the world owes me nothing (i'm taking from it still)
When she was six years old she stopped cutting her hair. It grew quickly, and in a matter of months it reached to her shoulders. Her parents exchanged glances, sometimes, but no one said a word. At least, not that she could hear.
When she was seven years old, she stole her cousin’s costume and walked the tightropes in secret. Her parents found her. Her mother smiled softly and told her she looked lovely, her father told her she would need her own costume, so she could stop taking the others’.
It took her a long time to choose her name. Nearly a year. She tried them out at night, whispering them into the dark. She added them to the end of her list of Saints and whispered them before she went on the ropes.
When she was eight, she stood on the platform. Her uncle was doing his usual announcements, making the crowd below them hold its breath in anticipation. She flexed her fingers on the long pole she carried for balance, closed her eyes. Breathed in. Recited their names.
Sankt Petyr, Sankta Alina, Sankta Marya, Sankta Anastasia, Sankt Vladimir, Sankta Lizabeta.
And the name she’d chosen to try for herself just...felt wrong. More deeply wrong than any of the others. A different word—a different name —came unbidden to her mind.
Inej.
She whispered it out loud, inaudible under the roar of the crowd, but she could feel the shape of it in her mouth.
“My name is Inej Ghafa,” she told the open air, and stepped onto the tightrope.
She had her name at last.
When Inej was ten, her parents took her to a Grisha Tailor. The Suli didn’t condemn Grisha—they were all outcasts in their own ways, after all. And magic, Grisha magic, was just a manipulation of the earth, not so different from the things ordinary people did every day. Inej had never been brought up to fear them.
The Tailor worked on her face, smoothing and rounding her features where she could. Not much could be done beyond that, but looking in the mirror and seeing her own face was more than enough for Inej. As she grew and the structure of her face changed, she returned to the Tailor again, once or twice a year. Tailors specialized in changing faces, not bodies, but Inej found that most times she didn’t mind so much. She’d always been slender, as though the universe recognized its mistakes and did its best to pave the way.
Her life wasn’t perfect. But it was good, sunshine and flowing costumes and perfect balance on the high wire, wild geraniums and cheering crowds and her family calling her name, Inej, Inej, Inej.
She was so happy.
-0-0-0-
When Inej was thirteen (nearly fourteen, still so young ), slavers dragged her from her wagon. There wasn’t even time to scream before they gagged her. She was in the hold of a slaver ship before she knew what was happening, caged like an animal among the other captured children. They weren’t there long before men began to pace the rows, taking names and ages. For what, Inej didn’t know.
One of them stopped in front of her cell. She recognized his face—he was among those who pulled her from her family. The girl she would become would have spat at his face or flung herself at him in attack, but the girl she was then cowered, frozen.
“Name?” he asked bluntly, in a thick accent she couldn’t identify. If he cared at all that she was a small girl he’d stolen , he didn’t show it. Inej remained silent.
“Give me your name, or we’ll pick one for you,” he demanded in rough Ravkan.
The words Inej Ghafa had never tasted so ugly on her tongue.
They gave her to Tante Heleen immediately. Inej let herself be poked and prodded and examined, holding her breath and begging her Saints to make it all stop. Her skirt was shoved up, her blouse torn halfway open, all right there on the docks for all the world to see. Inej didn’t know if it was worse that the slavers didn’t even care enough to watch it happen.
She thought about throwing herself into the harbor. In the end, the girl she was couldn’t bring herself to do it. More than anything, Inej had always wanted to live. She always would.
It was worse when they got back to the Menagerie, and Heleen gave her a much more thorough once-over. All Inej could think was that she was being treated like an animal, less than human.
Then Heleen called her “little lynx,” and it made sense again.
She didn’t hear her name again for months. She was “girl” or “lynx” or “Suli” or any of the names of thousands of girls that her clients whispered against her skin. Sometimes they whispered the names of boys. Those were the worst nights.
It was almost a blessing, if anything in her life could be called a blessing anymore. She could slip away from her skin, pretend it was happening to some other girl, as horrible as the thought was.
She tried to run, once, got caught and beaten and chained. She didn’t run again.
Every night, when the clients finally left and the girls went to sleep, she lay on her bed. Flat on her back, staring at the ceiling where the stars were meant to be, she recited the names of her Saints. Sometimes, her throat was sore from screaming or worse, and sometimes she was paralyzed with the fear of being heard, so she always formed the words soundlessly in the dark. Added her own to the end, as she had when she was young, a way of testing and trying her identity. Now it was a way of holding on to it.
Sankt Petyr, Sankta Alina, Sankta Marya, Sankta Anastasia, Sankt Vladimir, Sankta Lizabeta. Inej. Inej Ghafa.
When she was nearly fifteen, she saw Kaz Brekker for the first time, she remembered what the other girls said about him. The rumors about the gloves, the secrets he earned and kept and traded like kruge . She slipped up to him, soundless, and whispered, “I can help you.”
He just looked at her, his eyes flashing briefly with some emotion she couldn’t place, and kept walking. Her heart dropped like a stone, an arrow too heavy to fly.
The next morning, she was called into Tante Heleen’s salon. The arrow of her heart dipped lower, the deadly point of it piercing her skin. She knew what happened in Heleen’s salon. She’d been on the receiving end of it once, had heard the screams a thousand times. She’d heard the screams stop. Those girls never came back.
She was going to be one of them. She could feel it in her bones.
When she entered the salon, though, it was to Kaz Brekker and his cruel crow’s head cane. Everything inside of her froze. He must have told her what she’d done, how she’d talked to him, made trouble. Was Tante Heleen going to beat her in front of him? Would he care if she did?
Heleen in her peacock feathers said that she was someone else’s problem. Per Haskell--whoever he was--had a taste for Suli girls. He’d purchased her indenture.
She was too numb to speak. When she finally did, it was only, “I’m moving to a different house?”
She couldn’t decide if that would be better or worse than living under the talons of the Peacock. Apparently she didn’t have to, because Tante Heleen explained she was being bought for the old man himself.
She barely listened to the rest, too busy trying to quell the sick feeling in her stomach. She’d been bought. Sold. Like an animal, like the little lynx that she was.
When Heleen finally left with her parting words-- I doubt you’ll last more than a month in that part of the Barrel, and she shuddered despite herself.
Kaz Brekker shut the door, and her arrow heart leapt into her throat. Was he going to have his way with her, now that there was no one to stop him? If she screamed, would anyone care?
“Per Haskell runs the Dregs,” he said. “You’ve heard of us.”
She had. “They’re your gang.”
“Yes, and Haskell is my boss. Yours, too, if you like.”
Her head spun. If Kaz was offering what she thought he was (a way out, freedom, escape)...she gathered up her courage like purple silks in her hands and asked, “And if I don’t like?”
“I withdraw the offer and go home looking like a fool. You stay here with that monster Heleen.”
Monster. Kaz was right, but girls had been beaten to death for less. Her hands were on her mouth before she could think, terror freezing the blood in her veins. “She listens. ”
“Let her listen. The Barrel has all kinds of monsters in it, and some of them are very beautiful indeed.” Kaz kept talking, about information and trades and the way she’d spoken to him. She could barely force her replies from her throat. And then:
“Is Inej Ghafa your real name?”
She made an embarrassing sound, half sob and half laugh and half something else. It had been a year since she last heard her name. Her eyes stung with tears, but she forced them back. She hadn’t faced this year of hell dry-eyed only to cry at the first mention of her name.
“ Yes. ”
“Is that what you prefer to be called?” Kaz asked, and her eyes stung again.
She swallowed salt. “Of course.” Then, carefully, “Is Kaz Brekker your real name?”
“Real enough,” he said, and she understood.
He explained some more, about her silence, asked about her training. Inej’s heart tripped at the thought of acrobatics, walking the high wire, flying on the swings. Wearing silks for herself and not for the men who came to use her. Then Kaz asked her if she’d ever killed someone.
Her eyes widened without her meaning them to. “No.”
“Ever think about it?”
She crossed her arms and thought of every single awful idea she’d concocted. Necks wrapped in rough sheets, bloody knives stuck into hearts, bodies beaten with her hands or a switch the way all the girls were tortured at Tante Heleen’s hands.
“Every night.”
“That’s a start.”
She clutched a bit tighter at her own arms. Fantasies were one thing, but… “I don’t want to kill people, not really.”
“That’s a solid policy until people want to kill you. And in our line of work that happens a lot.”
Inej was still reeling slightly from Kaz’s calm assertion that people wanted to kill him--and her--before she realized the second part of what he’d said. “ Our line of work?”
She was joining the Dregs. Another contract, but one that treated her like a human, one she could pay her way out of. She could walk out of this house tonight, not free, exactly, but with a future in sight. She could get out.
Kaz wanted her to be a ghost. Inej was already a ghost. She died a year ago in the dark hold of a slaver ship.
Unless it was all a trap. Inej wasn’t in the business of trusting things too good to be true, not anymore. “If this is true,” she said at last, “then I’m free to say no.”
“Of course. But you’re obviously dangerous,” Kaz said. “I’d prefer you never become dangerous to me.”
Dangerous. Inej gathered the word to her chest like a bouquet of wild geraniums, letting her heart slowly take aim at a new future. She was dangerous. She was going to be free.
She liked that.
“All right,” she said. It wasn’t even a choice, really. Tante Heleen or the gangs in the streets. Danger or dangerous. She knew which one she’d choose, every time. “How do we begin?”
“Let’s start by getting out of here and finding you some proper clothes. Oh, and Inej,” she bit hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling as he led her from the salon, “don’t ever sneak up on me again.”
She didn’t get the chance to reply before she was blinking in the sunlight for the first time in months, with no fear dogging her footsteps and the future wide open and beckoning her forward.
-0-0-0-
Inej was freshly sixteen, the Menagerie a year behind her, the Ice Court (though she didn’t know it) a year ahead. She was the Wraith, the best in the Barrel, and there was no place in Ketterdam she could not reach, no secrets she could not uncover.
She was walking in the streets. The spring sun was shining on her skin. She had her head up, walking the streets of West Stave alone--she never did that, never even ventured to West Stave unless Kaz needed her to, but she was skirting the edges today, far enough from the Menagerie that she felt safe. Safe as she ever felt these days, anyway.
A hand caught her wrist and Inej whirled, a knife in the air and her teeth bared. Tante Heleen grabbed her other wrist and pinned her to the bricks of the building behind her. Every atom of breath left her lungs in a rush, and she froze again. Her blade clattered to the stones.
The Menagerie was blocks away. She was supposed to be safe.
“Hello again, little lynx,” Heleen purred.
Inej. Inej Ghafa. She wanted to say it, to spit it in the Peacock’s face, but her tongue was stiff and numb in her mouth.
“Still so pretty,” Heleen crooned. “Gorgeous hair, flawless skin...except for this.” She slid the circle of her fingers up Inej’s arm to the scar where her feather tattoo had been.
“You don’t own me anymore,” Inej gasped, wriggling in Heleen’s grasp. If she’d been thinking she would have remembered she knew a thousand ways to hurt someone with her hands pinned, but she wasn’t thinking. She was fourteen again and scared and desperate. An animal.
“I can bide my time, little lynx,” Heleen crooned. “Brekker will get bored of you eventually. More trouble than you’re worth, a girl like you.” She spat the word like an insult and Inej flinched.
“What will he say when he finds out who you really are?” Heleen asked. Before Inej could breathe she moved her hand from Inej’s wrist and slipped it into the waistband of her pants. She gasped and jerked away.
An animal. A lynx.
She lashed out, her hand forming a claw as she raked her nails across Heleen’s cheek. The Peacock stumbled sideways with a cry, and Inej dove to the ground to retrieve her knife, scooping it up and pressing the steel tip of it to Heleen’s chest.
“You won’t,” Heleen said. Her eyes were triumphant. “You can’t, little lynx, can you?”
“I can,” Inej said. Her voice shook. Her hand was steady.
“Not if you want to live,” Heleen said. she stepped backward. Inej didn’t follow. “Better run along, little lynx, we’re drawing a crowd.”
Inej glanced sideways. People were gathering, curious. She needed to go. Heleen Couldn’t be killed in broad daylight in the streets. She couldn’t meet her death on the end of a blade. She deserved worse than that. She deserved to die slowly and screaming, the way her girls did.
Inej lowered the knife and backed further down the street.
Heleen smiled. “There’s a good girl.”
Inej felt sick. She waited until Heleen had vanished around the corner to duck into an alley. She climbed to the roofs of Ketterdam and didn’t touch the ground again until she got to the Slat.
The crows settled here, sometimes. Inej fed them from a perch on the roof, watched the sky or the city below. It was quiet. Peaceful. A good place to think. She sat there now, not at the safer, flatter portion near the middle but right on the edge. Knees drawn up to her chest like a child, Inej stared at the horizon and tried not to think of anything at all.
Someone climbed on the roof with her and Inej’s entire spine went taut as the high wire. She slipped her knives into her hands and shifted her weight slightly, prepared to turn and spring.
“Thinking of jumping, Inej?” Kaz’s voice. She knew his rough gravel anywhere.
She relaxed, but only just. “No.” Inej hadn’t thought of jumping without catching herself in a year. She wasn’t going to now. Biting her lip, she added, “Please go away.”
“Since you asked nicely,” Kaz said, and she heard his uneven gait on the roof, the slide of his body as he moved to join her. He stayed farther back from the edge, she noticed. “I think I’ll stick around. Need to protect my investment.”
Inej wasn’t sure if she should slash him for that or just accept it. Kaz was who he was. She was what she was.
“What if your investment wasn’t what you thought it was?” she asked, her voice much smaller than she wanted it to be.
Kaz’s eyes bored into her back. It was a long moment before he spoke. “If it was no longer useful to me, there wouldn’t be much point, would there? Is this your way of telling me you want out of this life?”
Inej closed her eyes. Kaz couldn’t see her face, so it was allowed. “I wasn’t born Inej Ghafa.” It’s not an answer, except that it is.
She wanted out of this life from the start. But she wanted out of hell more. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“And I wasn’t born Kaz Brekker,” Kaz said. “You told me your name is Inej, so that’s what I’ll call you until you tell me otherwise.”
The insides of Inej’s eyelids burned red where she squeezed them tightly. “That’s not what I mean.”
“I’m aware,” Kaz said, and Inej opened her mouth to try to, what, explain? But he cut her off. “Tante Heleen kept records on all her girls’...bodies. If anything about you bothered me I wouldn’t have offered you a contract.”
Inej opened her eyes, tipped her head back a little to look at the sky. “Heleen...she didn’t think you knew.”
“You talked to her?” Kaz’s voice held a different note to it suddenly, something deep and black and deadly. Inej shivered.
“She caught me by surprise today. I wasn’t thinking. It won’t happen again.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Kaz said. Then, “If you have a problem with anyone in the Dregs, I’ll take care of it.”
Inej tightened her grip on her knives. “I can take care of myself.”
A beat. “I know you can.”
She sensed more than heard movement behind her. The air was utterly still, anticipation in the air. Inej was wobbling on a tightrope, her center of balance teetering on the edge of falling.
Kaz said, “Don’t feed the crows up here. Too many of the damn things as it is.”
“Your symbol is the crow, isn’t it?” Inej asked, but if he heard, he didn’t respond. His cane thumped awkwardly on the shingles and a moment later he was gone.
Slowly Inej uncurled her body, letting her legs dangle over open air and sheathing her knives. So Kaz knew. He’d always known. She couldn’t decide if the thought was comforting or if she hated that again, Kaz was hoarding his secrets.
She pushed herself up and stood, climbing higher up the roof. A crow fluttered near her feet, cocking its head to stare at her with one beady eye, asking for food.
Don’t feed the crows up here, Kaz had said. Inej smiled a little, to herself and the crow.
She slipped down the other side of the roof, where Kaz’s window was, and gracefully lowered herself down to the sill. Kaz was inside, but if he was startled by her approach he didn’t show it, merely turning his head to look at her and going back to his work. Inej allowed herself a tiny amount of disappointment. She still had never managed to sneak up on Kaz after that first night. It seemed that once he’d seen her, he would always know how to find her again.
She didn’t enter the room, just sat in the window sill. Back to one side of it, legs braced on the other. There was a small handful of seeds in her pocket, and she drew them out, holding her hand into the air. A crow landed on her outstretched arm, its talons digging in but not cutting her skin. It pecked at the seeds in her hand and flew off again.
“I told you not to feed the birds,” Kaz said. When Inej glanced inside at him, he still had his back to her.
“You said not to feed them on the roof. ” She waited for him to tell her that didn’t mean move to his window, but Kaz merely turned in his chair and fixed his eyes on her.
“Now you’re thinking like a proper thief, Inej.”
She smiled in spite of herself and carefully dumped the seeds across the ledge hanging into the air. Another crow landed by her boot and began to eat.
Kaz went back to his work, the only sound the rustling of his papers and the gentle cawing of the crows and the occasional shout from the world below.
Inej spent a lot of time in Kaz’s room, after that. Sitting in his window and feeding the crows.
She wasn’t the child she had been, free and careless and full of innocence about the world. She wasn’t a lynx, or a spider, or a Wraith.
She was Inej Ghafa, and she had found the aim of her heart again.