Crooked Kingdom (34 page)

“If it were Jes who lay suffering, would you say that?” asked his mother.

“Aditi—”

She'd kissed Colm's cheek, then swept Jesper up in her arms. “Is my little rabbit awake?”

“No,” he said.

“Well then, you must be dreaming.” She tucked him back in, kissed his cheeks and his forehead. “Go to sleep, little rabbit, and I'll be back tomorrow.”

But she didn't return the next day, and when a knock came the following morning, it was not his mother, just the same dusty Zemeni man.

Colm grabbed his son and was out the door in moments. He pushed a hat onto his head, plunked Jesper down in the saddle in front of him, then kicked his horse into a gallop. The dusty man rode an even dustier horse, and they followed him across miles of cultivated land to a white farmhouse at the edge of a
jurda
field. It was far nicer than their little cabin, two stories high with glass in the windows.

The woman waiting at the door was stouter than his mother, but nearly as tall, her hair piled in thick coils of braids. She waved them inside, saying, “She's upstairs.”

In the years after, when Jesper had pieced together what had happened over those terrible days, he remembered very few things: the polished wood floors of the farmhouse and how they felt nearly silky beneath his fingers, the stout woman's eyes, red from crying, and the girl—a child several years older than Jesper with braids like her mother's. The girl had drunk from a well that had been dug too near one of the mines. It was supposed to be boarded up, but someone had simply taken away the bucket. The winch was still there, and the old rope. So the girl and her friends had used one of their lunch pails to bring the water up, cold as morning and twice as clear. All three of them had taken ill that night. Two of them had died. But Jesper's mother had saved the girl, the stout woman's daughter.

Aditi had come to the girl's bedside, sniffed the metal lunch pail, then set her hands to the girl's fevered skin. By noon the next day, the fever had broken and the yellowish tinge was gone from the girl's eyes. By early evening, she sat up and told her mother she was hungry. Aditi smiled once at her and collapsed.

“She didn't take enough care when extracting the poison,” the dusty man said. “She absorbed too much of it herself. I've seen it happen before with zowa.”
Zowa.
It simply meant “blessed.” That was the word Jesper's mother used instead of Grisha.
We're zowa
, she would say to Jesper as she made a flower bloom with a flick of her fingers.
You and me.

Now there was no one to call upon to save her. Jesper did not know how. If she'd been conscious, if she'd been stronger, she might have been able to heal herself. Instead she slipped away into some deep dream, her breath becoming more and more labored.

Jesper slept, his cheek pressed to his mother's palm, sure that any minute she would wake and stroke his cheek and he would hear her voice say, “What are you doing here, little rabbit?” Instead, he woke to the sound of his father weeping.

They'd taken her back to the farm and buried her beneath a cherry tree that was already beginning to flower. To Jesper, it had seemed too pretty for such a sad day, and even now, seeing those pale pink flowers in a shop window or embroidered on a lady's silks always put him in a melancholy mind. They took him back to the smell of fresh-turned earth, the wind whispering through the fields, his father's trembling baritone singing a lonely kind of song, a Kaelish air in words Jesper didn't understand.

When Colm had finished, the last notes drifting up into the cherry tree's branches, Jesper said, “Was Ma a witch?”

Colm laid a freckled hand on his son's shoulder and drew him close. “She was a queen, Jes,” he said. “She was our queen.”

Jesper had made dinner for them that night, burnt biscuits and watery soup, but his father ate every bite and read to him from his Kaelish book of Saints until the lights burned low and the pain in Jesper's heart eased enough for him to sleep. And that was the way it had been from then on, the two of them, looking after each other, working the fields, bundling and drying jurda in the summers, trying to make the farm pay. Why hadn't it been enough?

But even as Jesper had the thought, he knew it could never be enough. He could never go back to that life. He hadn't been built for it. Maybe if his mother had lived, she would have taught him to channel his restlessness. Maybe she would have shown him how to use his power instead of hiding it. Maybe he'd have gone to Ravka to be a soldier for the crown. Or maybe he would have ended up right here anyway.

He wiped the stain of the
jurda
from his fingertips and placed the lid back on the tin.

“The Zemeni don't just use the blossoms,” he said. “I remember my mother soaking
jurda
stalks in goat's milk. She gave it to me when I'd been out in the fields.”

“Why?” asked Matthias.

“To counteract the effects of inhaling
jurda
pollen all day. It's too much for a child's system, and no one wanted me more excitable than I already was.”

“The stalks?” repeated Kuwei. “Most people just dispose of them.”

“The stalks have a balm in them. The Zemeni drain it for ointments. They rub it on babies' gums and nostrils when they're burning
jurda
.” Jesper's fingers drummed on the tin, a thought forming in his mind. Could the secret to the antidote for
jurda parem
be the
jurda
plant itself? He wasn't a chemist; he didn't think like Wylan, and he hadn't been trained as a Fabrikator. But he was his mother's son. “What if there's a version of the balm that would counteract the effects of
jurda parem
? There still wouldn't be a way to admin—”

That was when the window shattered. Jesper had his guns drawn in less than a breath, as Matthias shoved Kuwei down and shouldered his rifle. They edged to the wall and Jesper peeked outside through the smashed stained glass. In the shadows of the cemetery he saw lanterns raised, shifting shapes that had to be people—a lot of people.

“Unless the ghosts just got a lot more lively,” Jesper said, “it looks like we have company.”

 

PART FOUR

T
HE
U
NEXPECTED
V
ISITOR

 

17

I
NEJ

At night, the warehouse district felt like it had shed its skin and taken on a new form. The shantytowns at its eastern edges crackled with life, while the streets of the district itself became a no-man's-land, occupied only by guards at their posts and
stadwatch
grunts walking their beats.

Inej and Nina moored their boat in the wide central canal that ran up the center of the district and made their way down the silent quay, keeping close to the warehouses and away from the streetlamps that lined the water's edge. They passed barges loaded with lumber and vast troughs piled high with coal. Every so often, they'd glimpse men working by lantern light, hefting barrels of rum or bales of cotton. Such valued cargo could not be left unattended overnight. When they had almost reached Sweet Reef, they saw two men unloading something from a large wagon parked by the side of the canal, lit by a single blue-tinged lamp.

“Corpselight,” whispered Inej, and Nina shuddered. Bonelights, made from the crushed skeletons of deep-sea fishes, glowed green. But the corpselights burned some other fuel, a blue warning that allowed people to identify the flatboats of the bodymen, whose cargo was the dead.

“What are the bodymen doing in the warehouse district?”

“People don't like to see corpses on the streets or canals. The warehouse district is nearly deserted at night, so this is where they bring the bodies. Once the sun goes down, the bodymen collect the dead and bring them here. They work in shifts, neighborhood by neighborhood. They'll be gone by dawn, and so will their cargo.” Out to the Reaper's Barge for burning.

“Why don't they just build a real cemetery?” Nina said.

“No room. I know there was some talk of reopening Black Veil a long time ago, but that all stopped when the Queen's Lady Plague struck. People are too afraid of contagion. If your family can afford it, they send you to a cemetery or graveyard outside Ketterdam. And if they can't…”

“No mourners,” Nina said grimly.

No mourners, no funerals. Another way of saying good luck. But it was something more. A dark wink to the fact that there would be no expensive burials for people like them, no marble markers to remember their names, no wreaths of myrtle and rose.

Inej took the lead as they approached Sweet Reef. The silos themselves were daunting, vast as sentinel gods, monuments to industry emblazoned with the Van Eck red laurel. Soon everyone would know what that emblem stood for—cowardice and deceit. The circular cluster of Van Eck's silos was surrounded by a high metal fence.

“Razor wire,” Nina noted.

“It won't be a problem.” It had been invented to keep livestock in their pens. It would present no challenge for the Wraith.

They took up a watch beside the sturdy red-brick wall of a warehouse and held their position, confirming that the guards' routine hadn't changed. Just as Kaz had said, the guards took almost twelve minutes exactly to circle the fence that surrounded the silos. When the patrols were on the eastern side of the perimeter, Inej would have roughly six minutes to cross the wire. Once they passed to the west side, it would be too easy for them to spot her on the wire between the silos, but she'd be almost impossible to see on the roof. During those six minutes, Inej would deal with depositing the weevil in the silo hatch and then detach the line. If it took her longer than six minutes, she'd simply have to wait for the guards to come back around. She'd be unable to see them, but Nina had a powerful bonelight in hand. She would signal Inej with a brief flash of green light when she was clear to make the crossing.

“Ten silos,” Inej said. “Nine crossings.”

“They're a lot taller up close,” said Nina. “Are you ready for this?”

Inej couldn't deny they were intimidating. “No matter the height of the mountain, the climbing is the same.”

“That's not technically true. You need ropes, picks—”

“Don't be a Matthias.”

Nina covered her mouth in horror. “I'm going to eat twice as much cake to make up for it.”

Inej nodded wisely. “Sound policy.”

The patrol was setting out from the guardhouse again.

“Inej,” Nina said haltingly, “you should know, my power hasn't been the same since the
parem
. If we get into a scuffle—”

“No scuffles tonight. We pass through like ghosts.” She gave Nina's shoulders a squeeze. “And I know no fiercer warrior, powers or not.”

“But—”

“Nina, the guards.”

The patrol had disappeared from view. If they didn't act now, they would have to wait for the next cycle, and it would put them behind schedule.

“On it,” Nina said, and strode toward the guardhouse.

In the few steps it took her to cross the space from their warehouse lookout to the pool of lamplight bathing the guardhouse, Nina's whole demeanor changed. Inej couldn't quite explain it, but her steps grew more tentative, her shoulders drooped slightly. She almost seemed to shrink. She was no longer a trained Grisha, but a young, nervous immigrant hoping for a shred of kindness.

“Please to excuse?” Nina said in a ridiculously thick Ravkan accent.

The guard held his weapon at the ready but didn't look particularly concerned. “You shouldn't be here at night.”

Nina murmured something, looking up at him with big green eyes. Inej had no idea she could look so thoroughly wholesome.

“What was that?” said the guard, stepping closer.

Inej made her move. She lit the long fuse on the low-grade flash bomb Wylan had given them, then loped for the fence, keeping well away from that pool of light, climbing silently. She was almost directly behind the guard and Nina, then above them. She could hear their voices as she slipped easily between the coils of razor wire.

“I come for job, yes?” Nina said. “To make sugar.”

“We don't make it here, just store it. You'll want to go to one of the processing plants.”

“But I need job. I … I…”

“Oh, hey now, don't cry. There, there.”

Inej restrained a snort and dropped soundlessly to the ground on the other side of the fence. Through it, she could see the sandbags Kaz had mentioned stacked against the back wall of the guardhouse, and the corner of what must be the net he'd planned for her to use.

“Your … uh … your fella looking for work too?” the guard was asking.

“I have no … how you say?
Fella?
”

The gate beside the guardhouse didn't lock from the inside, so Inej pushed it open, leaving it just barely ajar for Nina, and hurried to the shadows at the base of the nearest silo.

She heard Nina say her goodbyes and walk off in the direction opposite their lookout. Then Inej waited. The minutes passed, and just as she became convinced the bomb was defective, a loud
pop
sounded and a bright flash of light crackled from the warehouse they'd used to spy on the guards. The guard emerged again, rifle raised, and took a few paces toward the warehouse.

“Hello?” he shouted.

Nina slipped from the shadows behind him and was inside the gate in a matter of moments. She closed it securely and headed for the second silo, disappearing into the dark. From there, she would be able to signal Inej as the guards made their rounds.

The guard returned to his post, walking backward in case some threat still waited in the warehouses beyond. Finally, he turned and gave the gate a shake to make sure it was locked, then headed inside the guardhouse.