like a gathering of shadows in the slant light, the wraith arrived. or had she come as the siren, wielding hand and rope like a trident of the sea. maybe she would never wear the wraith again, and matthias would never have the wolf’s head pin. inej, he reminded himself, did not belong to kaz anymore, if she had ever. they’d both left something behind on the ragged coastline. matthias wondered if the old clothes were as stiff and ill-fitting as his, though knowing inej she’d burned them before even lifting anchor.
he chanced a look in her direction, eyes cast over his shoulder and never sitting in one spot for too long. just taking her in, trying to decipher who had come for him – the wraith, the siren, or just inej. perhaps they were all the same, different sides of a rough-cut gem and not the costumes he’d imagined.
she hadn’t stabbed him yet, though. that was a start.
matthias turned his gaze back to the water. grisha believed in sainthood and the making at the heart of the world. matthias knew the ice and the sea; the forging, the undoing of all things. the ships at a distance, every man’s wish on board. their death, too, if inej was at the helm. whispers of her had strayed even to the northern shores of fjerda, though by the time they reached matthias in his driftwood towns each story had taken on a different shape. only he knew who laid at the center of each, a private truth when so much of him was a lie. again and again, matthias writes out debts to inej and the crows. his ledger was almost full.
“inej,” he said, only once he could no longer count the stone’s ripples. his fingers tightened around the edge of the stone bench, but matthias didn’t dare move until he knew what inej had come for. she did not ask a question, and so he’d give her not quite a reply.
“i’ve found that when he wants something, he rarely takes death as an answer.” an inconvenience, at best, but the work was never done for kaz brekker, or matthias helvar, or, he supposed, inej ghafa. death was a relief they had not earned, or a punishment not yet doled out. there were pieces to move on the board, pockets still to line, men to gut or make wish they had been.
there were a dozen things to say to inej, all of them insubstantial. i’ve missed you. it’s good to see you. how have you been? theirs was never the way of idle chatter. besides, matthias wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know just yet.
“i can only assume you haven’t come here just to intimidate me with pebbles.” although it’s working.
you’d be surprised, drüskelle, inej thought with her heart in her fist, at what he’s wiling to take for an answer. she ran her eyes down the banks. you’d be even more surprised at what he wants in the first place; i used to know, once. the grove was covered in exhaust dust. even here, tucked beneath the arches, the fumes had scattered in thin films over time. the world had a way to reach inside all of us. was that the lesson ketterdam saved for her? stitches and temples, selfhood folded twice over: the seams were bound to come undone, sooner or later.
it wasn’t kaz that called you. he only pried away the shell, the shroud, whatever layers held back what was left of you. it was your own need that led you here. raw and open at last.
she sidestepped the bench in a wide berth. at that distance, he might have been anyone; features clouded over by the foliage. she could only make out his hair, set like slate against the green of their temple. a single midrib splitting the leaf in two.
inej remembered nina revering that mop; saintly, she used to call it. it always earned her a pinch from the wraith. don’t blaspheme at my knitting table. take your ravkan mores over to jesper. you might even humble him a measure or two. he’s yet to learn making lust holy.
dirty and streaked with smog, this saint had seen better days.
she walked up the river. knelt down, still without a word, and dipped her hands until they reached the sediment. because the stream was artificial, goaded by the small science rather than any wheel of the world, the alluvium must’ve remained unchanged. her fingers clenched around the same clay of a century ago: a sedate coldness. she wondered, idly, if that’s how the glaciers in fjerda felt. if that’s how the permafrost moved under your heels, when you climbed the endless plateau, and you knew you were ruffling the sleeping seat of God.
i killed men of your homeland, drüskelle. slavers hold the same horror in every language. slavers look the same in every grave. i stopped seeing you as one of them years ago. i forgave you the moment she had. we both knew djel means more than what they made of Him. inej raised her head, a breath as high as the silence. i never imagined i should worry about meeting you under ghezen’s hand instead.
she thought she had known him. she had known his silence. not in the way she knew jesper, never-still jesper, never-silent-until-too-low-to-climb jesper. she could read the lighting in the fog of jesper’s distance, as they drifted and then plunged into the nearest spiral, the nearest punishment. not in the way she knew nina, either. greenglass-sharp nina, raging-in-the-night nina, can-never-hold-a-grudge nina. with zenik, she could time the beats in the storm, shirk its tightest, darkest eye with a hum. she could meet nina with stillness when her rage needed to crash against the stones, and with a tempest of her own when she could not carry it alone. matthias’ company, though, never demanded anything of her. inej did not have to be oracle or lighthouse, pier or spark; she simply brought her own silence to meet him.
she flicked a look over her shoulder. it felt sewn with catgut, her frown; a set of silk and wire that would not let her blink. this was what she did not forgive matthias, now: these quiet moments, this calm, even under the probe of knives and footfalls, of risks bearing down. the peace between them was drawn from one vein, and one vein alone. faith was voiceless.
trust, then, had to be voiceless too.
“you have about two minutes to start explaining what happened on that isle. generously, at that. i say two because there’s a good man waiting for me back up there, and a plate of dumplings that might be just be worth the biological hazard of this city. so start speaking. kaz has a bone-witch, i’ve heard. dripped to me down the grapevine. is she responsible for it? was it planned all along?” and why in the pit did you not tell her?
that one was the easiest of all. the question, even unspoken, made her jaw snap. narrowed her eyes to a sliver. matthias did not spare nina because it’s what kaz ordered him. and kaz? oh, demjin to the last. kaz ordered him because it’s what he himself would’ve done. if brekker could’ve faked his death to her and do away with all the technicalities, with all the answers she demanded from him, he would’ve done it a dozen times by now. and inej, like nina, would’ve spent the years wondering.
in his own way, he did. in her own way, she had.
she wiped her palms down her trousers. the mud barely scotched it; the leather ran deep, ran dark, as if she were still with the crows. inej grimaced at the thought.
“i do not care who brekker brings back up, unless i put a knife in them myself.” when i last met you, i did not kill. for the most part, that still holds true. but saints, helvar, look at the symmetry. when i first met you, it was all they taught you to do.
she clenched her hands, as if that could hide the lie around it. she let them drop, then turned. “what i care is why you’re here now, and what that means for all of us.”