Chapter Text
Almost two years now, and the sea air is too clean in Inej’s mouth. There’s an absence of Ketterdam, of the smoke and starkly human scents, perfume and garbage and sweat; she doesn’t miss it, quite, but she feels it, like the gap of a missing tooth. You don’t long for the wiggling and the pain of the what’s gone, maybe you taste the blood, but your tongue finds the empty space just the same. The salt and sun and silence are like that for Inej, even after this long, and she can’t decide if she likes it.
Certainly, she loves this mission; every life she saves from her own fate feels, somehow, like recovering a piece of herself that vanished during those long nights. She’s often felt that in leaving her body behind, she lost things; that she healed wrong, and that makes her think of Kaz. She had thought that she would never see those parts of herself again, and yet here she finds them, scattered across the sea—even if they don’t quite fit right with the armor she’s grown in their place. It’s a dangerous, wondrous thing.
But even if she has found her aim, does she miss Ketterdam? She’s soon to find out, she knows; by this evening at the latest, the Wraith will be at berth twenty-two and the Wraith will be back on the city’s rooftops. Back at the Slat. Back on Kaz’s window, feeding the crows, unless they’ve stopped coming while she’s been gone. She wonders, as another tangy breeze strikes her face and lifts loose strands of her hair, if that smell of ink and coffee still lingers around him, and then wonders why she cares.
Maybe that’s what she feels missing in the briny taste of the wind.
Her first weeks at sea, Inej had spent more time in the rigging than not, desperate to climb something. She’d understood for once the constant restlessness that kept Jesper in motion and even wondered briefly if this was right, if her aim had been true. But then they took down their first slaver’s ship, and their second, and by the time captains began coming up with names for her, titles like Kaz had earned, she knew better. They can call her the Reaper of Ships, the Scourge of the Seas, call her what they like, as long as no one ever calls her lynx again.
Now she takes to the nets as a kind of comfort, feeling safest when the thing between her and falling is thin. It makes her feel stronger, sheer dependence on her muscles and balance and—quite possibly—stubbornness. When she stands in the sky, a knife in her hand rather than the usual privateer’s cutlass, and sees nothing but waves beneath, how could her aim not be true?
One of the girls—Inej’s crew is mostly female—calls to her from below. As she expected, they’ll be in Ketterdam by early evening. Inej grabs hold of a rope and swings down to the deck, lifted for a moment on the thrill of the wind. She sticks a seamless landing even with the ground moving beneath her; that, she doesn’t like to admit, took some learning.
“What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get back?” asks another girl, Kaelish, with a tall and emphatic build like Nina’s. Her face is buried in freckles from this trip and her accent lilts.
Inej gives a small smile. “Take a bath and a nap.”
In that order.
Her hair and clothes are looser than they were back in the city, a messier braid and a billowy blouse; she’s almost certain that both are crusted with salt by now. The fresh water they have, after all, is best used for drinking.
“It’s Ketterdam,” her lookout, a Zemeni girl almost as tall as Jesper, protests. “Surely there’s something you want to see, somewhere you want to go?”
“If I haven’t seen my fill of Ketterdam by now, perhaps I never will,” Inej replies. Turning and changing tack, she asks, “How is she?”
As if he’d heard her, Specht, one of the exceptions, emerges onto the deck, holding a baby girl in his arms with surprising tenderness. Well, not a baby, exactly; the girl is a toddler, somewhere around three, and at least half Suli. Inej takes her and settles the nameless child on her hip.
“Good, considering,” Specht replies. He looks amusingly bereft now that Inej has taken the little girl.
Considering, indeed. The girl, whom Inej knows she should name, was taken with her mother, who had sickened and died on the slavers’ ship, from what Inej and her knives could discern from the crew. She knows, with a feeling that tightens her stomach more than the waves ever could, that if not for her the child would have been killed—or worse, left to die.
Inej hands the little girl back to Specht and hoists herself back into the ropes. If she can help it, she wants to be the first person to see that skyline she knows so well. And perhaps even despite her words, some part of her knows that the first thing she’ll want to do when her feet hit the docks is climb, discover it all again.
Climb to the Slat.
See if her room is still there.
See Kaz.
Inej sighs, even though nobody can see her face up here or see inside her head. It’s not the first time she has thought of him, nor will it be the last. Does she want to see him? Does she want to fight for the beginning that she hasn’t forgotten? The little girl will complicate things. And maybe he’s hardened in her absence. Maybe, even if she doesn’t seem to know better, he will.
Kaz allowed her to leave. Kaz propelled her to leave. Kaz gave her a ship and she put a dream in its sails. There are so many places where the paths diverge, where another could-have-been grows—there are so many lives that they could have lead, and for all Inej knows, in some versions she never meets Kaz. But those are not what is. This is what happened.
Maybe she’ll get enough calluses from the ropes to forget the softness of his hands. Maybe she’ll sleep enough nights on a hard and unforgiving bed to forget the feeling of laying her head on his shoulder. Maybe she’ll visit her parents enough that they won’t ask after him anymore.
For her next voyage is to Ravka, to the farm they’re renting until they can reunite with their caravan. Hopefully, the little girl will be safe with them. A stop in Ketterdam to re-supply and say her hellos, and then she’s going home. If it can be so called. If she even sticks to the plan. She’s worked with Kaz long enough to know that in every plan, there are more things that can go wrong than steps.
Inej pushes away a loose strand of hair and leans out over the deck. She needs to stop thinking about Kaz or they could end up going the wrong direction.
“Prepare your things for when we reach land!” she calls. And that’s another thing, another part of being captain: the Wraith has learned to be loud.
The chorus of shouts in reply buoys Inej, and, clinging to the rope, she hangs out into the wind like a flag; whatever awaits her in Ravka, whatever awaits her in Ketterdam, she will not wish for it. She will meet it as it comes.
“No mourners, no funerals,” she whispers to herself.
<><><>
Kaz has a knee pinning the man’s chest and a knife in the man’s side. The sad part is, he’s not angry, at least not by his standards.
This sorry sod tried to attack him, and since he bears no gang tattoos and fights with a polished style, Kaz can best discern that someone hired him. It’s almost funny. Especially since it’s the attacker’s own knife that now sticks out from beneath his ribs.
Shadows play over the man’s face as he sobs, illuminating in their absence scars and grimy cheeks smudged with tears and snot. The man whimpers, making Kaz hate him a little. At least don’t die like a keening infant.
“Now, for a last-ditch effort, this is just sad,” says Kaz, his lip curled. “It’s clear that’s what you are—some skilled fighter or assassin who thought that was all it took to survive in the Barrel.” Knowing how to use your fists means nothing if you aren’t ruthless enough to hit where it will hurt the most.
The man stares at him with unbridled horror, satiating the manic something that has broken loose in Kaz these past years.
“I was born without manners,” Kaz continues, pushing the man’s head back sharply, “but even I have the good grace to be insulted.”
Strangely, the man looks less terrified now and more appalled. Well, it’s not going to keep Kaz up at night, not when he has more important things keeping him awake. In a strained, choked voice thick with tears and revulsion, the man gasps out, “You’re heartless.”
“True. You’ll have no luck finding my heart here.” Kaz pulls out the knife, rises, and straightens his tie. Sorry sod, indeed. He would wipe the knife on his trousers, but that would ruin the point of wearing them.
He turns away.
“You’d be better off searching the seas.”