructions closely, hunched over the stove to make the infusion. With a glass eyedropper, she gradually eases the mixture into Genna’s mouth. Her baby is reluctant to take it, turning her little head away, but Inej is patient, persistent, and over the course of several hours she manages to get most of it down her neck with only a little spat out.

That night, Genna cries but settles more quickly than usual. Inej makes more of the infusion and the night after, Genna sleeps soundly between feeds.

The following morning, Kaz goes into town and puts in an order for an eye wateringly expensive amount of saffron.

Not just saffron. Inej writes him a list of all the things she needs, seeds or juvenile plants. Angelica, aloe, feverfew, lemonbalm - a dozen more besides.

During the days, while Genna naps, Inej clears the scrubby patch of land directly at the back of the house, digs beds into the dry earth, muscles burning from lack of use and sweat running down her back. She doesn’t know how well these things will grow here either, but there’s one way to find out for sure.

.

With the baby finally sleeping well and some of Inej's needs attended to, the small ember of love she's been guarding closely inside her blooms into something more consuming.

(It’s not that she didn’t love Genna, before, but it can be hard to like something that screams at you twenty-four hours a day.)

She used to spend hours watching Genna sleep in abject terror, paralysed by the overwhelming weight of the responsibility that lay in her hands, the little life that was now hers to guard and nourish. That terror hasn’t necessarily abated, but it has been softened by the adoration flooding her every sense. She still spends hours watching Genna sleep, but now she marvels at the perfection of her delicate features, obsesses over her tiny fingers and toes. When Genna wakes, Inej delights in her expressions, in the nonsense sounds she makes and the way she reacts to the world around her. Because she does react, now.

To Inej’s mind, having a newborn is a little like having an ill-tempered houseplant, if that houseplant was intent on driving its caregivers insane. A thing made entirely of need that gives nothing in return. Now that Genna is a little bigger, a personality begins to emerge. When Inej speaks, Genna watches her face intently. When Inej holds things up to her, she reaches for them. When Inej kisses her face and tickles her belly, she shrieks with laughter, and the sound is so precious Inej wants to cry.

In the evenings, before she puts Genna down to sleep, she holds her and sings her the soft, lilting lullabies she remembers from her own childhood. She presses her nose to the top of Genna’s head, inhales the sweet, milky scent of her baby as she falls gently asleep, pressed close over Inej’s heart with one tiny fist curled into the end of her braid, and she knows in her soul that there is nothing she wouldn’t do, no atrocity she would not commit, if it meant keeping this tiny little person safe. She’s never felt like this before.

She thinks that if this is what motherhood will be, perhaps it’s not so bad.

Kaz is a puzzle, though. Despite his words, his feelings regarding fatherhood remain largely impenetrable, but sometimes she thinks he might be softening.

Aside from night feeds, Kaz still tends to keep his distance from the baby, but now that Inej is better rested she can stay awake a little longer, can watch them together when he thinks she’s sleeping.

He seems fascinated by Genna’s hands, Inej has noticed, and her feet. She often observes him holding them between his fingers, scowling like they have personally wronged him, pressing them against his palm as though comparing the size.

Little fingers, little toes, she thinks. Perhaps it’s a universal experience.

.

When Genna outgrows her cradle, Kaz moves in a larger cot with high sides so that she cannot climb out when she’s more mobile, though Inej silently questions how long that will contain a child of Ghafa blood.

There’s a sort of community barter system that exists out here, Kaz explains as she helps him carry the cradle down the stairs. When it comes to their neighbours, the locals tend to deal in favours, gentlemen’s agreements, goods in exchange for goods. There’s no difficulty in that, it's a familiar language to both of them - the Suli trade among themselves, and Kaz built himself on his ability to broker a deal.

The cot had been obtained from the Zadis, lately vacated by little Effi, and the only condition had been that Kaz and Inej pay forward the help. The Meijers, their neighbours to the other side, were expecting their first baby and would surely be grateful of a cradle.

So it is that the morning finds them loading Genna’s cradle into the back of the cart. Inej clambers up onto the front bench beside Kaz - she’d been quick to say yes when he asked if she wanted to accompany him. Ever the wanderer, the more confident she grows with the baby, the further she wants to explore. Now that she’s familiar with their property, she is keen to see the surrounding country.

Genna is strapped to her chest, as usual, in her smock and sun bonnet. Now that she is bigger, Inej uses the sling to bind her upright, facing outward so that she can see her surroundings, and she is well behaved on the journey up the rutted road, placidly watching the world roll by.

They pull to a stop outside a farmhouse not dissimilar from their own, and Julia Meijer, who Inej judges to be a few years younger than herself, comes out to greet them, introduces herself to Inej enthusiastically. She is just beginning to show, belly gently rounded, and she clasps her hands together in delight when she sees Genna.

“Oh, she’s so beautiful,” she says in Kerch, and Inej is surprised to hear a strong Ketterdam accent coming through. “May I hold her?”

From over Julia’s shoulder, Inej sees Kaz stiffen, but she gently unwinds Genna from the sling and hands her over. Inej’s arms had never yearned for a baby until she’d birthed her own, but another woman might have different dreams. A woman secure in her nice, pastoral life, awaiting the birth of a much-wanted child, might be greedy for the weight of a babe in her arms.

Genna tends toward being reserved with strangers, Inej has noticed - she has only just begun to warm to Anathi after much exposure - and she watches with a blank expression as Julia coos, bouncing her gently.

The sound of Kaz offloading the cradle comes from behind them, and Julia looks around. “Joss should be here in a moment, he will have seen you arrive,” she says, craning her neck toward the fields. She says as an aside to Inej, “My husband.”

“Kaz will be fine,” says Inej, because he will be. People look at him and only see the cane, but he’s deceptively strong. “How long have you been out here?”

“Nine years, almost. Seems like no time at all.” Julia blows a strand of hair out of her eyes, reluctantly handing Genna back to Inej when she starts to squirm. “Oh, here’s Joss now.”

“Meijer!” Kaz says in greeting from behind her, and Inej turns in time to see him shake hands briskly with a burly, bearded man, and the shock renders her almost completely immobile.

Incredible. Unbelievable. They moved all the way across the world and wound up living next door to a Razorgull.

.

Inej sits stiffly beside Kaz on the journey home, trying to think what to do.

Her fight or flight instinct had gone into overdrive and, with her daughter in her arms, flight won out. With the only thought in her head to make as quick and smooth an exit as possible, she’d told Kaz she wanted to go home, that Genna needed to be fed and that she was uncomfortable. He hadn’t questioned. There’s a freedom to leaning on women’s issues of which Kaz has little understanding. Where he might otherwise question her peculiar behaviour, any reference to leaking breasts and he simply shuts his mouth and does as he’s told. It almost makes her regret not having a baby years ago.

Now he keeps his eyes firmly on the road ahead as Inej panics silently.

Joss Meijer is a Razorgull, she’s certain of it. Not a high ranking member, but she’s seen him dealing in the Golden Bend, glimpsed him in warehouses a time or two while she was spying on shipments. A long, long time ago to be sure, back when she still ran with the Dregs, but the Wraith never forgets a face. Especially the face of an enemy.

Kaz seems to have forgotten, or more likely never knew his face in the first place. She can tell, though, by the nervous way he watched Kaz when his back was turned that Joss recognised him.

When they arrive home, Inej leaves Kaz to deal with the horse and cart and goes straight inside to her bedroom. She has Sankt Vladimir in her boot, always, but now she lays Genna on the bed, pulling out the rest of her Saints and secreting them on her body. When she has strapped her last blade to herself she takes a deep breath, feeling more steady, and tries to consider the situation rationally.

He’s a Razorgull, the enemy. Not only that, but he knows who Kaz is, she saw it in his face.

They’re expecting a baby.

Kaz doesn’t recognise Joss, though. That much is evident in the disinterest he reserves for people who are neither a threat nor of any particular use to him. It makes sense. Kaz would have little reason to come into contact with a lowly footsoldier unless they had specifically done something to catch his attention, but every rat in the Barrel knew Dirtyhands by sight.

She should tell Kaz who their neighbours are. If she does, it will be a slaughter, of that she has little doubt.

They’re expecting a baby.

Inej is fairly certain that Joss has not recognised her, and that’s to be expected. She wouldn’t have been much of a spider if she was regularly seen about her work.

She could always slip in, cut his throat while he sleeps. It would be quick and painless, she would grant him that. She would leave Julia alive, unharmed.

Alone.

They’re expecting a baby.

Her head is spinning. She weighs the options, one life against two. Against three.

Inej had once told Jan Van Eck that if he harmed her, Kaz would cut the baby out of his pregnant wife and hang it from a balcony. Van Eck had believed her. Kaz’s vicious reputation had done its work, and it was not unearned.

The thing is, Inej hadn’t really believed it, not then. She’d wielded that reputation like a weapon, but in her heart she had believed butchering a pregnant woman to be beyond him. Now? Well. She wants to believe he would never do it, but she’s not so sure anymore.

Inej isn’t certain there are any lines she wouldn’t be willing to cross, to protect her child. Only the Saints know the depths that Kaz would sink to, should he deem it necessary.

They’ve had no trouble from the Meijers so far. If it were her, she would have struck hard and fast while she still had the element of surprise. They’ve been out here nine years, are well established in the community. She certainly can’t say it’s outside the realm of possibility that a Barrel rat would seek a better life for a young family.

She resolves to keep it to herself, for now. Before she was a sea captain, she was the Wraith, and it is to the Wraith’s habits that she returns in times of doubt.

Watch. Wait. Strike only if necessary.

Genna is almost never alone, and it would be a rare threat indeed that could get past both her and Kaz - Inej is not particularly concerned about a Barrel thug. That doesn’t mean there are no measures to be taken.

“Maybe we should get dogs,” she says to Kaz, that evening after dinner.

“Why?”

They are in the sitting room, Inej feeding Genna, Kaz working his way through some financial statement or other. He sits with her like this sometimes, in the evenings, and it’s nice. It feels like something approaching normal, sharing space but separately engaged.

Inej shrugs slightly, though he’s not looking at her, adjusts the cushion under her elbow to better support the baby. “I don’t know, early warning system?”

He doesn’t look up from the papers in his lap. “You’re anticipating trouble?”

“Usually,” she says, opting to skirt neatly past the specific threat. “You’re telling me you’re not?”

At some length, he screws the cap back on his pen, uncrosses his legs.

"Inej, darling,” he says, and if the pet name didn’t make her want to smack him, the theatrical patience in his tone most definitely would. “This is where it shows that you've never spent any time around farms. You know what makes for a far better early warning system than dogs? Geese."

"Geese?" says Inej, dubious.

"Geese," he confirms.

There is a long moment where neither of them speaks, and the only sound is the clock ticking on the mantel. Inej squints at him suspiciously, for once unable to tell whether or not he is pulling her leg.

"In what possible way are geese better than dogs?"

"Vicious, loud and extremely territorial."

She stares at him for another long moment. "You want to get geese?"

"I don't want to get geese, but you want an early warning system and I'm telling you what the best option for that is."

Inej, personally, is rather attached to the idea of one or two large, loyal watch dogs who are trained to attack on command. She’d thought Kaz would be as well. “What do you have against dogs?”

“Nothing says you have something worth stealing like a pack of ravening hounds. Nobody bats an eye at geese on a farm.” His face twists suddenly in a grimace. “And you can’t learn whistle commands for geese.”

“What?” she frowns, but Kaz only waves his hand dismissively.

Inej rubs her forehead, sighing. It seems as though every day recently there is a new contender for the strangest conversation that she and Kaz have ever had.

“Geese,” she says again, not quite able to absorb the conversation.

Kaz nods sagely. “Geese.”

.

She hates the geese.

She’s absolutely positive that she has never hated anything more than she hates the geese. The only thing that makes her feel better is that however much she hates the geese, she can be certain that Kaz hates them even more.

There are three of them and they’re just so needlessly...mean. Every time she sets foot out of the house, the gander is rushing at her, wings spread threateningly, hissing like a demon. She’s watched them chase the poor, still-nameless horse the entire length of the paddock for the crime of existing within ten feet of them. More than once, she’s seen Kaz hook his cane under the breastbone of one of them and launch it several feet into the air to avoid being attacked, with mixed results - sometimes it’s an effective deterrent, sometimes the beast simply doubles down, enraged.

Inej has never had much to do with geese; Suli do not keep fowl, a fact she is more and more grateful for every day as she battles to get out of her own house and imagines a time when Genna will be toddling, how easily she could be knocked down and hurt. Inej fingers her knives and thinks there will be a lot of roast goose in their future.

Eventually, though, the wretched creatures settle in, they learn that Kaz and Inej are supposed to be there and (mostly) stop attacking them. They begin to pay for themselves, too. Inej still has to employ a good deal of stealth to collect their eggs - never let it be said that the Wraith was bested by some oversized poultry - but she has to admit it’s nice to have them, enormous things with rich yolks. Just one is enough to make a decent breakfast for herself and Kaz, with enough left over for her to feed some to Genna, who Inej, dutifully following her mother’s advice, has begun to wean onto solid food. Some mashed vegetables here, a little scrambled egg there. It won’t be long before Genna no longer needs the breast, and Inej feels a strange mix of sadness and relief.

The geese prove their worth as watchdogs when they chase the man delivering the mail halfway up the farm track, spooking his horse and unseating him, letters scattering everywhere. Between the honking and the mail man’s cries of distress, the noise is deafening.

Vicious, loud and extremely territorial. Kaz hadn’t been wrong.

Inej sighs. He’s going to be unbearable about this.

.

Midsummer brings a long spell of intense heat that refuses to break.

The peaches ripen in the orchard and Inej spends days collecting the fruit into baskets, fingers sticky with juice from the ones she couldn’t resist eating as she harvested.

She has little time to work before the fruit spoils. She palms as much of the glut off on her neighbours as possible, and then sets about furiously making peach jam and pickled peaches and preserving slices in thick stock syrup. Genna eats fresh mashed peaches for a week, and Kaz grumbles about the bowl of them that appears on his desk, though Inej notes that they gradually disappear. Following a set of scribbled instructions from her father, she even sets some peach wine to ferment in the cool root cellar under the house.

On a slow, sultry afternoon when the world is still, Inej sits at the kitchen table, back door wide open in hopes of a breeze. Maps and correspondence are spread before her, pages of her first mate’s slanted handwriting.

Specht is a natural-born sailor, as at ease on the rolling deck of a ship as Inej is on the highwire. His gift for marinecraft is innate, his ability to read the sea and react accordingly unmatched, but he does not have Inej’s instinct for the hunt. The combination of these gifts is what made them such a formidable team for so long, Specht navigating the ocean while Inej navigated a tangled web of intelligence. It’s not that he isn’t up to the challenge - The Wraith is doing well enough out there without her - but her advice is sought nonetheless.

At this moment though, it is difficult to concentrate.

Inej has handled the heat better than Kaz, who has been ill-tempered and snappish for weeks, but the last of her patience frays over the course of the morning as Genna grows increasingly fractious. Refusing her breakfast. Throwing her little tin dish across the floor. Wanting to be held but then squirming unhappily in Inej’s sweaty grip, fussing and whining the entire time.

All the while, Kaz has been ensconced in his study doing Saints only know what.

Inej has great sympathy for Genna; the heat is hard enough to bear, but her first teeth are coming and she’s angry, dribbly, fat little cheeks flushed with soreness and temper. Inej wishes she could explain what was happening, do something to take the pain away. She rides out the temper tantrums and cuddles her close and feels very sorry for her indeed.

It’s just that, right now, she needs to think.

Finally, at her wit’s end and desperate for relief, Inej scoops up her child, marches into the study, deposits her in Kaz’s lap without explanation and walks right out of the house.

She goes straight to the creek. Stripped to her underthings, she almost sobs at the first touch of cool water on her skin, unable to fathom why she’s never thought to do this before. She’s aware that her underthings have turned translucent in the water, she might just as well have stripped naked. It would be awkward for someone to stumble on her now, but she can’t bring herself to care; Kaz never lets farm staff this close to the house and if he deigned to come down here himself, well, it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before.

She floats on her back, eyes closed against the bright summer sky, until she is cool and her temper has calmed.

Kaz’s face floats behind her eyelids. She enjoys the startled expression that had crossed his face when she burst in, coloured by the slightest hint of guilt.

She contemplates that. She hadn’t missed the note that Kaz had smoothly moved a file on top of to cover, a familiar scrawl and sign off. It was visible on the desk for no more than a split second, artfully concealed with no obvious intent, but Inej’s bread and butter has long been in the small movement, to see without appearing to see, a spider at the centre of a web feeling out vibrations.

Does he think she hasn’t noticed the couriers coming to the house? His piles of paperwork, the copious letters he sends and receives? She knows a farm requires management, just as she knows he would never trust another to do his books, runs the numbers himself, both for here and his business holdings to the south. She knows it generates work for him, but not this much.

How can he think she doesn’t know? It’s almost insulting.

But she thinks of Joss Meijer. The enemy at their door, though the severity of the threat he represents is unclear, if it exists at all.

She can let Kaz have his secrets. She has her own.

Emerging from the water, Inej sits on the grass and wrings her hair out while her skin air dries in the sun, before she pulls her clothing back on, makes her way slowly back to the house. She feels a familiar pang of regret at becoming frustrated with her baby, but she had just needed a moment.

She wonders what chaos she’s going to return to. Kaz had been working, and never likes to be interrupted. Has he watched Genna at all, or has he allowed her to grizzle miserably while he buries himself in his books? Inej has a sudden flash of her child lying alone, hungry or wet, in pain from her teeth, unattended to, uncomforted.

Heart in her mouth, she walks faster, gaining speed until she is almost running, bursting into the house and then into the study. She stops short, unable to quite process the sight before her.

Genna is still seated in Kaz’s lap, supported in the crook of his elbow. She has been given one of the small Fabrikated rubber teething rings that Inej keeps in the icebox, and she is alternating between shoving it in her mouth and chattering at her father in her sweet baby babble. Kaz, for his part, is still working steadily through a pile of papers, but will occasionally respond to Genna as though she is carrying out a full-blown conversation with him. Oh, really? he says, and I see, how interesting, and what do you think about that? and I quite agree, my dear and each time Genna gurgles some unintelligible noise back at him, flapping her little arms, utterly delighted.

Inej stands for quite some time watching them and their little back and forth.

“Feeling better, Wraith?” Kaz says to her during a lull in the conversation when Genna is gumming determinedly on her rubber ring. He still does not look up from his work.

Inej shifts uncertainly. “I’m sorry for leaving her with you, I just needed a moment to myself.” She steps into the room, toward the desk. “I’ll take her now.”

“No need,” says Kaz, setting one paper aside and pulling another in front of him. “She’s fine where she is.”

Inej feels like the house she walked out of an hour ago is not the same one she has walked back into. “Really?” she asks, and her doubt is evident in her voice.

Kaz does look up at her then, frowning intently. “She’s my daughter.”

A long beat of silence stretches between them.

She stares at him. “You haven’t seemed that interested in being her father.”

He stares back. “You haven’t seemed interested in letting me.”

That stings. She hasn’t been sure what he wanted, how much he was prepared to do. Aside from night feeds, he’s been distant, and though they’d spoken of his desire to be close, she hadn’t been certain how that translated into a desire to be practically involved.

And...no. She has to be reasonable about this. She knows she has hoarded Genna jealously. Whether from protectiveness or fear of rejection, it doesn’t matter. She wants Kaz to be involved in Genna’s life so badly, but that means that at some point she is going to have to trust him again.

This is the moment then, thinks Inej. Left or right. Do or die. She can pluck her baby from his arms and leave him to his work, and things will continue as they have - she parenting Genna essentially alone, he keeping a roof over their heads but otherwise tiptoeing around the periphery.

Or she can leave her baby - their baby - here with him, and go and get some work done in peace.

He’s still watching her.

“Alright,” she says, nodding slowly. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

Genna chooses that moment to fling her teething ring onto the desk, letting out an upset squeak as it leaves her grip. Kaz grimaces, picks it up between thumb and forefinger. It lifts the paper beneath it, sticky with drool.

Inej swallows a smile, leaves them to it and goes back to her work.

.

The only problem with Kaz stepping fully into fatherhood is that he starts to have opinions.

The problem with his opinions is that, more often than not, they don’t match up with her own.

Intellectually, Inej is aware that, despite her romantic musing on bare feet and grass, their upbringings were vastly different. It would hardly be possible to find two people with less in common than a farmer’s son from rural Kerch and the daughter of itinerant Suli circus performers.

But by the time they’d met, they had both been so broken, so twisted by the cruelties inflicted on them, that she had only recognised a kindred spirit. She’d resisted Kaz’s attempts to mold her in his own image, had never quite sunk to the depths that his own depravity could reach, but the same rage drove them both. Though hers expressed itself differently, it burned just as intensely in the same cold, dark place inside.

As for the objects of their rage, well. Their approaches differed, that was true enough, but the end result was the same: annihilation.

She supposes the same could be said of parenting, different approaches to the same end. It was inevitable that they would have different ideas on how children should be raised, but in truth she hadn’t given much thought to the fact that he might disagree with her. If she was completely and truly honest with herself, she expected him to follow her lead, as he had with almost every other aspect of their relationship.

Their latest disagreement centres around moving Genna into her own room.

Kaz is adamant that children should be taught independence from a young age (and what would Kaz know about children, she wants to sneer, but she keeps that thought behind her teeth). He believes that it will be beneficial for Genna to learn to settle in her own space, for her to be less dependent on Inej.

Well, Inej doesn’t want independence from her own daughter. She has no concept of privacy between parents and their children. Before she was taken, she'd spent every night of her life sleeping in her parents' wagon. For fourteen years, she had not spent a single day apart from them. She woke with them, and trained with them, and performed with them. She ate with them and did chores with them. When she was small and played with the other children, it had been within sight of them. Of the myriad horrors she had experienced in her life, one of the hardest to bear had been her abrupt separation from them, as sudden and senseless as death.

But the girl who'd curled into herself and cried for her mama in the hold of a slaver ship is gone. The woman who took her place knows well the value of privacy, of solitude, of a locked door.

And, quite apart from that, the thought of when she might return to her ship has been teasing at the edges of her mind, tantalising and distant. When - if - that day comes, if she can give Genna the smallest amount of independence, keep her from feeling her mother’s absence like a wound, then it can only be to her benefit.

That doesn't mean it will be easy, when the time comes. That doesn’t mean it’s easy now.

When the argument has run its course she looks at Kaz, and he's watching her steadily, patiently, as though he knows exactly what is running through her mind. "It's time, Inej."

So it is that Inej watches unhappily as the empty bedroom is gradually made ready, cleaned and aired out.

On the afternoon that the unwieldy cot is moved from Inej's bedroom, she refuses to help, walks instead through the orchard with Genna strapped to her chest, hums to her quietly surrounded by dappled sunlight and the sickly sweet smell of fallen, decomposing peaches, and feels something like grief for this first and smallest of separations.

Later, when Genna is put to bed in her own room for the very first time, she goes down easy, untroubled with both of her parents standing over her cot. Inej tries not to be stung by it. Obviously, she wants her baby to sleep easily. Obviously, she doesn't want her to lie awake and fret and be scared that she is no longer close enough to hear her mother breathing in the night. Obviously.

If Inej lies awake long into the night, looking at the empty space in her bedroom where the cot once stood, well. Nobody else needs to know. If she gives Kaz the cold shoulder for three days after, it’s no trouble to her whether that is deserved or not.

.

The sound of the geese creating an almighty racket in the night has Inej out of bed and running for Genna’s room with a dagger in each hand before her brain has fully caught up to her.

But Genna is sleeping soundly, undisturbed by the noise, and her room is dark and quiet. Inej scans the shadows and finds nobody lurking, tests the window and finds it securely locked, and though she cranes her neck she cannot make out anything unusual outside from this side of the house.

When she steps cautiously out of the room, she meets Kaz in the hall, barefoot with a shotgun in his hands.

His eyes flick to her, and then into the bedroom behind her. "Alright?"

She nods.

The geese are still honking loudly, and Kaz moves toward the top of the stairs. Then comes the pounding at the door.

Inej's hands tighten instinctively around her blades, gaze drawn back into the dark bedroom behind her, to Genna. She thinks of any number of The Wraith’s enemies who might have tracked them here. She thinks of Joss Meijer, just half a mile away.

Assassins don’t usually knock, though.

"Stay here," says Kaz, and she hears what remains unspoken. Protect the baby. As if she would leave her.

He starts down the stairs and halfway down, the pounding comes again, accompanied by a shout. "Rietveld!"

Koltan Zadi's voice.

Kaz's shoulders slump slightly, in relief or irritation, and he descends the rest of the staircase quickly, sliding the heavy bolts on their door and swinging it open.

Koltan’s eyes go wide at the sight of the shotgun still in Kaz's hands, but he still manages to gripe at him. “Those geese are an absolute menace.”

"What the hell are you doing banging on my door in the middle of the night, Zadi?” Kaz demands. “I've got a child asleep in here."

"Sorry, Rietveld," says Koltan, not sounding sorry at all. "Julia Meijer's time has come."

Inej's heart twists and she descends halfway down the stairs, out of the shadows.

Kaz just stares blankly at Koltan. "What's that got to do with us?"

"Midwife is indisposed, so they've sent for Anathi.” He looks up to Inej briefly, before his eyes skitter away when he finds her in just her nightgown. “She was hoping Inej would go with her.”

Inej exchanges a brief glance with Kaz, and then nods. “I’ll get dressed.”

Before Koltan can say anything in response, Kaz swings the door shut in his face.

He turns to her. “Are you actually going?”

Inej frowns. “Of course”

“Why?”

There is flat incomprehension in his voice, and she stares at him.

Men don't know, not the half of it. They sit and fret or pray or drink, and keep well away from where the women do battle behind closed doors, tearing their own bodies apart to bring their children into the world.

“I just have to,” she says, and turns away from him, hurrying back upstairs. “You wouldn’t understand.”

When she comes back down the stairs Kaz is still standing by the door, though he’s relinquished the shotgun, leaned it up against the wall.

She bends to pull her boots on. “If Genna wakes up before I get back, you can give her some porridge.”

“I know.”

“Just put some honey in it, she’ll take it easier if it’s sweet.”

“I know.”

“Or some eggs, she—”

Kaz wrenches the door back open, effectively cutting her off. Koltan is still waiting on the step, and the two men stare each other down for a moment.

She casts her eyes over Kaz; dressed in loose pajamas, hair mussed, scowling viciously. He looks for all the world like a man bitter that his wife has been pulled from his embrace in the middle of the night.

Koltan must be thinking along the same lines, because he gives a crooked grin. “Sorry, Rietveld. We’re all at the mercy of women, when there’s a child coming.”

.

When she clambers into the cart, Anathi reaches over to squeeze her hand. “Thank you.”

Inej squeezes back, but she is bewildered. “I don’t know what I can do, I’ve never delivered a child.”

“You’ve had a child, that’s enough,” Anathi waves off her concern. “Julia needs women around her now, and calm. Not Joss Meijer flapping about like a headless chicken.”

At the front of the cart, Koltan throws back his head and laughs.

The cart lurches forward along the uneven road, lantern barely penetrating the darkness, and she feels a little chill of apprehension as they leave the house further behind. She has never been further from Genna than the next room, not ever in her whole life. But then, where could be safer to leave her than in the keeping of her father, the most dangerous man Inej knows.

.

When they arrive at the Meijer farm there is a lantern lit in the barn, and Inej can see that Joss is already deeply involved in something that seems to involve a bottle of liquor and some enthusiastic sanding of a plough.

They find Julia inside, pacing the floor of the bedroom in her nightgown, wide eyed and tearful.

“Oh, you came,” she says, as though she hadn’t thought they really would, and Inej feels a great pang of sympathy for her. Nobody should be alone at such a time.

“Of course we did,” says Anathi, soothing, approaching Julia like a spooked horse.

Inej isn’t precisely sure what she should be doing, tries to think back on her own experience but she had been less concerned with what the other women were doing than what was going on with her own body. She sets about stripping the good linens from the bed, replacing them with a sheet of roughspun they’d brought with them.

Once this is done, Julia sits gingerly on the edge of the bed, swaying slightly. “It’s just our luck that the only midwife for miles takes ill the same night I go into labour.”

“There now,” says Anathi, resting a hand lightly on Julia’s shoulder as Inej sits gently beside her. “Inej and I will see you through, you can be sure of that. I’ve had four children, and none were attended by a midwife.”

“Who delivered them?”

“Koltan,” says Anathi, and laughs at the horrified expression that crosses Julia’s face. “He’s perfectly capable of lambing a ewe, it’s not so different.”

Inej snorts and brings a hand to cover her mouth quickly, and Anathi gives her a sly wink.

Poor Julia turns to her. "Who delivered your girl?"

They all did, thinks Inej. All the women of my caravan, all of them together in love and safety, and the Saints were in the room with us.

How to explain, though?

She only shrugs. "My mother."

“That’s nice,” says Julia, rubbing her hands over her belly. “I wish my mother was here. I wish—” She trails off, sighing, looks away.

“Perhaps Joss would like to be here?” says Anathi, very gently. “We could fetch him up?”

Julia laughs weakly, but at least she laughs. “The very suggestion would send him to an early grave.” She shrugs at Anathi’s raised eyebrows, nods her head in Inej’s direction. “Kerch men. Inej knows.”

Inej recalls vividly Kaz's furious demands to be allowed access to her while she was in the birthing bed, and bites her tongue.

Julia’s son comes quickly, far more quickly than Genna had. The sun is not yet over the horizon when he slips out onto the sheets, wet and bloody and squalling. Inej feels giddy, hands shaking as she helps bind the cord tightly, places the baby boy into his mother’s arms.

Inej putters about, putting things away and straightening blankets while Anathi steps out of the room briefly. When she returns, she crosses the room to stand close to Inej. “I need to get back.”

“Where’s Joss?”

“Downstairs sleeping off the drink,” whispers Anathi, rolling her eyes.

Inej makes a small noise of disgust, and looks over to where Julia is rocking her new baby gently, oblivious to their conversation. At this moment, her face is awash with that post-birth euphoria that Inej remembers so well, but she knows that only lasts so long, and there is no group of bustling women here to care for her.

She thinks of Genna, half a mile away but safe in her father’s care. “I’ll stay with her a while.”

Inej makes tea, because it’s something she would have been inordinately grateful for just after giving birth, had anyone thought to give her some. Julia is indeed grateful, closing her eyes in bliss as she takes the first sip.

Inej sits on the edge of the bed. “What will you name him?”

“I’d like to name him Erik,” says Julia, looking down at her son, sleeping peacefully in the crook of one arm. “I’ve always liked that name. But we’ll see what Joss says, I suppose.”

“Erik is a nice name.” Inej chooses to glide over the mention of Julia’s husband. Chooses not to voice the opinion that a man who cannot even show up to see his newborn child should get no say in his name, has no right to such a thing.

But then, she supposes, she’d granted that privilege to a man who couldn’t show up for the months preceding the birth of his child.

A long stretch of silence follows, the kind of calm that comes after the storm, before Julia speaks without looking up. “Does your husband know who Joss is?”

Well, then.

Inej considers a moment. Getting to the wife can often be the most effective means to a variety of ends. That’s Kaz in her ear, to be sure, but that doesn’t make it less true.

Perhaps this is the way forward, woman to woman.

“No,” she says, slowly, evenly. “Footsoldiers are beneath Kaz’s attention, until they’re not.”

Julia looks at her, then, and her gaze is sharp. “You recognised him, though. I saw it in your face.”

“Nothing and no one is beneath the attention of the Wraith,” says Inej, and watches the blood drain from Julia’s face in recognition of the name.

No, that’s all wrong. It won’t do.

Inej doesn’t want to frighten her, especially not with a new baby in her arms, when everything is frightening enough already. There is so much in the world to worry about, when you have a child. Dubious neighbours shouldn’t be one of them.

She leans forward, lays a hand on Julia’s arm. “Julia, I don’t want trouble. Do you want trouble?”

To her credit, Julia does not look away, only shakes her head.

Inej nods, holding her gaze. “Then let’s not have any.”

.

She walks home across the fields. It’s not too far, and it feels good to stretch her legs and breathe the morning air, sun warm on her face.

As she walks, she contemplates a lot of things.

She’d waited until Joss appeared in the bedroom doorway, wringing his hands. It was hard not to pity the terror in his face, but whatever sympathy Inej may have felt was tempered by the scent of whiskey rolling off him as he took his new son in his arms.

Before she left, she’d offered to return the following day to help with anything that was needed, and knew she’d made the right decision when Julia turned weepy with gratitude. Razorgulls or not, there’s no reason that Julia should be left to figure out alone the things that Inej had her mother to help with, in the first days.

Her thoughts turn to Kaz. It’s hard not to compare him to Joss Meijer, for better and for worse. Kaz might have been a bastard but he had shown up, in the end. At the last possible moment. He was intractable and uncommunicative - a real bastard, in short - but he’d been there. He'd been there and he's still here and she cannot believe it's a coincidence that he bought her a house with peach orchards. It's both the bare minimum and far too much at the same time and if that's not Kaz all over then Inej doesn't know what is.

He’s trying, and really, that’s all she’s ever asked of him.

When she reaches the house she can see Kaz beyond it, in the middle pasture. He’s in his shirtsleeves, leaning on his cane with Genna in his free arm, and they are surrounded by sheep.

They have recently begun allowing the Zadis to use their pastures for grazing - their one single horse and lone goat are not enough to control the grass - and a surefire way of keeping Genna entertained for hours is taking her out and letting her look at the wooly beasts. Inej can hear her squeals of delight even at this distance, and she smiles.

She doesn’t try to sneak up on him - as if she could - and he turns to her as she hops over the fence.

“You’re back,” he says, like he’s surprised to see her there.

“Yes,” she says, grinning freely at him. “It’s a boy.”

He grunts in acknowledgement and turns back to glower at the sheep as Genna protests loudly at having been turned away from them. He does not ask after the health of either mother or child, but presumably he takes her good mood as indicator enough that everything had gone well.

Inej feels an undeniable swell of fondness as she looks at him, hair still mussed, shirt rumpled, sharp features softened in the glow of the morning light. She steps to his side, closer than she’s intentionally been to him since the birth of their child, and there is confusion in his face when he looks at her.

Rising to the balls of her feet, she leans up toward him and pauses, waiting. He doesn’t move at all, watching her warily. Slowly, gently, she presses a soft kiss to the corner of his mouth.

When she pulls away, her heart is pounding and his eyebrows draw together as he searches her face. She’s feeling charitable towards him and she doesn’t want to ruin it by allowing him to speak, so she looks away and kisses Genna as well.

“I’m going to sleep for a few hours,” she says, and walks back toward the house.

.

The summer passes and things grow busy on the farm.

Additional staff are hired on and Kaz spends long days outside with Koltan, supervising the cultivation of the fields ready for planting. Inej wanders up to watch on one occasion, curious, but Kaz gets so twitchy about she and Genna being anywhere near the ploughs - despite having previously spent years sending Inej into some of the most dangerous situations imaginable - that she becomes annoyed with him.

On one evening towards the end of ploughing season, she goes down to the creek with a mission in mind. Genna sits in the muddy shallows, splashing happily in an inch of water. Inej is a few feet away, within easy reach, linen trousers soaked even though they are rolled to her knees. It’s welcome enough in the warmth of the early evening. Even autumn in this part of the world is pleasant; Inej wonders idly what the winter will bring.

She misses a definite turn in the season, has missed it all her adult life. During her childhood in Ravka, she had marveled at the leaves as they changed from green to gold and vibrant red, at the way the first snow in the forest blanketed everything in silence. She misses the thaw, the first shoots of new growth showing through the melting ice, the reverberating cracks as avalanches crashed in the high mountains. She misses taking the caravan ponies to the river to swim with her cousins, washing the sweat from their broad backs, as they make camp in the full flush of summer.

She encountered weather on the unchanging sea, but there’s something about watching a landscape go through the seasons that she never had again after she’d been taken. Even Kerch, though it transitioned from cold to an oppressive, humid heat, remained relentlessly wet and grey throughout the year.

Still, there is something to be said for perennially mild weather. It means that she doesn’t have to bundle Genna into stiff boots, and layers of wool and fur until she’s too padded and stiff to move, the way Inej had been as a young child. It’s more forgiving on Kaz’s leg, if not necessarily on his mood. It allows Inej to be knee-deep in cool water with her toes in the mud, an impossibility this late in the year in Ravka unless she wanted to lose her feet to frostbite.

And it's difficult to feel hard done by when the evening is rosy and sweet, heavy with the scent of honeysuckle, and the nightingale singing in the treetops.

Inej is planting Zemeni mustard root, the latest experiment in her ever-expanding kitchen garden endeavours. Anathi Zadi had given her a small jar of the thick, spicy condiment she’d made from the plant in return for a jar of Inej’s peach jam, and Inej had liked it so well she’d obtained a handful of juvenile shoots from the Zadis’ prolific mustard beds. The trade off had been more of the peach jam - more than fair, in Inej’s opinion. Saints know she has plenty of it.

Anathi has instructed her to plant it in a shaded spot, in around two feet of water, so Inej, lacking the cultivated beds of the Zadi farm, is pushing the shoots into the soft mud at the bottom of the creek. If it works, then in a few months these shoots will grow thick, edible roots below the surface. Inej wonders if it will be too spicy to give to Genna - she is making every effort to expose her to a wide variety of foods and flavours to try and prevent her from inheriting Kaz’s austere palate.

Seeking to fulfil the requirement for shade, Inej has half-buried herself in the shrubbery that overhangs the edge of the creek, which means she does not have a good view of the surrounding area when she hears the shout.

“Genna!”

Her blood turns to ice in her veins. In all the years that she’s known him, Inej has seldom heard Kaz raise his voice, and she has never, never heard that tone from him.

Scrambling and splashing, Inej fights with an uncharacteristic lack of grace to get out of the bushes, branches catching at her clothing and hair. Her hand goes instinctively to her belt, only to find it empty - for the first time she can remember since she left the Menagerie, she is unarmed. Without realising it, Inej has allowed herself to feel safe here, and now she will pay for it.

Standing over her baby and cursing herself for her complacency, she looks frantically around for the source of danger, trying to assess whether to fight or flee. But the only thing she can see is Kaz, half-running down towards them, face as pale as the white-knuckled grip on his cane.

“What is it?” she calls, heart in her throat.

He doesn’t answer her, but the expression on his face changes when he sees her and he goes even paler, somehow, practically white with anger.

When he reaches them he leans down and scoops Genna, who has gone still and wide-eyed at the sound of her father’s shouts, into his arms, turns on his heel, and walks away without another word.

“Kaz,” says Inej, confused, following after him at a jog to keep up with his rapid pace. “Kaz!”

He ignores her, striding determinedly for the house. Inej’s nerves are jangling, but she knows Kaz in the face of imminent threat and he would not refuse to communicate it to her like this.

“What’s wrong?” she tries again, speaking to his back. “Kaz, will you answer me?”

It makes no sense. She tries to piece it together, taking in the details: the tension in every line of his body, the way he’d shouted, the way he’d snatched Genna from the ground...

He is not a gentle man - in fact, she knows him to be capable of almost unimaginable cruelty - but he has always been gentle with their baby. He has never handled her roughly. He has never once raised his voice in her presence.

Held awkwardly in the crook of his arm and jolted by his rapid, uneven footsteps, Genna’s head swivels from Kaz to look back at her mother, and her eyes are huge and wet, face unhappy.

Inej’s heart lurches. “Kaz, you’re frightening her.”

He stops dead in his tracks.

It’s like watching him turn into someone else, someone she has not seen in a long time. A shudder goes through him, and Genna slips a little as his grip spasms against her bare leg - her wet skin.

“Take her,” he chokes, and Inej moves quickly, pulling the baby into her arms and bouncing her soothingly.

Kaz walks stiffly away from her, almost staggering, and Inej hangs back a while before following him up to the house.

Before she goes to find him, she strips Genna out of her wet clothes, towels her off and puts her in her cot with a few toys. She ought to play by herself for a little while, enough for Inej to see about whatever has gotten its claws into Kaz.

When she walks quietly into the study, she finds him pacing, agitated.

He speaks without turning to face her. "It was a mistake to buy property with a damned creek running through it."

"Don’t say that” she says mildly, shutting the door behind her. “I like the creek."

He turns around and snarls at her. "We’ll see how well you like it when the child you bore drowns in it.”

He’s rubbing his hands together in a way that signals to Inej that he’s itching for his gloves, a self-soothing tic he’s never quite managed to shake, though he would allow none but her to ever see it.

She wonders idly where they are, casting her eyes about. Locked in his desk, perhaps. He’d always worn them in public, in Ketterdam - a reputation to maintain, after all - but truthfully they function more as an emotional crutch than essential armour these days. Though he rarely flinches from the feel of skin anymore, in times of great stress he will invariably slip the gloves back on.

She thinks of the hazy, euphoric hours after Genna’s birth, and his hands wrapped in black leather. Takes a deep breath and finds a deeper well of patience.

“I was with her, Kaz,” she says, tone even. “I was within arm’s reach of her the entire time.”

He shakes his head. “It doesn’t take much—”

“I know that,” she snaps, before taking a deep breath, fighting to keep a hold on her temper. “What kind of mother do you think I am?”

He turns away from her again, jaw working furiously, but she presses him. “No, answer me. I’m the sort of mother who sets her baby beside open water and then, what, just leaves her? That’s what you think?”

He mutters something she can’t make out, and she arches an eyebrow. “What was that?”

“I said,” he grinds out through gritted teeth, as though it physically pains him to do so. “I wasn’t really thinking.”

That gives her pause, and she follows his gaze, looks out of the window.

The creek can be seen from his desk, and she can well imagine what happened. Can picture him working here, looking up and seeing Genna at the water’s edge, seemingly unattended with Inej hidden in the bushes. The terrible shock he must have had to push him to such out of character behaviour.

Inej knows the ebb and flow of his aversion to touch as intimately as she knows Kaz himself, but what she’s paid less attention to over the years is the fact that he really doesn’t much like the water either. She thinks of what she knows of his past, the awful story he’s relayed to her in fragments over the years. That he harbours such a distinct horror of Genna drowning should not come as the surprise it has.

“I was with her,” she says again. She doesn’t know what else to say. “She wasn’t in danger, Kaz. She won’t drown.”

He shakes his head again. “When she’s older, when she can walk—”

“I’ll teach her to swim.” Inej has the luxury of being matter of fact about this. She’d grown up playing in rivers and lakes, and had come to no harm. Her parents had taught her how to be safe. The fact that Kaz had been able to swim through the harbour at all, with or without the aid of his brother’s body, meant that his parents must have taught him the same at some point. “Fence it off, if it will make you feel better.”

“As if that will make a difference to any child of yours.”

“It may surprise you to learn the knowledge isn’t passed down in the blood,” she says, a mocking echo, although she’s had near enough the same thought herself. “We can deal with that when we come to it.”

He blinks slowly at her. “We,” he says, voice flat. “Are we a ‘we’?”

“Aren’t we?” Inej’s insides have gone to liquid all of a sudden.

“I don’t know. I don’t—” he breaks off, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

All this time, she’s been so uncertain of him. It never crossed her mind that he was uncertain of her, after she decided to stay. Hadn’t it been enough? Haven’t they been building...something? She doesn’t know what, exactly, but something. Trust. Their family.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

He shakes his head again, and she’s not sure if that’s directed at her or himself. There is a long silence, and when he speaks again, his voice is jagged. “I frightened her.”

“Yes,” says Inej, because he had. She’s not going to assuage his guilt for it.

“I don’t want to frighten her.”

It’s quite the admission from a man who built his life partially on his ability to terrify people into submission.

“Then don’t.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“It is.” If he takes nothing else away from this conversation, she wants him to take this. She needs him to understand. “You have a choice here, Kaz, about the kind of father you want to be.”

“And I suppose what you do is going to depend on that?”

She almost rolls her eyes, it’s such a ridiculous question. “What do you think?”

“I think I’ve always been waiting to lose you.”

Inej sighs deeply. She feels so heavy.

He's always been peculiar when it comes to her. He'd seen her, coveted her - though what he'd coveted had been her potential use to him rather than her body - and he'd stolen her away. Armed her with blades and armoured her in darkness, and never once asked anything of her that mattered that wasn’t freely given. She remembers that, now. It’s what has kept her always at his side, even when she was half the world away.

But this...it’s a bitter, dark wound that has festered inside him always. She’ll never be able to heal it for him, and she’s never tried. All she has ever been able to do is keep returning to him, hoping that one day he would learn to trust that she always would, if she were able.

This is the farthest distance she’s ever had to cross to do so. This is the first time he’s ever tried to meet her halfway. She doesn’t know if it’s enough.

She takes a step towards him, then another. He is tense and glowering, but he holds his hand out to her anyway, palm up.

Touch carries too much for both of them to ever be meaningless. It’s a question, a testing of the waters: do you still want me, will you push me away.

Wanting him was never an issue, Inej thinks ruefully. It’s living with him that’s the problem.

Slowly, heart in her mouth, she places her hand in his.

A mild shudder runs through him, but Inej’s hands are warm and she curls her fingers around his, gripping tight.

“If you keep just waiting to lose me, Kaz, then maybe you will.”

.

Winter comes gently, settles over them quiet and mild mannered, with hardly a dip in the temperature to indicate the turn of the season.

For someone accustomed to frozen Ravkan winters, or the pervasive damp chill of Ketterdam, it matters little. Inej switches to long sleeves and ensures that Genna is snug in the little knitted cardigans that her grandmother sends, and life continues.

With the planting over, Kaz sinks deep into his books, working the numbers for his various business holdings, plus whatever else it is that brings couriers to their home that he thinks she doesn’t know about. Inej cuts herbs from her garden and hangs them to dry in the kitchen, turning the air in the house aromatic. Both of them try to get Genna to say her first word.

According to Inej’s mother, Genna should start talking any time now. Inej watches her baby watching her, can see the way she pays attention when she speaks, and makes a concerted effort to show her whatever happens to be in her hand at the time and say its name: spoon, carrot, shoe.

Kaz has always spoken to Genna as if she were perfectly capable of understanding him, but he begins making a concerted effort to draw one particular word from her: pa. He begins to refer to himself in the third person, Genna, look at Pa and can you open up for Pa and no don’t poke Pa in the eye. It’s entirely ridiculous, and Inej starts to do exactly the same thing, except with mama. It becomes such an obvious contest between them that they end up placing a wager, fifteen Zemeni doma to the parent whose name she says first.

It’s a rare overcast morning, rain pattering against the window as they sit around the kitchen table. Kaz is feeding Genna a breakfast of porridge with mashed peaches while Inej skims a copy of the Shriftport Gazette. The paper is weeks out of date, having travelled the distance north by mail coach, but it’s the most reliable Zemeni publication for international news. She is deep into an article on the spice trade when she hears it.

“Ba-ba.”

Inej glances up from the paper to see Kaz frozen, spoon hovering in midair in front of Genna’s face. Genna goes almost cross-eyed trying to look at it, mouth open expectantly. Very slowly, he moves the spoon the rest of the way to feed her, squinting suspiciously.

“She said Papa,” he says, eyes fixed on the baby.

“No, she didn’t,” says Inej.

“She absolutely did.”

They sit in silence, both watching Genna intently as she swallows her porridge and looks between her parents before her eyes find their way back to the bowl in Kaz’s hands. “Ba-ba,” she says again brightly.

Kaz points with the spoon. “There, she said it again.”

Inej shakes her head. “She’s not saying Papa.”

“She is.”

“Genna,” Inej coos, leaning forward on her elbows, repeating her name until the baby’s head swivels toward her. “Sweetheart, are you saying Papa? Can you say that? Or Mama?”

Genna blinks placidly at her mother, listening attentively as Inej repeats the words papa and mama in an encouraging voice, before saying with as much conviction as a baby can muster: “Ba-ba.”

Inej sits back, smug. “She’s not saying anything, she’s just making sounds.” She makes a show of returning her attention to the paper, picking up her teacup, an affected air of disinterest. “She spends too much time around those sheep.”

“Don’t be a sore loser, Inej,” says Kaz, and she hears the scrape of the spoon against the bowl once more as she keeps her eyes determinedly averted. “Fifteen doma, cough it up.”

“I’ll cough it up when she actually says Papa,” she scoffs, turning a page but no longer really reading. “Anyway, I thought you were only trying to get her to say Pa.”

“She’s clearly advanced for her age.”

“Saints sake,” mutters Inej, though she has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling.

For all her insistence to the contrary, Inej thinks that Genna probably is attempting some approximation of papa. She has strangely conflicting emotions about it. On the one hand, she feels a new and glowing pride that her baby is starting to talk, but it’s mingled with just a touch of irritation. It’s typical, thinks Inej, that she’s the one who grew her and birthed her and fed her from her own body, only for her to come out with papa first. It’s absolutely typical, and all the more annoying because it means she has lost a bet to Kaz, as she gripes to Anathi Zadi one afternoon.

But Anathi only laughs at her. “All four of mine were the same. Mama is harder for them to say.”

Inej sulks and doubles down on her attempts to draw mama out of her baby, but Genna has the taste of her first word now and will not be distracted from it.

"Baba," she chirrups at Kaz every day now, delighted whenever he walks into a room, "Baba!" no matter how persistently he tries to correct her to Pa, still disgruntled over the sheep comment.

Inej hides her smile, somewhat placated by his irritation. "She'll grow out of it."

(She won't. Genna will always call him baba, even when she is a woman grown. So will her sister.)

A month later, when the word mama comes out of Genna’s mouth for the first time, Inej bursts into tears and Kaz actually has the audacity to laugh at her.

.

Late afternoon, they are returning from moving the sheep into the far pasture. Up ahead, a figure is coming down the farm track toward them.

Inej’s heart stutters, breath leaving her. She can hardly believe what she’s seeing. Almost unthinkingly, she presses Genna into Kaz’s arms and then takes off at a dead sprint, feet flying over the dusty earth, laughing all the way.

Nina drops her bag, opening her arms as Inej barrels into her, clinging tight. She’s crying, or maybe Inej is crying, either way the tears are wet on both their cheeks.

She has not seen Nina’s face in three long years.

Inej pulls away first, smile so wide it’s actually hurting her face. “What are you doing here?”

“Heard a little rumour that Dirtyhands had vanished off the face of the earth,” says Nina, grinning just as hard. Inej knows that Nina’s intelligence networks stretch far and wide - she’s made use of them herself in the past - but she’s surprised it took her so long to pick up the news. “I went to Ketterdam to see what the hell happened and a little sharpshooting bird told me you were shacked up in bucolic familial bliss. I had to see it for myself.”

Inej shakes her head, feeling giddy. There’s no reliable way to contact Nina, she disappears into the tundra for months or even years at a time. They cross paths when they can. Theirs is the rare friendship that can pick up where it left off, no matter how much time has passed.

The dull, steady thud of Kaz’s cane on the dirt track approaches as he catches up to Inej. “Zenik.”

“Brekker,” she nods at him, and Inej doesn’t have time to take in how strange the name sounds, now, before Nina gasps as she takes in the baby on his hip.

Genna is gazing steadily at Nina with the neutral expression she tends to display for new people. Inej imagines how Nina must be seeing her - wide mouth, pert nose, sharp eyebrows; every inch Kaz’s child. When those eyebrows draw down into a vaguely suspicious frown, the resemblance is so startling that Inej has to smother a laugh.

"Flaming martyred Saints, Kaz,” exclaims Nina, wide eyes fixed on Genna. “I'd like to see you stand up in court and deny this one."

The way Kaz’s brows draw down is absolutely identical to his daughter, and it’s simply too much for Inej. Snorting, she takes Genna from him, kissing her cheek and bouncing her on her hip as she faces Nina.

"Look Genna, this is your Auntie Nina."

Though they are speaking Kerch together, Inej uses the Suli word for auntie - didi.

Tante will always catch in her throat.

Nina is gazing at Genna with sparkling eyes, hands pressed over her heart. “I can’t believe it,” she says, shaking her head, looking from Genna to Inej to Kaz and back again. “I can’t believe she’s real. How did it happen?”

“The usual way,” says Kaz, dry as dust, and Inej swats at him halfheartedly.

“Come inside,” she says, bending to pick up Nina’s bag. “You must be hungry.”

“Famished.”

Nina stays an entire, golden week and it heals something inside Inej to be seen by someone who knew her before. She loves her daughter, obviously, but sometimes it’s hard not to feel consumed by her. Nina sees all parts of Inej, not just Genna’s mother. Not just Mrs Rietveld. It’s like coming up for air.

Genna warms to her quickly, as Nina tosses her into the air and makes bone shards dance in front of her face. Kaz adopts a put upon air, behaves as though he merely suffers Nina’s presence, but Inej spies them standing outside early one morning, deep in animated conversation, and thinks he’s probably quite pleased to see her, whether he admits it or not.

Inej just tries to soak her in for as long as possible before she leaves. Before she has to go back to her life and her work and the people she has waiting for her.

On the last evening, they sit on the back step, passing a bottle of Inej’s peach wine back and forth between them.

“Inej, I really hate to say this,” says Nina, wincing as she takes a swig directly from the bottle. “But this is terrible.”

“I know,” admits Inej as she takes the bottle back and drinks. So she’s a better sailor than she is a vintner. A person can’t be good at everything. “I wish you didn’t have to go.”

It’s a childish thing to say, but it’s the truth. Nina is her light.

Inej hadn’t spent time with any other women, in Ketterdam, before Nina. Only at the Menagerie, and those girls had not been her friends. Those girls had been soul-hungry and desperate, clawing strips off each other for whatever advantage they could gain to survive. Nina had been a balm, a reminder that there could be some tenderness in the world for her that didn’t come with a price. She will love her always.

“I know, me too.”

Nina’s voice is sad, and when Inej looks at her, so is her face. Her heart clenches. "Oh Nina, won't you come home?"

By now, Nina has been apart from them far longer than she ever was otherwise.

But there's still something that binds them together, all of them, for the things they went through together, the things they did, the people they used to be and the people they became and the people they will never be again. Even before the Ice Court, when they were so young and the stakes were so small, even when it hadn't seemed like it at the time. There's no time or distance that could ever break that bond, the thing that ties them all together. So she means it, when she tells Nina to come home. She doesn't mean a place. What she's saying is come back to me.

Nina is quiet for a long time, gazing out over the orchard. Then, she looks at Inej, eyes bright, smile beautiful. "I'm really proud of you both, you know."

Inej smiles back, tears coming to her eyes, and takes her hand, threading their fingers together. Says the words she’s not sure she could entrust to anyone else, even herself. "It's been so hard, Nina. It’s been so hard for so long. Sometimes it feels like we'll never be able to mend the damage we've done to each other."

"Inej," says Nina, squeezing her hand so hard that Inej can feel the beat of her pulse. "If I believe anything in this world, I believe in you. I believe in your ability to know your own heart. If there was no hope you wouldn't still be here.”

When Nina goes, a little piece of Inej’s heart goes with her.

She sends a quick prayer to the Saints, asks them to watch over her friend wherever she journeys, until they meet again.

.

Inej knows the storm is coming before the sky darkens by the way that Kaz’s loping gait turns stiff and halting.

By evening, the clouds are banked on the horizon and the sky has turned the colour of an old bruise, washing the world in a sickly, yellow light.

Inej stands on the front step and inhales deeply, smells the ozone and moisture on the clammy breeze, closes her eyes and listens to it whisper through the trees and just for a moment it sounds like waves against the shore.

Turning her face into the wind as it picks up, she imagines that it carries the scent of the sea to her, but when she opens her eyes all she can see is grass

The thunder wakes her in the night, one sharp crash and the following bright flash of lightning. She lies still a moment, listening, but there is no cry from up the hall. Genna does not seem to have woken.

Habit moves her to the window, scanning the darkness for anything that does not belong, but all is as it should be. The rain lashes against the window with every gust of wind, but she is not cold. The morning will be fresh and sweet when the storm has blown through, the scent of damp earth rising with the sun, before all trace of rain has burned off. Nothing like the way the incessant dank chill of Ketterdam sinks into the bones.

When the next crash of thunder comes, she hears the smallest whine of discontent and turns to pad silently up the hallway. When she reaches Genna’s room, she freezes in the doorway. Kaz is already there.

He’s standing in the window - looking out at the storm as Inej had, illuminated periodically by the lightning - and Genna is in his arms, head resting on his shoulder, mostly asleep, little hand fisted tightly into his sleep shirt.

Something inside Inej aches savagely, though she cannot put her finger on what or why.

As always, he seems to have some preternatural sense of her, turns slowly to look at her and when he does, she can see one hand rubbing Genna’s back in slow, soothing circles.

“Do you want me to take her?” she whispers.

“No.”

The thunder comes again, and Genna whimpers. Silhouetted in the window, she sees Kaz turn his face briefly into the baby’s soft hair as he sways on the spot.

“She could just sleep with one of us, you know.”

“No,” Kaz’s voice is a low burn as he turns away from her again. “It’s a bad habit.”

Inej sighs. He’s so adamant about Genna developing what he deems ‘bad habits’ - as though thievery and murder aren’t worse habits than anything a baby could pick up. She wonders if it’s a holdover from his own upbringing, rules that he had to follow as a young child, perhaps the only reference point he has for how children ought to behave.

Thunder breaks again, so loud overhead that the house vibrates with it, and Genna whimpers in Kaz’s arms. Without really thinking about it, Inej crosses the short distance to them, presses against Kaz’s side and leans her head on his shoulder so that her face is close enough to her baby’s for them to share breath.

Kaz doesn’t stop swaying, and she moves with him, slow and steady, stroking the back of Genna’s head until she quiets and her eyes droop again, safe in the embrace of both of her parents.

It’s going to be a long night if they have to stand here holding her until the storm blows itself out, but Inej finds she doesn’t really mind.

.

In the spring, she takes him back into her bed.

She’s been restless for weeks, skin too tight, eyes trailing the line of his shoulders, his jaw, the deftness of his hands. Mostly she watches him feed Genna, and change Genna, and show things to Genna, explaining them in detail as though she can understand every word he says.

There’s something unreasonably attractive about him just...doing what he should.

Truly, she thinks, the bar is so low she would barely trip over it.

When Kaz takes Genna to put her down for her afternoon nap, Inej trails after him with no real intention. She lingers in the doorway and watches as he kisses their baby and lays her down in her cot, leans over her and rubs her back and says soothing words to her until her little eyes close and she falls asleep.

When he straightens up and turns to exit the room, Inej remains where she is, not letting him pass.

He arches an eyebrow at her. She steps forward into his space.

He's watching her, pins her with that bright and unnatural focus. He is still, not tense, not preparing to fight, simply observing as she slides her hands up between them, smoothing over his chest to his collar where she slips her index finger into the space between his top buttons. Pausing slightly, she looks up at him, waiting. He doesn't move, and now his eyes feel like they are burning through her.

She slips his top button open.

When he slides one hand into the curve of her waist, she opens another button, and another, working his shirt slowly open, exposing his collarbones, then his sternum.

Moving slowly, softly, he takes her face in his hands, dips his head down, breath fanning softly over her face and – he stops. Waiting.

She meets him halfway.

The kiss is deep, slow but thorough, and she feels it all the way down to her toes.

He follows easily when she begins to walk backwards down the hall, tugging the open collar of his shirt, still kissing him. They bump against a doorframe somewhere, huffing laughs against each other's mouths.

She has no real concept of how or where they end up, only has the awareness of tumbling onto a bed with him. Their movements take on a frantic edge, hands shaking, pulling at clothing.

It feels strange, by turns both deeply familiar and brand new. He feels like the man who has held her for ten years. He feels like a man she has never touched before.

She’s fumbling with his belt buckle and he has a hand between her legs, working her with the ruthless competence of a man who has spent a third of his life learning her body.

She almost shrinks from his touch, mind skipping over itself, not settling, picturing the softness in her stomach that wasn’t there before, the extra weight at her hips, the stretch marks on her breasts. She tries to focus all her attention on the sensation, there is nothing to be gained here by overthinking, no reason for nerves. But her heart spasms in her chest when he presses his forehead to hers, drawing all of her attention to one single point of focus.

"Okay?" He whispers.

"Okay," she confirms.

In the next heartbeat he's inside her, and she stops thinking altogether.

After, she lies there beside him, her body bled of tension. His eyes are shut, but she knows he's not sleeping.

She'd imagined often, in her foolish youth when she'd been so breathlessly in love she could hardly stand it, how it might be with him. Would he be gentle and sweet? Or would he be cruel, did he have appetites worse than anything she'd endured at the Menagerie? Would he strip his clothes and take her fully into his arms, or would he simply undo his belt and bend her over his desk in between jobs? Would he hold her, after, or would he straighten his tie and dismiss her as though she’d simply delivered a report? Was he even capable of feeling any kind of desire at all?

The reality, as she’d eventually discovered, was somewhere in the space between all of those things. She looks at him now, dozing beside her as he's done a hundred times before, entirely ordinary. The Bastard of the Barrel turned out to be, in the end, only a man.

She looks around. They stumbled into his room, and she examines it with interest. She never comes in here.

It's...sparse. Kaz has never been one particularly inclined towards material comforts but this is austere even by his standards. If she didn't know already, she would struggle to glean that anyone lived here at all. She thinks of her own bedroom, a few feet and a million miles away down the hall. Thinks of the shawl thrown over the bed, her hairbrush on the dresser next to a vase of yellow meadowflowers, the little pile of Genna's old clothes sitting on a chair in the corner. It hurts her heart.

The window is open, letting in the breeze and birdsong. Funny, she's never thought of him as an open window man. She always thought he left the window open only for her. Perhaps he still does.

"I thought it would feel different," she remarks, apropos of nothing. "After Genna. I thought...do I feel different to you?"

"No," says Kaz, and his eyes remain closed, one hand resting lightly on his belly, breathing easily. "You feel like you."

She draws a deep breath in, fills her lungs. It’s so strange and so familiar and so comforting to lie here beside him, in the warmth of the afternoon, with the ghost of his lips on her skin and a sweet ache between her legs. This is what she wants, always. Just this quiet, this deep peace.

Kaz would say he doesn't believe in second chances.

Something in her still whispers that she's a fool, that he let her down once and he'll do it again. But, well. Inej does believe in second chances.

Inej herself had been given a second chance. And a third. And a fourth. She has reinvented herself over and over by now...she has reimagined her life so many times but every time Kaz has been in it. Every time except the first.

She rolls onto her side, facing him. "We could just stop, you know. I'm tired of...of being hurt, and angry. I'm tired of walking on eggshells in my own home. I'm tired of dancing around each other." She watches him closely, and his eyes are still shut but there is tension, now, in the line of his jaw. "Aren't you tired, Kaz?"

"Yes," he says, after a long pause, and it's a rare admission of weakness. "Yes, I'm tired "

“So let’s stop,” she whispers. “Can we stop?”

This moment is the longest of her life, as she watches the steady rise and fall of his chest and counts her own heartbeat.

Finally, he opens his eyes and looks at her. “Yes. Please.”

.

The first night they spend together again, he gets up in the darkest hour and walks up the hall. Inej wakes as the mattress shifts when he gets out of bed, but doesn’t think much of it. When he returns, she cracks an eye open. "Okay?"

"Fine. Go back to sleep."

But he does it the next night, and the next. Sometimes twice a night. At some point, the mattress shifts, and she hears him limp up the hall. There is no sound to indicate that he might be using the washroom or checking the windows or any other reason she can think of for him to get up in the night. There is only silence.

One night, after about a week has passed and she is unable to contain her curiosity any longer, she follows him, silent, and finds him standing in the doorway of Genna's room, watching her sleep in her cot.

“Is everything alright?” she asks in a low voice.

“Yes, everything is fine.”

Inej shifts uncertainly. “What are you doing?”

He doesn’t look at her. “Nothing, go back to bed.”

She studies him. His posture is casual, leaning against the doorframe, limbs loose. In the dull glow of the moonlight through the windows, though, she can see that his face is haunted.

She thinks of all the nights they have shared a bed in this house so far. "Kaz, how long have you been doing this?"

The low burn of his voice is so quiet that she can barely hear him. "On and off since she was born."

Her heart constricts and with it, a chill. At how vulnerable she'd truly been during those first, awful months. That someone could come to her room, watch her sleep, and she'd never woken - the Wraith would never. It's a testament to how exhausted, how outside of herself she'd been.

Or perhaps her body had simply never registered Kaz as a threat.

Now that she’s let go of her anger, she feels a great swell of pity for him. At the creature inside him that covets what he feels he cannot have. The thing inside him that fears. She hears the echo of his voice in her mind, I’ve always been waiting to lose you, and she knows that he wasn’t only talking about her.

Inej reaches out a hand to him but stops, hovering an inch from his back. She wants to comfort him. She wants to put her arms around him, smooth his hair back from his face, put her head over his heart. She does none of those things. His face is stormy, he’s fighting some battle inside himself that she cannot help him win. She can't tell how he'll react to being touched.

She lets her hand drop.

"Come back to bed soon," she says, and leaves him to his vigil.

~*~*~*~

Chapter Text

All of Kaz's worst anxieties come boiling to the surface when Genna learns to walk.

It's charming at first. Genna begins to pull herself upright, hanging onto furniture, sidestepping along. Kaz and Inej are excited, encouraging. They spend hours between them walking her up and down, holding onto her hands as she practises the mechanics of putting one foot in front of the other.

Their baby takes her very first steps unaided in their kitchen, tottering the short distance from where Kaz lets go of her hands to fall into Inej's waiting arms.

Inej simply dissolves into tears right there on the kitchen floor, overwhelmed with pride, laughing as she presses kisses into Genna's little cheeks. When she looks at Kaz, he has a slightly dazed, faraway look in his eyes but the expression on his face is one she generally interprets as 'happy'.

Their enthusiasm is short-lived.

Inej feels they've only just managed to get the hang of parenting a child who will reliably stay where she has been placed for a few minutes. Now that Genna is mobile, all bets are off. She's into everything, curious little hands grabbing at anything within her reach, more often than not shoving it into her mouth shortly thereafter. She must be watched every instant. Doors must be kept carefully shut, or else she wanders off into other rooms, unseen mischief.

If Inej feels frazzled by this latest development, Kaz becomes almost incoherent with paranoia. Weapons stashed all over the house are removed to high locations, out of even Inej's reach - though of course she requires nothing but her own knives - and only just within Kaz's. Bookshelves and any other items of furniture that Genna could conceivably pull onto herself are bolted to the walls. The stairs become a particular point of contention; Inej loses her patience when Kaz attempts to lock the door of Genna's room at night, arguing that the child has never once escaped from her cot, and even if she did, she would not be able to reach the door latch.

His worry regarding the creek resurfaces with renewed aggression, too. Where Inej has been in the habit of leaving doors open to allow air to move through the house, Kaz can no longer tolerate it, and they suffer a few weeks of doors being opened and closed eighteen times a day in a passive aggressive battle for dominance.

The solution is one that Inej herself had suggested many months before, after a fashion.

Kaz does not fence the creek, but he does spend several weeks constructing a low wall that completely encircles their house. Timber is scarce where they have settled, must be transported long distances from the temperate forests to the north, but bricks made from the loamy earth are plentiful and cheap.

He spends a few hours a day working on the wall, in the mornings and evenings when it's coolest. Inej helps by turns while Genna plays in the garden, though one of them must always hurry to scoop her up when she toddles too far on unsteady legs. It's hard work, but rewarding to see the direct result of their labour, the way the wall grows steadily day by day. The completed structure stands around waist-height to Kaz, solid, no gaps for a little person to slip through, too tall for the same little person to climb over.

For now, thinks Inej.

The wall is finished with two gates to the front and back - purchased to order rather than built - and she is confused when four gates show up, until Kaz explains his intentions. So now they must go through two gates every time they wish to go up or down the stairs - one at the top, one at the bottom. It's somewhat inconvenient, but it does eliminate the worry of Genna toppling down them, and Kaz remarks that it will save him a grey hair or two, to which Inej must smother a laugh.

Kaz has been going prematurely grey for a few years now, much to his chagrin. Inej found his first grey hair when he was twenty-five, carding her fingers gently through it one evening. Back then it had been a strand here and there, practically unnoticeable to all except the keenest of observers, unlikely to even catch the light in the dull streets of Ketterdam. Now, though, his dark hair is shot through with silver at the temples, all the more obvious for having grown out of the severe haircut he used to wear. Inej teases him about getting old but she likes it, truthfully, thinks it makes him look rather distinguished. She can picture him ten years from now, gone fully salt-and-pepper.

This is the first time she's allowed herself to imagine that he might live long enough to do so.

There's safety here, in a way they've never had before. For so long, she has not allowed herself to think beyond the next voyage, the next raid, their lives too dangerous, tomorrow too uncertain to count on. Here, the future unspools before her, sunbleached and unhurried. She can see it, now. She can think of Kaz growing old, of growing old beside him. She can picture Genna at ten, and fifteen, and twenty, though it makes her heart ache savagely to think of her baby growing up.

It should be enough.

She should be happy here, in her acres of rolling farmland, in her pretty house with its whitewashed walls and its trellis of creeping honeysuckle, watching her little girl grow every day.

Kaz, against all odds and anything she could have predicted, has settled into seeming contentment. But then, she muses, he's a man of routine in his bones. He likes to inhabit a place, master it, make it his own.

Not Inej, though.

Inej is a born wanderer. She has a restless heart, and she longs for her freedom.

When Genna is newly two years old, Inej returns to the sea.

.

Kaz is sour about it, and he only gets worse as the time for her departure approaches, but she knows he'll never make any move to stop her from going. As if he could. As if she would let him.

There is salt water in her blood, now, in her marrow. She has spent ten years upon the ocean chasing slavers to every far horizon. Perhaps in another life she could have remained all her days on the little patch of land deep in the Zemeni countryside, content to be a farmer's wife. Perhaps some long-dead version of her might have been willing to stay with Kaz always, sharing his bed and raising his children.

Perhaps that version of her is braver, in a way.

That's another life, though.

This version of her makes her preparations. Sends letters and arranges to meet her ship in Shriftport, packs a bag and puts a lethal edge on her blades. A not-insignificant part of her brain screams at her, every instinct fighting against leaving her child far behind, where she cannot see her and hold her and protect her. The rational part of Inej battles against those instincts, knows that she must go, for her own sake. And, too, she feels something about this place. She knows that even though she goes to blood and danger, this place will hold Kaz and Genna, protect them, keep them for her until she returns. And she fully intends to return.

But first, she must go. It will be better for them all, in the long run, if she goes.

Kaz's mood is apocalyptic, though, surly and sulky and wounded. As though, by leaving, Inej has somehow hurt his feelings. It makes her feel sick and unhappy, like she could peel her own skin off. She can go head-to-head with Kaz's anger any day of the week, but she finds she doesn't really know how to cope with the idea that she's hurting him.

She cannot leave him like this.

There is an easy way and a hard way to deal with Kaz's moods, she has found over the years; either wait for them to pass on their own, or give him something else to chew on and face whatever consequences may present themselves.

Well, Inej doesn't have the time to wait him out. She opts for the hard way.

The day before she leaves, they sit at the breakfast table as they always do; Inej facing Kaz, sharing sections of the newspaper while Genna sits at the head of the table between them eating her porridge. They discuss Inej's impending departure in clipped tones over the top of her head.

“I might stop in Ketterdam, this voyage,” she tells him.

Kaz takes a large gulp of his coffee, and the cup lands back in the saucer with a clatter as he sets it back down a little too hard. “How pleasant for you.”

“It might be,” she says, eyeing him over the top of the paper. “I might put in for a week or so, see Jes and Wylan.”

“The harbour levies will be crippling this time of year,” he grumbles.

Springtime, he means, when the tulips are in full bloom and harbour berths are charged at double - or even triple - rate for the ships bearing droves of foreign tourists who come to the city for the express purpose of taking day trips to see the colourful fields. Yes, the levies will be crippling indeed. Even in Dregs-controlled Fifth Harbour, where The Wraith has never worried about paying them because Kaz kept berth twenty-two open and waiting for her all the long year, at great personal expense.

But, of course, he's no longer there.

Sensing an opening, Inej shrugs one shoulder. “You'd know more about that than me these days, I'm sure.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I know you keep a hand in Dregs business,” she chides, gently mocking. She rolls her eyes at his expression. “You employed me as a spy, Kaz, what exactly did you imagine you could hide from me in my own home?”

He acknowledges that with a slight incline of his head, but otherwise only gives her a wary, assessing look. Historically, she has not reacted well to having things deliberately kept from her. “You seem remarkably unperturbed by that.”

Inej sniffs lightly, turns the page of the newspaper, and deploys the ace up her sleeve. “It’s alright, you didn't tell me you still have one foot in Ketterdam, I didn't tell you that Joss Meijer is ex-Razorgulls.”

Kaz's hand jerks so sharply that he knocks his coffee cup clean off the table, and Inej feels an uncharitable kind of satisfaction as it shatters on the flagstone floor. It's been years since she was last able to take him so thoroughly by surprise - at least eight if she doesn't count the night she told him she was carrying Genna, which she does not because it's so deeply unimaginative.

He places both hands on the table, palms down, and she meets the fury in his eyes calmly, waiting for him to speak.

“What.” The word is flat, calm, so precisely enunciated that the 'T' carves the air like a gunshot.

It is his most dangerous tone.

There are many who mistake Kaz's habit of not raising his voice for safety, to their peril. Where most men bluster and shout, he goes still and quiet, a snake coiled to strike. She cannot count those she has seen peacock in the face of his anger and realise too late they have walked directly into the jaws of the beast.

Inej feels the ground solidify beneath her. Yes, she can go head-to-head with his anger any day of the week.

She arches an eyebrow. “You heard me.”

There is a long, long moment where nothing happens. Kaz stares at Inej. Inej stares at Kaz. The only sound in the room is Genna singing an off-key, wordless tune to herself as she concentrates on her breakfast.

“How long have you known this?” Kaz's voice is still flat, and calm, and quiet.

Inej is equally calm. “Since the first moment I saw him.”

Kaz is holding himself so rigid that the muscle in the side of his neck is standing in high relief. His eyes have taken on a dark quality that she has not seen in some time. “And you didn't feel this was something you ought to share with me?”

“No,” says Inej. “I didn't.”

He bares his teeth. “Why?”

“Because he's not a threat,” she pulls back her shoulders, but otherwise makes no reaction. “But that wouldn't have stopped you putting a bullet between his eyes the first chance you got.”

There is no expression at all on Kaz's face as he looks at her. His jaw works, he's grinding his teeth - a sure sign that mind of his is working at full-tilt. Terrible habit, one she's often told him to stop, but he does it in his saints damned sleep—

Kaz stands abruptly, snatching his cane from where it rests against the table. He looks as though he has a few choice words he'd like to say to her, at the very least, but Genna is looking at him with her big dark eyes. He glares a moment, then turns on his heel and walks right out of the room.

Inej takes a deep breath, in and out. Then, she goes back to her tea.

.

She does not see him for the rest of the day. Not at lunch, not for dinner, not when she bathes Genna and puts her in her little nightgown ready for bed.

It is not until Inej is sitting on the back step watching Genna toddle about the garden in the fading light, letting her burn the last of her energy, that he appears. Inej hears him approach from behind, scoots to one side on the step to give him the space to step out. She thinks he might berate her for allowing Genna to play outside in her nightgown but he only stands and watches as their baby potters about, picking flowers and peering at insects, fully absorbed in her little two-year-old world.

When she notices her father, Genna hurries towards him on unsteady legs, little fist held out in front of her. Kaz holds out his hand, and she deposits a handful of leaves and tiny pebbles into his palm, watches as he dutifully puts them into his pocket.

She's a little collector of things, their daughter, and Kaz is her appointed trustee. He used to toss them away the moment her back was turned, but the day she returned ten minutes later and demanded one of her treasures back, his inability to produce the desired item precipitated a meltdown so complete that Koltan Zadi, passing on his horse, had turned down the farm track to investigate her agonised shrieking, convinced that Kaz and Inej had somehow both been hurt or incapacitated. So now Kaz must empty his pockets of twigs and rocks and crushed flowers every night before he gets undressed, scattering them out the window. Thankfully, Genna seems to forget about them while she sleeps.

Satisfied that her father has safely stored her haul, Genna toddles off again to resume her hunt.

Inej waits.

“You should have told me,” says Kaz, and the fury in his voice is muted and tightly controlled, but very much still present.

“Perhaps,” she acknowledges, keeping her eyes on her daughter, now back to rummaging around in a bed of spring greens, raking through the loose earth with her fingers. “But I was still very angry with you, at the time. It felt good to have something over you.”

“Are you still angry with me now? About all of that?”

“Of course not,” she says, and she realises - perhaps for the first time - that it's true, that she honestly no longer bears any resentment toward him.

“And yet, in all this time, it never crossed your mind to mention it?”

His tone is caustic. Inej looks at her hands, picking at one fingernail. “In all honesty, it just seemed like the sort of thing that would cause more problems than it solved.” He makes some noise, some huffing sound laced with disgust, and she bristles. “Anyway, you haven’t been exactly forthcoming about your…activities.”

He does look at her, then, a whip of his head over his shoulder. “That's different.”

“How is it different?” Inej hisses.

But.

As one, they both look to Genna, still digging around in the dirt, happily oblivious to the rising tension only a few feet away from her.

They'd promised they would never fight in front of her.

Inej clings to a suspicion that half the reason Genna was such a wretched infant was the poisonous atmosphere in their house during the first months of her life, and she is determined that they must never allow that to happen again. Oh, they still fight, because Kaz's default state is ill-tempered and Inej is incapable of not rising to the occasion when he's being, well, himself. But they have their disagreements well out of sight and earshot of their girl. They will not allow raised voices and slamming doors to be the ambient noise of her childhood.

They promised it to each other, made a deal when Genna was still a babe in arms and, for better or worse, they have held fast to that deal.

Sighing, Kaz lowers himself heavily onto the step beside her, resting his cane across his knees. “It's different,” he continues in a tightly measured tone, “because an ex-Razorgull in our midst represents a clear and present threat.”

Inej pauses, until she's sure that her tone can match his. “Are you telling me that you don't consider letters going back and forth to the Barrel a clear and present threat?”

He takes one breath in through his nose, and releases it slowly through his mouth. “There are several layers of failsafes in the routes those letters take—”

“And I'm supposed to just take your word for—”

“Yes, you are,” he says, flexing his fingers around his cane. “I have assessed the threat and found it negligible. You, on the other hand—”

“I also assessed the threat, and found it negligible,” she parrots, and this time she doesn't give him the opportunity to come back at her, speaks over him again, tone determinedly matter-of-fact. “It's been two years, Kaz. He's not going to hurt us. I made the choice I made. I will not spend any more time justifying it.”

“Nor I,” he grinds out immediately.

“Fine,” she says.

“Good.”

There is a long stretch of silence where they both stare resolutely ahead, until it seems that Kaz simply cannot help himself. “Why now?”

Because you're easier to deal with when you're angry, she thinks, but she cannot tell him that. “Because you should have all the facts. Because—”

She cuts herself off. It's an excuse, yes, but there's truth in it. The smallest chance that she was wrong, that there is a threat where she has not recognised it, and she'd told Julia Meijer that Kaz didn't know who Joss was.

“Because you're leaving.” Kaz hears what she does not say. “Because you may not come back.”

There's always a chance she might not come back, from the sea, but they never say it. Never. “Yes, that.”

Silence again, less tense. Inej watches Genna. She watches the small flying insects that are caught like dust motes in the last rays of evening sunlight. She looks about her garden, that she raised up from a patch of scrubby barren earth to be rich and fertile and fragrant. She and Kaz are pressed against each other, arm and hip and thigh, and she can feel the heat of him through their layers of clothing.

She looks at him. "What happened to the Dregs?"

She can ask now. Now that he can admit to knowing.

"Nothing happened to them," grumbles Kaz, slowly stretching the bad leg out in front of him. "Anika leads them."

Inej makes a small sound of acknowledgement. That comes as no particular surprise to her. "You took a risk, leaving like you did. It must have created a power vacuum."

“The Dregs were much too established for that, as long as they held together,” Kaz shakes his head. "The bigger risk was an internal struggle, a leadership challenge."

"Was there?"

"Not that I ever heard. And if there had been, Anika would have put it down."

There is something that she thinks might be pride in his voice. Anika had been Kaz's creature right from the beginning and, after Inej left, his second. Always at his shoulder, diligent in carrying out even his most unpleasant orders, eager to prove herself. A far more willing protégé than Inej herself had ever been.

“Far more bloodthirsty than me, then,” she quips, recalling a time when he'd lamented her lack of violent instinct.

She expects him to needle her gently, join in the joke, but he only slides his eyes sideways to her, eyebrow raised. “I might have said so, once.”

.

Her plan has not worked as well as she'd hoped, because Kaz has circled back around to being bitter over her imminent departure by the time they go to bed.

Oh well, she thinks. Never let it be said that he doesn't have a firm grasp on his priorities. She supposes he'll have plenty of time to stew over Joss Meijer - or possibly to murder him - while she's gone.

She has more practical things to worry about, now. As they move around their bedroom, getting ready to go to sleep, she reels off every kind of useful fact she can think of. Things like make sure she eats her vegetables and keep on top of the laundry, don't let her run out of underthings. She can see that it's making Kaz steadily more irate, but, well. She has to say these things, she just has to. Just to know they've been said. She's a mother, after all.

Turned into your mother, more like, something in the back of her mind whispers to her, and she stubbornly does not dwell on that.

“I do actually live here too, Inej,” Kaz bites out after she's told him that Genna doesn't like to go down for a nap with the curtains closed for the second time, when she knows full well he didn't need to be told the first. “I am also possessed of cognitive function somewhat above that of the average five-year-old.”

“I know,” she says, fidgeting with the covers. She chews on her lip a moment, hesitates, decides to say what she was going to say anyway. “You can wear the gloves, you know.”

On the other side of the bed, Kaz's shoulders stiffen. “What?”

“If you need to. If Genna—” she cuts herself off abruptly. If Genna what? If she's wet. If she's dribbly. If she has sticky fingers. If, if, if. She sighs. “If you need to. That's all.”

“If you don't trust me to take care of my own daughter, perhaps you shouldn't be leaving her alone with me,” he says testily, shoving back the sheets with more force than is strictly necessary.

“Of course I trust you to take care of her,” says Inej as she puts out the lamp, leaving them in darkness. “I just wonder if you trust you to take care of her.”

“What a patently ridiculous statement.”

Inej sighs heavily but does not respond. They lie there for a time in the dark, both tense, neither sleeping. Inej has spent enough years sharing a bed with Kaz to know the rhythm of his breath when he finally succumbs to sleep, but he is holding himself rigid, his temper keeping him apart from her.

Eventually though, he exhales and she feels the slow, deliberate release of tension as he forces himself to relax. “I don't want to fight.”

His voice is sullen, as it always is when he makes the first move toward conciliation. He's gotten better at it over the years, but it always sounds like it costs him something to concede the high ground.

“We’re not fighting, you foolish man.” Inej gives a little shake of her head, though he cannot see her. “You make everything harder than it needs to be.”

He says nothing. Clearly, he's gone as far as he's going to go toward making peace.

Inej sighs. “I'll be gone a month, maybe two. It won't be long.”

“I'll be sure to explain that to Genna when she's crying for her mama,” comes the muttered reply.

The guilt curls sour in her stomach once more. There's nothing she can do where her baby is concerned that doesn't make her feel guilty in some way or another. A part of her wants to cry, a part of her wants to lash out and hurt Kaz back. She clenches her fist into the blankets and grinds her teeth instead.

“Don’t do that,” she says quietly.

It is all she says.

Silence reigns between them for a long while. Inej feels wounded and annoyed and defiant and resigned. She is leaving him by mutual agreement; however hurt or angry he wants to be about it now, there had been a discussion, and he'd agreed that she should do what makes her happy. He has no right to be this way with her, and she is of a mind to light the damn lamp again and have it out with him right now.

The reason she does not is because she is almost positive that his renewed unpleasantness has less to do with her impending absence than it does the realisation that he will soon be parenting Genna alone.

She wants to tell him not to worry, that help is close at hand should he need it; Anathi Zadi on one side, Julia Meijer on the other. In truly dire straits, Colm Fahey would come when called, she knows he would. She also knows that Kaz would sooner set himself on fire than suffer the indignity of admitting to needing help, never mind asking for it. Bringing it up can only put him further inside his head, and Inej doesn't want to fight either.

And besides, while Kaz might be worried, Inej herself is not. What she told him is true; if she had any real concerns about leaving Genna with him, she simply would not do it.

Eventually, she feels the tell-tale dip of the mattress as he turns on his side to face her.

“Come here,” he says.

Slowly, Inej scoots over, under the arm he's lifted for her to tuck close against his body. There's still tension in him, and she winds her arm over his waist to press her fingers into the notches of his spine at the same time that she presses her face into his neck, breathing him in, soaking in the warmth of him. Even now, she is so grateful for this.

She’s grateful for it all, really, but especially this. She cherishes every kiss, every night of tangled limbs and panting mouths, but if all he ever did for the rest of their lives was hold her close like this, then it would still be enough.

Kaz tightens his arms around her for a moment, and she feels him press his nose into her hair, inhale deeply. She’s going to have to have severe words with him when she gets back; he cannot behave like a petulant child every time she leaves or it's going to be exhausting for both of them. Not tonight, though. Tonight, she just drifts. Safe. Loved.

.

She goes before dawn, while Genna is still sleeping.

Call it habit or call it cowardice, but whatever it is, Inej fears that if she has to look into her child’s face she will not have the strength to leave her.

And she must leave her. Inej has come to accept that in order to be a good mother, she must be a whole person, and the only way to be a whole person is to give every part of herself what it needs.

She knows that Kaz is awake, but he does her the courtesy of pretending he is not. Allows her to make her pantomime of painless separation, no tears, no farewells.

She slips away from them in the darkness, like the Wraith he named her.

.

With a brisk wind in her hair and salt spray on her face, Inej feels something she hadn't thought to feel again, sharp and hard and thrilling. It's the easiest thing in the world to step back onto the deck of The Wraith and inhabit her legend again, become Captain Ghafa, the Sankta of the Sea once more.

Oh, it's different of course, but also not. Specht grips her arm in respectful greeting when she walks up the gangplank, and then pulls her into a one-armed hug that lifts her clear off her feet. On the open sea, they are less Captain and First Mate, more equals. Specht has been in command on this ship for two years now, and seems to have settled well to the role. He offers her the captain’s cabin out of courtesy, but Inej takes a hammock on the gun deck with the rest of the crew, unwilling to turf him out for the short time she will be aboard.

It's good to be down there, among the crew, still mostly known to her even after her years away. Crewing aboard The Wraith is more a calling than a job; Inej thinks they couldn't stand the savagery if it weren’t. Crew stay a long while and leave when they can no longer stomach it, never to return. Inej, for her part, enjoys lying in her hammock between watches, catching up with them, listening to their tales. She sleeps well, with her knives strapped on and her hat pulled low over her face, the fatigue of a long day deep in her bones. Not the seemingly depthless exhaustion of new parenthood that still occasionally haunts her, but the satisfaction of hard-worked muscles and sea air.

And, of course, the work remains. A decade, more, of burning slave ships has done infuriatingly little to discourage the trade. Even Kaz's efforts at dismantling the indenture system in Ketterdam only went so far - he was just one man, after all, even with a criminal empire at his back. As demand in Kerch itself dwindled, it soared in the Southern Colonies, the moral squalor of Ketterdam flourishing anew in the tropical heat, where the rich men who exploit the local resources crave a taste of home. Inej still struggles to make peace with the fact that she has not obliterated the slavers, but every life saved, every man, woman and child who comes blinking out of the hold of a slaver ship is a victory, and she must hold onto that. They can only do what they can do.

Now, Inej stands atop the forecastle, scanning the horizon through a long glass. They are tracking hard straight across the sea toward Ketterdam on the tail of a slaver, riding the trade winds. The Wraith travels lightly, faster than anything else on the True Sea, even now. Inej has every confidence they will catch the ship before it reaches Kerch waters and, if their intelligence is good and based on the intercept course she has plotted, they should be upon it any time now.

She hears Specht before she sees him, measured footsteps approaching from her left, surefooted as always on the rolling deck. He comes to stand at her side, both hands resting lightly on the bulwark, and Inej feels a little shiver of familiarity, of rightness. How many times have they stood like this, shoulder to shoulder? The voyage thus far has been such a flurry of frantic activity, they’ve barely had time to speak.

“So, how fares our daughter?”

Her eyebrows shoot up as she slides her eyes sideways at him. “Unless I’ve suffered a terrible lapse in both memory and judgement, I’m not entirely sure what you’re referring to.”

“Co-captains,” says Specht, gesturing between them and winking. “By the law of the sea, we’re essentially married. What’s yours is mine.”

Inej snorts inelegantly. “I don't think that’s how it works.”

“It definitely is,” he says, nodding sagely. “So?”

“She’s well,” says Inej, thinking of the last time he saw her baby, when she was barely a few weeks old. “Walking, talking. Into absolutely everything. Probably prematurely ageing Kaz by about ten years even as we speak.”

Specht laughs, loud and long. “How is the old bastard, anyway?”

“Up to his ears in intrigue and making a lot of money.”

He barks another laugh. “Business as usual, then.”

He's not wrong. Kaz might have transplanted himself from Ketterdam to another continent, but, as evidenced by recent discussions, he carries on much as he always has. He would probably die if he didn't have at least four concurrent schemes running. Inej shrugs. “You know how he is.”

“That I do,” he says ruefully, and she marks his tone. Specht has always been faintly disapproving of her romantic entanglement with Kaz, and vocal in his opinion that she could do better. Inej wonders what he'd make of the idea that Kaz would likely agree with him. He sighs heavily, now. “I still can't believe you had a baby with that monster.”

Inej grins as she finally sights her target through the long glass, baring her teeth. Collapsing the long glass in one smooth, satisfying motion, she repeats a sentiment she's heard from Kaz many times over the years. “We're all someone's monster, Specht.”

.

Little Erik Meijer chatters away on his father's knee as the cart jolts over the rutted road towards home. He's a sweet, sunny lad, and Inej finds it easy to smile and nod and make interested noises from her position beside Joss on the bench of the cart. She'd caught them in town and begged a ride back towards the farm.

The sun is high overhead, beating down with no breeze to temper it. All occupants of the cart are well-used to the heat, bar one: poor Wylan is hiding under a wide brimmed hat in the back, misery incarnate, as Jesper carries on a very loud and very one-sided conversation beside him.

A not-so-small part of her regrets bringing them. After burning three ships, The Wraith had indeed made a whirlwind stop in Ketterdam to resupply, and Inej had seen her dear friends for the first time in near enough three years. If they'd been upset with her they'd been good enough not to show it, but there had been tears and a lot of wine, and Wylan had professed that he and Jesper were desperate to visit but weren't certain if they'd been welcome, and then Inej had cried again, and then Jesper had cried, and before she knew what she was doing the invitation was out of her mouth.

Whatever restlessness had been bubbling in her blood, itching under her skin, is quiet now. Now, she can only feel deep contentment at the blue sky and the warm sun and the rolling farmland. The dusty, rutted road is charming to her - how had she ever loathed it before? She tips her face to the sun, letting her head loll as she closes her eyes, her body moving easily with the jerking motion of the cart.

On the crossing, she'd tried to rationalise it; she has been gone the whole summer, longer than she intended, and she'd thought perhaps Jesper and Wylan would make a decent buffer between herself and what is sure to be a fraught reunion with Kaz. Now, though, she wishes she hadn't. She wants to kiss her baby, wrap herself around Kaz if he's not feeling too prickly, and tuck away for a good long while in the safety and comfort of the place they've made together. She doesn't want intruders, no matter how dearly she loves them. Sighing slightly, she opens her eyes again.

Beside her, Joss is sweating bullets in a way that has nothing to do with the heat.

In the back of the cart, Jesper has made himself comfortable. He is half reclined, legs splayed and elbows resting on the box board behind him, collar open and sleeves rolled to his elbows. The crow and cup tattoo on his forearm is on full display.

Inej feels a decent amount of pity for Joss. He can be a bit of a fool, but he's not a bad person. He doesn't really deserve the anxiety that must come from having Dirtyhands move in next door. He is plainly still unaware that they know his identity - Inej is somewhat pleased to see that Kaz has managed to refrain from shooting him and burying him underneath her vegetable garden - and part of her wants to put him out of his misery, tell him that if Kaz wanted to do him harm he'd have done so already. But she notes that his wife has done nothing to disabuse him of that notion, either, so Inej continues to let him sweat. She'll let Julia keep that one in her pocket.

When they come to the dusty track that branches off toward the Meijer farm, Inej hops down, tells him they can walk the rest of the way. Wylan glares at her from under his hat as he and Jesper climb down beside her, but Inej ignores it. She's not certain poor Joss will be able cope with a whole murder of Crows in one place.

She assures Wylan that the walk is a short one, and it is, but she can see that he's suffering in the heat. Jesper takes his bag from him and slings it over one shoulder, hefting his own bag over the other. So far on the journey he has been relaxed, untroubled by the weather, easy in his homeland. Now, as they approach the farm, for the first time Inej marks tension in his shoulders, a jittery energy in the slightly shortened length of his stride.

She says nothing, but she thinks that perhaps it's not just her own reunion with Kaz that's going to be uncomfortable.

Inej feels a tingle of something nameless as they turn onto the rutted farm track, finally stepping onto Rietveld land. She looks at her surroundings and realises that she had not understood how familiar this place had become to her, how dear, until she left it.

All is as it was, but also not. Time has passed here as it did on the ocean. Inej sees that the broken fencepost has been mended while she's been away. In the meadows to either side of the track, the grass has been scythed and raked into neat windrows for drying, and the air is sweet with the scent of it. It must have been in the last day or so, thinks Inej, perhaps even that very morning. Haymaking is a chaotic business, in her experience, a fine balance between decent growth and good timing, getting it in before the autumn rains come. They'd got it wrong last year, lost the bulk of it to damp. Kaz has waited longer this year, he must be confident in his window.

All chatter among their little group has ceased, and while Inej is cataloguing the changes around her, she also observes Jesper and Wylan looking about with interest. She wonders what it looks like through their eyes. Does it seem a likely place for she and Kaz to wash up? Is it what they expected? Had they expected anything at all?

Her questions die in her throat as the house comes into view and, with it, Kaz and Genna. Jesper stops dead in his tracks, mouth agape, and Inej and Wylan stop with him instinctively. Kaz, hunched over the front gate doing something that involves a hammer, seems to sense her presence in that peculiar way of his. He glances over his shoulder half a second before she opens her mouth to call out to him.

Their eyes meet, and Inej is suddenly breathless. Every single thing she thought she would do or say leaves her mind, replaced by the warm joy of seeing his face again. It doesn't make sense - Inej has spent far longer periods away from him in the past. But that was before.

Genna is kneeling by his feet, face close to the ground and bottom in the air, examining something very closely. Kaz leans down to her, one hand braced on his good knee, speaks. Genna looks up at him. And then he points, and she looks at Inej.

The excited squeal that Genna lets out cuts something loose inside her. She drops her bag and runs.

In the next instant, Inej is on her knees in the dirt pressing kisses to Genna's fat little cheeks, her little hands, hefting the weight of her in her arms as she smacks kisses into her belly and her girl shrieks in delight. All the while she murmurs to her in jumbled Suli, words tumbling over themselves, my darling, my little precious, my very own heart.

In the background she becomes aware of a great ruckus, all flapping wings and vicious honking and the distinctive sound of Wylan yelling fuck, fucking fuck!

Twisting to look over her shoulder, Inej sees that her friend has retreated a fair distance up the track and is climbing the fence, beset by geese and still shouting obscenities. Jesper, following after and betraying no particular urgency in coming to his husband's aid, calls, “Wylan no, darling, they can fly—”

She turns back to look up at Kaz, watching the proceedings with an air of resigned indifference, and all she can think is how much she's missed him. When he glances at her, she grins up at him, gleeful. He doesn't smile back, but the way he looks at her sitting in the dust with Genna tight in her arms, like she's the most valuable thing he's ever laid eyes on, is welcome enough for now.

.

While Jesper and Wylan get settled in the back bedroom where Kaz had once slept, Inej cleans the dirt of the road off herself, changes into the loose linen clothing she prefers to wear at home. Genna sticks to her like glue, keeping close at her feet as she moves about the bedroom, clutching her trouser leg when she goes back downstairs, forcing her to take slow, halting steps to keep pace with little legs.

In the kitchen, Inej pulls open the back door to let the afternoon light in and is hit by the fragrant air of her garden - which, she notes with some satisfaction, is lush and green despite Kaz's ill-tempered insistence that he would have neither the time nor the inclination to maintain it while she was away.

The man in question has sequestered himself in his study for the time being. It would be easy for Inej to feel annoyed with him, that he would rather hide away among his books than be with her after so many months apart, but she understands him too well for that. Kaz can adjust a plan at a moment's notice on a job - for all his dark legend, his true genius is his unparalleled ability to pivot in a crisis - but emotional adjustments take him longer. It was perhaps not entirely fair of her to bring Jesper and Wylan down on him with no warning, but it's a reckoning that needed to be had. Of anyone aside from Inej herself, Kaz has the most emotional ties to Jesper, and the messiest. Whether he would admit it or not, he draws strength from Jesper, leans on him in ways he wouldn't lean on Inej, and though she knows they've corresponded some, he'd cut that support off at the knees when he'd removed them to Novyi Zem.

She will not begrudge him the time he needs to get his head straight. She leaves him to his own devices.

Genna has dirt smudged across the bridge of her nose, and her hair - not yet long enough to braid - is escaping from the tufted little ponytail atop her head. Inej feels so much love for her that she could simply gather her close and hold her for hours and just weep with the joy of it. She elects to give her a bath instead, despite the early hour. She won't have their friends think that she and Kaz are dragging up some feral urchin.

She fills the deep kitchen sink with water warmed on the stove, scents it with lavender and lemonbalm pulled from her garden, spends a long time there getting Genna clean, scrubbing behind her ears, lathering up her hair.

Kaz comes in, at last, while Genna is having the time of her life sloshing the water around so that it spills over the side of the sink and onto the floor. He sits at the table and scratches numbers into the columns of one of his ledgers, and Inej is struck all over again by that sudden sense of rightness, the three of them being together again. She feels - insanely - like singing, like her contentment will burst right out of her skin unless she does something to express it, and she thinks she understands now why her mother would always be humming some nothing tune while Inej and her father were close by.

“So,” she says lightly, tone casual. “How have things been?”

“Fine,” says Kaz, still writing diligently. “We cut the hay yesterday, and we'll begin the harvest proper in about two weeks, I think. The oilseed has done especially well this year, and half the Ravkan crop failed so the price has shot up. We'll do well on it.”

“Oh,” says Inej, frowning a little as she rinses Genna's hair. The question he's answered is not quite the one she was asking, and she wonders if that is by accident or design. She tries again. “How have you been?”

“As you can see, I am perfectly well.”

Design, then.

She sighs. “And Genna?”

“As I'm sure you can also see, she too is perfectly well.”

Inej chances a look over her shoulder but he's sitting with his back to her, head still bowed over whatever he's brought to work on to facilitate this conspicuous display of ignoring her. She fights the urge to wring out the wet washcloth straight down the back of his shirt.

Evidently, she's going to have to drag base facts out of him piecemeal until he's done punishing her for her absence. “She's been eating well?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Sleeping well?”

A grunt is all she gets in response to that, which she takes to mean that Genna has regressed slightly in her sleeping habits. Her mother had warned her it might happen; it's unfortunate that Kaz has had to deal with it alone.

She scrubs a particularly stubborn patch of dirt on Genna's elbow. “And you've bathed her, while I've been away?”

“Of course I've bathed her, what kind of question is that?”

Kaz's tone could not possibly be more offended, but he is a study in contradictions, as always. For all his griping about bad habits, all his fastidious neatness when it comes to himself and his environment, he has some ingrained idea from his youth that childhood means grass stains on clothes and dirt under fingernails. He struggles with bathtime, too. For all his progress over the years, wet skin and pruned fingertips are something he simply cannot tolerate. The very few times he's lifted Genna from her bath, he's worn the gloves to do so. While Inej knows that he would never let their child go uncared for, she'd be prepared to wager good money that he's done little more than scrub Genna with a wet cloth while she's been at sea.

She looks over her shoulder again. “You've physically submerged her in water?”

“She's clean, isn't she?” he snaps.

Inej fights a grin, vindicated. It's debatable how clean Genna actually is, but only the cloistered children of aristocrats and rich merchers - who spend much of their days in unhappy isolation being neither seen nor heard, if Wylan is anything to go by - are kept in a state of scrubbed sterility at all times. She might tease, but she remembers fondly her own childhood of scraped knees and dirty feet. She is content for her child to be ruthlessly clean only some of the time.

When the water has turned a soupy grey, Inej lifts her baby out of the sink and sets her on the cool flagstones, unconcerned about the chance of catching a chill in the heat of the afternoon, and turns to collect the fresh towel draped over one of the kitchen chairs. She assumes that Genna will wait to be dried off, as she always has, but the child is as slippery as her father. Overexcited, Genna flees as soon as Inej's back is turned - runs giggling out of the room, stark naked and dripping water everywhere - forcing Inej to give chase, brandishing the towel in one hand.

She catches her just before she races out of the open front door, throwing the towel over her like she's attempting to trap a skittish cat and scooping her up, utterly bewildered.

“Oh,” says Kaz absently as she walks back into the kitchen, not looking up from his ledger. “She's started to do runners.”

“Thank you, Kaz, I see that,” huffs Inej, flustered, Genna wriggling in her arms. She notes Kaz's distinct lack of panic over his daughter's flight toward a vulnerable point of egress. “You seem to have let go of the worst of your paranoia.”

“Benefits of having her to myself the past few months,” he says, tapping his pen against the edge of the ledger. “I can't keep my eyes on her every second of every day.”

His tone is detached but he looks up as Inej kneels on the floor to roughly towel dry their child, and when she meets his eyes there is the very barest suggestion of humour there.

She raises her eyebrows in response. “Well, she evidently hasn't come to any mischief.”

“It turns out that small children are quite resilient, actually.”

That does not sound at all reassuring. Her eyebrows creep even higher. “Meaning?”

Kaz gives her a level look. “They bounce.”

For a long moment, they simply eyeball each other across the kitchen, before Inej looks at Genna again warily. There is precisely no chance she would not have noticed evidence of injury on her child immediately, but she scans her quickly anyway; aside from a small yellowing bruise on her shin, she is as perfect as the day Inej left her.

She flicks her eyes back to Kaz. “This feels like something I would rather not know the details of.”

“I would trust that feeling,” says Kaz, dropping his eyes to his ledger once more.

She is trying to decide whether or not he's teasing her, and whether to push him a little more, when Jesper chooses this moment to appear, sauntering into the kitchen with his hands clasped behind his back. “Good to see that discipline reigns in the House of Brekker.”

“Rietveld,” say Inej and Kaz in unison.

“Right.” Jesper grimaces slightly, eyes flicking between them. “Need to get used to that.”

Inej resumes towelling Genna's hair, and sniffs primly. “There's plenty of discipline in this house, thank you.”

“Oh, I'm not criticising, I thought that was excellent,” he says, placating. “I'm going to bring it up in my speech at her wedding.”

Inej snorts, but Kaz looks up sharply. “What makes you think you'll be giving any speeches at her wedding?”

“As her favourite uncle, it's my right.”

“As a perfect stranger, you mean.”

“Soon-to-be favourite uncle,” Jesper shrugs. “Detail.”

Kaz closes his ledger book with a snap and stands abruptly. “Well, she doesn't like strangers, so don't hold your breath.”

Gathering the ledger in one hand and his cane in the other, he walks stiffly out of the room and a moment later the study door shuts loudly. Jesper looks down at Inej, bewildered and a little hurt.

Inej opens her mouth to make excuses for him, but then she thinks of Specht with the baby sling bound to his chest. She thinks of Colm Fahey bouncing the baby in the crook of his arm. She thinks of Kaz and his poisonous jealousy and his resentment of any potential father figure that might give Genna whatever he thinks he cannot. So she closes her mouth, smiles a little, shrugs.

Jesper shrugs back, and a whole lifetime of silently communicating behind Kaz's turned back passes between them. Years of it's Kaz and he doesn't mean it and he means it but it doesn't matter because he's a miserable prick and it's only Kaz and he cares about you really and who's Jordie and it's Kaz it's Kaz it's Kaz—

“Uh, don't look now, but I think your child has disappeared,” he says in a stage whisper.

Startled, Inej whips her head back to Genna, but finds that she has simply sunk down all the way inside the towel she is still wrapped in, hiding her face.

“Well, it's true,” Inej says, apologetic. “She's always shy with new people.”

“That's alright, I'm not above bribery,” says Jesper, unbothered, as he crouches down beside them.

Genna leans instinctively into Inej, curling the fingers of one hand tightly into her shirt, and peers out from under her towel. Jesper smiles wide, and he produces a small stuffed rabbit with long floppy ears from behind his back with a flourish. Then, as they watch, he bleeds the colour from his own waistcoat, slowly turning the toy a vibrant chartreuse.

Genna's mouth falls open, and her dark eyes go huge with wonder. It is the first time she has seen a grisha - a zowa - in action, and Inej desperately wants to call Kaz back to them so that he can see her reaction, but it will ruin the moment.

Jesper holds the rabbit out and slowly, slowly, Genna reaches out to take it. The toy vanishes underneath the towel as Genna clutches it close, gazing at Jesper in wide-eyed wonder.

“Hello, little lady,” he says, grey eyes twinkling, full of triumph. “I'm Uncle Jesper, and I've been waiting a very long time to meet you.”

.

Dinner is a relatively quiet affair.

It is much earlier than civilised adults typically eat, because Inej and Kaz have grown accustomed to arranging their daily lives around the needs of a toddler, but it's just as well for those exhausted by a long journey.

Wylan carries the conversation valiantly, while Jesper mostly eyes Kaz across the table. Kaz for his part does not participate at all, but occupies himself with giving Genna her supper. Inej cannot take her eyes off them.

They are different together. Kaz is easy with Genna in a way he wasn't before Inej left. He's always been a dutiful father - after those first, rocky months, at least - but now there is something almost unconscious about the way he nudges vegetables across her plate, which she obediently shoves into her mouth. It's the way she chatters away at him as though he is the only other person in the room, baba this and baba that, and the way he listens to her, nodding and making the occasional noise of acknowledgement.

Inej is captivated. She can imagine their little routine, while she's been at sea, can picture them spending every evening at the table just like this. She has a sudden stab of guilt for neglecting her friends, but when she looks to them, Jesper is still staring at Kaz in frank fascination. Wylan, though, is watching Inej, faint smile on his face.

Kaz leaves the table first, lifting Genna seemingly without thought to take her up to bed, and something in her heart clenches at the sight. The way Genna grows is most noticeable to Inej when she's in Kaz's arms. She remembers watching him hold her for the very first time, how small she was in his hands. It seems almost impossible to draw a line between then and now.

The rest of them do not linger, long journeys making for tired bones. Inej hopes that she is not bound for an argument; she's found it hard to get a good read on Kaz since she got back, and it would be a far more pleasant state of affairs to simply slip into bed and fall asleep beside him.

.

She hears him long before he enters the room, tracks the sound of his uneven footsteps and the thump of his cane as he makes his customary circuit of the house, checking doors and windows, before coming slowly upstairs.

Inej remains where she is, standing beside the dresser, slowly brushing out her hair. She hears his footsteps pause briefly, the sound of Genna's bedroom door creaking quietly as he looks in on her before he comes the rest of the way to the room they share.

“A month, maybe two,” his voice comes from behind her, parroting the words she'd spoken in the springtime.

Here it is, the inevitable confrontation. They're going to fight with Wylan and Jesper just down the hall after all.

Inej sighs, puts her hairbrush down. “I'm sorry.”

“Are you,” he says, crossing the room to stand in front of her, and he doesn't sound as angry as she thinks he should. “What for exactly? That you stayed away for so long, or that you said you wouldn't?”

It's so like Kaz to interrogate her. It will never be enough for her to issue a blanket apology, he will always demand to know what, precisely, she is apologising for. A little rich, she thinks, when Kaz has never once apologised to her for anything. He shows contrition by his actions, but words - real words, from his heart, not the circles he dances around his enemies with sharp mind and sharper tongue - never come easy for him.

What is she sorry for? Not that she left, but that's not what he's asking. She had never intended to stay away for so long, but the work demands what it will. She'd been very aware of what she was doing while she was doing it, guilt sharp in her every time they put to sea headed in the wrong direction. But the opportunities had been too good, the whole operation like a house of cards - once they pulled one, the rest tumbled neatly after.

Forty-eight men, women and children cut free of their shackles. Forty-eight lives against one summer away from her child. A child safe in her father's care. No, Inej does not regret staying away.

But she had said a month.

“The second one, I suppose,” she sighs, looking up at him through her lashes. “I wrote to you.”

“It never arrived.”

“So I gather,” she says ruefully. “Forgive me.”

She's not asking. They are well past that, by now.

Kaz reaches out a hand to brush her hair behind her ear. His fingers find her chin, tilting her head up slightly, and his skin is warm against hers. She doesn't expect it - in the past, he has often needed to warm up to touching her again, having retreated back into himself during her long absences. Evidently caring for Genna has not allowed him to retreat this time.

“You are what you are,” he says, rubbing his thumb lightly across a fading scar on her cheek, and she leans into it. “I know it well enough.”

He drops his hand, but she catches it in both of hers.

“She looks well. She's been well, I can see it. I knew she would be.” Inej worries at his hand, runs her fingers over the tan line from where he still wears his shirtsleeves stubbornly buttoned to the wrist, even on the hottest day of summer. “I don't want you to think that it was easy, to leave her. It wasn't. It…it hurt.”

She doesn't want to look at him, not in this moment, but he's silent for so long that she finds she must. When she looks into his eyes, they are so dark that for a moment she forgets to breathe.

“And what about me?” he says, voice low and rough.

She winds their fingers together and squeezes his hand, once, twice. Doesn't he know? Surely he must—

“It was never that it didn't hurt to leave you, Kaz,” she says, and her heart is in her throat suddenly. How can she make him understand? “It just hurt more not to.”

They stand like that a long moment, and then Kaz gives her hand a light tug, pulling her toward him.

Inej goes willingly, steps fully into his space. Lays her head on his chest, and listens to the beat of his heart. Just as for him, it might have been an easy thing for her to shy from his touch after returning from the sea, when she has witnessed so much cruelty and violence. But there's a truth that lives in her that, no matter the difficulties they have faced, she has never forgotten: these hands, bloodsoaked as they are, will never harm her.

In his arms again (finally, finally) she answers her own question from long ago: what can there ever be for her here, in this hot, dry land, too far from the ocean to be of any comfort?

Family, her heart whispers. Home.

.

She wakes in the night, overheated and uncomfortable, with something sharp digging into her side. When she cracks an eye open, she finds Genna wedged between her and Kaz, limbs akimbo.

The window sits open, letting in the cool night air and the sound of crickets, and the light from the full moon casts a pale glow over the room. She looks up and meets Kaz's eyes - he is not sleeping, just watching her quietly.

“You've been letting her get into bed with you,” she says after a moment.

He doesn't try to deny it. “She's been clingy while you've been away.”

She could tease him for this erosion of rules and boundaries, ask him about bad habits, tell him he's going soft. Instead, she gently removes Genna's elbow from her kidney and winds an arm around her, cuddling close.

“Hmm,” she says, and closes her eyes again.

.

When Inej next wakes, the sun is over the horizon and birdsong fills the room. She is alone in an empty bed, sheets rumpled where Kaz and Genna had slept beside her, and she stretches her arms over her head, luxuriating in the large bed after the cramped confines of ship and stagecoach.

She cannot hear Genna's distinctive chatter anywhere in the house, likely meaning that Kaz has already gone out and taken her with him, so she takes her time getting washed and dressed. The door of the back bedroom sits open and it seems that, for once, Inej is the last in the house to rise. She feels sluggish and heavy, but in a good way. In a way that comes after a long, deep rest.

She finds Jesper and Wylan in the kitchen, with coffee and fruit and the dense black bread that is Kaz's staple contribution. They look vaguely like children caught with their hands in the biscuit jar when she enters.

“We made ourselves at home, I hope you don't mind,” says Wylan, making a show of contrition but continuing to spoon thick cream into his coffee.

Inej doesn't mind, saints know she has spent enough mornings doing exactly the same in their home. She communicates her feelings with a wave of her hand, making a beeline for the pantry and her tea jars.

They exchange pleasantries, how did you sleep and you have a lovely home. They tell her the preserves are delicious, and she thanks them. They tell her the bread is also very good, and she tells them that Kaz made it, and watches as they try to process that information.

“Where is Kaz this morning, anyway?” asks Wylan.

“I haven't seen him,” she says absently, setting the copper kettle back onto the stove to boil. "Probably out communing with his sheep.”

Jesper's coffee cup stops an inch from his mouth as he stares at her. “He's what now?”

Inej's eyebrow twitches at shock in his voice, and bites the inside of her cheek to keep the grin from spreading over her face. Kaz does go out to the sheep each morning, it's true, but only to check if any of the flock have been lost overnight. He takes Genna with him because she likes to look at them, and if he lingers at all it's only because it delights her and not because of any fondness he bears them, despite how Inej teases him for it.

Truthfully, Kaz holds the sheep somewhat in contempt, frequently complains that their only purpose in the world is to attempt to die at every available opportunity in increasingly creative ways. They have had sheep in ditches, and sheep stuck in fences, sheep wandering off and getting lost. Just before lambing, especially, the sheep frequently get stuck on their backs and must be rolled back over to save their lives, with Kaz muttering furiously as he takes two handfuls of fleece that any creature stupid enough to get itself into such a state should simply be left to perish.

He still does it, though.

It had been an offhand comment, a joke that would have landed with Kaz, but Jesper has missed for lack of context. The opportunity is too good. “Oh yes,” she says now, spooning loose leaves into her teapot. “He goes out every morning. I think it's meditative for him.”

As she turns back toward the pantry, she winks at Wylan, who hides a smile behind his hand.

“Excuse me,” says Jesper, standing stiffly, sounding slightly dazed. “I have to go for a walk.”

By the time Inej has finished putting the tea away in the pantry, Jesper has left the kitchen. A moment later, they hear the front door open and close.

Wylan spoons some sugar into his coffee. “I take it that Kaz has not suddenly developed an affinity for livestock.”

“Obviously not,” says Inej.

Before she takes her seat at the table, she reaches over to the spiky aloe plant sitting on the window ledge, snaps off one of the leaves and hands it to the redhead, gesturing to his sunburnt nose.

.

That evening is not as tense as the previous one, aided largely by the two bottles of kvas that Jesper brought with him from Ketterdam. It's the cheap, astringent, gut-rot stuff that Inej and Kaz and Jes used to drink in Kaz's attic rooms at the Slat, when they were fifteen and too old for their years but mostly just so, so young.

“Barrel bought,” says Jesper, holding one of the bottles aloft before taking a swig. “Little taste of home.”

Kaz snorts beside her, taking another drink from the other bottle and handing it to Inej. She takes her own drink and says nothing, feeling the familiar burn of the liquid as it settles in her belly. Was the Barrel ever really home to any of them, or just somewhere they landed after falling from a very great height?

Across from her, Wylan coughs. “I can't believe we're voluntarily drinking this swill.”

“We're recapturing our youth,” says Jesper, clapping him on the back. “It's called nostalgia.”

There's not much to be nostalgic about from that time, thinks Inej, but those evenings in the attic, the very first stirrings of camaraderie…well. If there's anything at all, it would be that.

They are under the stars this evening, around a low fire. Another way to 'recapture their youth', apparently, though Inej likes to think they are not actually old yet. Kaz had objected to setting fires on his land, but after much wheedling he had grudgingly assisted Jesper in clearing a patch of earth to the side of the house.

Inej is warm. Too warm, really, between the mild evening and the fire and the drink in her veins. She glances back toward the house, all quiet. She'd kept Genna in her lap until her baby fell asleep in her arms, and put her to bed still smelling of smoke. They'll all stink of smoke - probably the whole house will by morning after they've thoroughly smothered their bed linen in the scent - but it's worth it, for evenings like this.

She lets her head tip onto Kaz's shoulder, gazing across the fire where Jesper and Wylan are now bickering over whether the label on the bottle is genuine or has been lifted from a bottle of better quality liquor. While their attention is elsewhere, she feels Kaz turn his head and press a kiss into her hair.

When she is so tired she can no longer keep her eyes open, she leaves them to it and trails up to bed. Before she falls asleep, she hears Wylan call his goodnights, and then his footsteps on the stairs. Kaz and Jesper must remain outside. Good. Her last thought as she drifts off to sleep is that she hopes they will have a good, long talk, and do away with this tension between them.

.

Inej wakes suddenly to a loud thud, sits bolt upright in bed. She has fallen asleep with the lamp still burning, and in the dim glow she can see Kaz leaning heavily against the door, wearing what, on him, might pass for a sheepish expression.

She blinks at him, bleary eyed. “Kaz?”

Rather than respond, Kaz levers himself off the door and sways too far in the opposite direction, staggering slightly. He is very, very drunk. Inej rubs her eyes tiredly. He is not a man given to drink to excess, but on the very few occasions she has known him do so, he snores tremendously. She's about to tell him that he can take himself back downstairs to sleep in the sitting room, thank you very much, when he turns toward her and she sees that his right shirt sleeve is soaked with blood.

She is out of bed and reaching for him in an instant but he sways away from her, just a little. It's enough to stop her dead, hand frozen in midair. “You're hurt.”

“No,” he says.

She squints at him in the low light, assessing. His pupils are blown wide and he is sweating, deathly pale except for two spots of colour high on his cheeks. Drunk, yes, but that's not all.

“Sit down, Kaz,” she says, gesturing to the bed.

He shakes his head. “It's nothing.”

“Sit down.”

Her tone brooks no argument, but he obliges more easily than she thought he would - a concern in itself - dropping heavily onto the mattress. She steps slowly into the space between his knees, watching for any sign he doesn't want her there. When he doesn't move away from her, she reaches for his right arm, taking him by the wrist. He is watching her with unfocused eyes, but he lifts the arm for her, holds it level with his chest.

His cuff is undone, so she is able to peel the bloody shirt gently back from his arm, still holding his wrist in one hand. She expects a wound, but there is nothing. Where the blood has not been smeared by his shirt, it beads, little scarlet droplets on a canvas of pale skin.

That's when she realises what's so wrong with what she is seeing. Heart hammering in her chest, she swipes her thumb through the blood, across the unblemished skin of his forearm.

His tattoo is gone.

“Kaz,” she breathes, horrified. “What have you done?”

“Jesper—”

The shock goes right through her. “Jesper did this?”

Her eyes snap to his face, to the usually sharp eyes now clouded with alcohol and pain and something that she cannot quite identify but is certain that she hates. He nods and, almost unthinkingly, she balls her free hand into a fist and smacks him in the shoulder as hard as she can.

“Idiot,” she hisses through clenched teeth, suddenly as angry as she can ever remember being with him. “You complete and incomprehensible fool.”

He scowls at her, and opens his mouth to say something in response, but she drops his wrist and stalks out of the room, making for the back bedroom to, she doesn't even know, but—

She gets two-thirds of the way down the hall before stopping. Muffled voices float through the door, an odd mirror of the conversation which just took place in her own bedroom. She can hear Wylan, voice thick with sleep and tight with fury, pitched low for the sake of decorum and the child sleeping next door. “...idiot…could have been badly hurt…both of you…completely irresponsible…” and Jesper's voice, conciliatory and also unmistakably drunk.

Inej stands in the dark of the hallway and lets out a slow breath, and forces herself to be calm. She won't make anything better by wading into the middle of that argument. She's not even sure what she would say. Mostly that one or both of them could have suffered irreparable damage, but Wylan seems to have that angle covered.

She lingers a moment longer, and then turns away and leaves them to it.

On her way past, she pokes her head into Genna's room, finds her fast asleep and entirely oblivious to the absurdity going on around her, and she casts a quick prayer to the saints that it will always be so.

When she returns to the bedroom she shares with Kaz, she finds that he's removed his ruined shirt and used it to wipe away the remaining blood, leaving an expanse of perfect - if red and angry looking - skin. The black 'R' on the inside of his bicep remains, but the crow and cup that he's worn on his forearm as long as Inej has known him is no more.

She cannot quite absorb it. She thinks of the first time he removed his shirt in front of her, how her eyes had been drawn immediately to the contrast of black ink and pale skin, before being drawn to…other things. She thinks of muscle flexing underneath it the first time he allowed her to trace the design with her bare fingertips. She thinks of a decade of watching him undress for bed, the tattoo so much a part of him that she failed to consciously register it most of the time.

She registers its absence, now. It's jarring. It looks wrong.

Kaz is watching her quietly. He's recovered some of his composure, no longer deathly pale although his eyes are still glassy and bloodshot. It seems perhaps the shock of it is what did for him, more than anything.

“I didn't know Jesper could do that,” she says eventually.

“Neither did he,” says Kaz, looking down at his arm, clenches and unclenches his fist, flexing the muscle. “Drew the ink right out of the skin. Quite extraordinary to watch.”

Inej closes her eyes as worst case scenarios flash through her mind, and dares not dwell too hard on whether it was Jesper's remarkable skill or his unrivalled ability to hold his drink or just sheer dumb luck that stopped things from going disastrously wrong.

“You scare me when you do things like this, Kaz,” she whispers.

“I know,” he says, because he's a bastard. But then, “I'm sorry.”

She opens her eyes, shocked, but he is still looking at his arm. He glances up again when she steps close to him, back in between his knees. He is loose-limbed and sleepy, so unlike himself that she wants to take him by the shoulders and shake him until his teeth rattle. “Why did you do it?”

“I'm here.”

She frowns, shaking her head. “What?”

“I'm here, Inej.” He takes her wrist and, whether intentionally or not, his long fingers wrap over the place where she once bore the peacock feather of the Menagerie. “All of me. With you. With Genna. I don't have one foot in Ketterdam.”

She stares at him a moment, uncomprehending, before she recalls the accusation she'd hurled at him in the spring, when she'd been trying to make him angry. She hadn't thought he would dwell on it, hadn't thought it would penetrate his thick hide at all. She really ought to know better by now.

His fingers shift over her wrist, not quite a caress, and her breath catches as she thinks of the similarities, of the differences. Her, with a butcher in a back alley, blood and cheap alcohol and the burning, cleansing pain. He, in the company of a friend, who drew out with love what had been marked in fear. In anger. In grief.

Can erasing the mark of a former life wipe that life entirely away? No, in her experience. No. But it's a start. It's something. It means you don't have to look at it every day. It means that other people don't look, and make the connection between you and it, before knowing anything else about you. And when the outward tether is gone, that's when you can start untangling the ones inside you.

Perhaps, after all, them being all the way out here is as much about Kaz as it is about Genna and herself. About what he wants, not only for their child, but also for himself. About the life he wants to have. With Inej.

She lets out a shaky exhale, and her voice absolutely does not wobble when she speaks. “I'm still upset with you for doing it this way.”

“I know.”

She swallows, hard. Puts on her best stern tone. “You're in big trouble when you've sobered up, Kaz.”

“Yes,” he says, but his voice is muffled because he has pressed his face to her abdomen, hands slipping to her waist, holding her to him.

She sighs, but cannot stop her hands from finding his shoulders, smoothing over the defined muscle of his upper back as the warmth of his breath seeps through her nightgown.

When she gets him into bed - still in his trousers and socks, but minus his belt and boots - he snores like a congested pig.

.

She catches Jesper in the hall the next morning, just before he enters the kitchen. The knife she throws embeds itself into the wood of the doorframe less than an inch from his nose.

He sways back a hair as his eyes focus on the blade in front of his face, before turning his head slowly to look at her.

“Inej,” he says, voice cautious.

She walks up to him, wraps one hand around the hilt of the knife and yanks it out of the doorframe, flipping it in her fingers so the blade is pointed threateningly toward him.

He does look truly grim. Worse than Kaz, even. His eyes are bloodshot, and there is a fine sheen of sweat over his high forehead. She almost relents out of pity, but when he brings a hand to the back of his neck, sheepish, she sees that his fingertips are stained purest ink-black.

“If you ever,” she says, quiet, threatening, “ever do drunken, experimental Fabrikation on my family again…” she trails off, allows the unspoken threat to hang in the air. Truthfully, she doesn't know what she'll do, but whatever Jesper can imagine is likely scarier than anything she can come up with.

He shakes his head, eyes wide. “Never again, promise.”

She stares at him long enough to make him visibly nervous, a tactic that serves her as well here as it does on the deck of her ship, and thinks about scolding him, about making more threats, about telling him he'd frightened her.

But he's swaying slightly on the spot, looking distinctly green around the gills. She thinks of Kaz, who she just passed in the study with his head on the desk and an untouched cup of coffee at his elbow.

She can think of a hundred ways to vent her anger, but perhaps coaxing Genna into some kind of excitable squealing fit at close range might be more punishing. Perhaps Wylan would like to help her.

Flipping the knife again in nimble fingers, she sheaths it neatly at her belt and, with one last pointed glare, turns on her heel and walks away.

“Fix that,” she calls over her shoulder, gesturing to the divot in the doorframe where the knife cut in.

Jesper is plainative. “Uh, wood isn't really my thing, to be honest.”

“Make an exception.”

.

Jesper finds her late in the afternoon, walking through the orchard, watching her baby run ahead of her. Genna has truly found her legs while Inej has been away, and goes everywhere at full speed. It's wonderful, but exhausting, and she finds she is developing a new appreciation for Kaz managing this alone.

She can see Kaz, through the trees, down by the creek. Wylan is with him, and they are engaged in what seems to be a very involved conversation. They are much too far away for Inej to hear what they're saying but Wylan becomes suddenly animated, and now he is crouching down, and Kaz is gesturing to something with his cane, and—

“What do you think they're talking about over there?” Jesper appears at her shoulder, looking much, much better than he had the last time she'd laid eyes on him.

She shakes her head. “Either something extremely dangerous, or something extremely boring.”

“Probably both,” snorts Jesper.

Kaz and Wylan's shared interests can be boiled down to essentially two topics: things that make other things go boom, and extremely niche areas of economic theory. If they really get into it, they can go back and forth on a given subject for hours, well past the point that any others in the room have checked out of the conversation.

Inej smiles a little and turns away from them, following Genna as she meanders through the dappled sunlight on her own little adventure. Jesper keeps pace, one stride of his long legs for Inej's every two.

“I am sorry,” he says, uncharacteristically sombre. “For last night. For what I…well. For all of it.”

“I know,” she says, and she does. Jesper is very good at being sorry after he's done a thing. She supposes that's another thing that connects them, the Crows. They are all very good at seeking forgiveness, less concerned with whether they should be doing the things that require forgiveness in the first place. “But that was stupid and dangerous to do while drinking, Jes. You could have hurt Kaz badly.”

“I know.”

“You could have hurt yourself—”

“I know, Inej. And if I didn't, then Wylan has already hauled me over the coals well and good, don't you worry about that.”

But she does worry. She is worried. She wants to tell him - what? That the blood had alarmed her, but Kaz is whole and unharmed? That she'd been shocked by the disappearance of the tattoo, but it was Kaz's body to do with as he pleased? She wants to rail at him for his irresponsibility, about the stupid, stupid risk but, well. Who knows the risk more than Jesper? Who knows more than he does exactly what he's capable of? He's already acknowledged it was a foolish thing to do.

“Why did you do it?”

Jesper shrugs. “He asked me to.”

“You should have said no.”

“Never been very good at that, where Kaz is concerned.”

Inej scoffs. Which of them has? She takes his hand, running her thumb over the pads of his fingers, still stained the colour of pitch. “Will it come out?”

“Yes,” he says, and there is easy confidence in his voice. “I can get it out. I just…” he trails off, sighs, looks away.

“What?”

When he looks back at her, the expression on his face is almost shy. "I almost don't want to. Get rid of it, I mean. It's like having a piece of him with me."

Her heart constricts. Dear Jesper. She feels a dull stab of guilt. She and Kaz have both struggled in their own ways with the weight of what they left behind. She never thought about it from the other side. In his own way, Jesper had also lost something profound.

Something of her thoughts must show on her face because Jesper gives her fingers a gentle squeeze. “Hey, none of that.”

Inej lifts their clasped hands to her mouth and presses a kiss to his knuckles, and then he's folding her tightly into his arms, resting his chin on the top of her head. She lets it happen. Dearest, most darling Jesper. Her very first friend in the Barrel, who'd been so kind to her, looked after her so well. She winds her arms around his middle and holds on tight.

“Inej,” he says into her hair after they've stood for a long while. “That kid is really fucking cute.”

She laughs into his chest. “I know.”

“She looks so much like Kaz, and yet she is so cute…”

Inej smacks him lightly on the back, a token gesture in defence of the father of her child, but there's nothing behind it, not really. “Nina said she was proud of us,” she says, because it had touched her, and she just wants to tell someone who will know why.

“As she should be,” says Jesper seriously. “As am I. I'm proud of all of us, actually.”

“Oh?”

“Look at us. You might have had to drag that stubborn bastard out by his balls, but in the end, all of us made it out of the fucking Barrel.”

Inej thinks of Matthias, who she has not thought of in so very long. “Most of us.”

“Yes,” agrees Jesper, stumbling slightly as though he has remembered something very suddenly. “Yes, most of us.”

.

Jesper and Wylan are with them a fortnight before departing for Cofton to visit with Colm. Before they go, Inej gives them a letter for him, along with several jars of last season's peach jam.

A part of her wonders what they will tell him, about what they've seen here. She wants them to say that she and Kaz are well, their business grows, their child thrives. That everything is different from the abject misery he encountered when he came here.

She will miss them, but a large part of her is glad to see them go, to be alone with her little family once more. The restlessness in her wandering heart has eased, now. She feels snug and content, stubborn in her urge to burrow down and remain here all her days. It won't last, she knows. Sooner or later the urge to roam will take her. But she thinks she can stay for a good long while before she has to go again.

.

The harvest passes in a blur of activity, as it always does, and then comes the cooler weather, the winter rain. Long evenings find them before the fire in the sitting room, Genna curled into Kaz's side as he reads to her, finger tracing along the words as he goes. Genna is yet too young to read but she follows the path of his finger diligently, chewing on the ear of her bright green teddy.

(“What the fuck is that?” Kaz had asked in horror the first time he'd laid eyes on it.

“It's a rabbit, Kaz,” Jesper had responded with theatrical patience.)

Inej can tell already that their child is going to be clever, and she doesn't think it's a mother's bias. Genna is bright as a button, curious. She is a delight and an exhaustion to them both in equal measure during these winter evenings; into everything, constantly questioning, talking a million miles a minute. Inej marvels at how far she's come since the spring, all the new words she expresses in her garbled toddler-speak - including one that sounds suspiciously like fuck, to which Kaz pointedly averts his gaze while Inej glares at him.

With Kaz beginning the earliest stages of Genna's education, Inej occupies herself with teaching her more practical skills. Swimming lessons will wait for warmer weather, but now that Genna is walking well, it is time for her to learn to climb.

Inej begins as she remembers being taught, with a plank of wood on the ground. Balance and precision comes first, the rest will follow with time - strength, and speed.

It shouldn't be necessary. Genna should be safe here, in this peaceful place, this idyllic land.

But Inej had once thought herself safe. Her parents had thought her safe. None of them could have imagined the cruelty that awaited her. Inej has a new and devastating insight into what it must have been like for her parents, when she was taken. The horror of not knowing where your child was or if you would ever see them again. If they were even alive. If somebody was hurting them.

Genna will never have those same cruelties inflicted on her, Inej vows. She is not foolish enough to believe she can protect her, she has seen too much, plucked too many children from the holds of too many ships, and travelled too widely to think that slavers are the only danger a young girl faces in the world. Inej cannot be with Genna every moment of her life, but if it kills her she will give her daughter the tools to protect herself. She knows that Kaz will, too. The unspoken agreement sits in the silence between them, a promise more binding than any they have ever made to each other.

Genna will never be caught and caged, because she'll learn to climb, to make impossible leaps, to melt into shadows. Genna will never be kept in chains, because she will learn to pick locks like a master thief, slip bindings like an illusionist.

Between herself and Kaz, they can make Genna formidable, even dangerous. Inej wishes anything but violence for her little girl, but she will learn to fight. She will shoot, and if she loses her gun she will fight with blades, and if she loses those, well. Kaz is a brutal and pragmatic hand-to-hand combatant. He taught Inej to fight, he can teach their daughter, too.

They'll give Genna every tool and dirty trick that's kept both of them alive this long, and then they will give her a life where she never has to use any of it.

This will be their gift to her. In this way will they have succeeded.

It's how it should be, Inej muses. It's the duty of every parent to pass on what they know, to prepare their children as best they can for the world.

Inej's parents had not taught her combat or lockpicking or intrigue. But they had taught her the acrobat's skill that secured her place in the Dregs and so, her freedom. And they'd taught her faith, from which she drew her greatest strength.

And Kaz's parents had taught him...what? She knows so little of them. Kaz guards his past jealously, even from her, even now. She doesn't know what they gave him. A thread of humanity, perhaps, stretching all the way from the child he'd been to the man he is today. A thread stretched taut enough to snap, but there all the same. The thing that made him just less than a monster. The thing he'd pulled himself along to make his way to her.

.

Kaz has begun to keep some of the little rocks that Genna fills his pockets with in a large glass jar on his desk, and he's developed a habit of taking one out and worrying it between his fingers when he is particularly deep in thought. Inej is charmed, but also a little perplexed. He has never been a man inclined toward overt sentimentality and, as far as she has noticed, fatherhood has done little to change him in that regard.

She asks him about it one afternoon, when she catches him with one in his hand, thumb rubbing slow circles over it. He holds it out to her in response.

“Take a look at that,” he says, dropping it into the palm of her hand as she comes to perch on the corner of his desk.

Frowning, she examines the small stone, tipping it back and forth so that it catches the light. It's small and uneven, warm from Kaz's skin, one out of thousands upon thousands of such rocks littering the land, she imagines. She's not sure what she's meant to be looking at, besides the mottled blue-green on one side - does he like the colour?

“Pretty,” she comments, puzzled.

“It's copper,” says Kaz.

Her eyes tick up to him, but she does not speak, waiting for him to elaborate.

He obliges. “It's possible there's a vein of it under the property.”

She blinks. “You are joking?”

“Not at all,” he says, leaning back and resting his chin on his hand. “Wylan confirmed it while he was here. His visit was quite timely, really, I ought to thank you.”

“You ought to thank me for a great many things,” grumbles Inej. Her eyes go to the jar by her hip. “You're telling me you only keep these because they contain a potentially valuable material?”

“Why else should I keep them?”

Why, indeed. Inej doesn't know what she expected. She hands the rock back to him, sighing. “If you're waiting for your daughter to make you another fortune by collecting pebbles, you'll be waiting a long time.”

Something that might be a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “She's got the rest of her life.”

Inej rolls her eyes, and hops off the desk. “You are the worst person I know.”

He barks one sharp laugh, unoffended. “There's a high degree of probability that's factually correct, but you're still here so, really, what does that say about you?”

“Saints, let's not examine that too closely, hmm?” She's going to leave him be, but she hesitates in the doorway, looks back at him, a slight twist of unease in her stomach. “Did you know when you bought the place? That there might be copper?”

“I had an idea,” he says, meeting her eyes. “Some old surveys included with the land registry...”

He trails off, letting the words hang in the air between them, and Inej starts to feel a sinking sort of disappointment. She doesn't know why this, of all things, disappoints her. Kaz never does anything without multiple hidden agendas - there's no reason that this time should have been any different.

And yet, she'd hoped it was. Just this once, she'd hoped perhaps his only agenda was the welfare of his family. She doesn't count the interest he maintains in Dregs business, because - despite his words, despite the removal of his tattoo - she cannot expect him to change his entire personality. But she'd really thought that his primary goal was to build something with her, to give their child the happy home that they had both been taken from far too young. Not to turn that home into yet another money making scheme.

In the still of the afternoon, Inej can hear the birds chirping in the trees. She can hear the ticking of the clock in the hallway, and the creak of the old rope on the swing that Kaz hung for Genna as it sways in the breeze. It's one of the things she loves best about this place - their home - the quiet tranquillity of it. She can hear herself think. She has space to breathe.

She imagines that tranquillity broken, the air filled with dust and the sound of pickaxes, the clear waters of their little creek choked with slurry. It makes her feel faintly sick. “So, are you planning to start strip mining?”

She wonders what he hears in her voice, sees in her face, because he looks at her for a very long time, black eyes glittering.

He shakes his head, once. “Not today, my love.”

“You're really going to sit on a valuable resource and not exploit it?” She raises her eyebrows at him. “Just leave it there, untouched?”

He looks back to the jar on the desk, filled with the little blue-tinted stones that their baby girl had picked up off the ground and gifted to him with trusting hands.

Eventually, he rolls one shoulder in a lazy shrug, drops the pebble back into the jar with the others. “When you and I are both dead, Genna can do what she likes with the place.”

Inej stands in the doorway and considers him. He meets her eyes, untroubled, unchallenging. A man who likes to inhabit a place, she thinks, and in her mind she rearranges a few things in the place marked 'Kaz'. She looks at him, his relaxed stance, the hair that has long grown out on the sides, the sleeves rolled to his elbows displaying the unmarked skin of his forearms, and feels a warm surge of inescapable fondness for him. She walks back to him, because she can.

He tilts his head as she approaches. “Such little faith in me, darling.”

“Oh, just enough I should think,” she murmurs against his mouth just before their lips meet.

It's true, what she thought so long ago. Every now and then, Kaz still manages to surprise her.

.

Though the crops sleep quietly in the ground, the winter is never idle. Kaz sinks deep into oilseed futures, the business of selling off their harvest. The letters continue to go back and forth from the Barrel, too, but now he shares their content with Inej; he is currently advising how best to strategise a territory expansion. He'd left Anika suddenly, well before she was fully ready to step into his shoes. The least he can do is guide her, he explains, the way no one had ever done for him.

Inej corresponds with Specht, plots routes, deciphers whispers and snatches of intelligence. Their ploughs are serviced - Kaz is meticulous in their maintenance - and they have someone come to fell the tree at the top of the farm track that had been struck by lightning the previous winter and was displaying signs of instability. They dry herbs and cure meat and this year Kaz helps Inej with her winter planting in the garden.

Their neighbours fare busily, too. The Zadis have acquired more land and, with it, an additional two thousand head of sheep. Joss Meijer goes to Shriftport on a buying trip, leaving the running of their enterprise solely in Julia's hands.

Out of this bustle and chaos, an informal clutch of children develops, being passed from home to home dependent on who has the time in the day to care for them. Genna and Erik Meijer and little Effi Zadi, so much younger than her brothers, make quite the little unit. A whirlwind of shrieking chaos and dirty faces and skinned knees. Genna has always played nicely with the others - especially Erik, to whom she is so close in age - but with each full day they pass in each other's company, a deeper bond begins to develop.

So, on the days when it is Inej and Kaz's turn to host the three of them, she watches Genna play with the others. She watches the way they are together, the way they look out for each other. The way they sit in a row like little ducklings to eat their lunch and chatter in their own secret language, words bubbling over each other. Their deeply involved games of make believe, that can keep them occupied from dawn until dusk.

When it is time to retrieve their offspring from one house or another, the adults congregate and someone brings a basket with bread and pickles, and someone else brings a bottle of good wine, and they stand in someone's farmyard and toast another day's work done well and watch their children play together, and even though everyone is so very busy, everything seems just a little bit easier.

And Inej begins to think.

.

She's never imagined having more children, really. She never even imagined having the one she's got. If someone had come to her even a few years ago and told her that both she and Kaz would give up everything they'd ever worked for to sit on a farm and raise a child - raise their child - she would have dismissed that person as a raving lunatic and given it no further thought.

Genna had been a surprise (Inej does not like to think of her as an accident, and has certainly never thought of her as a mistake). She changed their lives, in far more ways than the choices they had made to accommodate her existence. She has challenged them, ripped them apart in some ways, healed them in others. She has rewritten their story, set them so far off course that they have had to reevaluate everything they thought they knew about themselves and each other and the way they thought their lives would unfold. It hasn't always been pleasant. It's certainly never been comfortable.

Inej will never, never regret Genna, but she'd also felt absolutely no desire to ever do any of it again.

But.

It's hard to see Genna play with other children and not think of her with a younger brother or sister. It occupies idle moments when Inej’s mind is otherwise unfocused, when she is washing a dish or pulling weeds in her garden or brushing her hair. Would another child favour Kaz as strongly as Genna does, or might they have Inej's nose, her eyes? If they had another daughter, would she be like Genna, sunny and bold, or would she be different? If they had a son would he be tall and lean like Kaz, or small and wiry like Inej's own father?

Kaz, she thinks, will probably not even consider the possibility. Genna has been the making of him in a lot of ways, but it would be fair to say that she has also been his undoing. He has had to come further than Inej. In many respects, he still has much further to go. How can she ask him to add even more disturbance to his life?

She keeps her thoughts to herself.

But they won't leave her. She can see them, all these imaginary children, every possible combination of features and personality traits. She can picture them toddling beside Genna, smaller, holding her little hand. She can almost feel the weight of them in her arms. They haunt her dreams.

The only thing for it, she decides, is to just ask Kaz about it directly. She can drive herself insane trying to divine his thoughts on having more children but, for all that she knows him well, she does not live inside his head. And even if he is entirely unwilling, as she suspects he will be, at least she'll know, and she can put the matter to bed once and for all.

.

“I've been thinking…” she says to Kaz one evening.

He hums slightly in acknowledgement but does not look up from his book. She is laying with her feet in his lap, her own book closed and resting on her stomach. She had joined him on the couch intending to read, but instead had found herself drifting in and out of a light sleep almost immediately. And while dozing, she had dreamed again of their imaginary children.

He is relaxed, in a good mood after a productive day. Now is as good a time as any to ask.

She watches him carefully now, trying to gauge his reaction. “How would you feel about having another baby?”

For a moment, she thinks he has not heard her at all, he remains so perfectly still. But then he turns his head to look at her, a sharp, hard-eyed stare that almost makes her flinch.

It takes him a solid minute to speak. “You struggled, last time.”

Inej scowls, an almost automatic reaction. “Whose fault is that?”

He winces slightly at that, chastened, but holds to his point. “Before, I mean. With the pregnancy.”

She chews her lip. He's not wrong. A little of it he'd seen for himself, the rest he'd heard either screamed in his face by her father or, much later, when she told him what she could in fits and starts. The loss of ownership over her own body had been awful, difficult to cope with in a way that had taken her completely by surprise. Childbearing is what a woman's body is designed for, after all. It had never occurred to Inej that it would be so upsetting to experience.

“I know,” she says, slowly, thoughtfully. “I think it would be better this time, though. Now I know what to expect.”

Now the feeling of something wriggling around inside her won't be such a horrible shock.

Kaz looks dubious, though. He's still got that hard look in his eyes. It's not an expression she sees often, anymore. It's a very Brekker look. One he wears when he's trying to work out a particularly difficult puzzle.

“Why?” he says, eventually. “Isn't she enough?”

“Of course she's enough,” says Inej. “Of course she is.”

“Then why?” Kaz asks again, shaking his head a little.

His tone is one of complete incomprehension, and it is clear that her desire for another child is something that he'd neither considered nor anticipated. His questions are not rhetorical either; he is watching her expectantly, waiting for an answer.

How to make him understand when she doesn't rightly know herself? It's just something she feels inside of herself, a surety that this is the road she wants to go down, if only he will follow. As a rule, Kaz does not normally respond well to emotional appeals when someone is trying to request something of him, but then, this is not a normal request. And an emotional appeal is the only one she's got.

“I just want one. I just do,” she says, picking at the corner of the book still resting on her belly. “And I think it would be nice for Genna to have someone.”

His eyebrows draw down sharply. “What do you mean someone?”

“Someone to play with, someone to grow up with. Someone for after we're gone…so she won't be alone.” She looks up at him through her eyelashes, and she's playing a bit of a dirty game now, appealing to his memories. But she does think that, truly. It comforts her. “I mean, don't you think that would be nice?”

The silence that follows is perhaps the longest of her life, the clock on the mantel ticking away the beats of her heart. She had not realised how badly she wanted him to say yes until she was staring the possibility of his refusal in the face.

After so much time has passed that Inej is sure that the only answer that can be coming her way is no, Kaz clears his throat somewhat uncomfortably. “Let me think about it.”

She had never been intending to do anything else, but she nods anyway. “Of course.”

He returns his attention to his book, but she notes that he does not turn the page for the rest of the night.

.

They do not speak of that conversation again for several weeks. Inej is perfectly willing to give Kaz time to get used to the idea, because saints know that's what he'd wanted before, but he behaves so resolutely as if their conversation never happened that she thinks his silence might be a tactic, that he might simply try and wait until she changes her mind of her own accord.

So Inej wonders how long is reasonable to wait before she prods him for an answer, and the weeks roll by.

Genna, usually one to rise with the sun, sleeps late one morning, and they do not have the heart to wake her, basking in the silence. Parents must take advantage of these moments of peace, and it is a pleasant thing indeed for Inej to push Kaz gently onto his back and settle her weight onto him as the morning sun streams through the open window.

Later, when Genna is up, and she and Kaz are manoeuvring around each other in the kitchen as they prepare for the day, Inej pulls down the small jar of bitter white powder from the highest shelf of the pantry. As she prepares to spoon some into a glass of water, Kaz catches her wrist.

She looks up at him, and he looks at the jar in her hands, and the two of them remain like that a moment, silent and still as Genna chatters in the background waiting for her breakfast and the kettle whistles on the stove.

"Don't," says Kaz eventually, squeezing her wrist once before releasing it. "If you want."

Her breath catches in her throat as his meaning settles over her. And then she smiles, nods once, and screws the lid tightly back on the jar.

.

Everything is different this time. She's never wanted anything like this. Never hoped like this.

Once the decision is finally made, nobody can say that Kaz doesn't apply himself to the task. Perhaps a little too well, in fact, almost past the limits of his own boundaries - at one stage, he unsettles himself so badly he has to spend several days sleeping in the back bedroom once more.

He's not the only one who meets with bumps in the road. Trying for a baby adds weight to activities that already carried a lot of weight for both of them, and sometimes it's so excruciating that Inej simply cannot bear for him to touch her

But they forge a path forward together, the way they've done so many times before, with patience and compassion and no small amount of much-needed good humour. They snatch moments where they can, late nights and early mornings and the hour that Genna goes down for her nap. They don't put pressure on themselves, they only lean into each other when they find themselves both ready and wanting, and sometimes that's in their bed but sometimes it's the couch, it's the high-backed chair in the study, it's the back bedroom when they haven't made it all the way up the hall.

Later, Inej couldn't say exactly where or when the child was conceived but she likes to imagine it was the time on the kitchen table while the kettle boiled on the stove, when they were almost caught by Julia Meijer coming by with some fresh butter. If nothing else, it makes for a good story.

.

It is the beginning of spring, just before Genna's third birthday, when Inej misses her bleeding.

She notes it but does not put too much stock in it, otherwise. She has never been precisely regular, it's how she was so slow in realising the first time she was with child. Or in denial about it, a nasty part of her mind whispers.

Either way, it means nothing. But a week passes, and then another, and then another, and still she does not bleed. Her breasts grow tender, and she is tired all the time. One morning, when Kaz has taken Genna out to check the sheep, Inej sets a pot of coffee to boil on the stove and the smell catches at the back of her throat. She only just makes it to the sink, retching painfully until tears are streaming down her face, and she knows for certain.

What she has not expected, but supposes she shouldn't be all that surprised by, is the fear that grips her at the prospect of telling Kaz. As she stands before him in their bedroom that night, the only thing running through her mind is the night she told him about Genna. It is for this reason that she does not hold his hand as she delivers the news this time; she couldn't bear for him to pull away. Instead, she twists her fingers together in front of her, palms sweaty, as she waits for his reaction.

“You're certain?” he asks, and there is no expression on his face or in his voice.

“Yes.”

He nods once. Swallows. Inej waits.

Slowly, he places his hands on her upper arms, draws her towards him, and presses his lips to her forehead. The tension goes out of Inej so quickly, her knees almost give out. She honestly thinks for a moment that his hands are the only things keeping her upright.

“Okay,” he whispers, and there is something wrecked in his voice. “Okay.”

Another dull stab of fear goes through her, then, an urgency. “Kaz, you can't disappear again, you have to be here. You have to help me this time.”

“I will.” His hands tighten on her arms, and he sounds angry that he even has to say it but. Well.

She needs to know.

“I will,” he says again. “I'm not going anywhere.”

.

Genna turns three, and they have a little party. It's nothing fancy, just their neighbours, and the children, and a cake that Inej only just gets through the making of, dry heaving and nibbling on a corner of bread as the smell of chocolate turns her stomach.

Birthdays are such fun though, now that Genna is old enough to understand the concept. She gets chocolate all round her mouth, and plays games with her friends, and twirls in a new dress that Inej's mother has made and sent all the way from Ravka. She is very lucky indeed to be gifted with some new toys, though she clings stubbornly all day to her favourite grubby green rabbit.

When they bring out the cake, Inej manages to hold it together long enough for Genna to blow out the candles, before she must excuse herself to discreetly empty her stomach again.

When she returns to the party, she doesn't think anyone has taken notice of her absence, but Anathi slides up to her with sparkling eyes and a knowing smile. No words are spoken, just the raise of an eyebrow and an expectant expression, and then Julia is there on her other side with the same look on her face. It's too early to tell people yet, really, but Inej gives one confirmatory nod all the same, cheeks aching with the failed effort of trying to contain her grin. There is no commotion, and no congratulations. Women know well enough the time to celebrate and the time to be discreet, when there's a baby on the way. They only stand either side of her while they watch the children play, arms around her waist, squeezing her tight.

Inej is struck by the contrast with her first pregnancy, when the news was met with disappointment and sympathy at every turn, and suddenly there are tears in her eyes, and oh no not the fucking crying—

They try to spread Genna's gifts throughout the day, so in the evening, when everyone has left, she has another little pile. These have arrived from Ketterdam, from Cofton, and even a mysterious, unsigned little parcel postmarked from somewhere in Fjerda. The most special gift, though, is the magnificent wooden rocking horse that Kaz had ordered almost a year previously, hand carved and painted by the finest Kerch artisans, and shipped with exquisite care across the sea.

Inej had been annoyed with him when he told her, and thoroughly gobsmacked by the cost - imagine ordering such a thing for a child - but the way that Genna falls silent in wide-eyed wonder, the way she trails her little fingers through its genuine-horse-hair mane and tail, and looks at her parents with a trembling lip…well. The hormonal tears make their second appearance of the day, that's for certain.

“You'll have to get her a real pony next year,” she tells Kaz wetly, as he stands beside Genna while she rocks back and forth.

His only response is a non-committal grunt, hand on their daughter's back to steady her, and all is right in Inej's world.

.

Explaining to Genna that she's going to be a big sister is easier and more difficult than anticipated. Through the Zadis, she is familiar with the concept of siblings and is excited at the prospect of having someone new to play with. Kaz and Inej are at pains to explain to her that the baby will not be able to play right away, and she nods, but it doesn't seem like the information really sinks in.

The greater difficulty is when she starts asking questions.

Is it a brother or a sister? We don't know yet. When is the baby going to be here? Not for a long while. Why? Because it has to grow and get ready. Where is the baby now? In Mama's belly.

At that last one, Genna looks at them with a frankly sceptical expression on her face, as though she suspects one or both of her parents of lying to her.

They prepared in advance for how they were going to answer the question of how the baby came to be there in the first place, and are mutually quite proud of how they handle it. Tragically, though, they failed to anticipate the perhaps inevitable follow up: how is the baby going to get out of Mama's belly?

It's here that Kaz gets somewhat lost in an overly literal comparison to the only frame of reference Genna has - the spring lambing, just finished. The poor child begins to alternate between paying attention to her father and sneaking wide-eyed, alarmed looks at her mother, and this gives way to a whole new barrage of questions. It's a seemingly endless interrogation, every question followed up with Genna's very favourite word - why.

Will the baby be born in the pasture? No. Why? Because Mama will have the baby inside. Why?

Will there be more than one baby? We don't know. Why?

Will the baby be able to walk right away? No. Why?

Will there be blood? Maybe. How much blood? We don't know. Why?

Eventually, mercifully, she loses interest in the conversation. When she runs off to find one of her toys, Inej and Kaz remain on the couch, mildly dazed.

“I think that went well,” says Inej.

Kaz puts his face in his hands.

.

Kaz takes great interest in the pregnancy, and the force of his attention is almost startling. The first time, setting aside the fact that they were apart for much of the time she was carrying, Inej had taken great pains to hide the symptoms from him, the changes in her body. As though drawing his attention any further to the situation would drive him further away or, conversely, bring him closer and force her to confront her own denial.

This time, she makes no such effort. She lets him see her sickness and her exhaustion. She notices him notice where she hurts and what she craves and the things that make her feel unwell.

She has begun to swell already, much more quickly than with Genna, and when she undresses Kaz's eyes go directly to her belly, tracing the visible signs of his child growing inside her. There is frank interest in his gaze; a sort of piercing, analytical look that she's not sure what to do with. It's been a long time since she has been so aware of his eyes on her body, but something about the way he looks at her now makes her feel like an insect pinned under a magnifying glass. It's not a feeling she entirely enjoys.

When the child quickens, Inej is pulling a book down from the shelves in the sitting room, and she almost drops it as she feels the movement, gasping, hand flying to her abdomen. Kaz is on his feet like a shot, halfway to her before she can even open her mouth to tell him what happened.

“What's wrong?” he demands, all the colour drained from his face. “Should I send for someone? A midwife, or—”

“It's alright.” She holds up a hand to silence him. “I felt it move.”

“Oh,” he says, pulled up short, eyes going to her middle like he can see straight through her skin.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to alarm you. I was just surprised.” Inej smooths a hand over the gentle curve of her belly thoughtfully. “I don't think you'll be able to feel, yet, but I can.”

Frowning slightly, Kaz takes her elbow, guides her to the armchair. He always wants her to sit down these days, you look tired Inej and you should be resting Inej and let me do that Inej, like she's unwell rather than simply with child.

She'd fought one of the most vicious battles of her seafaring career when she was about this far along with Genna, but she thinks that telling him that is probably not going to improve the situation.

“Do you need anything?”

“No, Kaz,” she waves him away, huffing in irritation.

He settles in the other armchair, and she pulls her feet up underneath her, opens the book…as before, now that it's started, it keeps coming. She closes her eyes, resting her hand lightly on her belly, waiting for each tiny movement.

“What does it feel like?” Kaz asks after a while.

“It feels like…like a kind of fluttering,” she says, eyes still closed. “It's difficult to explain.”

“It's a good sign though?”

She opens her eyes, startled by the question, about to tell him that obviously it's good Kaz, but the words die in her throat. He looks tense, a little awkward. He's got a firm enough grasp on what to do with a child once it leaves the womb, but no real concept of anything that comes before. She's well past assigning blame for why that happens to be, but it's also not something she's really given proper consideration. The fact that this is all new for him.

She taps a finger against her belly thoughtfully. She'd had her mother's patient guidance to placate her anxieties regarding pregnancy. Kaz only has her.

“Yes, it's a good sign,” she says, more patiently than before. “It means things are progressing as they should.”

He nods, taking that in. “And you don't need anything?”

“No, thank you.”

She smiles at him in what she hopes is a reassuring manner and, seemingly satisfied, he goes back to the newspaper he'd been reading.

She smiles, but in her heart, the first sliver of cold seeps in.

.

A heavily coded missive is dispatched to Jesper and Wylan in Ketterdam, deliberately vague despite the elaborate cipher they have developed between them: new cropping expected in the autumn.

.

Inej writes to her mother.

.

It's not that she expected things to be easy, precisely, but…she'd thought a large part of why it was so hard the first time was the shock of it all. The shock of a child, the shock of Kaz's reaction, the sickness and the unfamiliarity and the whole thing not her choice.

This time is her choice. She'd wanted it. She'd asked for it. They had tried for it, together.

So why does she feel like this?

She feels wrong, she feels off-balance, she feels outside of herself. Every movement inside her makes her skin crawl. She wants to cry all the time and it's not the hormones, it's the bitter, crushing disappointment because she'd thought that this time would be okay. She'd thought that she could have this.

She'd thought she could have another baby, and her beautiful daughter. She'd thought she could sleep beside Kaz every night, and have their home, and have her ship, and have everything she ever wanted, but she can't because she's weak. She's greedy and she's weak—

Kaz's eyes follow her everywhere. He is constantly asking if she's okay, and she tells him yes, she's fine, just tired, but he knows, he always knows, and he's always looking at her.

She lies in bed every night with the same thoughts chasing round and round inside her skull until she wants to scream, exhausted. She doesn't. One night, she sits up, swings her legs out of bed, pads up the hall in her nightgown and bare feet.

Genna is sleeping soundly, clutching her green rabbit. They have exchanged her high-sided cot for a narrow bed - so grown up - and Inej sinks onto the wooden floor beside it, gazing at her first baby in the dull glow of the moonlight. She is so perfect, so pure, and Inej counts the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes, matches her own breath to it.

She hears him, uneven footsteps on the floorboards. He cannot move silently the way she can, but he always knows when she's gone.

“Inej?” His voice from the doorway, pitched low to avoid waking Genna. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” she whispers, not looking at him. “I'm going to stay here tonight.”

“Here,” he repeats, like he's not quite sure he's heard her right.

“Here,” she says, emphatic.

There is a long, long pause before he steps into the room. “You're pregnant, Inej, you can't sleep on the floor.”

“Of course I can, it won't do any harm.”

Another long pause. This time when he speaks, his voice is cold. Cold the way it used to be. Cold like it's giving her an order. “I want you to go back to bed.”

It's a nice try. At one time, it would have worked. Her head is all a muddle, and she wants to scream at him to leave her alone, and she wants to beg him never to leave her at all, but the one thing she does know is that she does not want to go back to bed.

“I want to stay here,” she says, stubborn. And then, shakily, less sure, “I just want to look at her, Kaz. Let me be.”

At some length she hears him give a long sigh, and then the sound of his footsteps retreating up the hall. He really has left her, she thinks, the way he did before, but - no - she hears the footsteps coming back, and then something soft and warm is draped over her shoulders. The blanket from the end of their bed.

She clutches at it, pulling it tightly around herself, desperate to hang onto something as Kaz eases himself into the old rocking chair in the corner of the room, settling in for the night.

Inej keeps her eyes focused on Genna, sleeping peacefully, and repeats to herself like a mantra, this is what you get at the end. Holds onto it, a tiny precious golden thread of light in all the darkness that threatens to drown her.

It doesn't matter. She sinks anyway.

.

She doesn't know until much later, but Kaz writes to her mother as well.

Come as soon as you are able, he writes, and he sends money for the fare. She needs you.

.

The next months are hard. Some days she can get up and go about her business, but a lot of days she loses herself, cannot get out of bed - not sleeping, but not truly awake. It's worse than last time, though, because now she has a daughter and she is neglecting her. Now Genna cries for her, and she can hear Kaz explaining, placating - Mama's very tired, Mama's not well - and Inej closes her eyes and leaves that behind because she cannot bear to hear the evidence of her miserable failure.

Kaz is angry, she knows. Angry at her, angry at himself, angry at the whole world and anyone in it who ever hurt her. She wishes she could be angry too - she was angry once, she's sure of it - but she is so, so heavy and she cannot find the strength. She wishes she could be like Kaz.

All Kaz knows is the fight.

Not Inej.

Inej's first instinct when she's in pain has always been to disappear.

.

She blinks awake to Kaz kneeling on the floor beside the bed. The room is dim, but there is light behind the curtains and the birds are loud outside. Kaz's hand hovers an inch from her shoulder.

He is reluctant to touch her, these days.

“I brought you something to eat,” he says, and over his shoulder she can see a bowl of something steaming on the nightstand, and it smells good but she's not hungry, and she tells him so.

His voice is ragged. “You need to eat.”

“I know,” she says, because she does know. She does. She needs to eat for herself, and for her baby. “I know,” she says again, more strongly, and levers up on one elbow.

The stew is her own recipe - heavily spiced, exactly the sort of thing Kaz hates, but he still made it for her - and it's hot and comforting, and it makes her feel a little more awake. A little more alive. She's glad she ate some.

“More,” he says, when she sets the bowl aside.

“Not right now,” says Inej.

He scrubs at his face with one hand, pushing his hair back from his face. His eyes are red, she notices, and he wears the shadow of two-day stubble on his jaw. It's possibly the most unkempt she's ever seen him when he was not actually shot or beaten or otherwise in some self-inflicted dire straits.

“I don't know what to do for you, Inej,” he says roughly, and she can see that it pains him to admit it. “Tell me what to do.”

She blinks at him tiredly, and brings a hand up to trace his jaw - stops halfway and lets it fall back into her lap. Kaz Brekker does not admit to not knowing. Kaz Brekker does not ask for help. Kaz Brekker would never. But Kaz Rietveld…

But Inej can't tell him how to help her. She doesn't know. What can he do? If she knew the way out of this, she would tell him how to reach down for her and pull her up. She would.

She would.

She is about to tell him so, but what she says instead, unintended and raw, is: “Tell me you love me.”

“I love you,” he says, immediately.

Her heart thuds painfully in her chest. It's always hurt her, in a way, to hear him say it. She swallows, hard. “Tell me you won't leave me.”

“I will never leave you,” he says, and the intensity in his eyes is almost frightening.

“Tell me...tell me…” she closes her eyes. She doesn't know what she wants him to tell her. What can he promise? What can he say? She doesn't know what she needs to hear from him.

But Kaz has picked up the thread of her thoughts, clever mind two steps ahead as always. He tells her that she is brave. He tells her that she is strong. He tells her that she is safe.

It's not much. It's only words. But she does believe him. With all her stupid, sentimental heart.

It doesn't make it easier, but at least she is not alone. Not this time.

.

What's different from before is that, as time passes, Inej does start to feel a little stronger.

Kaz is with her. Unlike her mother, he cannot sit with her all day and hold her hand - he has a farm to manage, after all, and their daughter needs at least one of her parents to actively parent her - but on the bad days he throws the windows wide to let in the sunlight, brings her meals to her in bed, tells her all the sweet and reassuring things that are not in his nature to say but that she needs so desperately to hear.

She has precious, perfect Genna, who picks little bunches of brightly coloured meadow flowers and brings them to her, who climbs into bed with her in the early morning and cuddles close and lets Inej rub her nose into her hair and tickle her so that she can hear her lovely laugh.

Most of all, as her belly swells and the creature inside her gets larger, its movements get stronger, more defined, more baby-like. The feeling no longer fills her with panic, with dread. Some kind of sense memory takes over. Oh, we know this, her body tells her. This is a baby, this is okay.

Anathi comes to her, and helps her to wash her hair, combs sweet scented oil through the lengths of it. It's such a simple thing but it makes Inej feel so cared for, and she does not have the words to express what it means to her.

Her friend helps her in other ways, too. Though she could not possibly know the reasons behind Inej's distress, she takes it in stride. She offers no judgement, only support. “Some women just don't like being pregnant,” she says, squeezing Inej's hand with gentle understanding. “There's nothing wrong with that.”

It's an offhand comment, but it hits Inej like a well-landed punch to the gut.

Inej has shed tears and bitter recriminations for the damage that was done to her that has made her useless for the one thing her body was made for. She has railed against her past, against the people who hurt her, against her weakness and her wretched, saintsforsaken luck. And all of that has its place, undoubtedly, but underneath it there is something else she has not quite recognised.

She doesn't like it.

She doesn't like feeling sick and tired. She doesn't like the way her emotions fluctuate, and the way she cries at the slightest provocation. She doesn't like having bloated ankles, and losing her balance, and feeling slow and encumbered. Inej had thought there was something essential missing inside her, stolen like her childhood, that prevented her from joyfully embracing pregnancy the way she has seen other women do. It had never once occurred to her that the experience of carrying a child is something that she simply does not enjoy. And that it is okay.

Inej has relative confidence that she is a good mother. She would do anything to keep Genna safe and happy. She would kill for her. She would die for her. She loves Genna with everything she has, but all that came only after she had vacated Inej's body.

She knows, then, that although she had wanted this desperately, she will never bear another child.

She sits in bed one night, rubbing a hand over her swollen middle. The thing inside is restless, and the shape of her belly moves and distends as it shifts, little feet and elbows fighting for space inside, visible even through the thin cotton of her nightgown.

When she glances at Kaz beside her, she finds him watching with a faintly unnerved expression on his face.

“This is the last one,” she tells him.

“Yes,” he agrees, keeping his eyes on her belly. “The last one.”

And so, although they do not disappear entirely, the bad days become less frequent. Inej sets her mind on that hazy, not-too-distant finish line, and counts the days.

.

Her parents arrive at the end of summer, when the True Sea is calm and Inej is round and heavy with child.

There's something to be said for carrying out a pregnancy in the frozen depths of a Ravkan winter, thinks Inej. The heat of the Zemeni summer has been particularly difficult to bear this year. She wears loose linen dresses, goes barefoot, takes herself down to the creek at every available opportunity though it sends Kaz into fits of furious paranoia at the possibility of her slipping. Nothing helps. She feels uncomfortable every minute, flushed and overheated, strands of hair clinging to her damp skin.

Her temper frays accordingly. She and Kaz have petty, whispered arguments late at night about what Inej should or shouldn't be doing, about how she should or shouldn't be taking care of herself, about how Kaz is a bothersome son of a bitch who should or shouldn't mind his own fucking business.

Mostly, they make preparations for the new baby. Kaz fetches the old cradle from where it has been gathering dust in the Meijers' barn, cleans it up and gives it a new coat of paint. Inej pulls out Genna's old clothes, sorts them into piles; the smocks and bonnets she'd worn when she was very small will do for either a boy or a girl, and they'll see about the rest after the birth.

This is how Ishani and Ettan Ghafa find them, on a sunny morning under an intense blue sky.

Inej is out collecting goose eggs, Genna at her heels. She no longer has to employ stealth tactics to get at them, which is just as well because she can't in her present condition, as long as the beasts are a decent distance away from the clutch. Genna is a busy child, and eager to help her mama with all little tasks, so all Inej must do is hold out her basket and say carefully, carefully while the little girl places the eggs into it with both hands, face screwed up in concentration.

She is walking back to the house when she sights her parents coming down the track, large packs on their backs, and she almost drops her basket. Her mother cries out, shoulders off her pack, and runs toward her - as Inej had once run down that very track to Genna. Inej raises a hand in greeting - large as she is, she cannot do much more than waddle rapidly - but her mother is nimble despite her age, and Inej is in her arms within seconds. Her father joins them quickly, both of them raining kisses onto her face and talking over each other as Inej laughs and laughs and says, “Mama, Papa, let me have some air, please!”

They step back, and her mother takes her face in her hands. "It's good to see you like this, meja."

Inej grins, perplexed. "Enormous and sweaty?"

"Happy," says Ishani. "Healthy. Ripe as a fresh plum."

She remembers the last meeting between them, when she was heartbroken, and frightened, and so alone. She is glad for them to see her this way, too.

Looking about, Inej finds that her child has vanished. No, not vanished - crouched down in the long grass to the side of the farm track. She would be quite well hidden, but the bright orange ribbon in her hair gives her away. Inej calls out to her encouragingly, holding out a hand, and her little girl emerges slowly, carefully, big eyes watching these new strangers as she comes to press close beside her mother.

Ishani gasps, presses her hands to her heart, eyes bright with tears as she looks at the grandchild she has not seen since she was just weeks old. “Oh, Inej,” she whispers, voice shaking, and Inej feels tears come to her own eyes. “She's so big, and so beautiful.”

Her father makes to bend down, perhaps tweak his granddaughter's nose the way he used to do to Inej when she was small, but Genna squirms away from him, reaches both her arms up to Inej.

Sighing, Inej sets the basket down, hauls her daughter with some difficulty into her arms. She's too round, really, and Genna too big - the only thing that Inej can do is hold her awkwardly on her hip.

“She's a little shy,” she says by way of explanation, apologetic.

“It's alright, meja,” says her mother, smiling kindly at Genna, who gazes steadily back at her. “She does not know us.”

A moment of sadness passes between them, the shadow of another life, where Inej made a different choice and Genna grew up in the colour and bustle of the caravan, performing for crowds and swimming in the river with the ponies, just like her mother had done before her. It might have been a good life, but Inej would not trade what she has now for anything, and anyone who tried to take it from her would have to pry it from her cold, dead fingers. She wants her parents to see that. She wants them to know that she made the right choice.

After a moment, Ishani seems to shake herself off, presses her hand to Inej’s cheek once more. “Now, where is that awful man?”

.

The atmosphere in the house is distinctly chilly for a few days. Inej's parents have not forgiven Kaz for the myriad crimes they feel he has committed, not the least of which is spiriting their daughter and only grandchild to the opposite side of the world.

It doesn't last, though. By the end of their first week, her mother, at least, has considerably warmed up to Kaz.

Inej is bemused. She forgets, sometimes, how ruthlessly charming Kaz can be if he sets his mind to it. Mostly because she's never been on the receiving end of that charm. There's no hard feeling in that, though, because she recognises it for what it is: a con.

He's not desperate for her parents' approval, because Kaz is desperate for no one's approval, save perhaps her own. In fact, he's not even chasing her parents' approval, because his charm offensive is directed only at her mother, although he treats her father with perfect civility. Inej doubts it's for her sake, either, though he is well aware she would like him to have a good relationship with her parents. No, he's decided he wants something, decided that Inej's mother is the best route to getting it, and the what and the why of the situation are mysteries known only to himself.

Still, Inej does not interfere - not yet, anyway. It makes for a peaceful home.

How long it will make for a peaceful home is another matter, if the way her father grinds his teeth every time Kaz speaks is any indication.

One evening after dinner, when Ettan has stepped out into the garden to play with Genna, Inej goes out to join them. Genna has developed a fast friendship with her grandfather, who indulges her and tickles her and tosses her squealing into the air, arms as strong as Inej remembers from her own childhood. She smiles as she approaches them, fingers laced together over her belly.

“Don't excite her too much before bed, please,” she says, with a stern tone that she doesn't really mean.

Her father is unaffected anyway. “Ah, meja, it is a grandfather's prerogative. Boring things like bedtime are yours to worry about.”

He winks at her and she can't help laughing, coming to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as Genna runs toward the bottom of the garden.

“I remember when you were that age,” sighs her father, a nostalgia in his eyes that she has never really seen there. “She is very like you, you know.”

“Really?” Inej is surprised. She's never really seen anything of herself in Genna, besides the obviously Suli colouring that she bestowed upon her, and she says so.

“There is something of you in her manner, in the way she moves. She is joyful, like you were as a child.” His smile then is tinged with sadness. “Her laugh is your laugh.”

That thought warms her through, that she might have given her child the very purest things about herself, the things she thought she lost. She doesn't know how to say that, though, not to her father who blames himself so heavily for losing her, so she just shrugs one shoulder. “I always thought she was Kaz's child, through and through.”

“She looks like him,” her father agrees, nodding. “Thankfully she wears his face better than he does.”

“Papa!” says Inej, scandalised, and he laughs again, wrapping an arm around her, pulling her close. She leans into him, presses her nose into his shoulder, inhaling the familiar scent of cigar smoke and the peppermint oil he uses for his joints.

“This is a good place,” he says, pressing a kiss to her temple. “You have done well, Inej. You have done very well indeed.”

.

“Anika has a son.”

Inej looks up in surprise from where she is washing a dish, as Kaz walks into the kitchen, open letter in his hand. If he'd come in and informed her that he was the rightful king of Fjerda, he could not have delivered less expected news.

“Oh,” she says, nonplussed.

Kaz reads her face, as he always does. “The Dregs succession is secure, it seems.”

Ah. Well, that makes a little more sense. She grimaces. “How mercenary.”

She gets a flash of that old Dirtyhands smile, then, all teeth and no warmth. A strychnine grin, she's always thought. A corpse grin.

It's there and gone in his face, a second and nothing more before his features smooth out again and he drops the letter on the kitchen table for Inej to read, if she wants. He comes around the table, absently stroking a hand over the back of Genna's head as he passes, and takes the dish from Inej's hands to dry it.

“Does it bother you?” Inej asks with genuine curiosity, leaning a hip against the sink, cocking her head to one side. “That your children won’t inherit the empire you built?”

“No,” says Kaz. He sets the dish aside and places a hand lightly on the curve of her belly, in a way he had never touched her when she'd been carrying Genna. She places her hand over his, holding it there. “I'm building something else for them.”

.

When Inej answers the front door one morning, she's not sure who shrieks the loudest. Herself, at the sight of Nina standing on her doorstep, or Nina, at the sight of Inej's by now unmistakable condition.

They are clutching each other tightly - and somewhat awkwardly, with Inej's belly in the way - when the study door flies open so hard the doorknob makes an almighty bang as it bounces off the wall, and Kaz steps into the hallway.

Inej is very near her time, now, and he is hyper alert to any sign of labour coming on. The stricken look on his face morphs into irritation at lightning speed the second he lays eyes on Nina. “Oh, for fuck—”

“Hello, Kaz!” Nina crows, grinning widely, arms still tight around Inej. “I'm delighted to see you, too!”

He scowls at her - at them both, really, which Inej thinks is slightly unfair - and disappears back into the study. “Just keep the screaming to a minimum!” he calls, right before the door slams shut again.

“It's comforting, in a way, to know that he will never, ever change,” says Nina, unbothered by Kaz's temper. Her hands are hovering over Inej's belly, fingers wiggling like she cannot contain herself. “May I?”

Inej is grateful beyond measure that Nina thought to ask permission before laying her hands on her, but then, of course she did. It's extraordinary how many people feel entitled to touch a pregnant woman, but then, Inej is no longer surprised by such things. A sharp glare and a sharper knife, she has found, make for quite a good deterrent.

She nods her permission and Nina settles her hands on either side of Inej's middle, feeling for kicks. The little creature inside obliges - it kicks Inej so much that her insides feel bruised.

“How did you know?”

“I didn't, I was just in the vicinity and thought I would stop by,” says Nina, and Inej knows that there is no point in asking what sort of work brought her close, because she will never reveal it. She is still grinning, gleeful. “Another one! Are you mad?”

“Probably,” says Inej. A thought grips her, then, and she clutches Nina's wrists, voice urgent. “Nina, will you stay with me? Until it's over?”

If Nina is alarmed by her sudden intensity, she does not show it, but her grin softens into something more genuine. “Of course I will. I’d be honoured.”

It's tight quarters, in the house. With Inej's parents occupying the back bedroom, Nina takes up residence on the couch in the sitting room, and Kaz grumbles constantly that he cannot move freely in his own home. But Inej feels a happy, warm, burrowing feeling with all of her loves gathered close to her, exactly where they should be.

.

Kaz isn't the only one feeling jittery. It's the waiting that gets to Inej, with so little time left.

She knows she's close. She has the same familiar dull pains as last time, in her abdomen and low down in her pelvis. The weight of her belly has shifted low, too, a sign the child has 'assumed the position', as her mother puts it. Inej feels like she's going to vibrate right out of her skin, impatient to get on with it.

Any day now, she'll have her new child in her arms and she will never have to be with child ever again. It cannot come soon enough.

She takes up her walks again, twice per day just as before, and she is never without an arm to lean on. She adds enough spice to her food to make even her father's eyes water. Nina tells her that sex can bring on labour, a notion Inej suggests to Kaz one night, though he resolutely will not oblige her with so many people in the house. Not that she feels like it, anyway. She is exhausted and achy and she's heard anecdotally that her feet are the size of small melons, though it's been so long since she saw them for herself that their normal appearance is only a distant memory.

Mostly, her brain irritates her with stupid things at stupid times. Just before Genna was born, Inej had been so irate with Kaz and so focused on avoiding him that it had occupied her every waking thought. Now, with Kaz being only his usual level of bastard, her mother and Nina making all the preparations for her labour, and her father occupying Genna much of the time, Inej has nothing to think about except has she washed the baby linen and does she have enough bonnets and perhaps there's still time to get more. It is starting to drive her mad. It's also starting to drive Kaz mad, because he is the one most often subjected to these inane thoughts.

In the middle of the night, she struggles upright in bed, not for the first time.

“Kaz,” she says, voice urgent.

“What?” He jerks awake beside her, levering up on one elbow. “Is it time?”

“You put the order in for the saffron, didn't you?”

It's too dark for her to see his expression, but he drops back onto the pillows and his voice is muffled when he speaks, like he's got a hand over his face. “For the love of Ghezen and all your cursed Saints—”

“Kaz,”

“Yes, I ordered the fucking saffron,” he grinds out.

Inej takes umbrage at his tone. “Don't be like that, I'm only asking—”

“It's in the pantry, you saw it yourself—”

“If you want to be up all night with a colicky baby again—”

“If you're not actively about to give birth, go back to sleep,” snaps Kaz, finality in his voice, and the bed shifts as he turns over.

Inej fumes in the darkness for a few moments before resigning herself to the ridiculousness of the situation. She's still annoyed when she lies back down, trying to get comfortable, and she sighs heavily as she rubs a hand over her belly.

“Any time now, little one,” she whispers.

.

Their second child comes with the dawn.

.

Inej is restless the whole day, anxious, for no reason she can explain. Her back aches savagely. When she goes to bed, she tosses and turns as well as she is able with her enormous belly, and she cannot find a position to rest in. If she lies on her back, she cannot breathe comfortably. If she lies on her side, the ache in her back gets worse. She is too hot, so she throws the covers off. Then she is chilled, so she pulls them back to her chin.

She huffs, and puffs, and feels annoyed at everything and everyone, and she falls asleep without being aware of doing so.

She has not been asleep very long when the familiar pain comes, rolling slowly through her like thunder, pulling her unwillingly back to consciousness. She lets out a quiet moan that comes from deep inside her chest, fisting her hand into her pillow and drawing her knees up as far as she is able.

“Inej?” Kaz's voice, awake despite the fact she had not made much noise. His voice comes from above her, his breath is on her neck, he's leaning over her. “Should I wake your mother?”

She breathes deeply, riding the pain out until her body relaxes again and she can unclench her jaw. “Yes.”

.

This time, Kaz refuses to be barred from the delivery room. Not under his own roof.

“Not this again,” says her mother, anger and disappointment in her voice. “In the name of all the Saints, I thought you had learned…”

All activity in the room stills.

Nina is there, and Anathi, and Julia. Come as soon as they were summoned, the way Inej had once left her bed in the middle of the night to attend to Julia. They are doing all the good, bustling busywork that happens while waiting for the birthing to get truly underway; stripping the good linen from the bed and manoeuvring the mattress topper into place, readying towels, telling jokes and offering good company.

Inej, pacing the floor in her nightgown and rubbing the small of her back, turns with the rest of the women to watch the showdown happening in the bedroom doorway.

Ishani Ghafa stands with her feet planted and one hand gripping each side of the doorframe, drawn up to her full height, entirely blocking entrance to the room. Kaz stands just over the threshold in the hallway, jaw stubbornly set, and Inej can see her father hovering just behind him, wearing an expression that is surprisingly more resigned than angry.

Inej has a moment of startling clarity, that this is the reason Kaz has been so deferential since her parents arrived, so solicitous, so oozing with false charm. To ease his way into the birthing chamber when the time came. There is no band of Suli women brandishing fire irons here to stand in his way, now, only Inej's mother, who it seems has not been so taken in by him that she has forgotten every belief and custom of her people.

Kaz clearly expected it to be otherwise. Poor deluded fool. Inej rolls her eyes, and gets a strange look from Anathi. She supposes most women would be upset by a fight breaking out like this while they were in labour, but Inej has been half expecting it. He was so determined, the last time. And this is nowhere near as dramatic as that.

Kaz looms threateningly in a way that Inej has seen bring grown men to the point of tears, all efforts at charm and tact seemingly abandoned. “Now listen, you belligerent old—”

“It's not your place,” snaps her mother, uncowed. “Nor the place of any man.”

It's the worst possible thing she could have said to him. His eyes go practically black with fury, and poor Julia - who's never really gotten over her abstract terror of Kaz - gives a frightened squeak.

“Not my place?” he seethes through gritted teeth. “It's my house, and my child, and my wife.”

“It's women's work.”

“Hang your women's work!”

Inej's father chooses that moment to place a hand on Kaz's shoulder to try to draw him away, and Kaz shrugs him off violently, half turning, cane hefting in his hand—

— Nina steps forward, hands raised, “Why don't we—”

“Stop,” says Inej, and everyone does, immediately.

Well, she thinks, it's good to see that in the birthing chamber, the woman doing the actual birthing holds some sway.

“Is nobody going to ask what I think?” She looks to her family, who have the grace to look slightly shame-faced - with the exception of her father, who determinedly will not look at her at all, trying so hard to give her the respect that he clearly feels she is not being accorded by the father of her child. “It's my house as well—” here she raises an eyebrow at Kaz and he drops his eyes “—and I am the one actually giving birth here. I think what I want should really be the only thing that matters, don't you?”

There is a short, tense pause, and then her mother's face softens, her shoulders relax. “Yes, of course, meja,” she says, apology in her voice. “Of course it is. What do you wish?”

“I want him to stay,” says Inej, giving her mother a firm look before she can even open her mouth to protest. Then, she meets Kaz's eyes, snapped back to hers, holds his gaze. “I want him to stay.”

She feels like the look he gives her then could burn her up until there was nothing left of her, but she cannot return it because another pain comes and she has to lean forward and grip the bedpost and grind her teeth. But she hears the tap of his cane on the floorboards as he enters the room, hears her mother direct him to the chair in the corner.

“Sit there and stay there and do not get in the way,” Ishani instructs, sounding slightly flustered. Then, presumably for want of a better outlet for her frustration, she rounds on Inej's father, still hovering in the hallway. “And you most certainly know better, away with you,” she shoos him. “Do something useful and get some water boiling downstairs.”

.

Once again, her thoughts turn to how different everything is than before. Inej had wondered if she would miss the safety of the caravan, the comfort of the women around her with their prayers and their strength and their combined years of knowledge. But she has her own little community of women here with her, women she loves, women she trusts. Anathi, Julia, darling Nina. And her mother, travelled across the ocean to see her second grandchild safe into Inej's waiting arms.

She is not with the caravan, it's true. She is somewhere better. When Genna was born, Inej had no home. It's not something that hurts her to think of, just a fact. Where should she have called home? The captain’s cabin on The Wraith? Kaz’s rooms at the Slat? Her parents’ wagon? Home was people, a feeling of being close to the ones she loved most. She was a wanderer and she'd decided long ago she didn't need a home.

She is still a wanderer, but she has a place to call her own now. This baby will be born in her own bedroom, in her own bed, in the home she and Kaz have suffered and fought and cried and loved in. The place that has been Genna's home. The place that Inej can always return to.

When things start moving more quickly, she gets on her hands and knees and pays little mind to Kaz on the sidelines, though in between the pains, she can find it in herself to be amused at the reactions to his presence. Her mother has adopted an air of resigned acceptance and Nina will never be fazed by anything that Kaz does, ever, but Anathi and Julia seem oddly wrongfooted by it.

Joss had certainly never demanded such a liberty, and Inej can only wonder at what a picture it must make, Dirtyhands demanding to be present for the birth of his child. Anathi, on the other hand, is not shocked by his presence but seems rather taken aback at the manner in which he'd achieved it. She knows nothing of Kaz Brekker. She knows Kaz Rietveld, generally acknowledged to be prickly, but a solid sort of fellow nonetheless. A responsible employer, well respected in the community if not necessarily well liked. Diligent with his taxes and a clever head for numbers, a man who could be relied upon for sound financial advice should you happen to catch him in the right mood.

Inej wonders idly how long it will take the story of him strongarming his way into the birthing room to circulate around their small community of farmers and rural tradespeople, but then the pains are coming faster, and stronger, and her legs are shaking, and she has no focus to spare anymore.

.

So little time has passed that the sun has not fully risen when Inej feels a familiar, almost unbearable pressure in her lower back.

She had needed so much help, when Genna was born, so much guidance. Not this time. She has done this before, and her body remembers. She recognises what it's trying to tell her.

“I have to push,” she gasps.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Kaz sit up straight.

“Surely it's too soon?” Julia says, whirling from where she is wringing a cloth over the washbasin.

“No,” says Inej through gritted teeth. “I have to.”

A hand between her legs, feeling, checking. Anathi's voice from somewhere over her shoulder. “She's right, it's time.”

Her mother, comforting and solid beside her, smoothing her hair back from her face just as she had before. “Ok, sweetheart, you know what to do.”

She does. She pulls herself upright, onto her knees, loops one arm around her mother's shoulders and the other around Nina's. When she bears down this time, she pulls everything inside of herself, and makes no sound.

If it kills her, Inej will not have Genna wake to the sound of her mama screaming.

This, too, goes far more quickly than she remembers, or perhaps she is just too focused to note the passage of time. Before she knows it, she feels that hot, stinging gush of fluid, and the child is slipping out of her, and a voice cries it's a girl! and she slumps into her mothers arms, sobbing and laughing, equal parts exhaustion and elation.

Then she is on her back again, and a wet weight is on her chest, and a high, furious cry fills the room.

She does not look for Kaz, not yet, because this is still the women's time, laughter and tears and useful, loving hands. But she can feel him, a steady, still presence just out of her sight.

At this moment she has eyes only for her little daughter, brand new, streaked with gore. Born in blood, as all women are, over and over and over through their whole lives. This will be her burden, and her gift.

“Hush little one, ” Inej croons as the baby squalls angrily on her chest, pressing her lips to her sticky head. “Mama's here. We've been waiting for you.”

.

While they wait for the afterbirth to come, when Inej's nightgown has been unbuttoned and she has been covered over with a towel to keep the baby warm while she rests a moment against her bare chest, she does look to Kaz.

He is still sitting in his chair - where he has remained obediently, observing the proceedings - elbows propped on his knees. His hands are clenched together as if in prayer, partially obscuring his mouth. His face is utterly expressionless but his eyes are bright, fixed on her, intensely focused.

Inej lets her head loll to the side as she gazes at him, tears still leaking slowly from the corners of her eyes. There is so much she wants to say to him, in this moment. Not here, though, not with everyone listening. The words are only for him.

Watching him now as he watches her, the look in his eyes, she wonders if he already knows.

She notices her mother frowning at him, troubled by his lack of visible reaction, but Nina brushes a hand across his shoulder, just briefly, as she passes.

.

As before, Inej is stripped and washed, the bed is stripped and remade, and while this is happening the baby is made clean and dry. And this time, the tiny wrapped bundle is passed directly into her father's hands.

Kaz looks at his new little daughter with something like awe, and something like fear, and he holds her so, so carefully as he crosses the room. Before he places her into Inej's arms, he bends and brushes the softest possible kiss to her tiny forehead.

“She looks like you,” he says as he passes her over.

“Really?” Inej peers into her tiny face. “Do you think so?”

“She's got your nose. And your chin.”

There is a chorus of agreement around the room, and Inej feels unreasonably pleased though she cannot quite see it herself. For certain, the child resembles Kaz less strongly than Genna - though Inej would perhaps argue the chin is more his than her own.

“Are you two going to argue about names for the next three hours?” asks Inej's mother, cleaning her hands in a basin of water.

Of course, Ishani had been in the tent with them all that time ago in the forests of Ravka. The other women assembled are looking at her with interest, and she laughs. All tensions, all arguments, all resentments have been forgotten now that Inej is safely through the birth with a living child in her arms. “It was unbelievable. I thought there would be bloodshed before the end.”

Kaz glowers, but Inej laughs a little too. “We have a name for her already.”

“Well, don't keep us in suspense,” says Nina, perched at the foot of the bed.

Inej looks to Kaz, checking in one last time, are we sure? He nods. She nods back.

“Livija,” says Kaz, with something like reverence in his voice, the first time he has spoken the name aloud with his child there to receive it.

All assembled seem to let out a collective sigh, crooning over the baby again, saying her name to her, saying hello.

“How beautiful,” says Ishani, nodding approvingly. “What does it mean?”

Inej looks down at the child in her arms. Clean, now, and only half awake, drifting off into that deep newborn sleep. Coming into the world is tiring work.

“Life,” she says.

.

The others trail out one by one. Anathi and Julia leave her with kisses on her cheeks and blessings on her new baby. Nina wraps Inej in her arms and cries a little - and she makes an odd, abortive motion like she wants to hug Kaz but then thinks better of it - and then she goes to get some sleep. Ishani wanders in and out, as she had before, cleaning up but letting them have their space.

Kaz brings her some tea, and if she hadn't already, Inej thinks she would declare herself ready to bear his children all over again.

He looks as though he could do with some tea himself, truthfully. Even now, already a father, he looks a little bit sickly. He hadn't been present for Genna's birth, she supposes, only the immediate aftermath.

Inej has heard childbirth described as a lot of nonsense things. Beautiful, magical, even spiritual. Pretty words all, but in her experience, when it comes down to it, it's a grim and bloody business. What do men know of that, if they haven't seen for themselves. She pats his hand comfortingly, and laughs when he glares at her.

When Inej is well settled into bed, and the baby is sleeping soundly in her arms, Kaz goes to fetch Genna.

Their daughter - their eldest daughter - woke to the sound of her sister's first cries, and there was a short, frozen moment when they heard her calling groggily in the hallway. As is custom with the Suli, she would ordinarily have been in the birthing room with them, but Inej had not wanted to wake her while she laboured through the night.

The sight of her mother in the birthing bed, covered in tears and sweat and blood, is perhaps not the best first introduction to childbirth for a little girl, and so Anathi had raced into the hallway to intercept her, and Inej's father had kept her safely away, distracted her and fed her breakfast and taken her outside to play.

Kaz returns with her on his hip, still in her nightgown, and she is looking at the bundle in Inej's arms with wide, uncertain eyes.

Excitement over a new sibling is all very well and good until you're confronted with the reality that you are no longer an only child, thinks Inej.

Kaz sits down on the edge of the bed, arranges Genna in his lap. Inej lifts her arm slightly, moves the blanket aside a fraction so that she can see the baby.

“Look, sweetheart,” she says, smiling softly at her firstborn. “This is your sister, Livija.”

Slowly, slowly, Genna's eyebrows draw down into that frown she inherited directly from Kaz, and she turns her face into her father's neck and remains there.

Inej bites the inside of her cheek hard to keep from laughing. “Oh dear.”

Kaz rubs Genna's back with one hand, tries to nudge her out of his neck. “Don't you want to see her?”

But Genna shakes her head and burrows deeper, little fingers clutching hard at Kaz's shirt, and she will not move no matter how much he tries to disentangle her.

Kaz looks to Inej, eyebrows raised, but she just shrugs helplessly, so he pats Genna on the back again and lets her hold onto him.

“I'm sure they'll be firm friends in no time,” says Inej, reaching out to stroke Genna's hair with one hand. She hopes they will, anyway.

Inej looks around her. There is a pile of linen tossed in the corner of the bedroom. Genna has not been dressed, and there is dirt on her feet and grass stains on her nightgown. Kaz, with stubble on his chin and his shirt tails untucked and his sleeves rolled haphazardly to the elbow. Inej is grateful there is not a mirror in her direct line of sight, for she knows how she must look: hair in disarray, bags under her eyes.

It's all a mess. It's messy. Just like their life. Messy and perfect and theirs.

"Hey," she whispers.

Kaz's eyes flick from his new daughter to Inej and she feels her heart somersalt in her chest, as stupidly, breathlessly in love as she'd been at seventeen.

She feels the grin spread over her face, wide and unguarded. "Look what we did."

~*~*~*~

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Ursula K. Le Guin

~*~*~*~

This is not the end of a story, but the beginning.

~*~*~*~