Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living: in that world I shall abide forever.”

Antigone | Sophocles.

Jesper secures his mask over his face. It's a dark brown with a protruding, hooked nose and a horrible grey goatee. Jesper's sole saving grace is the vivid green of his balloon pants.

Beside him, Kaz is dressed in an unfairly sensible brown tunic with a velvet black vest. He removes his mask—a marbled black half-mask—to slick his hair back in a smooth motion. His hair has grown longer than he usually keeps it, and the street light casts him in an oddly warm glow. Even after all these years, it's unfair how handsome Kaz can be without trying. If only he didn't have such a foul personality.

Kaz quickly refits the mask on his face, only the lower half visible.

“You look ridiculous, Kaz,” Jesper says, taking a thrill out of the experience. He keeps carefully out of range of Kaz’s cane. “Never thought I’d see the day where you join the theatre, Kaz.”

Kaz rolls his eyes, the motion clear through his exaggerated tilt of the head.

“You were there for the Mister Crimson con.”

“Extenuating circumstances.” Jesper bounces on his heels, grinning. “That was for survival. This is for a job.”

Kaz sighs in the same way he has the other five times Jesper tried fishing out an explanation.

“If you don’t want to be here, then leave. You signed up for this,” Kaz reminds Jesper sharply, stepping out onto the street.

“Oh, I want to be here,” Jesper quickly reassures Kaz. He hurries after Kaz. “Trust me, there is nothing I want to see more than you, mister dark-and-serious, act in a play. Wylan promised to watch, you know.”

“What else would I do?” Kaz fixes his gaze on Jesper, but the effect is lost through the mask. “Haul sandbags?”

“You’re too skinny. They’d never hire you for that, Kaz.”

Kaz responds with a quick thwacking of his cane against Jesper’s exposed ankles, who winces but accepts his fate.

“Okay, I maybe deserved that one. But you have to see the humour in this.”

“For one night only,” Kaz says drolly, because he’s secretly a funny bastard underneath it all, “come see Dirtyhands and a mercher’s fiancé in the Kommedie Brute.”

“They’ve had mercher’s mistresses before.” Jesper flourishes his hands. “When you think about it, we’re hardly the weirdest performers.”

Kaz grunts.

The word fiancé still sends a ripple of pleasure through Jesper, and he smiles at Kaz. Finding more goodwill towards him. Jesper popped the question to Wylan a few months ago and planning the wedding will take some time. He invited Kaz almost immediately, knowing Kaz would appear in some form even if he didn't stick around, but hasn't quite mustered the courage to ask Kaz to be his best man.

Like Kaz would do it willingly.

"You could have cast me in a more fitting role," Jesper points out. "I do not look good in this mask, even if my trousers are fabulous."

Kaz tilts his head in concession.

"But you make such a dedicated harlekijn," Kaz mocks, clearly taking pleasure in Jesper's pain. "Who else could have adopted the role so fully?”

“Ha ha, Kaz. So funny. I am not a clown.”

Kaz raises an eyebrow in response. Jesper waves Kaz away.

“Fine, I’m happy being a clown. Not everyone can be the dashing hero,” Jesper sniffs dramatically, “so I will gladly take the role of the dashing sidekick, the beloved comedy relief. Everyone knows the harlekijn is the best to watch.”

“You tell yourself that,” Kaz says, sounding like he doesn’t care. Situation normal.

“But why did you give yourself bedrienger?” Jesper complains, although he can admit that the shoe does, indeed, fit Kaz. Trickster roles are right up his alley. Hell, they practically are his alley. What is the Dirtyhands persona if not an elaborate piece of theatre?

Kaz shrugs. "Some people are more suited for the role than others.

Another flash of white teeth. Like a shark. Jesper rolls his eyes, knowing that Kaz is taking a childish glee from this job. It's the closest Kaz ever gets to something like fun.

They slip out onto the street. Kommedie Brute productions range in location. In the winter, they book out one of the theatre halls in the Stave, but in the summer, they spill out into the streets and stage plays along the canals. During the winter, even the poorest of Kerchmen are willing to fork over a few kruge for the sake of a place to keep out of the cold. Summer and spring are another matter.

Ketterdam never gets hot. That's a fact. Novyi Zem gets hot and always has. The difference in climate shocked Jesper when he first came to Ketterdam. Without much heat, there is little incentive for anyone except avid theatregoers to pay for a theatre ticket, but almost everyone will stop to watch a Kommedie Brute play in the street. The trouble is competing with the boar pits.

Kaz leads the way, and they manage to smoothly integrate themselves into the back of the troupe. No one seems to notice the addition of two performers. Kaz turns to grin at Jesper.

Saints, he really is having fun.

Jesper quickly throws himself into making friends with the other performers. The beauty of the Kommedie Brute is that they commit themselves to wearing masks even during rehearsals, and their cast continually rotates seemingly at a whim. Jesper tugs his collar higher, but between the mask and the gloves his Zemeni-dark skin isn't obvious.

Kaz, predictably, hangs back and says nothing.

They travel in a group along the street, conspicuous in their costumes. A few people whistle. Jesper takes a dramatic bow towards one, tipping his ridiculous clown hat, and waits for a young woman’s pleased giggles before catching up with the rest of the troupe.

He doesn’t exactly know why Kaz has brought Jesper along for the job. Not yet anyway. Kaz always runs a job within a job and while it’s guaranteed to get him in trouble someday, but Kaz also has more lives than a nine-tailed cat. He’ll land on his feet. Somehow. For Jesper, it means that he has to more-or-less trust what Kaz has told him:

That he needs Jesper as another body in the troupe, a second on the inside. Someone to help fleece the product and get them both out successfully.

A partner is what Jesper heard and what Kaz won’t ever say. Even Wylan shrugged when Jesper relayed the request.

“It sounds like he wants to spend time with you,” Wylan said, setting down his pen and looking up at Jesper with an ink-freckled face. “Kaz could probably pull off that job solo and blindfolded. If you want a reason to get out of the house, I say go for it.”

Jesper worried at his lip. “You don’t mind?”

“That you’re taking a job for Kaz?” Wylan snorted. He picked up his pen again with an amused glance at Jesper. “I know you’ve been bored at university, Jesper. And I’m not exactly the best person to judge you for still working for Kaz.”

“That’s where all our potassium nitrate went?”

Wylan shrugged. “Kaz needed more smoke bombs.” His expression turned sheepish. “And I might have been a bit bored, too.”

“I love you, Wy,” Jesper said, deadly serious. He kissed Wylan before he flounced out the door, Wylan looking after him fondly.

Today is another rehearsal. For the troupe, at least. It’s not the grand lynchpin of their theatrical tour through the Stave. Barely a pitstop, even.

Neither Kaz nor Jesper are required for any scenes today, but the Kommedie Brute travels together or not at all. They end up by a quieter canal in the East Stave; a somewhat more respectable area of Ketterdam, but not quite. Enough that there are small stone barriers all along the canal.

Kaz easily picks his way over to the stone and takes a seat, propping up his leg beside him. Most of his body is angled towards the street and not to the canal. If someone startled him, Kaz would have a better chance of falling onto the stone instead of the water.

Jesper takes up post beside him. A habit he hasn’t yet shaken, even three years out of the Ice Court job. Jesper crosses his arms and watches de dame rehearse her heart-breaking ballad begging for mercy from another trickster. Kaz isn’t in this scene only because his character is supposed to come on two scenes later, when de dame has already been swindled of all her money and bedrienger swoops in to force her into marrying him to settle her debts. De dame refuses, of course, and the bedrienger stalks off miserably and pushes the young hero into the harbour, refusing to let him out until the hero pays a fee to the bedrienger. Jesper is desperate to see Kaz act it out, knowing full well that Kaz has pushed people in the harbour for real. Sometimes sans an eye.

Kaz turns to glower at Jesper as though he can sense Jesper’s train of thought.

“Focus on the scene,” he says warningly. It’s cute that Kaz thinks he can put Jesper off that way. It’s like watching a tiger lazily swat its paw at a gnat. Which would make Jesper the gnat, but whatever.

Point is, Kaz doesn’t actually care what Jesper does here, so long as Jesper doesn’t blow their cover or get into any serious trouble. Jesper mockingly salutes at Kaz and turns back to the rehearsal.

De dame is good. She is the only character who doesn’t wear a mask, but her expression is oddly still as though she is confined by one anyway. The actress’ voice and movements are animated and pleasant to watch. Her skin isn’t quite as dark as Inej or Jesper’s, but he suspects some sort of mixed heritage. The faint hint of an accent betrays her as a non-native which naturally makes Jesper feel a sense of affinity for her.

He looks at Kaz, who has clearly also clocked her accent but hasn’t outwardly reacted. They only have one more rehearsal before the actual street shows begin. The Kommedie Brute’s custom is for three rehearsals only. While the play is blocked and scripted, the majority ends up becoming improv and ad-lib. Each performance being slightly-to-majorly different helps to keep drawing crowds in for the same show, no matter how many times it has been performed that season.

Good business, Jesper thinks. He is nothing if not a natural performer, which can equally be said about Kaz. The two of them have had no issues blending in. Kaz has only rehearsed exactly one scene, but Jesper glued himself to the bench nearby and watched every moment of it eagerly. Kaz makes it look easy. He only barely glanced at the script before he just got it, snapping into character as easily as shutting a window. Cutting off Dirtyhands.

Jesper just whistled and clapped his hands, slowly shaking his head. It never fails to give Jesper the shivers.

As soon as the rehearsal concludes, Kaz turns to Jesper.

“Follow me,” he says without waiting for an answer.

Jesper automatically trails after Kaz. He breaks into a jog to level with Kaz, walking side by side. Kaz’s cane snaps out with each step. It sounds strange against the cobbled path. Jesper, after years of hanging around Kaz, is used to the customary heavy thud of the weighed crow cane, not the odd skittering of a wooden cane designed for poor Kerchman.

They ditch their costumes in a public changeroom and shove them into a bag that Jesper slings over his back. He doesn’t bother asking Kaz to carry it. From there, Kaz leads Jesper further down the street and across the canal, moving closer to the West Stave than the East. Jesper keeps his eyes peeled for clues about where Kaz is taking them.

They finally stop outside the Church of Sacred Provision. Jesper’s eyes flick over the sign. The delicate gold scrollwork suggests that the church is, indeed, unusually prosperous for Ketterdam despite the outwardly dirty façade. Kaz opens the heavy wooden door with a flourish.

“After you.” Kaz makes a motion of inviting Jesper in.

Jesper rolls his eyes but steps inside. It’s a reasonably safe assumption that the church is a component of Kaz’s plan. Jesper has never seen Kaz attend a service and never will.

Kaz immediately directs Jesper to sit beside a gruff-looking older gentleman in the back row. Around them, the emblems of Ghezen are stained into the glass. A hand cupping a bag of coins. A flourishing orange tree. A mercher ship sailing on the ocean. A candlestick with three prongs representing the three aspects of Ghezen: commerce, trade, and charity. It’s all very impressive, and not of any particular interest to Jesper. He considers himself an atheist. If anything, he identifies more strongly with his mother’s connection to the earth and the land. Ravkan Grisha, like the Suli, might believe in saints, but the zowa in Novyi Zem found their salvation in nature. No saint ever saved Jesper’s mother or helped their farm prosper. All of it—every damnable inch—comes down to humans.

The preacher doesn’t bat an eye at the late entrants to the service. He continues with his sermon about charity honouring Ghezen. To accumulate wealth through legitimate business practices is a form of dedication to Ghezen, showing commitment to the principles of commerce and trade.

“Charity,” the preacher declares loudly, “allows for the less fortunate to climb back to their feet so that they, too, may pursue the honourable path of commerce and accumulate wealth in offering to Ghezen.”

The preacher pauses to give an offering pot to the front row. They immediately begin dropping kruge in and passing it to the person beside them. It’s a quiet service, today. Less than twenty people in attendance. But that means an increased pressure to donate more kruge than the person previous, looking up at the preacher and waiting for an approving nod of the head. Jesper knows that some churches charge just for entrance, and then again for mandatory charitable donations, and then again as a token of appreciation for the preachers. Scammers, as far as Jesper cares. He has never understood the Kerch and their obsession with money, which he recognises as an ironic statement considering his own gambling debt.

The Kerch love their money, and Jesper loves the good thrill of a game.

Because Kaz is physically incapable of not being blasphemous, he leans over to the man beside them with a suddenly pleasant expression.

“Excuse me,” Kaz says, his voice pitcher higher and softer. Jesper muffles his snort of laughter in his sleeve. Kaz shoots Jesper a warning glance and looks back at the man. “I find myself new to the Stave. Praise be to Ghezen.”

Here, Kaz pauses for a quick upward look at the ceiling in a passable impression of devotion. Jesper has to hide another laugh. The man turns his head towards Kaz, expression still edging towards displeasure.

“Praise be,” the man returns, voice neutral enough. A good sign that he’ll hear Kaz’s bullshit out.

“I find myself lost as to the usual donation for this particular service.” Kaz blinks, eyes wide and guileless. He gestures ruefully to his cane. “Unfortunately, I have not been able to attend a service in some time… and the customs have changed so much these past years.”

Ever since the Crows nearly shut down the Church of Barter with their auction stunt, Jesper thinks. The churches of Ghezen near-unanimously changed their service procedures afterward. Jesper still takes an inkling of pride in that.

The man visibly eyes Kaz’s cane curiously.

“You ill, or crippled?” he asks gruffly, but there is no hostility behind it.

“Crippled, I’m afraid.” Kaz sets both hands atop his cane. It’s odd to hear him speaking so softly. “A business partner of mine took no interest in the honourable pursuit of trade and saw fit to sell my shares in the business without my say-so. I discovered the deceit only when a troupe of thugs came to my house and broke my leg in front of my mother.”

The man swallows Kaz’s bullshit whole. He grunts.

“Five kruge,” the man says. “Ten, if you can manage. Some righteous folks donate up to fifty. Praise be.”

“Praise be,” Kaz repeats. The twitching of his fingers is the only tell of Kaz’s irritation.

“Must have been a bad break.” The man motions towards Kaz’s leg. “I’ll ask the good father to pray for you.”

“Would you?” Kaz’s expression lightens. “You’re a good man, sir. It’s gentlemen such as yourself that keep this city upright and righteous.”

“Damn right.” The man’s attention is finally fully diverted to Kaz. His chest puffs out in pride. “I run my own bakery. Finest in the stave, if I say so myself. Treat my customers honest and ask only that they make offerings to Ghezen with each purchase.”

“Yes, I have an offering altar of my own,” Kaz enthuses.

Jesper looks at Kaz and raises an eyebrow. An offering altar? In Ketterdam? Jesper hasn’t heard of such a thing.

Clearly, the baker hasn’t either, because his eyebrows also shoot to the roof. A touch of wariness enters his face. Snaking through his mouth.

“You ain’t southern, are you?” He looks at Kaz shrewdly. “Them southerners do itstrange. Do it wrong. They think planting a few crops count as acts of service. Twisted it all up to make Ghezen about farming.”

“Of course not,” Kaz recovers smoothly, faking a look of horrified disbelief. “I’m Ketterdam born and raised, sir. Taught in the good tradition of Ghezen by my mother and Father Lukas of the Church of Prospect. I’m afraid it’s my southern grandmother, rest her soul, that instilled some unfortunate family traditions I am still ridding my relatives of.”

“Hmm.” The baker turns this over and seems to accept Kaz’s claim. “Well good luck to you, boy. I’ll pray for your efforts in restoring your family to the righteous ways.”

“Thank you kindly.” Kaz turns his cane in his hands, looking at the baker earnestly. “Ghezen is of the merchants and traders and businessman. Of course, we should worship him in those aspects.”

“Damn straight.” The baker finally relaxes, leaning back into the pew. “Them country people call Ghezen by strange names, too. Blasphemy, if you ask me. Ghezien.”

The baker shakes his head. Jesper abruptly startles. He turns and tries to stare a hole through Kaz’s head, who resolutely ignores him. Because Jesper has absolutely heard Kaz refer to the god as Ghezien before, when it was just the two of them—or three, with Inej—in his office.

Kaz’s insistence on avoiding Jesper’s gaze suggests that he has something to hide, here. Jesper just needs to work out what it is.

Jesper doesn’t know enough to understand what Kaz’s play is here, with the church. Old dogs can learn new tricks, so Jesper keeps his mouth shut, only looking at Kaz curiously. Kaz doesn’t look back.

To Jesper’s surprise, they stay for the rest of the service, Kaz maintaining his mask of pleasantry. At the end of the service, he turns to the baker and shakes his hand.

“Many thanks for your kindness, sir,” Kaz says politely. “My mother will be pleased to hear that I have run into such a fine gentleman. Not enough people are focused on Ghezen, these days.”

Kaz shakes his head dramatically. The baker nods and drops Kaz’s gloved hand.

“You take care of yourself boy.” He motions towards Kaz’s leg. “Injuries like that don’t improve with age. Took my brother down when he was just your age. We need more devout men in the world, and I’d hate for your mother to grieve you early. Praise be.”

“Praise be,” Kaz repeats back, but his eyes have turned flinty. His smile lacks its casual ease of before.

The baker walks out of the service with another donation to the offering bowl. Kaz watches him go.

“What was that, Kaz?” Jesper finally risks asking Kaz.

Just like Jesper suspected, Kaz slowly spins his cane in his hands and keeps his eyes on the door.

“Nothing at all, Jesper,” Kaz says. “Nothing at all.”

They listen to the rest of the service to evade suspicion. Their mark, if Kaz is to be believed, is Lukas Vanderwald. A name Jesper recognises only through the trouble he has been causing Wylan. While they rarely keep secrets from one another, Lukas Vanderwald is a name that makes Wylan alternately look at the ceiling or sigh into his desk, shaking his head in both instances and asking to move the conversation into more pleasant pastures. Fine by Jesper.

The Kommedie Brute performance is important… somehow. Jesper knows that particularly well-performing plays often get invited into the opera house and off the street, and he knows that Vanderwald is a frequent patron of the arts. What that equates to beyond the possibility of an open house is beyond Jesper. He thinks their plan is probably to slip in while Vanderwald is at the opera house and rob him blind.

Then again, he isn’t Kaz.

The moment the service ends, Kaz slips a key into Jesper’s hand. Jesper tries not to turn his head. He hadn’t seen Kaz get up to go anywhere, which means he had the key on his person. Or… and Jesper personally thinks this is more likely, Kaz pickpocketed the baker they were just speaking with.

“Make me a copy,” Kaz orders. “Bring it to me by twelve bells.”

Jesper is too curious to argue, for once. He turns the key over in his hands but it remains just that – an ordinary, if heavy key.

"Anywhere in mind?" Jesper tries turning to Kaz to ask, but Kaz is already gone.

Isn't that typical.

Chapter Text

"Polynices was a rebel and a traitor and you know it."

"He was my brother."

Antigone | Sophocles

Jesper doesn't understand Kaz. He never has. Even when it was just the two of them, a rag-tag duo more akin to a master and his dog than something so dubious as friends. Jesper genuinely believes it would kill Kaz to admit that he has them, much less cares about them. One day, he'll finally say the words then immediately spit up blood and die. Jesper will have to mail his sentiments to Kaz's grave.

It's a pity, really. Kaz has always been a scrapper. Even now, with his expensive coats and his pockets lined with, generously, approximately sixty-percent of the Barrel's wealth, his haircuts are self-done and he fights like a street kid. No technique. No finesse beyond his own dramatic flare. Kaz's whole fighting philosophy is to hit them until they stop hitting back.

Not gentlemanly, Jesper will admit, but more than effective at getting them out of trouble.

Despite the mercher mask and Kaz's silver tongue and his seemingly unparalleled knowledge of the arts—mainly what is valuable enough to steal—Kaz is rough around the edges in a way that suggests a lack of formal education. Unsurprising for a Barrel rat. Surprising for Kaz.

After Kaz abandons Jesper at the church, Jesper takes the long route home to get the key copied on his way back. Jesper could try to do it himself, admittedly. He is sure that Wylan will have old pieces of iron laying around. But even though it's been years since Jesper was outed as a Grisha, he still doesn't feel comfortable using it for anything beyond his shooting and unlocking the occasional door when the lock jams. Some fears never truly go away, Jesper thinks. He wishes they would.

If Jesper took the key to the Barrel, everyone in the Barrel would know within the hour that Jesper is back, stealing keys, and running jobs for Dirtyhands. Although the Barrel shuts down and rallies around its own, keeping the prying eyes and ears of the rest of Ketterdam firmly out of the Barrel, it is still the Barrel. All it would take it one enterprising gangster or one desperate child and the entire Merchant Council would know.

Jesper stops into a shop on the Upper East Stave and charmingly pretends to need a spare key.

"My fiancé will be moving in soon," Jesper says, smiling winningly. "And I would love for him to have his own key. A key is what makes a home, don't you think?"

And the older lady behind the counter melted, just a little, and promised Jesper it would be ready for him to pick up at eight bells, but not a moment later, young man. Which works just fine for Jesper, thank you. 

Jesper isn't avoiding Wylan. It would be a pretty shitty thing, he thinks, to avoid your fiancé. To take another loop around the block to avoid going inside.

But he is. It's just -- a bad feeling, deep in his chest, that tells him something is about to go wrong. Jesper hasn't lived this long by ignoring his gut but he can, generously, admit that he hasn't always made good decisions concerning his own future.

Jesper gets these feelings sometimes. Wylan tells him that it's intuition. His brain subconsciously processing information faster than his conscious mind can register, tickling that, yes, something is wrong here. But there are feelings, and then there are feelings. Sometimes, feelings are just that and nothing more.

His mother was Zowa, like Jesper. It wasn't a bad thing in Novyi Zem. They were blessed. Had teachers and all in the west, with the bigger cities. Never had to hide. Never had to run. But Grisha are hunted everywhere in the world and sometimes, sometimes, there would be someone in the square making a touch too many pointed comments about the unusual nature that none of the town's tractors ever seemed to break down, the Fahey's included. His mother would always smoothly redirect the stranger, making a quick motion behind her back, and his mother and her friends would nearly frog-march the stranger out of town with a collard pie and a pinch of jurda pressed into their hands. Aditi Fahey was good at that. Putting people at ease. She never made anyone feel bad for a moment, even when telling them to get lost.

Jesper's father worried. Constantly. Kaelish man that he is, he worried for Aditi and Jesper and didn't want them using their powers too openly, lest the wrong person stay in town and refuse to move on. Novyi Zem isn't pro-Zowa, exactly, nor pro-Drüskelle. It's neutral ground. Jesper guesses that his father was worried about the day that the scales tipped in the wrong direction. Colm Fahey didn't want them using their powers frivolously, but Jesper's mother always shrugged.

"We are Zowa," she said, showing Jesper how to shoot a gun. "It's something we are, not something we do. Whether we use our powers or not, we are still Zowa. Why should we deprive ourselves? When our powers can help others? When we can find joy in fixing rusted locks and smoothing old gears?"

His mother shot, then. Three bullets in a row hitting dead-centre of the tin cans she had lined up in a row along the back field.

"You will never miss, Jesper," she told him. "Not as long as there is breath in your body."

They buried her beneath the cherry tree. Tin cans still scattered nearby.

Now, Ketterdam. Another monster entirely. New Grisha to the city dumb enough to let their powers slip are sold into indenture the moment anyone catches wind. Even after all these years, even with his connections to Kaz and Wylan and Inej--none of whom would ever let him get sold, and if he did, they would rip the city apart to get to him--the back of his neck still itches. Like lice. Like hair stuffed down your shirt. The ever-shifting urge to hide, to distract, to fawn.

 Maybe that’s what binds them, in the end. That ever-present sensation of danger. They watch out for each other because they have no one left.

Jesper eventually makes his way home. He checks Wylan’s study and finds it empty, leading Jesper into the garden. He spots Marya sketching with charcoal and drops a kiss on the top of her head.

“Afternoon, Marya,” Jesper says. “Haven’t seen Wy, have you?”

Marya looks upwards and smiles, like a sunflower tilting to the sun.

“He has a meeting, darling,” Marya says. “Did Frances not tell you?”

Frances, the maid they hired to take care of Marya. Jesper shakes his head.

“That’s alright, lovely,” Jesper returns smoothly. He leans over Marya’s shoulder to look at her charcoal drawings. “These are beautiful, aren’t they? Should show Wylan when he gets home.”

Marya just smiles.

Jesper spends a lot time sitting in the drawing room, before realising there is too much time in the afternoon left for him to spend it doing nothing. Jesper doesn’t have anything to do these days. He takes his university courses one at a time, steadily chipping away at the literature degree his father sent him to Ketterdam for, once upon a time. The problem is that it feels like it belongs to some other Jesper. The Jesper of another lifetime.

He has no job, no real responsibility, and certainly no obligation to go running all over the city for Kaz. It’s nice, the rest. The peace. It’s nice. Jesper has put his life on the line more than enough. But he is still agonisingly, infuriatingly bored.

Jesper goes to see Kaz.

Kaz looks up at Jesper over his paperwork. Kaz wears half-moon spectacles, these days. Part of Jesper thinks it is from nearly a decade spent hunched over, eyes pressed nearly directly against his precious paperwork in the dark, and the other part of him suspects, more simply, that Kaz has probably always been short-sighted and is only now admitting it. Either way, Jesper knows better than to comment. Jesper guarantees that Kaz would never wear them again. The horror of being seen and known. Even then, Kaz rarely wears them outside his office. Jesper wonders if Inej has seen them. If she knows.

“You’re early,” Kaz says, setting down his paperwork to fold his hands under his chin. He looks at Jesper neutrally. “You’re never early, Jesper.”

“What is it they say?” Jesper leans back in his chair and gets comfortable. “Early bird gets the worm? Thought I’d give it a try.”

Jesper looks around for Kaz’s cane—habit, keeping track, but Kaz never forgets it even when he’s blind drunk or passing out from blood loss—and finds it tucked just to the side of Kaz’s desk. Within easy reach, although Kaz doesn’t seem inclined to hit Jesper with it today.

Kaz ignores him. “I said twelve bells.”

“Yeah, and my key-maker said eight bells. It is now—” Jesper checks his watch “—five bells and here we are, both not busy. What a coincidence.”

“I am busy,” Kaz says. He looks pointedly at his paperwork to prove it. “What business, Jesper? Why are you not busy?”

“No business. Wylan’s out,” Jesper says by way of explanation. “Mercher business takes ages. Can’t I drop by without a reason, Kaz?”

Kaz doesn’t dignify that with a response. He simply removes his glasses and places them on the desk, leaning back in his chair with folded arms.

“You can’t hide here,” Kaz says. “This is my workplace.”

“—and my former workplace.”

“Emphasis on former.” Kaz keeps staring at Jesper calmly, occasionally blinking. Like blinking is optional. Sometimes, Kaz reminds Jesper of a highly determined cat.

Jesper shifts. “Maybe I just wanted to see you, Kaz. Ever thought of that?”

Kaz looks away like he always does when someone implies that they might, just might, actually enjoy his Ghezen-forsaken company.

“You’re not getting any information,” Kaz informs him. He picks his glasses back up but doesn’t put them on, cleaning them with a cloth he withdraws from his desk. “It’s safer this way.”

“More convenient for you, is what you mean.” Jesper tries not to let years-old resentment colour his tone. Not all teenage gripes need to survive in adulthood. “Kaz, if you think I don’t know how you operate by now, you’re dead wrong. You’re going to string me along with the barest amount of information then rip the rug out from under me at the very last moment, and it’ll be brilliant, and I’ll be furious, and then we’ll go eat stroopwafels. Right?” He doesn’t wait for Kaz’s answer. “Right. So why don’t we skip the stage where you prickle at me and we just talk, like normal people occasionally do?”

“Not much to say.” Dead eyes, Marya once said of Kaz. Empty eyes. “Business is good.”

“Okay.” Jesper waits for Kaz to add something, anything, else. “Cool, okay. What about you, Kaz? Has Inej written?”

“Yes,” Kaz says to the latter, for once showing a hint of interest in their conversation, “and she sends her love.”

Jesper dramatically grasps at his chest, ignoring that Inej had very recently written directly to tell him the same thing.

“Inej, light of my life, treasure of my heart,” Jesper declares. “A queen among mortals.”

That earns a slight twitch of Kaz’s mouth. A facsimile of a smile. What’s irritating is that Kaz can smile, and laugh, and does so with wild abandon when the mood strikes him.

But the mood almost never strikes him.

Kaz checks the time. “Nearly time for you to leave.”

Jesper cranes his neck to look at Kaz’s pocket watch, but Kaz snaps it shut before Jesper can see. His gaze cool.

“It is not,” Jesper argues. “I just got here. No way is it eight bells.”

“No, it’s not,” Kaz agrees. He finally puts his glasses on, flicking through a sheaf of papers on his desk. “But I have another job for you since you appear to have an abundance of free time. Here.”

Kaz hands him a document that Jesper gives a cursory glance. He doesn’t recognise the script.

“Is this code?” Jesper asks, still studying the writing. “It isn’t Kerch, and it doesn’t look like Ravkan. Or Fjerdan.”

Jesper still remembers the look of Fjerdan from the Ice Court.

“Maybe you don’t know enough Ravkan,” Kaz responds smoothly, standing from his desk and opening the window. Which answers almost nothing.

Jesper sighs. “I’m guessing I’ll find out eventually.”

Kaz doesn’t answer that either.

“The paper,” Kaz says over his shoulder, “needs to go to a jeweller on Main Street. You’ll know the one.”

“Which jeweller?” Jesper shakes the papers at Kaz. “Despite what you may think, I’m a durast, Kaz. Not a bloody mind reader.”

Kaz rolls his eyes like Jesper is the one being ridiculous.

“The one,” Kaz says slowly, dragging out the vowels like he is speaking to a particularly slow child, “that specialises in emeralds.”

“Why emeralds?” Jesper cries. He throws his hands up in frustration. “Kaz, when did emeralds come in?”

“I have a meeting,” Kaz says. He gestures to the door. “Off you go.”

Jesper could shake him.

“Why emeralds?” Jesper repeats. “First, it’s the Kommedie Brute. Then it’s the church. Then a key. Now I’m talking to a jeweller about emeralds we most certainly do not have, Kaz, unless you have something hiding in your safe that you haven’t mentioned. I thought the plan was to rob Vanderwald’s house?”

Kaz doesn’t confirm or deny the assumption, which could mean anything.

“Why not emeralds?” Kaz shrugs. Then he adds, almost reluctantly: “This is extra.”

Because Kaz, despite it all, has learned to give a little.

Jesper shakes his head. “Your job-within-a-job schemes will get you in trouble, someday.”

“Already did, and I survived.” Kaz smiles faintly. “Goodbye, Jesper.”

He motions to the door and turns his back on Jesper, clearly dismissing him.

“I’m not a dog,” Jesper grumbles, but leaves.

Jesper, because he’s an idiot, sees the jeweller then collects the key.

The jeweller, when faced with the papers, had simply made a noise of understanding and winked at Jesper.

“Tell your boss that I’ll get it sorted,” he said like it would make any sense to Jesper.

Sometimes Jesper thinks that Kaz views them all as little dolls to move around for his own amusement. Other times, he wonders if Kaz realises they’re human at all. That Kaz is human.

Predictably, a grubby street urchin runs up to Jesper once he exits the store with the freshy-collected key at eight bells. The child shoves a slip of paper into Jesper’s hands then stares up at him expectantly.

“You’re not getting a tip,” Jesper informs him.

The child stares more.

“Seriously.”

“Kaz said you would,” the child says. “Kaz says you’re a good person.”

Jesper sincerely doubts that Kaz said the latter, but he has to hand it to the kid. Guilt tripping is an excellent tool to use on pigeons, and Jesper is now, it seems, a pigeon.

“Fine.” Jesper sighs and hands the kid five kruge. “Now shoo. Go prey on some other pigeon.”

The kid takes the kruge and runs.

When Jesper turns, Kaz is already standing in the street.

“Holy Ghezen.” Jesper startles and puts a hand on his chest. “How do you do that, Kaz?”

“By not talking obnoxiously and giving myself away,” Kaz says flatly, but he seems pleased that Jesper still hasn’t cracked on. Bloody drama queen, Kaz. He probably does it just to see how long it’ll take for someone to finally notice him sneaking up on people.

“Yes, you’re so clever and talented, Kaz. The world is astounded at your brilliance every single day.”

Kaz shrugs. “I have an array of very powerful people from different nations who all seem to think so.”

“Nina doesn’t count.”

“I wasn’t talking about Nina.” Kaz briefly turns his eyes upon Jesper with a wicked grin.

Kaz takes pleasure in this, Jesper knows. Being needed. Being wanted. There is no one worse than Dirtyhands and no one better for a job, and Kaz knows it. Even Zoya Nazyalensky knows it, and she would legitimately eat her own intestines on a skewer before willingly asking Kaz for help. It’s why Sturmhond does it for her.  

“You okay?” Jesper risks getting stabbed by asking, shooting a sidelong look at Kaz. “Been an awful lot of rain, lately.”

When the rain hits the polluted filth of Ketterdam, it mostly evaporates on the cobblestones and drowns them all in smothering humidity. Almost like home, for Jesper. Swaddled in a blanket of heat. But uncharacteristically for Ketterdam, the water has stuck around of late and puddled in the watery lanes. Spilling over in canals.

“I’m not going to melt in water,” Kaz says irritably. “I’m not a witch.”

“I mean—” Jesper stops at the warning in Kaz’s eyes. He shakes his head. “You know, someday Kaz you’ll actually let us ask about you without getting stabbed. Excuse me for being worried about you slipping in the wet and hurting yourself.”

“I manage fine.” Kaz picks up his pace just to be contrary, but it hasn’t escaped Jesper’s notice that his cane is placed down each time with unusual care. “I don’t need you mother henning me, Jesper.”

“Not mother henning.” Jesper rolls his eyes. “I’m not your ma. Just your friend, who cares about you, bastard. Ghezen knows why.”

Kaz’s eyes go tight and he takes a long moment before answering Jesper.

“It’s fine,” Kaz says shortly, but his jaw is tensed in a way it wasn’t before. He doesn’t say I’m fine. Only it’s fine.

For the first time in a long time, Jesper feels a hook of genuine irritation pulling at his ribs. Reeling him in.

Jesper stops walking. Kaz continues onward nearly halfway down the street before he thinks to pause, turning over his shoulder with an eyebrow raised at Jesper.

“We don’t have all night,” Kaz says evenly. His eyes scan Jesper like he is trying to divine the issue. “No time for temper tantrums.”

Jesper considers—just for a moment, just for fun—taking out his revolvers and shooting Kaz. Somewhere non-fatal. His fingers twitch towards his revolvers.

Kaz spots it and rolls his eyes. “Shoot me if you must but hurry up.”

It’s fine that Jesper still doesn’t know anything about Kaz except that he was, presumably, born in Ketterdam, grew up in the Barrel, broke his leg on an unnamed con, and once had someone he cared about by the name of Jordie. Jesper has known for a long time that Kaz will never open himself to Jesper the way he does Inej. And that’s fine. Jesper has had a long time to get over it. Meeting Wylan helped – scraped away the last vestiges of the crush he used to have on the mad bastard. But it still stings, more than a little, that Jesper is perhaps his closest friend—through thick and thin in the Barrel, through Per Haskell and the rest—and Kaz still won’t even answer a question about his fucking day.

Kaz throws his hand up when Jesper won’t move. He leans more heavily on his cane when he is standing than walking.

“The rain makes it hard.” Kaz sounds like Jesper is pulling teeth with him from a pair of pliers, clearly irritated at Jesper’s line of inquiry. “Is that what you want to hear? I’m managing but it’s hard, just like every other day with a cane. I can’t change it, Jesper, so there’s no use in complaining to every sodding podge who asks about the weather and the cane.”

Kaz sounds tired. That, more than anything, is what makes Jesper finally walk up to Kaz – who doesn’t acknowledge it. He just nods and keeps walking. Jesper by his side.

Because Kaz is a peculiar bastard, he takes the key from Jesper and slips it into his pocket, then directs them to a restaurant.

“Are we seriously going for dinner?” Jesper blinks. “Then what was all that about the key and needing it by twelve bells?”

“I did need it by twelve bells.” Kaz pulls out his lockpicks and makes quick work of the front door without bothering to look around for witnesses. Jesper looks over their shoulders reflexively, but the street is empty. “I just didn’t need it for this.”

Jesper shakes his head, reluctantly entertained.

“Tell me we’re not stealing from this place.” Jesper follows Kaz inside, Kaz’s dark coat quickly disappearing. Jesper steps around a serving cart. “I know this restaurant. Wylan and I come here sometimes. The owner barely turns a profit – there’ll be nothing in the safe, and if even if there is, taking it would put him out of business. This is his livelihood, Kaz.”

“Calm down,” Kaz throws back. “Help me look.”

“What are we looking for?” Jesper crosses the room and helps Kaz move around crates of bread left beside a table. Hindered by the dark. “Seriously, please tell me we aren’t robbing this restaurant.”

“So this would be morally acceptable if the restaurant belonged to a rich man?” Kaz spared the moment to flick his eyes up towards Jesper with deliberate intent. He returned to his search. “Pity, Jesper. Seems the Barrel influence is fading from you. Ketterdam is dog-eats-dog. I thought you would remember that.”

“This isn’t a dog.” Jesper holds up a dinner roll demonstratively. “This place isn’t even a pigeon. This is some fucked up duck sitting around, hoping the fox doesn’t come along. There might be a farmer with a rifle somewhere nearby.”

“He better aim true,” Kaz says, not without amusement, “and fire quickly, before the fox eats him too.”

Jesper shakes his head.

Eventually, Jesper lifts a crate of dinner rolls that seems suspiciously heavy. He quickly sets it down and alerts Kaz, who moves to stand beside Jesper. Kaz picks up a roll and throws it between each hand, nodding in satisfaction.

“That’s the crate. Don’ t touch it, Jesper.”

Kaz walks over to the kitchen while Jesper watches, pulling out a bowl and helping himself to the hutspot—still hot—on the stove.

Kaz stops to serve himself a bowl of hutspot—still hot—from the stove. He catches Jesper staring and lifts a spoon in query, hands curved around the bowl with his cane propped between his knees. Kaz leans heavily against the bench while he eats.

“What?”

“Ghezen, Kaz.” Jesper prays for patience. “You break into this poor man’s restaurant and then you eat his hutspot?”

“I,” Kaz says slowly, taking another spoonful, “happen to like hutspot.”

“That doesn’t make it okay!”

“No.” Kaz pauses in his eating to gesture loosely around them. “Would it settle your delicate sensibilities if I told you that this restaurant is merely a front?”

“Front for what?”

Kaz smiles. “You and Wylan aren’t as well-informed as you think.”

Jesper runs his hands along his pistols. Nervous habit.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jesper asks bluntly.

Kaz shrugs.

“Kaz, I happen to like this place. What is it supposed to be a front for?”

“Take a guess.”

“I asked you.”

“And I’m telling you to guess.”

“Kaz, this place is so small that you can watch him cooking from your table. It can’t be a front.”

“If the restaurant is that small,” Kaz says slowly, clearly trying to get a point through to Jesper, “and the owner is struggling that much, then how is it turning a profit?”

“What?” Jesper blinks. “It isn’t. Wylan made a shadow donation just recently to keep it open. He supports a dozen small business like that.”

Kaz shakes his head. “Wylan isn’t the only donor, and the owner hardly needed it.”

Jesper, whatever Kaz thinks, isn’t stupid.

“It’s a front,” Jesper finally admits, sighing. “Shame, I liked this place. But what is it a front for?”

Kaz finally puts down his bowl of hutspot and walks back to Jesper. He flicks out a knife and cuts into one of the dinner rolls, ripping it open further and showing it to Jesper.

Rolls of kruge stuffed into the centre of the bread.

“Holy shit.” Jesper touches it. “Yeah, okay. I was wrong and you were right, but please explain what this means, Kaz.”

“It means,” Kaz says, pleased with himself. “That we have even more reason to perform in our theatrical production.”

“Is Vanderwald involved, then?”

Kaz doesn’t answer, which means yes.

“So Vanderwald is bankrolling this restaurant, for whatever reason, and it’s also a front for something else.”

More blank amusement from Kaz as Jesper puts the pieces together. Pieces of what, is what Jesper can’t help from wondering.

“Okay,” Jesper says, thinking aloud. “So we’re doing the Kommedie Brute for access to the opera, for access to Vanderald’s house, and we also needed a key from the baker in the church for something else. Kaz, I can’t even begin to understand where you’re going with all this. How do the emeralds come in, anyway?”

“You’ll understand, soon.” Kaz slips the kruge into his pocket, because of course he does. He nods at the rest. “We can leave this here. I just wanted to verify my information.”

They walk out the way they came—through the front door—and Kaz locks the door behind him which strikes Jesper as almost ironically funny. They stroll out into the street like two normal young men going for a late-night walk.

The street is still empty.

Chapter Text

“Polyneices, who came back from exile, eager to burn with fire the city of his fathers and the shrines of his gods, eager to drink his kinsmen’s blood and lead them into slavery...”

The following morning finds them back in the Church. Jesper strains to keep his eyes open, staring at the preacher with the barest sliver of attention. He tries to take a discreet sip from the flask of coffee that he smuggled in—spiced with caraway seeds—but Kaz kicks his ankle and shoots Jesper a disapproving look, mouth pinched.

“Fine,” Jesper says quietly, “you win, Kaz.”

He puts the flask away.

This morning’s sermon is on saints, something that made Kaz roll his eyes when he heard the preacher introduce the topic.

“Not a fan?” Jesper asked quietly, trying to contain his amusement. “I thought you liked Inej’s saints.”

“I leave Inej’s saints alone,” Kaz responds coolly. “It doesn’t mean I have to respect them.”

“Don’t let Inej hear you say that.”

“Inej already knows.”

Jesper rolls his eyes. He looks longingly at his flask of coffee then back at Kaz.

“You’ve never thought of converting for her?” Jesper jokes, leaning back in case Kaz decides to take a swipe at him.

Kaz turns his faux-attention from the sermon to make a discrete, yet communicative gesture involving his middle finger.

“We’re on a job,” Kaz points out, “one that requires your full attention.”

“It doesn’t,” Jesper disagrees, “otherwise you wouldn’t be bickering with me. You’d have that blank, oh I’m so clever and mysterious look on.”

“I don’t have a look like that,” Kaz denies, with the look on.

“See!” Jesper points at Kaz. “You’re wearing it now.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

“I am not.”

“Boys,” an older lady near them cuts in, frowning. “Some of us are trying to listen to the service. Have some respect.”

“Apologies ma’am,” Kaz greases immediately, tipping his hat. A silly bowler hat that Jesper is ninety-percent sure that Kaz liberated from Jesper’s own wardrobe. Jesper wasn’t aware he owned anything in plain black.

“Yes, apologies,” Jesper throws his own into the ring, never one to be outdone. “We’re new to this church, see, and our old one was rather more informal. Our deepest, most sincere apologies.”

The woman’s eyes twitch upward in something that could be considered an eyeroll, if Upper Stave ladies were ones to roll their eyes.

Kaz and Jesper make eye contact. Kaz looks away first with a smile twitching at his lips.

Jesper lowers his voice, talking through the corner of his mouth and maintaining a pleasant, engaged smile for anyone else looking over at them.

“So what is your problem with church, anyway?”

“I never said I had a problem with it,” Kaz shoots back, just as quiet.

“Bullshit.”

“Really? Check your memory. I have never once said that I have an issue with the Kerch religion. In fact, I rather respect it.”

“You?” Jesper turns his head at that, unable to help himself. His eyebrows shoot upward. “Kaz, you have about as much respect for religion as you do for pigeons. That is to say, none. You once told Matthias to his face that Fjerdan religion is stupid.”

Kaz shrugs easily. “I do think it’s stupid. But I respect the theatre.”

“Theatre?”

“Theatre.”

“How is religion theatre?” Jesper says, immediately regretting it when Kaz’s eyes glint.

“Saints have never saved anyone,” Kaz says mockingly. “Have you ever heard of a miracle that can’t be attributed to a Grisha in hiding? Even if not open about it, the saints were all Grisha, or otherwise ordinary people who did something stupid, like trying to shave a drowning shipload of indentured children and drowned themselves. The saints—” Jesper almost winces at Kaz’s scorn “—have never helped anyone. There is no protection from illness except medicine. No protection from drowning except good lungs or a Tidemaker’s abilities. Religion is false hope that someone else will do the hard work of protecting yourself and your family.”

“I’m still not getting how that’s theatre.” Jesper half-listens as the preacher moves onto another sankt – Sankta Evgenia, who once healed an entire village from plague.

Kaz is listening too, his face making a particularly sour expression.

“Plague healing,” Kaz says mockingly, keeping his voice low so they don’t get told off by the woman again. Kaz makes a rude gesture but keeps it underneath the pew. “If plagues could be healed like that, the healers of Ketterdam would have done something during the plague here.”

Jesper had only heard of the Queen’s Lady Plague. He was still home, two years before his mother was put to rest beneath the cherry tree. It was something far, something distant, despite Kerch neighbouring Novyi Zem. Something that could never, and would never, touch Novyi Zem, so he didn’t pay it any attention.

But something tickles at Jesper’s brain.

“You were born in Ketterdam,” Jesper says slowly.

Kaz makes a vague sound that Jesper takes as confirmation, not that Jesper needed it.

“So you would have lived through the plague, right?”

“Everyone lived through the plague.” Kaz’s mouth draws a tight line. “Except for those who didn’t.”

“It was…” Jesper strains his memory, “mostly the Barrel impacted, right? The merchers all left for the countryside. I think Wylan said something about it, once. He said that he and Marya started learning violin together for something to do.”

Kaz straightens when it looks like the preacher might be finishing the service – but no, the preacher is simply taking a water break, drinking from a glass delivered by a young girl in the front, flicking over to the next page of his service. Kaz falls back into his seat.

“Mostly pickpockets, at first,” Kaz says shortly. “Barrel rats with plenty of contact from the infected coming of the Queen’s Lady. The ship, that is. Then it hit everyone. All at once.”

“No rest for the wicked, I suppose.” Jesper tries to hide his discomfort. He feels guilty, in a way, that while Kaz was living through the plague, he was writing it off as a foreign tragedy.

“No.” Kaz absent-mindedly spins his cane. “No rest at all.”

“Help me understand, then.” Jesper breaks the momentary silence. “Explain your thinking, Kaz, I know you like making your grand speeches.”

Kaz rolls his eyes, but the twitch of his hand betrays his eagerness. Kaz does like making his odd moral stands.

“It’s all theatre,” Kaz says again. “Sankta Evgenia might have healed that village, but I doubt it. Nina could barely heal one person as a heartrender. People that far gone with plague – there isn’t a cure. You would have to catch them right at the start of the infection. More likely, Sankta Evgenia—” more scorn drips into Kaz’s voice “—was simply treating victims of fever, and they attributed it to the plague.”

“Still a feat. Healing that many people.”

“But not plague healing, as the good gentlemen claims.” Kaz has the nasty expression on his face he wears when he finds something amusing. A smile, but not a pleasant one. A smile that warns of danger. “I call this theatre because it is. We have actors—” Kaz points to the preacher— “an audience, a stage, window dressing. Scripts. Calling it by another name doesn’t make it any less true. It’s a production. Tricking and luring you into putting your faith into an impossible being. Feeding you stories to entertain your mind, your heart. Keep you complacent. Keep you content so you don’t ask questions.”

Jesper studies Kaz’s face for a long moment. Something else itches at him. Pulling his attention away from the service – not that Jesper was ever paying any true attention. Like Jesper told Kaz before, he has no horse in this race. Kaz’s opinions on religion aren’t at all important.

Except that they are.

“You believed in this,” Jesper realises. He makes an aborted gesture towards the preacher. “You weren’t just dragged to church as a kid. You believed. No one gets this passionate about something they never believed in. They just don’t.”

Kaz doesn’t hit him, despite the sudden blackening of his gaze.

“Children will believe anything,” Kaz says. “Including that there is a magic man in the sky looking out for their family.”

Jesper notes the phrasing, but Kaz has turned his head.

“Family,” Jesper says. “Not you. Did you think Ghezen would protect your family? Did you have family, Kaz?”

Kaz doesn’t answer. Jesper raps on the wooden bench, forcing Kaz to look up – if only to chide him for making noise during the service and drawing attention to them.

“You had family, Kaz. Didn’t you?”

“Everyone is born somewhere,” Kaz replies coldly. He is still barely looking at Jesper’s face. “Just because you assumed I was abandoned on the street as a babe doesn’t make it true.”

“So you—what, grew up with them? Went to church with them? Had Sunday dinners and threw offerings into canals?”

Kaz’s mouth tightens.

“Don’t be trite,” Kaz says. “I admitted to having blood family, not being from a family of merchers like your dear Wylan. Don’t attribute what you know doesn’t fit.”

“But you went to church.”

Kaz goes quiet. “Yes,” he says after several long moments, “I went to church.”

Jesper turns his own eyes on the preacher. “You believed in it. You, Kaz Brekker, believed in Ghezen.”

“As I said.” Kaz rests his hands atop his cane. An odd twist to his expression. “Children will believe anything. Even from a conman.”

“You think religion is a con, too?”

“Isn’t it?” Kaz looks at him

Jesper’s mind ticks backwards. Slowly, smaller details that never made sense to Jesper—like the odd slanting of Kaz’s consonants when he gets mad, tipping from crisp to sharp, angular—steadily form a picture in Jesper’s mind.

“You’re southern, aren’t you?” Jesper doesn’t wait for Kaz’s confirmation. “You grew up on farmland, I’d wager. The only thing I can’t figure out is how you ended up here. Sent to an orphanage, maybe. I know there aren’t many in the south.”

But Ketterdam, as usual, has far too many.

Kaz, Jesper suddenly realises, looks both like he is seconds away from hitting Jesper, and sick. His skin has an ashen pallor that Jesper has only seen when Kaz is deep in the throes of fever.

But Kaz isn’t sick. Not physically, as far as Jesper can tell, but that means very little when it comes to Kaz.

“Our staging of Granida could be religion, if we tried hard enough.” Kaz leans back against the bench, visibly exhausted. It worries Jesper that Kaz is unwittingly letting it show. “Call Granida a goddess, a saint. Say she did impossible things. Say that we developed the play in her honour – to spread the word of her good deeds. Who knows? Within a year, we could have her installed as a saint based on no word except our own.”

A job within a job within a job. Jesper mentally re-evaluates Kaz’s imagined plotting. There is no way that Kaz isn’t running a con outside the one with Jesper. His eyes are fever-bright in the way they always get when he is charmed with his own cleverness, despite his otherwise ill health.

Jesper shakes his head. He senses that he has once more waded into treacherous waters, and the only option is to stop talking immediately before Kaz really does hit him.

The rest of the service passes in miscontent. Why Kaz dragged them back to the church, Jesper can’t even begin to fathom.

“Bastian Meerbeek?” a reedy, thin voice calls as they exit from the side of the church.

Kaz turns; Jesper follows.

Two men are standing in the alleyway outside the church. Kaz’s eyes flick over them. He makes a smooth gesture behind his back for Jesper to go to the end of the alleyway and flank them.

Jesper begins walking off, keeping his expression blank like Kaz, like these men, mean absolutely nothing to him. One of the men reach out and stop Jesper, who looks back at Kaz reflexively.

Kaz’s own expression remains guileless. He leans a little more weight into the plain wooden cane he had adopted for this job, his hair more dishevelled than usual.

“Can I help you?” Kaz asks.

Jesper gets punched. He wheezes as oxygen gets expelled from his body in one go, doubling over with the punch. Jesper fights every instinct to use his revolvers on the man, watching Kaz from the corner of his eye for a cue. He tries to stay slumped.

“There is no need for that!” Kaz cries in faux scandalised appal. He waves a hand at the men. “I hardly know this gentleman, much less what you want from me!”

“You work,” the first man, the one staring Kaz down and not holding Jesper, says slowly, “for Kaz Brekker. Our employer sends his regards.”

Fuck, Jesper thinks. He continues playing possum. Waiting for his cue.

Kaz smiles nastily.

“Your intel,” Kaz brings his cane high in the air, “is not as good as you claim.”

He brings the cane down on the man’s head, splitting with a wet thud like a watermelon cracking open.

Jesper hits the other man in the stomach, quickly, then pulls out his revolvers and shoots him twice through the chest.

“We need to move,” Jesper says. “No point waiting around for more of them.”

Kaz steps over the men bleeding on the floor. If Kaz’s target is still alive, he won’t be eating without assistance for months – maybe the rest of his life.

He lets Jesper take the lead in leading them out of the alleyway and out into the open streets. Kaz knows Ketterdam like the back of his hand, but there are limits to where even Dirtyhands can go without raising alarm. Without question. The Upper Stave is Jesper’s area, his home, however strange it still may seem.

It is the Upper Stave. Something that had taken Jesper several days to realise. Kaz lead them from the East where they were practicing with the Kommedie Brute, up through the West – in such a neat circuitous loop that Jesper hadn’t realised at all that the Church of Sacred Prospect fell into Mercher domain. No wonder, then, that they had so quickly pegged “Bastian Meerbeek” for an intruder, and no wonder that the baker, it seems, was also part of the con.

If Jesper had known, he would have been on the lookout. He could have helped Kaz from whatever made him – got him identified on the job. But knowing Kaz, he either didn’t care to prevent being caught, or he intended it. Maybe both.

Jesper’s own intuition is strong. He takes them out through the right of the church, ducking down into the gardens below. There is a canal nearby where they can commandeer a narrowboat and escape down the waterflow to the Zelverstraadt, Jesper thinks.

Something prickles at the back of his neck. Jesper turns in time to shoot at the man approaching behind Kaz’s back. Kaz whirls and finishes off the man with a twirl of his coat, silver knife flashing out of Kaz’s sleeve and just as quickly back into it.

Kaz is limping more heavily, now. Taking his weight off it to use his cane against that first man – it hurt Kaz. Maybe he hadn’t been leaning on it for show. Trying to learn into the poor young Mercher mask of Bastian Meerbeek. Maybe he really had needed it more today. With the rain.

Jesper ignores the flash of guilt that runs through him. If Kaz wants to be a contrary bastard and hide from his own needs, that isn’t Jesper’s issue. He isn’t going to fight for Kaz to get some rest.

“Done playing with your food?” Jesper throws at Kaz, who looks up, face flecked with blood. “There’s a canal nearby. If we hurry, we can catch the next narrowboat.”

Kaz’s mouth thins out the way it always does when someone mentions the harbour, or canals, but Jesper is too tired to parse what it means. His blood thrums at the promise of a good fight.

They barrel around the corner, moving as fast as they can with Kaz’s leg—which is still, Jesper thinks sometimes, faster than he should be able to—and nearly run headlong into more men moving threateningly toward them.

Jesper rapidly shoots two in the chest, Kaz swinging in with his cane. It must be weighted, Jesper thinks, but he spots a silver knife flashing out from the end as well. Kaz cuts one on the arm.

The men force them back. Jesper tries to gain further distance, unwilling to risk shooting Kaz at such a short distance. Jesper glances over his shoulder and spots a ladder leading to the rooftops. He opens his mouth to tell Kaz, but Kaz has already noticed and is moving steadily towards it. Jesper fires off more shots to cover Kaz and quickly climbs up after Kaz, who is already halfway up the ladder.

Their saving grace is that none of the men brought firearms, expecting a quiet, subdued fight from one civilian mercher with no sense in his brains. It doesn’t stop one from throwing a knife, forcing Jesper to duck. It narrowly misses Kaz’s moving leg.

The men are wary to approach because of Jesper’s pistols, taking cover behind some crates in the alley. Kaz and Jesper take advantage, getting onto the roof. The benefit of living in a city with narrow streets is that it’s a short jump onto the next roof.

For a moment, Jesper thinks they can make it all the way to the canal, but it seems their luck has finally run out.

Some of the men are climbing onto the rooftop from the opposite side to Jesper and Kaz. Jesper says something foul in Fjerdan that would have his father washing his mouth out with soap, if he heard, but Jesper would argue that it being in Fjerdan should excuse him on principle.

“Head to the canal,” Kaz barks at Jesper, removing a throwing knife from his vest. “We’re getting pinned here. You take out the ones in the alley and I’ll handle this lot.”

Jesper knows better than to argue. “Got it, Kaz.”

He quickly gets onto his stomach to avoid any stray shots or knives and takes potshots down into the alleyway. The angle is difficult, with the crates, but Jesper spots something metallic flashing behind the men camped in the alleyway. He ricochets his next few shots off the metal, letting the bullets slam into the men. One, two, three all down. Jesper pats himself on the back for a job well done. He scans the alleyway for more men but all that’s left seem to be on the rooftop.

Jesper props himself back up and finds that Kaz has done a decent job taking them out. Kaz is never without weapons. Even discounting his cane, he carries more knives with him these days than he ever did as a Dregs lieutenant. Being a Barrel boss makes you wary like that.

None of them have guns. Jesper grins and takes advantage. He knows he is running out of bullets, so Jesper takes a knife that Kaz gets close enough to palm off to him and sets out cornering one of the remaining men. There are maybe two, three left on the roof, the rest either dead on the ground or too badly injured to move. Kaz isn’t one for mercy. Considering they just tried to kill Jesper alongside him, Jesper isn’t feeling particularly generous either.

Jesper has on the verge of giving up. He can see it in the man’s eyes, the way they keep roaming past Jesper, mouth tight. Jesper takes advantage and sticks the knife in his shoulder, the man howling in pain. Jesper can hear Kaz behind him engaging what sounds like the final two men, judging by the number of knives he can hear slashing through the air. A distinct, whistling sound, made obvious by the wind on the rooftop.

Well. Better help the bastard before he gets killed.

Jesper turns in time to see Kaz fall from the roof.

Kaz’s vision whites out.

He thinks—absurdly—of the coin in his safe. The oleander leaves ringing its smooth surface.

It doesn’t mean anything. Too much time in churches and too little time with his head in paperwork.

Get up, Kaz thinks. Get up.

His whole body feels – stunned. Speared through like a Fjerdan fish. White-hot pain lances through his leg when Kaz tries shifting and he immediately goes cold.

Something in his chest breaks. Kaz breathes out slowly, carefully. His entire back is spasming. Muscle lashing out against him, resisting the impact of the fall. Kaz tries moving his leg a fraction, and immediately stops. He turns to spit on the ground and lets his head fall back.

This sort of pain – you have to wait it out. Kaz tracks the rise and fall of his chest. Waiting for his paralysed body to respond. I’m alive, he reminds himself. I’m alive.

It’s too soon to tell if his leg is broken. Kaz can’t even feel which leg it is. His good leg, or previously broken leg.

The pain makes his mind cloudy. Unfocused. Kaz goes very still and stares at the lavender sky. The sky wasn’t lavender when Kaz’s father died, and it wasn’t lavender when Jordie died.

Bright, clear grey for his father. Kaz can’t remember for Jordie. He imagines it was night. It felt dark and cold, but maybe that was just Kaz.

Kaz never thinks of his father. Again, this is the churches – fucking Jesper pushing and prodding and prying, making these thoughts leap at him like a viper in the grass. But Kaz isn’t thinking. The sky – it’s lavender, but it almost looks grey. Kaz’s vision is grey enough. Growing greyer as the pain doesn’t stop, doesn’t fade, just begins to throb viciously like Kaz really did break his leg, again, femur splitting open and bone shards shattering on the street. Maybe they could sell them. Come collect your piece of Dirtyhands’ bones.  Sell it for a premium. Do business like the merchers, Kaz, don’t act like a farmer.

He drifts. White on grey on lavender.

His father once took him into Lij for the markets. In the beginning of the end. They were from Liij district but not Liij itself – Kaz and their family lived two towns over, where the fields were better. But Lij was bigger, and had its name on maps, while Kaz’s village didn’t.

The markets were where the deals were made; how famers bargain for better deals with the consumers.

“Our produce gets bought by the cities,” his father said, a guiding hand on Kaz’s shoulder as they walked through the markets. “Big merchers who then mark up the price and sell it to people in stores and street stalls. Like this, see?”

“Why can’t we sell it to people directly?” Kaz asked his father, nine years old and already following keenly.

His father scratched his beard. “It’s difficult,” he admitted. “We’re out here, and they’re in the city. We’d have to produce it, transport it, market it, sell it, and then get the profits back here. It’s too much.”

“But we could do it,” Kaz insisted. He looked across the market to the farmers trying to work out better deals with the representatives of the merchers. Not the merchers themselves. Big men never came to Lij – Kaz knew that even then. Big men don’t make deals in person. They send others to do the dirty work for them.

“Kaz,” his father sighed again, but his lips curved in amusement. He ruffled Kaz’s hair. “What am I going to do with you, boy? Should send you to church more often, I think. Keep you out of trouble.”

“I’ll make trouble there,” Kaz declared, before spying a stall selling huspot and begging for his father to get them a portion. Two kruge for a serving. Five kruge for two.

His father shook his head.

“Don’t you want something else? Poffertjes, maybe?” his father suggested encouragingly. “They do them with chocolate and powdered sugar, here.”

“Hutspot,” Kaz said firmly, before remembering his manners. “Please, Da.”

His father was never much of a cook. Never picked up the habit—not truly—after their mother died. Mostly, he focused on keeping his boys fed. Simple recipes. Cheap recipes. Hutspot was his speciality. Mashed potatoes with onion and carrot. For Kaz, who often struggled with remembering to eat, and then being able to finish the monotonous task of chewing and swallowing, the hutspot was perfect.

Kaz wants his father’s hutspot. For a moment, he longs for it so keenly that he feels it in his teeth, knocking the back of his throat. But they can’t all get what they want.

The pain has faded enough that Kaz feels confident raising his head off the ground, bitting back a cry as it jostles his leg.

Kaz hears two distant shots—Jesper? —before Jesper is suddenly kneeling by Kaz’s side and whistling at the wound. He doesn’t seem to notice the blood on his face. His collar.

“Ghezen, Kaz,” Jesper says lowly. He shakes his head. “You need a medik. Probably a healer.”

“I’ll walk it off,” Kaz says, but he is still drifting. He can’t quite place Jesper’s eyes. “I’m not about to lose the damn leg, am I?”

“No.” Jesper’s response comes slowly. “But I can’t be sure you didn’t break your back.”

Kaz snorts. He tries to sit up, to brush off Jesper’s concern, but chokes back a scream at the nothingness that envelopes his spine. Like sticking your hand in the river. Like closing a fist around a bulrush, packed cotton exploding against your palm. Like the grinding chain of a safe being lowered to ground floor. Nothing and everything at once.

For the first time, a flash of true terror licks up Kaz’s spine.

“I need to get a healer,” Jesper says over Kaz, hovering. “I’m—sorry, Kaz, I’ll be right back.”

“No—” Kaz reaches out and grabs hold of Jesper’s ankle through the trousers, tugging. “Don’t go.”

Jesper squats. He gently knocks Kaz’s hand away using his elbow, avoiding skin-to-skin.

“I have no choice,” Jesper says apologetically. “I know you’re hurt and vulnerable right now but I can’t risk moving you right now. Please be sensible and wait here.”

“Vanderwald’s men,” Kaz manages to get out. “The roof.”

Jesper shakes his head.

“I shot the rest,” he says. “After you fell. Used my last bullets, but it’ll be fine as long as we don’t run into anymore. I was trying to save the bullets for if we found someone with  a pistol too, but you scared the living daylights out of me. Bad enough that I shot first and still haven’t asked questions. I swear to you Kaz, I’ll be fast. But I can’t stay.”

Kaz lets his hand fall the rest of the way. He’s floating again. He turns his face to the sky.

He isn’t dying, he doesn’t think. Not from the injuries. If infection takes root—guts out the wound—

Then he really will be rotten on the inside. Physically, not just spiritually the way everyone says. One of the merchers on the East Stave said that if Kaz had a soul, he would have been thrice damned by Ghezen already, to which Kaz retorted that he can’t be damned, Ghezien doesn’t do that, only your own actions can, except; except that the memory is wrong, he never said that. Only the mercher did. Kaz, in response, had simply laughed, because the mercher was originally Fjerdan and thus was not worth a lick of Kaz’s time. Not for business or debate.

Kaz’s eyes fall on the sign out the front of the building.

Restaurant: geopend.

At least it wasn’t a fucking bank again. When Kaz fell the first time, he spent a month fielding off twitchy young runners—younger than Kaz, younger and desperate enough that some of them went canal-fishing on their off-days—telling him that it was a bad omen. Ba-ad omen, Kaz. A sign from Ghezen that he had fallen from favour.

You shouldn’t have accidents in a place of commerce. That’s Ghezen’s domain.

Kaz had eventually threatened them all with a knife for some peace. What had believing in signs and Ghezen ever done for Kaz?

Shame runs through him for grasping at Jesper like a scared child. He pushes his pain to the side. Packs it away for later. Despite the frissions of fear still clamouring for his attention, Kaz takes a deep breath and sets up in one go.

His back screams. Kaz keeps his mouth shut and waits it out. Despite the way his back has locked on him, freezing against his will, he doesn’t think it’s broken. Stress fractures, maybe, but nothing broken, nothing displaced.

Kaz takes the moment to look down at his leg. For a second, he can see it crooked, see it wrong, see the shattered edges of femur pressing against his skin, Kaz’s fear so palpable he tastes metal. Then the moment passes, allowing him to see that his leg—both—is not visibly disfigured or broken.

In the time it takes Jesper to return, Kaz has crawled his way to a nearby dead body and taken the pistol from his holster. Jesper finds Kaz sitting against the wall of the alley, sitting with one arm tucked underneath his armpit and the other resting on top, keeping the pistol levelled at the alley.

Jesper isn’t alone. The medik—healer? —is a young woman all in white, looking all the world like she would rather be anywhere else. She casts a glare at Jesper.

“Triple my rate,” she threatens Jesper, “like you said, or I swear I’ll let this bastard die.”

Healer, Kaz realises, from the White Rose. Like Nina was before he bought out her indenture. Kaz hasn’t frequented the White Rose in years, and last he checked they didn’t have a branch in the Upper Stave. Only the Barrel. He questions, quickly, how Jesper coincidentally found an indentured healer wandering around the Upper Side but puts that thought aside for later.

What she cannot, and will not, know is Kaz’s identity. Despite Kaz’s reputation, few outside the Barrel can recognise him by sight, relying on his crow-headed cane as proof of identity. But Kaz’s cane is gone – flung further from the roof than Kaz can follow or broken in pieces.

Kaz frowns at her. He doesn’t recognise her, and he would remember a Grisha with a shock of Kaelish-red hair in Ketterdam. Which means she is calling him a bastard out of the presumption of who Kaz must be. That is, a gangster.

Jesper’s face pinches.

“Heal him, and I’ll pay whatever you want,” he says, then tucks a hand on his revolvers. “But I swear, if you don’t follow through on your end, I’ll kill you myself.”

The woman shrugs it off. Kaz is too tired to fight as she places her hands on his leg, but he lashes out with his tongue.

“It’s my broken leg,” Kaz says crossly. “Keep your hands off it.”

The woman rolls her eyes and does not remove her hands. Jesper drags a hand over his face and flicks both hands at Kaz.

“Let her help,” Jesper pleads. “Saints, if I bring you home like this, Inej will kill me.”

Inej, a fairly common enough name for Kerch, passes over the woman’s head.

“She won’t see,” Kaz responds, short as the woman begins healing. He knocks his head against the wall, drained. Kaz waves a hand through the air. “Besides, the healer has already started, without my consent.” The woman ignores Kaz. “Inej will never have to know.”

“You can’t keep falling from rooftops, you lucky bastard. I swear, I have never seen anyone with better luck than you.”

Kaz smiles coolly. Pain thrums in his leg, his elbows, his joints. Whatever the woman is doing has taken the pain from the break and dispersed it throughout his body.

“Luck isn’t given,” Kaz says. “It’s created.”

 Jesper shakes his head.

“Just the leg.” The woman looks up, brushing off her hands like Kaz’s body is dirty. His clothes, more likely. “Nothing else is broken. He’s lucky that he broke the other leg – if he had done that femur twice, he wouldn’t just be limping. I doubt he would be walking at all.”

“Thank you for your vote of confidence,” Kaz says icily, but Jesper throws up an impatient hand to stop him. It shocks Kaz into silence.

“It’s healed?” Jesper presses. “No more recovery time, rest?”

She shrugs. “His body is a mess. You paid for the leg, so I fixed the leg. This one, anyway. He’ll be able to walk but if I were him, I wouldn’t go running around for a few days. The bone will be fragile.”

Kaz tests out his newly un-broken leg and finds it delicate, but not painful. Out of habit, Kaz reaches for his other leg, checking that she didn’t heal the old break without him knowing. The throbbing of his thigh answers that question for Kaz, and while he isn’t pleased about the pain of the leg, of using a cane, it’s his injury. His old break. His leg that never healed, reminding him of his hubris and his grief and his determination. Kaz hadn’t been ready for Pekka Rollins when he broke his leg. But after—after, with the cane and the mythos he constructed brick by brick—he truly became something fearsome. A demjin.

The healer opens a cheque book—really? —and scribbles out her price. Jesper signs without looking and isn’t that a sign of how far he has climbed in the world. The woman raises her eyebrows but doesn’t comment, simply turning on her heel and calmly walking away from the alley.

Onto the next problem.

“My cane,” Kaz admits reluctantly. “I can’t find it.”

“Hang on.” Jesper casts around for the cane, walking up and down the cobblestones until he lets out a triumphant cry and straightens, holding pieces of Kaz’s cane in the air.

He pads back to Kaz and crouches beside him. Jesper looks over his shoulder and shuffles closer to Kaz, concealing his movements from any pigeon who happens to walk past. Jesper closes his hands around the clean break of his cane and shuts his eyes, concentrating. When Jesper opens his palms, Kaz’s cane is whole once more.

Jesper passes Kaz the cane, who uses it to lever himself to his feet.

He resists the urge to push Jesper and run. There is no shame in accepting help from Jesper. Not after what they have been through. But Kaz still feels it itching beneath his skin, writhing to the surface. Ringing like a bell through his mind: don’t trust anyone. Don’t show weakness.

Kaz clears his throat. “Back to business.”

Jesper rolls his eyes so strongly that Kaz almost thinks they will fall out of his head.

“You and your business,” Jesper grumbles, but he sticks close to Kaz’s side as they walk out of the alley.

Chapter Text

Dear god, shout it from the rooftops. I’ll hate you all the more for silence—tell the world! 

Despite Jesper fixing his cane, and the healer more-or-less fixing his leg, it doesn’t change the purpling bruises along Kaz’s back. It hurts. Hurts to breathe and hurts to walk; every step jostling the sprained muscles. Hitting the ground leaves damage.

Kaz doesn’t mention this to Jesper, especially since Jesper paid out the nose for the healer. Kaz will remind Jesper of this later. Don’t get scammed, no matter how rich you are now. Kaz’s mind is scattered, trying to move forward despite the shocks still running through him.

For a moment, Kaz thought he had broken his back. That would have been the end of Dirtyhands. Not the end of Kaz Brekker—plague, Pekka rollins, tractor accidents and falls all failing to bring him down—but the end of the only life Kaz wants to live. What is left, without Dirtyhands? Just the farm boy who pulled himself out of the gutter.

Kaz is slow. Jesper keeps slowing to let Kaz catch up, trying not to make it obvious. Kaz ignores him. Calling attention to it would only be more embarrassing when Kaz proves that he can’t keep up with Jesper.

“We need to go to the zelverstraadt,” Kaz says shortly.

Jesper turns his head. “The zelverstraadt? What do we need there?”

“Not what,” Kaz says.

Jesper groans. “For once, can you just explain, Kaz? You just fell from a roof. That’s not exactly a great sign.”

“It wasn’t a bank.”

Jesper pauses. “I know. I didn’t say it was. Why, did you think it would be a bank?”

“I knew it wasn’t.”

“That implies you checked.”

“If it was a bank,” Kaz forges onwards, “or some other place of commerce, I would have stopped to rob it.”

Jesper scents blood. He skips up to Kaz. “You asked because you’re religious,” Jesper announces with delight. “You as good as admitted to it in the church. Everyone knows that accidents near places of commerce are bad signs.”

“No such thing.” Irritation sparks through Kaz. He levels a glare at Jesper. “Accidents are accidents.”

“But you checked,” Jesper says again. He valiantly suppresses a smile, but Kaz can see it twitching at the corners of his mouth. It temporarily washes the lingering fear off Jesper’s face. “You so went to church as a kid. Me? We didn’t have churches. We had nature and animal spirits. I wasn’t dragged to church so much as dragged outside to sit in the sun. Very different.”

“I didn’t go to church.”

“You already admitted it, Kaz, just give in.”

“I didn’t,” Kaz insists, now truly annoyed with Jesper.

It’s true, for once. Kaz never went to church. Apparently, his mother was the pious one, and after she died, the whole family stopped. Kaz was firstly too young to attend, then too young to remember the family stopping. Jordie was pleased for it. Kaz remembers that much. No more stuffy collars and sermons on giving back to your community. It’s pious to earn money. It’s even more pious to spend it, letting the economy circulate.

The man they traded wheat for apples with used to pinch Kaz’s cheeks and tell him that farmers are the key to everything, including the Church of Ghezien.

“We keep the whole island running,” he said in his smoker’s voice. “Without us, no one would be alive, much less earning money. We’re the centre of it all. Never forget that Kaz. Its why farmers are so honoured. We spend money for our crops and livestock, which gets sold, then gets cooked and consumed by people who go and purchase it all again. No better way to honour Ghezien, Kaz. It’s the ultimate offering.”

His Da used to threaten the two of them with church if they didn’t do their chores. The closest they came to worship was at the family altar.

Most people in their town worshipped at altars like that. Churches were for bigger towns. Places where you didn’t have to travel an hour just to encounter the next property. But their mother used to make the trip, before Kaz was born. She came from a bigger place. A city, someone said. Kaz doesn’t think of her often.

But he thinks of her oleander coin, now.

“Fine!”  Jesper throws his hands up. “You never went to church, okay. But you did something.”

“Zelverstraadt,” Kaz reminds him. “Our priority for the day.”

“Shooting people wasn’t enough? Fine. Let’s go shoot more of Vanderwald’s men.”

“Enough shooting,” Kaz says firmly. “We have other things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Like making it to the zelverstraadt in one piece.”

Jesper rolls his eyes. They reach the canal, Jesper reaching out to untie a narrowboat and pull it closer to them. He motions for Kaz to get in first, Jesper holding it steady.

Kaz doesn’t argue. He hates boats, and he hates getting into them even more. He gingerly lowers himself into the boat, each rock of the boat tugging at his back. Kaz bites back a groan.

Jesper climbs in quickly after Kaz.

“Fastest way to the zelverstraadt from here,” he reminds Kaz pointlessly. “It won’t take long, Kaz. It’s also best to avoid you walking right now.”

“Just start rowing,” Kaz says. He wraps his hands around his cane like a lifeline and closes his eyes.

Jesper is right – it doesn’t take them long to arrive at the zelverstraadt, centre of most commerce practices and trades in Ketterdam. The country, even.

“Where to now, boss?” Jesper says with only a hint of mocking.

Kaz ignores him. He places his cane on the side of the boat and gradually levers himself up. Kaz inelegantly climbs out of the boat and quickly moves away from the water that still coats his tongue with bile.

“Okay, then,” Jesper comments calmly. “Another Kaz special. I’ll find out right at the end, yeah?”

But he follows Kaz deep into the zelverstraat without argument.

Kaz stops outside Lukas Vanderwald’s house. It’s buried deep in the zelverstraadt and isn’t obvious to anyone passing by. From the outside, it looks like it could be another commercial centre, and not a private residence buried between a bank and a consultant company. The tall building is modern, converted. Formerly owned by an investment banker, if Kaz’s information is correct.

“This,” Kaz says calmly, knowing Jesper is directly behind him, “is where we are robbing.”

Jesper lets out a whistle. “I can see why we needed a con, now.”

With the house being surrounded by the most profitable businesses in Ketterdam, the entire district is littered with guard dogs, security guards, alarm systems, and spying neighbours. The stadwatch patrols the zelverstraat the most out of any Ketterdam district, barring the Upper Stave. It is hardly an easy place to break into. It would be nearly impossible for anyone else.

“The theatre troupe will get us inside for a private viewing, if all goes well,” Kaz says, knowing full well that he will make it go well, “giving us access to the house and the ability to take what we need. Take the goods, rejoin the troupe, and slip out the way we came.”

“Simple.” Jesper raises an eyebrow. “Too simple for you, Kaz. What do we need with the church and the emeralds you talked about? Why did I get a key copied?”

Kaz ignores him. “Just focus on this house. The locks are all made from a specific combination of metals designed to make it hard for any durasts to break down or alter. Do you think you can manage?”

“What, all the locks in the house?” Jesper cocks his head. “It’s impossible to tell without getting closer, but the actual shape of the locks? I can manage them fine.”

“I’ll give you the formula. Share it with Wylan and work out a way to get through the locks.”

“For the safes, right?”

“And anything else we need access to, besides the main doors.”

“Right.” Jesper visibly bites back the rest of his questions, amusement stealing across his face. “I’m just waiting to find out where the emeralds and the key come into play.”

“Nothing you need to worry about.”

Jesper rolls his eyes. “You’ll keep saying that right up until I do need to worry about it. Please don’t fall off any more buildings, Kaz. I already spent way too much money on that healer.”

“I fell from that roof, actually.” Kaz doesn’t know why he does it, but he points towards a bank across the street. “Broke my leg the first time.”

Jesper tracks Kaz’s gesture. His eyebrows shoot up.

“Shit, Kaz. That’s at least two storeys. You survived that? There is absolutely nothing around that building that could have broken your fall.”

“The human body can endure up to a four-storey fall without death, unless you hit your head.”

“Still.” Jesper shakes his head, then stops. He visibly does the math. “Hang on, Kaz. We met when we were fifteen, and you already had your cane. How young were you when you fell?”

“Young enough,” Kaz says smoothly. His hands itch. Everything itches with the need to keep moving. To run from Jesper.

Why did he say that? Kaz hasn’t told anybody how he hurt his leg. Anyone. Even Inej.

The bloody church, stirring up memories like silt in water. Then the fall. Everything is mixed up. Slipping through Kaz’s fingers. Walking into a dream.

“The stories you tell…” Jesper starts. He shakes his head again. “Maybe you really are a demjin.”

“No such thing. Demjins are a story the Fjerdans tell themselves to feel better about all the things they don’t understand.”

“Like Grisha,” Jesper says, then shakes his head. He looks at the house thoughtfully, his fingers drumming against his thighs. “I know, but sometimes I wonder, Kaz.”

Kaz checks his pocket watch. “I’ll give you three hours to study the formula. I need you ready for tonight.”

“But we aren’t staging Granida for another week,” Jesper cries, alarmed. “What do we need from the house tonight?”

“Nothing.” Kaz leans heavily on his cane.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

Jesper rolls his eyes. “Test run, then. You want to make sure that if my abilities can’t get us in, then we have a backup from Wylan. You could have just asked Wy to make you a corrosive compound.”

“Would he have done it?”

Jesper wiggles his hand. “Fifty-fifty shot, depending on the day. He likes you well enough, and he hates Vanderwald. But enough to risk his career for the Dregs? I don’t know.”

Kaz shrugs. “This is simpler.”

“Simpler?”

“Yes.” Kaz checks his watch again. “I need Wylan to have more than just plausible deniability. I need complete deniability.”

“He needs an alibi,” Jesper realises. “And a believable reaction. Wylan’s a good actor, and you know that, Kaz. He was brilliant with the market scheme.”

Kaz shrugs. He begins walking away from the house, Jesper quickly catching up to him.

“He was good then, yes,” Kaz allows, “but Wylan is an honest person. I’d rather keep him in the dark until necessary.”

“And what would make it necessary?” Jesper increases his pace, nearly overtaking Kaz with his stupidly long legs.

“When it becomes necessary.”

“Wow.” Jesper shakes his head. “Illustrative, Kaz.”

“I try.”

Jesper sighs. “When do you need this test run?”

“Seven bells.”

“That’s early.” Jesper’s eyebrows shoot up, and he unconsciously checks his pistols. “Why not wait until it’s darker?”

“Too dark, and we look like thieves. Too early, and they will realise we’re there. At seven bells,” Kaz explains smoothly, diverting them down a side alley, “we look like security contractors. Making a routine sweep through the zelverstraadt.”

It isn’t uncommon for the Merchers to pay for the stadwatch and the security contractors to do special checks on their properties. Perpetually worried about losing even a drop of their ill-gained wealth.

“That’s our ruse, then.” Jesper grins. “Oh this is going to be fun.”

“Isn’t that why you agreed?” Kaz turns his shark-eyes on Jesper, nearly smiling himself. “By the time we are done, Vanderwald will be ruined. I guarantee it.”

They both know that Kaz’s guarantees are carved from rock.

“I look forward to it,” Jesper says honestly.

They round another corner and Jesper stops, realising they are on the same block as his house with Wylan. Kaz watches him in amusement.

“I know my way around,” Kaz says. “Do you?”

“I thought I did.” Jesper keeps looking around. “But I have no idea how we got here from the zelverstraadt.”

Kaz shrugs. He leans onto his cane. “Time to brush up on your geography, Jesper. Remember, seven bells. Don’t be late.”

Jesper gives a mocking salute and trots down the street to his house, no doubt planning excuses for Wylan. Jesper is smart. Although Wylan knows that Jesper is involved in a job for Kaz, the less Wylan knows about the details, the better it looks if he is called into an investigation later.

Kaz turns his head and realises he is standing directly outside a church. Not the Church of Sacred Provision. A smaller, but no-less wealthy church, designed for the leisurely Sunday visits of the Upper Stave residents.

Kaz knows the fall really did rattle his brains, because for some unfathomable reason, he walks inside.

In the grand scheme of things, Kerch is a small place. It comes with being an island. Half of Kerch’s population live in Ketterdam, while the other half live in the countryside. Kaz’s life is a fifty-fifty split of the two most common experiences in the whole island. Farm boy turned city rat.

Kerch has been monotheistic for nearly its entire existence, raised from rock and supported by the cloaked Council of Tides that Kaz so wisely pissed off in dealing with Jan Van Eck. There is nothing secret, nothing unknown about Kaz’s childhood rituals of kneeling by their family altar, praying to Ghezien—Ghezen, forget it, Kaz—and placing coins in the smooth white dish. It isn’t private. Everyone in Kerch has a similar memory. It is the childhood of nearly every person in Kerch who grew up even minimally religious.

Nor, too, is there anything particularly special about Kaz’s childhood of farm chores and climbing apple trees. Falling out of the tree at eight and breaking his left arm, nursed by his father’s simple tomato soup.

The nature of childhood is that everything feels secret, sacred, anyway. Childhood is not shared. Kaz’s family altar wasn’t anyone else’s family altar. His mother’s picture rested there, along with her final offering to Ghezien—a bronze coin ringed with oleander leaves—immortalised on the offering dish, until they sold the house.

Kaz’s father was never particularly pious. He said religion could bring no comfort for anyone except the dead and dying. But he never moved the coin.

When their father died, Jordie—thirteen years old—ripped the whole altar down. He didn’t do it in front of Kaz. Kaz wandered inside for a final look at the house they would soon leave behind forever, and found the dish shattered on the ground. He hated Jordie intensely in that moment. Hated him enough to be sick.

He still can’t explain what drove him to pocket their mother’s coin. It doesn’t matter, anyway, only that he did. Keeping it safe from Jordie’s rage. Jordie’s foolishness. Bustling around with a fevered energy that scared Kaz.

In the end, it wasn’t safe from Kaz’s foolishness, either. It fell into the harbour with Kaz and Jordie, and only Kaz crawled back out.

Kaz takes a seat inside the church and looks at the open palm of Ghezen resting in the centre of the church. Smooth, white marble. There was a church in Lij that had a stone palm half the size of this one. Their mother, according to their nosy neighbour, used to make the trip to Lij to visit that church. When their father took Kaz and Jordie to Lij, they walked quickly past the church without stopping.

Kaz’s lip curls with distaste. It feels wrong, sitting in the church. Stifling. At any moment, a preacher will come along and tell Kaz to leave, sensing the wrongness of it dripping from Kaz’s skin.

Praying to gods and saints has never helped anyone, no matter what Inej believes. He cannot share her faith. He cannot tell her that he did, once. That he would kneel by the altar and hold his mother’s coin in hand, thinking of what to share with Ghezien. You cannot miss a mother you never met. But he could feel it, sometimes. The outline of what was missing.

Kaz would pray for a good crop that year so that their father could look less worried, and they could buy chicken to eat for once. Kaz prayed that the village school—run by an unmarried woman named Marta, greying and unworried—would bring in a real math teacher from the city, so that Kaz could learn multiplication. He prayed that Jordie would stop skipping school. Jordie wouldn’t work on the farm, and he wouldn’t go to school. He spent his days dreaming and walking, walking and dreaming.

If there was a Ghezien, his father wouldn’t have died. Jordie wouldn’t have gotten sick.

But Kaz looks at the palm of Ghezen and remembers what it was like to have that kind of faith. The endless hope that things would be alright, because no matter how things got, no matter how cold the nights were sleeping in the gutter, there was a god up there. There was Ghezien, and everything would be alright. He just had to hold on.

Well, Kaz held on. He held on through Jordie’s first night racked with coughs, and the first night of his own fever, and he slipped into sleep thinking it would be for the best, that either they would both wake into the after-life—whatever that was—together, or they would both wake up dead.

Now, he knows that he was being laughed at.

Kaz’s hand tightens around his cane, and he suddenly wants to hit something. He refrains; in case someone really is watching.

Choosing to run a job that involves churches so heavily was, Kaz can admit, perhaps a bad idea. He thought it wouldn’t hurt him. The market job involved a church, too, and a faked plague, and the auction. It shouldn’t hurt him, and yet his heart rattles around his chest. That blackened, old thing.

Kaz doesn’t have a conscience, and he doesn’t have religion, but he sticks to any deal he offers and, in some circles, that is praise to Ghezen enough.

He wonders what they would think about him falling from a bank. They’d probably laugh themselves sick.

Kaz could have used it to further his legend, in some strange way. Another sign of him being forsaken by Ghezen. Not a demjin, because Kerch legend doesn’t believe in those, but something else. Something wrong.

But Kaz feels wrong enough, these days.

Please. Please. Please.

Kaz will never know why Jordie—older, stronger, healthier—succumbed first. Whether something inside him gave out before it did in Kaz. They said, later, that it was mostly children and the elderly that were hit hardest. Jordie got it first, and he got it worse. Kaz wasted days trying to find food and medicine for Jordie. Wiping Jordie’s mouth. Trying to clean away the oozing pus of the sores all over his body. Kaz ran and ran and ran around the streets of the Barrel, trying to find something to save his brother. They had no money for medicine and the entire city had locked up their stores tight. Everyone in the Barrel was looking for medicine, and if anyone had anything left to sell, it was out of Kaz’s price range even if he still had all Jordie’s money from the sugar scam.

Taking care of Jordie was likely how Kaz himself got sick. Kaz didn’t care. He was scared and sick but refused to leave his brother.

“Ghezien protect us,” Jordie said, eyes glassy and blank during one of his more lucid moments. Praying to a god he never believed in, alternating between scoffing and spitting when he walked past the town altar. “Please.”

There would be no mercy for Jordie and Kaz. Not from Ghezien, and certainly not from Ketterdam.

 The test.

Jesper meets Kaz the street down from the zelverstraadt, wearing a grey outfit and gaudy accessories that passes, superficially enough, as something a security contractor would wear. Famously wealth because of all the bribes they receive to either deviate from their route and check on another Mercher’s house instead, or to look the other way at strategic business sabotage.

“Wylan’s onto us,” Jesper warns once he is close enough for Kaz to hear. “He doesn’t want to know any of it, but he’s smart. He’s starting to work it out even without me telling him.”

Kaz shrugs. “We’ll be quick. Do you have what you need?"

Jesper withdraws a small bottle from inside his jacket. He grimaces.

"Wy says we can't use anything stronger without making it obvious that the locks have been degraded," Jesper says. "This should make it possible for me to undo the locks, but it'll still take time. Can you just pick the locks instead, Kaz?"

"I'm needed elsewhere," Kaz says. He doesn't bother explaining. "And there is no lock to pick."

"What do you mean?" Jesper shifts. 

Kaz contemplates whether to explain. He sighs, and does.

"There aren't locking mechanisms, per se. The locks are Fabrikator-made. They only open with a durast. I'm assuming Vanderwald keeps one, either hired or indentured. I have the formula for the chemical they use to prevent other durasts from opening the locks themselves, but the solution to break it down is kept even more hidden. Only the durast themselves would have the solution, and my sources tell me there's a man who never leaves the Vanderwald house."

"So you can only get to the house through the durast, who never leaves the house themselves. Shit, I hope this works." Jesper doesn't seem confident. "This could go really badly, Kaz."

"Hence the test run," Kaz reminds him. "This is our only through the locks. We can get in with the Kommedie Brute, but we need a way to his office, and to let ourselves out if they see through the ruse."

Jesper's fingers twitch like he wants to reach for his pistols. He places the solution back inside his pocket.

"Let's give it a go," he says.

They enter the zelverstraadt with fake credentials flashed by Kaz and make their way along the street in a convincing sweep pattern. Jesper saunters ahead while Kaz lingers behind, maintaining the ruse.

It doesn’t take long to arrive at Vanderwald’s house. Jesper steps confidently up to the driveway with his light firmly in hand. Kaz takes to the bushes, waiting in the dark. Jesper walks all the way up to the front door with an unhurried ease, looking all the world like he is testing the locks instead of undoing them. Kaz brings out his pocket watch and counts down the time.

Jesper drops a small amount of the formula into the lock, tilting the bottle awkwardly. He turns over his head to mouth, remind me to get a dropper, then turns back. Jesper places his hand over the lock and focuses. 

It takes nearly two minutes for Jesper to step back from the locks. He nods at Kaz, who puts his watch away. They meet back on the street and quickly finish their pretend sweep, escaping down an alley and away from the zelverstraadt before anyone can see through them. 

Out of sight, Jesper slowly exhales.

“That took too long, Kaz.”

“It did,” Kaz agrees, frowning. “If the plans—”

“What plans?”

“—are correct, then we have five locks to get through. Ten minutes for a durast means at least twelve for me, even if there wasn't the compound on all the locks. If there was even one more mechanism, I could get through the locks, but I can't."

Jesper doesn’t argue at Kaz placing himself only slightly below a durast. He cocks his head.

"We must really be screwed for you to be admitting you can't do something," Jesper says. He folds his arms and tips his head. "It's too long, Kaz. There are too many things that could go wrong in that time.”

“We’ll have to hope that the play takes up their attention,” Kaz says.

“You mean we need to make it take up their attention.”

Kaz shrugs. “Isn’t that the same thing?”

“It’s going to be a problem,” Jesper says again. “We’re both supposed to be on for nearly all of the scenes, and intermission only runs for so long. Have a plan for that, Kaz?”

“One or two,” Kaz says easily, and nothing further.

“How long left?” Jesper drags a hand over his face. “Until we stage, I mean.”

“One day,” Kaz says. “For the canals. For the invite to Vanderwald’s for a private viewing? Well. Come morning, the invite will be sitting with the troupe leader.”

"I thought we had a week?"

"We did." Kaz smoothly tucks his watch into his waistcoat. "And now we have one day."

“You’re excited to stage this.” Jesper shakes his head, but he is half-smiling. “Aren’t you? Positively shaking in your books.”

“It’s the job,” Kaz says.

“You can admit that you like acting, Kaz. I think all of Ketterdam knows that by now.”

“This is hardly acting. This is a street play.”

“Yeah, and it’s theatre. You love theatre.”

“The Kommedie Brute was a means to an end.”

“You sooo enjoyed the Master Crimson scheme. Admit it, Kaz.”

Kaz admits no such thing. He doesn’t enjoy anything except making money, these days, and occasionally top-shelf whiskey.

“Go to bed,” Kaz says, turning his back. “We have a play to stage in the morning. Everything will be in place by tomorrow night. Be ready.”

“Right,” Jesper says, sounding confused. “I’ll leave you with that, then. Night, Kaz.”

Kaz doesn’t reply.