Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It takes Inej a surprisingly long time to figure out what’s wrong with the horizon. When she finally does, she lets out a harsh breath, and Mama, sitting next to her in the carriage, turns a questioning look on her.

Inej glances at her, then quickly away. She gestures toward the horizon line in front of them, which she’s seeing for the first time without the looming specter of darkness in the distance. “It’s gone. The Fold,” she says with a nonchalance she doesn’t quite feel.

“Oh,” Mama says. “Yes.”

The Fold has been gone nearly three years now, but the last time Inej was on Ravkan soil, it still loomed in the distance, more menacing than ever to the people in the West, its borders pushed to engulf Novokribirsk. Inej remembers the fear that had gripped her when word had reached them what the Darkling had done. Their troupe had performed in Novokribirsk just the summer before, and now it and its people were gone. If the Darkling could expand the Fold, what was stopping him from expanding it all the way to the True Sea, destroying West Ravka in its entirety? They'd lived with that fear for months until shortly before Inej had been taken, when the Sun Summoner had returned to Ravka with Prince Nikolai, and hope along with them.

She’d learned nothing of the state of the war while she’d been at the Menagerie—Tante Heleen wasn’t exactly interested in keeping her girls up to date on world affairs. In fact, Inej had only learned of the destruction of the Shadow Fold and the martyring of the Sun Summoner after she’d joined the Dregs, months after it happened.

Kaz had mentioned it offhand while discussing a recent influx of Ravkan Grisha fleeing prosecution by their government for crimes during the war. The news had floored her. She’d mourned the death of a living saint while rejoicing in the destruction of a centuries-old blight, but she’d been so far away, so focused on surviving day to day that she couldn’t afford to give the change much thought beyond naming one of her knives after Sankta Alina, to represent the hope of light in the darkness.

But now, as she returns, she truly sees the change wrought on this country she’d once called home. The ever present black smear on the horizon, hundreds of miles away, but still a looming presence, is gone. West Ravka, the only physical home she’d known before Ketterdam, is reunited with the east under the rule of the once prodigal prince, now progressive upstart king Nikolai. The Second Army is governed no longer by a Darkling, but instead by the Triumvirate she’d met two-thirds of back in Ketterdam. The Sun Summoner, Sol Koroleva, Sankta Alina, is gone, but celebrated and remembered and worshipped throughout the land.

The country is practically unrecognizable after these three long years. Inej wonders if the same could be said about her.

—

Her father directs the carriage driver to let them out on the outskirts of the Suli settlement, slightly removed from the hubbub of the performance tent, which rises high into the sky, its bright colors illuminated by the lanterns. Inej can hear the music and cheers of a crowd, the sound so familiar and yet somehow so foreign after all these years. The evening performance is always the best attended, so the camp itself is silent, all its occupants catering to the Ravkan locals who’ve come for a good time.

Inej is glad for it, because she feels suddenly unsteady on her feet, a sensation she has not often felt. Dimly, she is aware of Papa unloading their meager bags and thanking the driver, and she feels the movement of the air behind her as the carriage pulls away, but she’s frozen in place, staring at that tent, unable to take in her surroundings. Mama touches her arm gently, and pulls back with a tightening in her lips when Inej flinches. “I think the performance is nearly done,” she says, and, yes, Inej can hear the swelling of applause that always came with the grand finale. “Why don’t you go with Papa to the pavilion, and I will intercept the family to let them know you’ve come home?”

Inej nods robotically, and lets Papa put his arm around her and lead her to the dining pavilion which has been constructed in the middle of camp. It’s the height of summer now, so everyone in the caravan eats together in the open air while the weather still permits it. There are long tables set up, low to the ground, with cushions lining either side. She lowers herself to one on shaky legs, and Papa follows. They sit there in silence for a moment, and then he reaches out and gently pries open the fist she’s made around her skirts. “It will be alright, Inej.”

She shakes her head, feeling befuddled. “I don’t know what to tell them, Papa. What do I say?”

He smiles sadly at her, and gently tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “You say whatever you need to. Tell them as much or as little as you want. It is your story to tell, when–if–you want to tell it.”

He knows everything–back in Ketterdam, she’d sat in a sitting room at the Van Eck mansion and the whole story had come spilling out, from her time at the Menagerie to her place in the Dregs and the sins she had committed there. Her parents had wept first, but Inej had joined in. The three of them had held each other there on Jan Van Eck’s stuffy rug for hours, and the tears had cleansed them all, in some strange way. That night, she’d slept sandwiched between her parents like she had when she was young and suffered a nightmare, her mother stroking her hair and her father’s arm heavy and protective around the two of them.

She is glad she told them; they needed to hear it and Inej needed to say it, if she had any hope of rekindling the relationship she’d once had with them. But it had been painful, like ripping out a lung in order to breathe better, and she’s not sure she has the strength to go through it all again. It reassures her, just a little, to know Papa will not allow anyone to demand to know the full extent of her pain if she doesn’t wish it. He is on her side, always, her first and most steadfast ally. It gives her strength enough to stand when she hears a shriek and running footsteps.

She barely has time to steel herself before she’s hit with the full force of a girl about her own height. She’s enveloped by a suddenly familiar scent of sandalwood perfume, and then the girl pulls back to look her in the face. “Saints, I can’t believe it’s really you!”

Her cousin Zina was born only a few months before Inej, to her mother’s younger sister. The two of them had been raised side by side, schooled by the same elders at the same time, and resembled each other enough that they were often mistaken for sisters. As children, they’d often pretended to be twins. The only glaring difference between them was Zina’s crippling fear of heights. Inej hadn’t realized how deeply she’d missed her, and she collapses into tears at the sight of her.

Zina hugs her again, but she’s soon pulled away, and Inej hears a jovial voice cry, “Let me have a turn!” She looks up to see a broad shouldered young man with a grin splitting his face.

“Hanzi?”

“Little Inej!” Hanzi crows, scooping her into a bone crushing hug and lifting her into a spin.

Now that the flood of tears has started, Inej cannot stop it as she’s passed from Hanzi to his older sister, Asha, who can barely hug her over her enormous belly, then to their father Kashi, and on and on until every member of the caravan has hugged her at least once and Inej feels a headache coming from all the tears.

But after everyone has had their moment with her, she stands alone in the circle of her family and an uneasy silence descends. She can feel them all looking at each other, wondering who will address the elephant in the room.

Her Aunt Sorina is the one to take the leap. “Inej,” she says tentatively. “We have wondered for so long. What happened to you, meja?”

All eyes are on her now. Inej’s fingers twist in her skirt again, aching for her knives, but they are packed away with the rest of her belongings. She had known it would come to this, but she is unprepared for it all the same. The pavilion, despite the exuberance that had filled it mere moments ago at her return, is dreadfully silent.

She does not have the strength to go through it again, she realizes. She cannot bear to have so many people she loves bear witness to her shame. It is bad enough that Mama and Papa should know the ways she has been violated, the sins she has committed, to have it be known by all these people who once loved her so fully is unfathomable. But she must tell them something, so she takes a deep breath and begins to speak.

“What you suspected was correct. I was taken by slavers and sold to a woman in Ketterdam under a false contract. An Indenture, they call it. They are designed to be impossible to earn out of. But I was fortunate enough” –fortunate, that is a strange word for her situation, true though it might be–“to be given a more fair employment opportunity. It took me nearly two years, but I am no longer bound by that contract. A friend helped me find Mama and Papa, and now...here I am,” she finishes lamely. She is surprised to find that this sanitized, vague version of events tastes no better in her mouth than the truth that poured out in the Van Eck sitting room two months ago. Better terrible truths than kind lies, she thinks. But she has made her decision, and she is going to stick with the kind lies.

Everyone is silent, many of the eyes previously on her slipping off in the face of her hardship. Aunt Tezaria looks close to tears, and Inej is suddenly glad she spared the details. When it is clear Inej does not intend to say more, Aunt Sorina nods and says quietly, “We will rejoice for your return and pray for your peace in the aftermath of this hardship.”

Peace is hardly what Inej, aspiring pirate and avenger of the downtrodden, has in store for her future, but she is grateful for the sentiment all the same.

Papa, whose keen eyes have not left her face the entire time, clears his throat. “It has been a long and difficult journey for all of us. It may be best to let Inej get some sleep. Yes, meja?” He raises an eyebrow at her and Inej’s heart constricts in gratitude.

“Yes,” she says, and she hopes it doesn’t sound as eager as she thinks it does. “I’m…tired.”

Papa nods and places his arm over her shoulder. “Thank you all for being here to welcome our daughter home at last. We can rejoice in the fact that our family is once more complete tomorrow. For now, we’ll take our leave.” And with that, he leads her off, Mama following quickly behind.

“Thank you, Papa,” she whispers to him, and he simply smiles and places a kiss on top of her head.

Eventually, they reach the plot of land where her family’s wagon is parked. Inej nearly sobs at the sight of it—the sunny orange paint, the intricate carvings around the doorframe. For the Suli, home has never been a place, but if Inej had to pick one, this wagon would be it.

She steps across the threshold arm and arm with her parents, happy to finally be home, and then her stomach drops and her feet come to a standstill.

The caravan looks the same as it always has. Her parents’ bed on one end, a tapestry strung for privacy, a small combination sitting, eating, and cooking area in the middle, and on the other end, another tapestry, behind which her bedding perches atop built-in storage.

The sound of the tapestry pulled back. Five more minutes, Papa. Hands on her, grabbing her legs and arms, another over her mouth. Being pulled from her bed. Head hitting the floor. Scrabbling for anything to hold on to. Overturning a table. Her mother’s favorite icon of Sankta Marya hitting the floor. Dragged across the ground. Nails digging into the wooden doorframe. Screams muffled behind meaty, hairy hands. Another blow to the head. Darkness.

“Darling?” Mama asks, eyebrows furrowed and gaze concerned. Inej just shakes her head, her breathing becoming unsteady, vision blurring.

Papa follows her gaze, then places himself in her line of sight, hands on her shoulders. “You do not have to sleep there, meja. You can share with Mama in the other bed. I will take that one.”

Inej nods, frantically wiping her eyes. Mama pulls her into a hug, and Papa places his arms around the both of them.

She is home, but it does not feel the same.

Chapter Text

In the morning, Inej wakes to the familiar but nearly forgotten smell of her mother’s flatbread and the soft murmurs of her parents’ early morning conversation.

The linens beneath her are softer than those she’d used at the Slat, yet without the decadence of those at the Van Eck Mansion. They don’t have the slick slide of the false silks at the Menagerie and they smell of the oil her mother uses in her hair, not the sweat of dirty deeds. Inej feels at peace.

She rolls to her back and stares up at the wooden beams above her face. On the other side of the wagon, she knows, the beams are full of doodles of hearts and flowers and carvings of her initials and those of her cousins and boys she’d had crushes on. Her mother had always scolded her for it, but both beds in the wagon are high off the ground to make room for storage beneath them, and the easy access was simply too tempting for a young girl.

Mama and Papa’s beams have no doodles or carvings, but dried geraniums hang from them at each of the four corners of the bed, their scent long gone, but the petals still a vibrant pink. Inej reaches up a careful finger to trace one of the petals, remembering, unbidden, Kaz draping a Mister Crimson cloak around her shoulders, petals falling around them. It’s good to be back, she’d told him then.

It’s good to be back, she says to herself now, and it’s almost convincing.

Last night had been emotional, which she’d expected. Her reunion with Mama and Papa had been the same, an endless flood of tears, terrifying swings from exhilarating joy to terrible heartbreak, until they’d finally reached an easy middle ground of happiness in their reunion, couched with only the smallest amount of sadness at the years missed.

All these years she’s been running, and she thought when she’d finally come back here, to this place that raised her, she’d be able to rest. But then she couldn’t even look at her old bed without losing it completely. In the early morning light, she feels a bit embarrassed about it.

She rubs the sleep and last night’s tears from the corners of her eyes and sits up. She’s going to be normal today, she decides. Yes, one terrible thing happened in that bed three years ago, but how many nights had she slept in it soundly and safely? It’s no big deal.

She takes a deep breath and pulls back the tapestry.

Mama and Papa’s conversation comes to a halt, and both look to her expectantly. She pastes a smile on her face and gives them a cheerful, “Good morning,” which they both return. When she slides into her old seat at the table, Mama places a plate of flatbread in front of her and runs a hand over her hair. “Did you sleep alright, meja?”

Mama surely knows that she didn’t, because they shared a bed last night and Inej tossed and turned for hours before her body finally gave in and dropped into an uneasy sleep. But Inej is being normal, so she just gives her a small smile and a noncommittal hum before shoving a piece of flatbread in her mouth to keep from having to elaborate.

The three of them have spent two months together now, first at the Van Eck mansion, then on the Wraith on their journey here, so it’s easy to fall into a pleasant silence as they eat, punctuated by occasional compliments on the taste of the bread and inquiries about the schedule for the day.

“We ought to spend some time in the practice tent today, don’t you think Marik?” Mama asks, looking across the table at her husband. “We’ve been away a long time, and it’s easy to fall out of practice at our age.”

“Yes, I suppose,” Papa says. “Would you like to come, Inej?”

“Maybe for a bit,” she says, perhaps too unenthusiastically, because both her parents are quick to reassure her she can do as she pleases.

This is a new development Inej is not particularly thrilled with. In the wake of their reunion, her parents have been walking on eggshells not to contradict her in any way. No matter what opinion she expresses, they fall over themselves to agree and support her. Which is nice, but a little aggravating after a while. Before she was taken, spending a few hours in the practice tent would have been non-negotiable. Though, to be fair, she supposes, before she was taken, she was performing consistently and practice was necessary.

“It might be nice,” she says, giving them a reassuring smile. “I’m sure that’s where everyone will be anyway.”

Mama and Papa nod in unison, hopeful smiles on their faces. She doesn’t know what they want from her.

She shoves the last of her breakfast in her mouth and stands up. “I should get dressed,” she announces, as if they need to be made aware of her every intention in this wagon, as if she is a guest rather than a member of this household.

“Yes, good idea,” Mama says, but when Inej turns to her traveling bags, she feels a hand on her arm. “You’ve been wearing those clothes for weeks, they could really do with a wash. We’ve kept all your old things, why don’t you wear something that doesn’t smell of the sea?”

Inej doesn’t mind the smell of the sea, but Mama is right, and the sea is hardly the only smell in those clothes. She only had one outfit that would be deemed appropriate for a normal Suli girl traveling across Ravka, and she’d worn it several days in a row on the journey here. It’s about ready to get up and walk off on its own. She nods and heads over to the drawers underneath her old bed. Her heartbeat quickens as she approaches, and she gently admonishes it. Normal, she reminds herself. We’re being normal.

She digs through her drawers, encountering long forgotten articles of clothing, blouses and skirts and garish performance costumes all folded neatly and placed away like bodies in a tomb. Inej knows her mother must have done this, for she was never capable of being this neat with her things.

She finds a blouse that fits, although it is a bit tighter in the bust than it used to be. It has long sleeves, which will be conspicuous and too warm in the heat of midsummer, but her forearms still sport the puckered scars from Dunyasha’s blades, and she’s not interested in answering questions.

The skirt she selects is a bit more of an issue. As soon as she steps in it’s clear it’s not going to work, but she tries valiantly anyway. It’s no use–the waistline gets stuck at her thighs, built for the hips of a pubescent girl, not the near-woman she is today. She awkwardly steps out of it, and tries another with the same result. Papa looks respectfully away, and Mama’s hands are fluttering nervously, her mouth opening and closing like a fish, desperate to fix something, although Inej doesn’t know what.

Humiliatingly, tears start to form hot and angry in the corners of her eyes. She forces them away, stepping out of the skirt with too much force.

“It’s fine,” she says, unable to keep the frustration out of her voice. “I’ll just wear my Ketterdam clothes.” She will get strange looks and the dark colors and heavy fabrics of her Wraith clothes are sure to boil her alive, but there’s little alternative.

“No,” Mama says quickly, “No, that’s silly. Just borrow one of my skirts. We’re about the same size now.”

Inej looks Mama in the eyes, and she can see how much she wants this, wants to see her little girl looking normal, not like some haunt from a foreign city. Inej lets out a breath and nods, and Mama rushes over to her own drawers and draws out a finely crafted silk skirt in a beautiful shade of teal. Inej takes it gratefully and pulls it on. It’s a bit loose around the waist, but she’ll survive.

Mama frets over her a moment longer, running fingers through Inej’s hair, arranging it over her shoulder. “We’ll talk to Chachi today, see about getting you some skirts that fit.”

Aunt Tezaria, her father’s younger sister, is the best seamstress in the caravan. She’d made all of Inej’s clothes her whole life, and a visit to her wagon when she’d had a growth spurt was always cause for celebration. Now she just feels a dull ache somewhere behind her ribcage.

“I’ll go see her this morning,” she says calmly, trying to quell the anxiety that has been rising behind Mama’s eyes since the first skirt didn’t fit. “While you and Papa get some practice in.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she says, firmly, hoping for no resistance. She loves them, and she’s so glad they’ve been reunited, but she needs some time without them hovering over her shoulder. It takes several minutes of reassurances and clear annoyance creeping into her voice for them to relent, but eventually they head off to the practice tent, leaving Inej blissfully alone for the first time in days.

She closes her eyes and lets out a breath, a bit startled by how shaky it sounds, how close she feels to tears.

Several deep breaths and whispered prayers for strength later, and she’s able to pull herself together enough to step out the door. Before she goes, she casts a glance at her bag, where her knives rest in their sheaths on top of those clothes too smelly to wear. For a moment she considers strapping them on, but she would not be able to hide them in this outfit. She shakes her head. This is not Ketterdam—she has no need for that kind of protection, nor the desire for the questions they would prompt. She leaves without looking back.

For a while, Inej wanders through the camp, keeping an eye out for Aunt Tezaria’s familiar sky blue wagon. Along the way, people call her name, smile at her, hug her and squeeze her arms, and she faces it all with a plastered-on smile.

Eventually, she finds it. Her aunt is out on the front lawn, hanging clothes up on a line to dry. She spots Inej from across the way and waves frantically at her.

“Inej, my girl, how are you?” she asks, hugging her from the side.

“I’m well, thank you, Chachi,” Inej says, bowing her head in respect.

“Wonderful! It’s such a blessing to have you back with us,” Aunt Tezaria says, then turns to one of the sheets waving in the breeze. “Isn’t it nice to have your cousin back, meja?”

Inej is confused by this statement for a moment, but then the sheet is pushed to the side, revealing a girl of around fourteen, if Inej’s math is correct. Her cousin Fitrat is three years younger than her, and had spent her childhood following Inej and Zina around, always wanting to be just like them. Inej had perhaps not treated her as kindly as she deserved back then, a fact that she feels a bit ashamed of with the perspective of the last three years.

“Oh, yes!” Fitrat cries, bouncing on the balls of her bare feet. “We’ve missed you so much, Inej.”

“And I you,” Inej assures her. “You’ve gotten so tall—I barely recognized you last night.”

Fitrat beams, swishing her skirts back and forth. Inej remembers her as a little girl, barely coming up to her shoulder, her smile full of teeth her face hadn’t quite caught up to yet. But here she is, Inej’s height, or perhaps even a smidge taller, her figure showing the beginnings of the curves of womanhood.

But she’s still fourteen. Her cheeks are round with childhood, her limbs a bit too gawky, like different parts of her are growing at different speeds. Did Inej look like that, she wonders, when the slavers pulled her from her home? When Tante Heleen sized her up on an auction block? When man after man after man came to her bed and stripped her bare and used her up until there was nothing of the child left?

She shuts those thoughts down. If she begins to think them now, she fears she will never stop. Instead, she turns to her aunt. “It turns out, I’ve grown a bit, too. None of my old clothes fit,” she tells her, tone purposefully light. “I’m in desperate need of your services.”

Aunt Tezaria claps her hands. “Excellent! I do love a new canvas. Fitrat, take Inej inside and get us set up for a fitting. I’ll finish hanging these last things and be right in.”

Fitrat seizes Inej’s hands and pulls her into the wagon, striking up a stream of excited chatter that Inej remembers from childhood.

While Fitrat bustles about the wagon, pulling out her mother’s measuring tools and bolts of fabric, she regales Inej with gossip about whether or not cousin Abi’s wife is pregnant (Fitrat thinks she is, she’s been strange about food recently, and she’s taking a break from the trapeze), what gender Asha’s new baby will be (Fitrat is hoping for a girl, since she already has a boy), what she thinks Zina is doing when she sneaks off after performances, as she’s been doing the last two weeks (Fitrat thinks she has a secret Ravkan lover that she doesn’t want them to know about), and whether Bujami (you remember Bujami, don’t you Inej, the son of Charani the contortionist?) might like her back. Inej is only able to get in affirmative noises, and she is relieved when Aunt Tezaria comes in.

The relief only lasts a moment, though, because Aunt Tezaria smiles at her, and says, “Alright, let’s get you undressed so we can measure.”

“Oh,” Inej says, panic cresting in her like a wave. “I don’t…I just need a few skirts, it’s…”

“Nonsense,” Auntie says, looking at her incredulously. “We must make you a whole new wardrobe, now that you’re back.”

“I don’t need a whole–”

“And either way, how do you expect me to make you a skirt that fits if I don’t know your measurements?”

It’s a fair point. Inej thinks maybe she can get away with just removing the skirt, but when she does, Aunt Tezaria clicks her tongue. “The blouse, too. It’s too tight, you need more room to breathe.”

Inej nods mechanically, her breathing and heart loud in her ears, and tries to quell her panic as she strips to her undergarments. She shouldn’t be this nervous. Bodies are no mystery in the caravan; everyone lives in such close quarters, it would be impossible to be prudish. And these are two women, her family, she knows she is safe with them. She knows that. But her head and her heart seem to be on two different pages lately.

And there’s more to it than just being undressed in company. She’s painfully aware of every mark and scar that has been made on her body in the last three years. From Dunyasha’s blades, from Tante Heleen’s lash, from men who made their mark on her with nails and teeth. She can only hope propriety will compel her aunt not to mention them.

She doesn’t, not right away, and Inej is grateful, for she can surely see them. But when her aunt is close to her, her tape measure around Inej's bust, she lets out a slight gasp. “Inej, my sweet girl, what happened?”

Inej has been keeping her eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance, focusing on her own breathing the way Nina had once recommended, so she doesn’t know what Aunt Tezaria means right away. But then she feels the brush of fingers against the vicious scar on her ribs—the one from Oomen’s knife, which had nearly taken her life mere months ago.

“I–” Inej says, folding her arms across her chest, knocking her aunt’s hands away. “It’s nothi–an accident. I’m fine.”

Aunt Tezaria looks at her with concern, but heeds the finality in Inej’s tone. She nods hesitantly, and continues her measuring in silence. Fitrat, either unaware of the awkwardness or deliberately ignoring it, picks up her stream of gossip again. Inej is grateful, though she doesn’t hear a word.

It only gets worse when Aunt Tezaria steps back and instructs Fitrat to bring her a bolt of fabric.

“Not purple,” Inej says abruptly, the first words she’s uttered in several minutes. The harsh tone stops Fitrat in her tracks, grip tightening on the bolt of lavender silk in her hand. “I don’t—not purple.”

“Okay,” her cousin says, her voice small, and Inej hates that she did this to her, but if either of them try to put purple silks on her now, she’ll lose it entirely.

Aunt Tezaria’s gaze travels between the two girls, and she gently pries the fabric from her daughter’s hands. “How about something else, then. Orange, perhaps?” She gives Inej a strained smile.

Inej manages to return it. “Yes. Orange is fine, thank you.”

The fitting never quite recovers, but there are no more painfully awkward moments. When they are finally done, it’s nearing lunchtime and Aunt Tezaria invites Inej to stay and eat with them, but Inej cannot bear another moment cooped up in this wagon. She begs off, and tries not to be stung when her aunt doesn’t put up a fight.

She spends the afternoon wandering the camp and surrounding woods, praying no one will bother her. She doesn’t end up visiting the practice tent, and when her parents find her as evening falls, they are beside themselves with worry.

“Gone all day!” her mother frets, hands on Inej’s shoulders and arms and cheeks, as if to make sure she’s still there.

“Leave her be, Soora,” Papa says, and his eyes on Inej are far too knowing for her liking. “She’s not a child, and she can take care of herself.”

They know this, for they have seen her armed to the teeth with her Saints. Dangerous. Inej finds herself clinging to the word nearly as desperately as she had those first days out of the Menagerie.

Mama relents, but doesn’t seem particularly soothed. “The evening performance is starting,” she says, and a bit of that old I am your mother and you’ll do as I say tone creeps into her voice. Inej is surprisingly relieved to hear it. “Come with us to watch.”

And so Inej finds herself sitting in the crowd amongst those who are not performing or working the carnival—her parents, not yet enfolded back into the routine, Cousin Asha, seven months pregnant with a toddler on her hip, and Naniji, her ninety-year-old great-grandmother.

There is music and excitement and the smell of sweet treats in the air, and Inej is transported back to her childhood, back when this was the most important thing in the world. Back when her heart’s arrow was set only on another successful performance, another cheering crowd.

It is a good show. The routines are new, and Inej finds herself gasping and clapping at all the right moments. Hanzi is a daredevil on the wire as always, and Aunt Elderi and Uncle Inan are electric on the trapeze. And then, between acts, Zina, her twin in all but birth, comes out to dance.

While Inej had been born to the wire, and has always felt more at home in the sky than on the ground, Zina has suffered a crippling fear of heights since a bad fall off one of the platforms as a child. She refuses to even climb a ladder to help affix banners, and so had precious few options for circus acts that kept her completely on the ground. But the grace she shares with Inej had suited her well as a dancer, and for years now she has mesmerized the crowd in between the death-defying stunts performed above.

Her costume is new since Inej last saw this. It’s more revealing, now that she’s practically a woman and not a little girl. Red silks that bare her midriff and slits in the skirt that reveal long legs, her eyes heavily made up with kohl.

Stop it, Inej says to herself, forcing down the thoughts of false silks and pretending at sensuality. It’s not the same thing. This is not a mockery of her culture; it is a celebration of it. She will watch her cousin dance and be proud of who she is and where she comes from and the strength and grace of her people and she will not fall apart.

It’s going rather well until Zina lifts one leg in a graceful sweep above her head and Inej sees the bells around her ankles.

Inej has spent three years fading into silence, mastering the art of disappearing. Here in the crowd and the noise and the spectacle, fading into the background and out into the night air beyond the tent is easier than breathing.

Chapter Text

Her mother finds her half an hour later, seated at the table in their caravan, bags packed at her feet, a blank sheet of paper before her.

“Inej,” Mama says, the relief in her voice obvious. She leans out the doorway and calls into the night, “Marik! She’s here!”

Inej sighs and looks down, knowing her getaway is thwarted. If only she could think of what to say in the note, she could have been gone by now.

Mama sits next to her at the table and takes her hands as Papa comes barreling in the door. Her eyes find the bags at Inej’s feet and her face falls. “Inej, you are not—”

“I can’t stay here, Mama,” Inej says, closing her eyes so she doesn’t have to see the heartbreak on her mother’s face. “It’s too—I can’t.”

“But—but, you’ve only just returned, meja,” she says, the urgency in her voice forcing Inej to look at her, and oh, Saints, there are tears in her eyes. “We’ve only just got you back.”

“Mama,” Inej says, her voice cracking with unshed tears, “I have to go.”

Mama just shakes her head, and Papa sits down on her other side, folding his hands over the knot of Inej’s and Mama’s, a tangle of calluses and brown skin. “We know this is difficult for you, Inej, but it’s only been a day. A bird cannot fly if you do not give it the time and the space to learn.”

Inej feels a sudden kinship with Kaz, being on the receiving end of a Suli proverb when she’s not in the mood.

“I was never here to stay, Papa,” she says, pulling her hands back. “I have a mission—I’m going to hunt slavers, you know that.”

Mama closes her eyes, and Papa gives her a sad smile. “I know, my brave girl,” he says, reaching out to take one of her hands back. “But we lost you for three years. You cannot blame us for wanting you here for a little longer.”

Inej shakes her head, but Mama stills her with a hand to her face, fingers tucking her hair behind her ear. “It is your birthday next week. Please, stay until then?”

Her birthday. Inej had nearly forgotten. The last birthday she’d celebrated with the caravan had been her fourteenth, just over a week before she was taken. Her mother had made her her favorite meal and she’d spent the day wandering the market in Os Kervo with Zina, who’d teased her all the while about her crush on Hanzi’s friend Alafair. Last summer, she’d celebrated her sixteenth with breakfast at the Kooperom with Jesper and Nina, and spent the night on a roof with Kaz, peering through a long glass at some merch’s mansion, playing twenty questions to keep each other from falling asleep.

In between, her fifteenth birthday had passed unnoticed, for Heleen didn’t keep her girls appraised of the date. But, counting backwards from the date on her contract with Per Haskell, she’d been able to surmise that on the day she turned fifteen, she’d screwed up a courage she hadn’t known she possessed and whispered four words to a boy who would change her life come morning.

It was impossible not to believe in fate, in moments like that.

Specht is in Os Kervo with the crew she’d put together in Ketterdam, equipping the ship for the journey and keeping an ear out for news. He’d told her to take all the time she needed with her family, that they’d be ready to set sail when she returned. She supposes she can spare five more days, in order to celebrate with her parents, to grant them this one wish.

She sighs and nods, and the relief that sweeps over them is palpable. She pretends not to see the look that passes between them—the one that says, crisis averted.

—

The shape of her days is this:

She wakes in her parents’ bed, sends a silent prayer to her Saints for strength, and hauls herself up to face another day. She dresses, either in borrowed clothes or in the bright orange skirt Aunt Tezaria delivered to her on her third day in the caravan. She thinks about strapping on her knives, but never does.

She keeps busy. She visits with family and old friends, keeps a pleasant smile on her face and keeps the conversation as light and inoffensive as humanly possible. She tries her best to avoid any talk of where she’s been the last three years or what she’s been doing, and weathers the spike of panic when she inevitably fails.

It’s ridiculous, really. No one is even asking her real questions about Ketterdam, as afraid of the truth as she is, but it seems like everything leads her back there.

Still, she pushes through. She endures long tearful hugs and rowdy meals squished in at the pavilion and entreatments to come see the performance tonight, Inej, and she finds all the right excuses to avoid doing just that.

In the evenings, while her parents make their way to the performance tent, Inej sets up shop at the little table in their wagon and sifts through documents and shipping manifests and notes on things she’d overheard in her last evidence-gathering days in Ketterdam. And if sometimes she finds herself simply staring at the places where her own handwriting sits alongside a jagged, nearly unreadable scrawl…well, there’s no one around to notice.

And at the end of the day, she falls into bed beside her mother, exhausted despite not doing much of any actual work, and prays to her Saints for a peaceful nights’ sleep and the strength to face tomorrow.

—

On her second day home (and it is home, she repeats to herself, not quite convincing no matter how hard she tries), she finds her way to Asha’s wagon with an offer to help look after her son. She’s being helpful, she reasons, not avoiding accompanying her parents to the practice tent.

Asha opens the door looking first harried, then surprised when she sees Inej’s face. “Inej!” she says, putting foot out to stop the small toddler behind her from making a break for it out the open door. “What…what can I do for you?”

Inej plasters on a smile. “We haven’t had the chance to spend much time together, and I thought you might like some help with”—she falters for a moment, unable to recall the name of the little boy— “your little one,” she recovers smoothly. “I’d like to get to know him.”

“Oh,” Asha says, her face bright, “Well, I could always use the help. He keeps me on my toes, don’t you Khulai?”

Khulai, Inej repeats to herself, grateful she didn’t have to ask.

Asha lets her into the caravan, and seats herself at the table. Khulai, seeing his escape route blocked off, returns to the small space between the table and the bed, flopping down to push a small wooden wagon on a winding path across the floor.

Inej sits gingerly across from her cousin, who has a basket of baby clothes in front of her. Inej recognizes it, having seen it passed around all throughout her childhood. Babies grow so fast that they never have time to wear through their clothes, so the diapers and linens and dresses are communal, traveling from family to family, new mother to expectant one.

“When is the baby due?” Inej asks, folding her hands in her lap, unsure of what to do now that she’s here.

“Around the equinox,” Asha answers, then says wryly, “Just in time for the weather to start cooling off. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the rest of the summer.” Inej smiles, looking from her rounded belly up to her face. She certainly looks overheated and uncomfortable. “I didn’t have to do this with Khulai,” her cousin continues, folding diapers with practiced hands. “I didn’t get huge until the winter.”

“How old is he?” Inej asks, a bit ashamed at her inability to tell. She’d grown up around the other children of the caravan, but there are so few small children in the Barrel that she is woefully out of practice.

“Almost two and a half,” Asha says.

Two and a half. Inej finds herself unconsciously doing the math. He would have been born only six months after Inej was taken.

Asha can clearly see her calculations, and she looks down at her hands. “I realized shortly after you were…after. We kept it quiet until I couldn’t hide it anymore. It didn’t feel right to celebrate.”

“That’s not fair,” Inej says. New life in the caravan is precious, as the Suli population is always in danger of dwindling, and the announcement of a pregnancy is always greeted with celebration—food, music, the joyful sharing of both resources and advice. Asha should have been able to experience that immense joy for herself.

“Nothing about it was fair, Inej,” Asha says, looking her shrewdly in the eye and placing a hand on the table in front of Inej, an open invitation for her to grab it.

Asha is six years older than Inej; growing up, she’d watched over her when her parents needed time to themselves, taught her how to do elaborate hairstyles, given her advice about everything from highwire acts to boys to faith. She’s always seemed to know what Inej is thinking, always taken her moods and tides with love and understanding and without judgment.

Tell her, Inej thinks suddenly, the thought appearing in her mind almost as if from another source. Tell her everything. About the slaver ship and the Menagerie and the Dregs. Tell her about the men—the ones you were forced to bed and the ones you were forced to kill. Tell her about Tante Heleen.

And there is a part of Inej that wants to. A part that desperately wants to drop the act and stop pretending. She can’t believe how sick of it she is after only a few days. She’d once been forced night after night to play a part and she’d borne it for a year—how can putting on a brave face for her family take so much more out of her?

She wants to tell her. But there is another part of her that simply cannot bring herself to do it. It is the part of her that vividly remembers dancing at Asha’s wedding, remembers how beautiful she’d looked in her bejeweled silks, gold jewelry at her wrists and ankles and neck and in her nose. That part remembers the way she’d looked at her new husband, and knows that they’d gone off to their new wagon that night and made love with sweetness and passion and trust. And that part of her knows deep down that someone who’d had that wonderful moment for herself could never understand the fear and the pain that came with a man who’d paid a hefty extra fee for the innocence of a girl of fourteen.

That part knows that, despite the unfairness of Asha discovering she was with child while mourning the loss of another child in the family, she was able to move past it, to revel in the new life she’d created. She’d gone on to have this beautiful little growing family, and she could never understand the confusion of being pulled into Heleen’s salon after weeks of a mysterious stomach bug, only to be faced with a Corporalnik and a night of terrible bleeding.

That part knows that Asha has never taken a life, innocent or otherwise, has never been faced with the decision of him or me and chosen me. Never had to fall to her knees and weep and beg for the forgiveness of her Saints, or been unsure whether that forgiveness could be granted. And even if she had, Inej knows, Asha would never sign up to willingly put herself in a position to do that again and again.

Growing up, Asha had been a great source of advice, because everything Inej was going through, her cousin had gone through first. But now, when Inej looks at their lives side by side, she can barely see a resemblance.

So Inej silences the voice inside her screaming to tell, and places her hand atop her cousin’s. She musters up a smile and says, “You’re right, it wasn’t fair.” And she leaves it at that.

—

It does start to get a bit easier, as the days go on.

She still feels too often like she’s missed a step in the dark, but at least she’s becoming more acquainted with the feeling, and she regains her balance quicker. When she forgets a Suli word, she pushes the devastation down and simply finds another way to say what she means. When Hanzi scoops her up into a hug from behind, her heart nearly jackrabbits out of her chest, but she manages to refrain from clobbering him with the right hook she’d learned from Kaz. When Naniji fixes her with a look that’s far too shrewd for her ninety years and looks to be gearing up to say something important, Inej simply excuses herself and puts as much distance between herself and her great-grandmother as possible. Is it rude? Perhaps, but it’s keeping her sane.

The conversations she has with her family get easier, a bit less stilted, and Inej even begins to enjoy herself, just a little. It’s exhausting, and she’s still counting down the days until she can leave, but it does feel a bit like progress.

—

Eventually, Inej gets tired of visiting and begs to be given something to do. The chores that had once been designated as hers have long since been delegated elsewhere, but her family manages to scrounge up work for her. Which is how she finds herself sitting in the pavilion with her cousins, hemming costumes and getting increasingly frustrated at how out of practice she is.

“So, Inej,” Zina says, perhaps recognizing that Inej’s focus is elsewhere and jumping on the opportunity to tease her. Her tone is one that Inej recognizes from childhood. It usually meant they were about to get into a heap of trouble. “We have very important things to discuss, and it is a tragedy that we have not yet had this conversation in the four days you have been home.”

“Oh yes?” Inej says, distracted as she rips out her uneven stitches.

“Yes,” Zina says definitively, like a magician about to reveal to the audience that they had the volunteer’s card in their pocket the whole time. Inej senses rather than sees Asha and Fitrat, who round out this quartet of female cousins, roll their eyes at Zina’s dramatics.

“And what is this all-important topic of conversation we’ve been neglecting?”

“Kerch men. I’ve not had the occasion to meet many. What are they like?”

Inej feels a ball of anxiety begin to form in her stomach, but despite their earlier eye-rolling, Fitrat and Asha seem intrigued as well, and she knows they will not be easily deterred from this topic. “I’ve heard they are very stoic,” Fitrat adds, with a shy giggle. “Strong and silent. Mysterious.”

“I’ve heard they are very tall,” Asha adds, placing an emphasis on the word ‘tall’ that clues Inej in that height is not exactly the measurement she’s talking about.

Zina waggles her eyebrows at Inej suggestively. “Well? I imagine you’re somewhat of an expert. At least compared to the three of us.”

Inej is, in fact, a bit of an expert on Kerch men, but not of her own free will, and the Kerch men she had the occasion to know in the manner Zina is suggesting are certainly not the best the country has to offer. She can’t tell them that, though. They would be horrified, embarrassed, they might try to hug and soothe and comfort her, and to Inej that feels just a bit too much like pity to even consider. So she clenches her sewing needle harder in her hand to try to stop the shaking and says in a deliberately measured voice, “I wasn’t on a pleasure cruise, you know. Sampling the local fare wasn’t exactly a priority.”

Fitrat looks down, and Asha and Zina exchange a glance, seeming to realize they may have overstepped. “Alright, I’ll grant you that,” Zina says carefully. “But don’t try to tell me there aren’t any Kerch men in your life. I heard Auntie Soora telling my mother about a young man who paid for their travel to Ketterdam. Apparently, he was with you when they disembarked. Chachi said he seemed very nervous.”

Inej can feel herself blushing, and knows she is caught by Zina’s delicately raised eyebrow and Asha’s delighted grin. Still, she must try to keep up appearances. “I don’t know what you’re talking about."

Zina puts down her own sewing so she can shove Inej playfully on the shoulder, sending her a bit off balance. “You filthy little liar!”

Inej can’t help the small grin that comes over her as she rights herself. She has not had the occasion for this kind of talk in so long, not since she last saw Nina. “Okay, maybe there’s one boy.”

Zina and Fitrat squeal, and Asha abandons the pretense of sewing entirely. “Tell us, tell us, tell us!” Zina cries, and then they unleash a barrage of questions that feels not unlike Jesper’s gunfire in the middle of a turf war.

“What’s his name?”

“Is he handsome?”

“What does he do?”

“Is he a good kisser?”

“Is he sweet?”

“Oh! Was he the one who helped you find your mama and papa?”

“Are you going to get married?”

“What—Fitrat!” Inej exclaims at this last bit. “It’s not—we—I don’t—we are definitely not there yet.”

“Okay, okay, but seriously, what is he like?” Asha asks, flapping her hands at the other two to get them to shut up.

Inej feels strange, being asked to talk about Kaz like this. Since she met him, the only people she even remotely talked with about her feelings for him were Jesper and Nina. With Jesper it was always sardonic commiseration about their mutual bad taste. With Nina, the conversation was even less in depth—it usually involved Nina hinting heavily and obviously at Inej’s feelings and Inej finding the quickest possible escape or change of subject. And both Nina and Jesper already knew Kaz and all his peculiarities. She doesn’t know how to describe him to someone who’s never met him before.

“He’s…” she starts, then comes up empty. He’s what? Nice? No he’s not. Sweet? Not particularly. A good kisser? Inej wouldn’t know. She settles on “He’s the best thing that happened to me in Ketterdam.”

Because that is, without a doubt, true. He has not always been nice, and he is certainly not easy, but he has given her so much of who she is today, with her ship and her freedom and that word he gave her long ago in the parlor of Inej’s personal hell—dangerous.

“He’s the one who helped me escape my indenture, and he helped me get back on my feet. He found Mama and Papa, and brought them to Ketterdam, even though he knew it would take me away from him.”

“Aww,” Asha and Fitrat say in unison.

“Yeah, yeah, but is he cute?” Zina asks, flapping an impatient hand.

Inej remembers a day, about a year into her time with the Dregs, when she had slipped in his window bearing a juicy piece of information on a judge. She’d already opened her mouth to begin her report when she realized he was asleep, his arms folded on his desk, cheek smushed against a fist still holding a pen. There was a line of ink along the corner of his lips down his chin from the pen. His hair was disheveled, falling across his forehead, and the early morning sunshine streaming in caught in his eyelashes, thick and long and dark, the kind of eyelashes ladies along the Geldstraat would kill for. Her heart had squeezed, and her stomach did a funny flip flop as she freed the pen gently from his grip. He’d stirred a bit but hadn’t woken, and Inej went back to her room blushing a bit. Just like she is now.

“Details, Neja, details,” Zina says, snapping her fingers at her.

“He’s very handsome,” Inej says primly.

“Is that it?” Zina demands after a pause when it becomes clear Inej doesn’t plan to say more.

“Oh, hush,” Asha says. “What does Prince Charming do for a living?”

Prince Charming. Inej nearly snorts. “His name is Kaz. He’s a businessman.” A thief. The same thing, really. “The Kerch are rather big on business.”

“What type of business?”

And again Inej is brought to a flummoxed halt. What can she say—that this boy she’s fallen for runs a gambling hall with the express purpose of conning tourists out of their money? That he must be patted down for weapons before meeting with his competitors? That his most recent stream of revenue came from pulling a fast one on the entire city of Ketterdam and the governments of several countries?

What would they think of him, her cousins? Asha with her kind-hearted husband, Fitrat with a schoolgirl’s crush on a contortionist’s son, even Zina with her mysterious, maybe-fictional Ravkan lover? She feels suddenly protective of Kaz, of their relationship, knowing that outsiders could never understand.

(When did she start thinking of her family, her people, as outsiders?)

“He runs a…gaming hall. For tourists,” Inej says carefully. “Ketterdam, it’s a port city, and the people who come there want to be entertained.” Entertainment is a very sanitary word for what Ketterdam provides, she thinks, given that for a time she was the entertainment sought out by tourists and locals alike.

“Hm,” Zina says contemplatively. “A crowd pleaser, is he?”

Once, after a particularly successful job, when Kaz had been coerced into a few drinks at the Crow Club, he’d pulled out a deck of cards and put on a show for her and Jesper and some of the other members of the Dregs. The rest of them had gotten spectacularly drunk, hooting and hollering as Kaz changed the suit of the cards in front of their very eyes, but Inej had just sipped a glass of water and watched the way his face lit up at their reactions, thinking she’d be quite content to live in that moment forever.

“I guess so,” Inej says.

Her cousins continue to pester her for details, and she gives them the most family-friendly version of him she can.

He keeps the books himself, he’s great with numbers.

He’s very smart, but no university. Entrepreneurial spirit.

Where does he live? He’s got a house, but lots of people live there. Sure, like a boarding house, I suppose.

A dog person, I think.

No, he’s not a ladies’ man. Yes, I’m sure.

In the end, they walk away with a picture of her Kerch boy as a nice young man, smart, keeps to himself, but successful. She can’t help but think Kaz would hate to be sanitized this way.

She wonders what he’d think if he could see her sanitizing herself.

Chapter Text

Inej is standing in the middle of a crowd in the center of their camp. A bonfire rages, despite the heat of the midsummer evening, and there is a wide open expanse of stars above her head. People are eating and drinking and dancing, and everyone keeps coming up to her to hug her and tell her how beautiful she is, and congratulate her on becoming a woman.

She’s dressed in bejeweled emerald green silks, gold jewelry at her wrists and ankles and dangling from her ears. Her hair is down, oiled and perfumed to shiny perfection. Her eyes feel heavy from the colored powder and kohl her mother had applied for her this afternoon. She feels itchy and exposed, but she’s trying her best not to show it.

Tomorrow, she thinks, tomorrow I can leave. She’d promised her parents she’d stay through her birthday, and here it is. After this she’ll have no more obligation to stay here, and she can go back to Os Kervo and board her ship and begin her new life, leaving this old, ill-fitting one behind.

—

The day of Inej’s seventeenth birthday dawns sticky and hot. The tapestry is holding the heat and humidity in, and she rolls out of bed quickly to escape it.

She expects to be met with well-wishes and her favorite breakfast prepared, maybe a small gift from her parents. Instead, her mother is bustling around, fretting to her father about how much there is to do before tonight.

“What’s tonight?” Inej asks, hopping down from her parents’ bed.

They both look over at her, and her mother breaks into a smile. “It’s your Pandrahavaan, meja,” Mama says, and Inej’s heart falls into her stomach.

Pandrahavaan—a traditional celebration of womanhood for young Suli girls. The word simply means “fifteenth”, and it is, naturally, celebrated on the fifteenth birthday of each girl in the caravan. It includes several rites of passage performed throughout the day, topped off by a caravan-wide celebration full of food and music and—occasionally—fireworks. As a child she’d looked forward to the day with a giddiness unique to children who long to be grown ups, but spending that all-important fifteenth birthday in a brothel had disabused her of the notion that she would have one. In the Menagerie, she’d been forced to feign womanhood, her costume a farce of the silks she would have been granted for her Pandrahavaan, and her experiences there had brought her nothing but pain. If that was womanhood, she wanted no part in it.

“Pandrahavaan, Mama? You can’t be—I’m turning seventeen,” Inej says in response to her mother, so blindsided she can’t come up with anything other than the blatant fact that the numbers simply don’t line up.

Mama’s eyes tighten, but she forces her lips to turn up into a smile. “I know, meja, but we were not able to give you this celebration when you turned fifteen. I know it’s later than usual, but you cannot expect me to send you out into the world without these blessings!”

Inej very much does not want this celebration, or any of the rituals included, but her mother is looking at her with such pleading eyes, and when she makes eye contact with Papa over her shoulder she can read his thoughts on his face as clearly as if he’d said them aloud.

Please, my girl, so much has already been taken from us. Let us pretend, today, that it hasn’t.

So she sighs and nods and allows her mother to pull her away to the bathhouse for the first ritual: a rosewater bath, during which she is to be attended to by her mother alone, to signify the unique relationship formed in childbirth.

At the Slat, there was a single washbasin in the kitchen that had to be filled with water (always cold, no matter the season) from the pump outside, and privacy was a luxury no one could afford. Inej and Anika and the other few female Dregs would stake out the kitchen on Saturday mornings and keep a watch on the door for each other, sending the boys packing if they tried to sneak a peek.

At the Menagerie, there was a fine gold tub in the corner of Inej’s room, where she was instructed to wash every day. I’ll not have my whores filthy and reeking, Tante Heleen would sniff derisively, this is a luxury establishment. It was the only one of Heleen’s rules she did not chafe against—in fact, she often bathed more than once, trying without success to scrub the feeling of naked men from her skin. The soaps were heavily perfumed, and nothing was suitable for her hair—a fact which she and Jawara the Zemeni fawn and Anu the Shu serpent commiserated about in the parlor when Heleen was not paying attention—but anything was better than the sticky, horrible feeling she was left with each time a client finished up with her.

Here, Mama has drawn a bath, and filled it with perfumes and oils meant to nourish her skin, and added a flourish of rose petals floating on top. The bathhouse is not usually private, given the size of the caravan, but Mama must have made known that this ritual was happening today, for they are the only two people here. Inej is glad for it as she disrobes and lowers herself into the water. It is cool compared to the heat of the day, and she pulls her knees to her chest as Mama lowers herself to her knees beside the tub. She wills herself to relax.

Mama cups a handful of water and brings it to the crown of her head, letting it spill down, plastering her hair to her neck and shoulders. “I remember when you were small,” Mama says, lifting another handful. “You used to love when I did this.” Inej hums, remembering the same thing. The handfuls of water cascading down her back are soothing, and she closes her eyes, content in the silence and the safety of her mother’s presence here. She has not felt this safe while this exposed in three years.

The silence stretches out between them, punctuated only by the splashes of the water and the distant sound of children chasing each other through the camp. Inej begins to relax, stretching her legs out in front of her and wiggling her toes, cupping water in her hands and letting it spill out over her fingers like she had as a child. Eventually, Mama places her hand on Inej’s forehead and whispers a quiet prayer, easing her back gently. Inej immerses herself in the water and exhales, bubbles floating up from her lips. When she emerges again, she feels as if a weight has lifted off her shoulders, although she cannot identify why.

“You’ve grown into such a beautiful, strong young woman, meja,” Mama says, “I could not ask for a better daughter.”

Humiliatingly, Inej feels tears form in her eyes. Is she so starved for love that the slightest positive word will reduce her to tears? In her time here, she has felt so distant from the girl she once was. She knows that her parents love her no matter what, but part of her has been terrified to ask if they still like her, if they are proud of the dangerous girl she has become.

Mama notices and draws her near, placing a kiss on her temple, before tucking her wet hair behind her ear. “I wish we could have done this at the proper time, but if the Saints did not see fit for it to happen that way, we must accept it. I am glad I can do this now.”

“Me too,” Inej says, almost surprised to find that she means it.

—

She is wrapped in a silk robe and brought back to the wagon, where she finds a bevy of older female relatives—both of her grandmothers, her aunts, Asha and a couple other married cousins. They are here for the next part of this sacred day, for Inej to receive the blessing of Sankta Vasilka, the patron saint of unwed women.

The furniture has all been moved out of the way, and Inej is instructed to sit in the center of the floor while they all circle around her. She feels a bit claustrophobic, but Asha, sitting directly in front of her, takes her hands and gives them a squeeze accompanied with a reassuring smile. Mama kneels behind her, oil and a comb at the ready. Others place their hands on her arms and shoulders.

Mama combs the oil through her hair, slowly and methodically, while the other women begin their prayer—for protection as she journeys into the world as an adult, for safety in the strength of the caravan, for purity of mind and body until she finds a husband. Protection, safety, purity. Each stanza sends an icy jolt through her chest.

Many nights in the Menagerie Inej had prayed to Sankta Vasilka for rescue, prayed that, like the saint herself, she might be given the wings of a firebird in order to flee from this tower prison. Sankta Vasilka was meant to watch over unwed women, to provide them shelter and keep them from a fate such as the one Inej was suffering, but her prayers had gone unanswered. She’d been angry, feeling abandoned and discarded, wondering if the first firebird only answered the prayers of unwed women who remained pure and unsullied.

It was not until Inej had joined the Dregs that she remembered Vasilka had weaved the wings that allowed her to escape herself. As the women around her pray, she wonders if any of them truly understand that part of the story.

—

With Inej now suitably blessed, the other women take their leave, and her father returns to the wagon. He holds out a box to her, and Inej takes it gingerly, knowing what lies inside.

On a bed of black silk, she finds an exquisite set of gold jewelry. Bangles for her wrists, a heavy necklace inlaid with emeralds, and a pair of matching earrings, which will hang nearly to her shoulders, if she’s judging the size correctly.

“They’re beautiful, Papa,” she says, running her fingers over them, the craftsmanship delicate and expert.

Papa pulls her close to him and places a kiss on her forehead, his beard pleasantly scratchy between her eyebrows. “We have kept them all these years, even when our finances were…strained.” Strained, she knows, from looking for her. When she came back, she'd noticed, like the spy that she is, the suspicious lack of many of the family heirlooms they’d had growing up. Finely painted dishes, her mother’s jewelry, the tapestry woven by Papa’s great-great-grandmother, who had been one of the most talented weavers their caravan had ever seen. All sold off to fund their search for their missing daughter.

But not this. Not these pieces, which are surely more expensive than anything else in their possession, because these were for her. A gift she would receive if—when—she came home.

Look how much we believed, this jewelry says. Look how we always knew you would find your way back to us.

Inej smiles, but she feels a knot forming in her stomach. Because there is a ritual that goes with this gift, one that has been stolen from them. Traditionally, when a Suli girl is presented with jewelry from her father, her parents would then each take a long, sanitized needle and pierce her ears—father on the right, mother on the left, signifying all the advice they had poured into those ears in her first fifteen years, in the hopes that she would listen and heed them as she began to be less dependent on her parents.

But Inej’s ears were pierced in a back room at Tante Heleen’s House of Exotics, held still by a man with tattoos, because the customers wanted a girl who looked like a Suli woman, and everyone knows Suli women wear earrings. The fact that Inej was not yet a woman was never a factor.

Papa holds her face in his hands, stroking the apple of her cheek with his thumbs before shifting to hold her earlobes gently between his thumb and forefinger. He smiles sadly at her, feeling the hole there, and Inej knows he feels another hole in his heart, that he has missed out on this moment with his daughter. She knows, because she feels the same hole open up in her, and the two of them have always been twin souls.

He simply squeezes her earlobes like he used to when he was being playful with her as a child, and lifts one of the earrings from its box. He holds the other out to Mama, who takes it. “May we?” he asks Inej, and she nods. Father on the right, mother on the left, they slide the earrings through the holes in her ears. There’s a small popping sensation—the holes have begun to close in the two years she’s not worn anything in them—and then a weight settles as her parents step back.

It’s not the way it should have gone, but Inej can make peace with the way that it is.

—

Mama adorns her eyes with a green powder and traces a line of kohl across her lid and darkens her lashes with it. Her hand is gentle, loving, unlike Heleen's when she'd done the same those early days, frustrated at Inej's inexperience. (You look like a drenched rat if you do it that way, stupid girl. Give it here. Must I do everything?) Mama draws out a dark lip stain and swipes it across Inej’s lips. Inej twitches, and Mama simply licks her thumb and wipes away the resulting smudge.

She’s not worn makeup since she left the Menagerie, and it feels strange on her face. It makes her feel less like Inej Ghafa and more like Tante Heleen’s Lynx, but Inej reminds herself that this is probably a moment Mama had always dreamed of having with her, a sign that her little girl was grown up, and for that, she will bear it.

Lastly, she is presented with the most important gift of the evening—her first real pair of Suli silks. There is a difference between the silk that the Suli use for everyday clothing and silks. Silks are made of the finest material, delicately embroidered and bejeweled by hand over months and months of work. They’re meant only for formal occasions, the first of which is Pandrahavaan. They come in two pieces—a top whose neckline swoops to bear the collarbone and stops at the bottom of the ribs, and a skirt that swishes down to the ankles, the fabric cut in a way that if the wearer twirls, it flies about them in a mesmerizing show. They are not provocative, the way Inej's costume at the Menagerie had been, or like Zina's costume for her performances. These are dignified, beautiful, and a staple of Suli womanhood.

The silks she is presented with are emerald green, accented with gold, to match the jewelry her father had given her. When she slips into them, she finds they fit perfectly.

“We had them made while you were…” Mama says, her expression slightly pained. Inej feels a complicated tug behind her ribcage at this second reminder that her parents never gave up on her return. “I had Tezaria alter them once she got your measurements.”

Inej steps forward and folds her mother into a hug. “Thank you, Mama,” she whispers, and she means thank you for the silks, and thank you for believing I would come back, and also thank you for a thousand other nebulous things that she cannot quantify, but that she feels deep in her heart.

Mama sniffs and wipes her own eyes, pulling back to give Inej a stern look when she sees the tears forming there. “Don’t you do that. You’ll ruin your makeup.”

Chapter Text

The celebration is in full swing, music wailing into the night, food being passed around, a bonfire raging despite the heat of the night. The Suli are a people without a home, subject to years of mistreatment and ostracization, so when time comes for celebration, they grasp it with both hands.

The whole caravan has turned out in celebration of Inej, partially because this is supposed to be her entrance into adulthood, but there is a manic energy in the air that Inej does not remember from her older cousins’ Pandrahavaans. She supposes she should have expected this—it is not just a celebration of Inej entering womanhood, but also a celebration that she is back amongst them, for she had less of a chance of reaching womanhood than others.

She cannot hold it against them, this joyous night, this thanking of the Saints that she has been returned to them. It is a miracle, and she was not the only one affected by her kidnapping. Her parents lost the most, but the rest of her family bore the burden of a lost child as well. She must remember that.

Still, as she is passed from person to person, hugged and kissed and occasionally wept over, she finds herself clinging to the time limit she’d given her parents. I’ll stay for my birthday, she’d told them, but no longer. I have slavers to catch.

She’s leaving tomorrow, bright and early, if she can manage it. But everyone around her seems to be on a different page.

They all have something to say to her, and within the first hour her ears are ringing with empty praise and invasive questions.

Oh, Inej, you look so beautiful!

Inej, your silks are gorgeous!

Inej, you look like a real Suli woman now.

Inej, when will you come back to the performance tent?

Inej, we miss you on the high wire, won’t you show us how it’s done?

Inej, look at you! Your future husband will be so lucky. Isn’t it nearly time to start looking?

Inej, your skin looks flawless.

Whatever sense of peace she’d reached in the bath, in the wagon with her parents, has fled. Her silks chafe at her despite their fine weave, the makeup on her face feels like a mask, and the bangles at her wrists seem to tighten like shackles.

She grits her teeth and bears it all, until it comes to a head in a conversation with her Aunt Sorina.

Sorina is her mother’s younger sister, Zina’s mother, and Inej loves her, she really does, but it’s no secret where Zina inherited her meddlesome personality from. Aunt Sorina is always saying the things no one else dares, crossing the boundaries of social politeness with all the delicacy of a drunkard lurching his way up East Stave after a particularly wild night at the bars. I’m just saying what everyone else is thinking is her standard line when others chastise her for her lack of tact, and the worst thing about it is that she’s usually right.

All things considered, Inej supposes she should be happy she’s waited this long.

“Now, Inej,” her aunt says, taking her by the wrist and dragging her into her circle of aunties in a rainbow of silks, the firelight reflecting off their jewelry. Zina stands among them in magenta, a glass of rice wine clutched in her hand and a long-suffering look on her face. “We’ve all been talking about how absolutely beautiful you look tonight. Isn’t that right?”

The aunties all coo in agreement, some reaching out to touch her hair or run the fabrics of her silks through their hands. Inej curls her fingers in her skirts in an attempt to keep from swatting their hands away.

“And I know it’s your Pandrahavaan, but you are seventeen. It must be nearly time to start the courting process, no?” Aunt Sorina continues. “Zina’s already met with a few eligible bachelors, but none have taken her fancy, yet.” With this, she tosses a fond look of frustration at her daughter, who downs the rest of her glass of wine in one go.

“Oh,” Inej says with an uncomfortable little laugh. Her aunt’s hand on her shoulder feels like it’s pushing her into the soft earth beneath her bare feet. “I don’t…”

“Oh, I know there was a special someone back in that horrid city,” Aunt Sorina says with a knowing wink. “Your mother told me about him. But you’re back among the caravan now, surely it’s time to look for a respectable husband here, among your own people. You can’t let a fling stop you from securing a good future.”

Inej feels her breathing quicken a bit, and she looks to Zina with a pleading expression. Her cousin attempts to come to her aid. “Mama, not everyone wants to be married the minute they hit adulthood. Some of us would like to live a little first.”

“Oh hush,” Aunt Sorina says, “Just because you’ve got all these funny ideas in your head doesn’t mean everyone else feels that way. Inej is a good girl, and I’m sure she wants to make her parents proud. Isn’t that right, dear?”

Something inside Inej is aware that she’s being used by her aunt to voice her frustrations about her headstrong daughter, and knows that Zina is probably just rolling her eyes and will pull Inej away soon to complain about her mother and her unrealistic expectations, like she had so many times in their youth. But that part of her is drowned out by the words Inej is a good girl rattling around her head.

Because suddenly it’s not her aunt saying those words at all, it’s Tante Heleen pinching the skin on the back of her arm, just above the elbow, her nails breaking skin, leaning in to hiss in her ear, Be a good girl, Lynx, he’s a big spender.

It’s Heleen’s hand on her shoulder now, not Aunt Sorina’s. Heleen standing behind her as Inej sits before her vanity, one beringed hand resting possessively on her shoulder, the other tucking her hair gently behind her ear, cooing, You’re my best girl, you know that? The others get so temperamental, so uppity, such spoiled whores. But not you, Lynx. No, you’re a good girl, aren’t you?

It’s a man, one of her regulars who she’d later learn sat on the Merchant Council, pulling her into his lap, a heavy hand fondling her breast, whispering, good girl in her ear with hot, foul-smelling breath when she hands him another glass of wine.

It’s another man, and another, and another, pulling at her clothes, tugging at fistfuls of her hair, holding her down on the bed, bending her over the table in the corner of the room, forcing her to her knees, saying be a good girl, now, as if she had any other choice, as if she was a girl at all and not some toy for them to use and discard over and over and over again.

“—ej? Inej?” she hears as if from the far side of a tunnel, and when she comes just the slightest bit back to herself, she sees Zina before her, eyebrows pulled together in concern, a hand on her arm. The aunties are all looking at her quizzically as well, even Aunt Sorina, her underhanded digs at her daughter forgotten.

Her breathing is rapid and shallow, her heartbeat is pounding in her ears, and her eyes won’t focus, no matter how hard she tries. The silks against her skin and the makeup on her face and the hands on her, both real and imagined, have sent her down the path to disappearing again.

But just like it was when she was trapped beneath the Ravkan man that horrible night at the Menagerie, her mind is on a short leash. She can’t get far enough away from herself to escape all this, because these people know her, or at least, they think they do, and it pins her here in this body that she so desperately wants to escape.

If she can’t escape her body, she can at least escape the situation.

She wrenches herself from Zina’s grasp and takes off running. She knocks into a man serving his wife a glass of wine, pushes through a circle of dancers, upsetting their rhythm. But other than that, and the aunties calling her name, no one else seems to notice. At least, not that she sees. There is a part of her that is still the Wraith, slipping away into the silence as her feet fly over the dew-streaked grass across the green.

Eventually, Inej stumbles up to her parents’ wagon, and it is perhaps this more than anything else that shows just how off-kilter she is. She is a Ghafa, and she has never stumbled in her life.

She throws the door open, breathing heavily, and crashes toward Mama and Papa’s bed, falling to her knees beside it, not even bothering to shut the door. She pulls her traveling bag out from where it’s been tucked away and upends it. All manner of things spill out along the floor—her dark Wraith clothes, a leather-bound journal stuffed with evidence of the slave trade in and out of Ketterdam, a book on sailing, the wanted poster of Kaz that he’d slipped into her pocket as a joke on the docks the day she departed. And there, with heavy thunks as they splay out across the wood floor, her Saints.

She scrambles on her hands and knees, gathering them all to her chest, getting to her feet on shaking legs and dropping them in a pile on the table. One by one, she picks them up and holds them to her forehead, the steel cool against her overheated skin. She recites their names, praying to each saint one by one.

Sankta Alina, the bone handled knife that she straps to her left forearm. It’s her most recent addition, named for the Saint who banished the Shadow Fold, in hopes that she would show Inej the light in the darkness that surrounded her in Ketterdam.

Sankt Vladimir, her boot knife, named for the drowned saint who had held back the waters of the bay in Os Kervo at the cost of his own life. Inej had purchased this knife shortly after she’d made her first kill, after she’d realized just what she was willing to give up to keep her friends afloat.

Sankta Lizabeta, the ornate rose-etched blade that had been a gift from Nina after Inej had saved her life on the first job they did together. The roses had fit the patron saint of gardeners, but they also reminded her of Lizabeta’s vigilance, which had saved her people when all others had grown soft and complacent.

Sankta Anastasia, the long, straight dagger she straps to her thigh, the garnets lining its handle like drops of blood, fittingly named for a woman who had bled herself dry to save others.

Sankta Marya, its handle inlaid with turquoise, named for the only Suli saint in the Istorii Sankt’ya. The patron saint of those who are far from home, Marya had always been a favorite of Inej’s growing up, given that they shared the same heritage, and that the caravan had often borne out the harsh Ravkan winters at the base of the Sikurzoi, where Marya had carved the caves meant to shelter their people. Ketterdam certainly had no caves, but Inej had sought shelter regardless.

And finally, Sankt Petyr, her first knife, a gift from Kaz in her first week in the Dregs. Its handle is plain black, no etchings on the blade. Ruthless and practical, just like him. She’d not been happy to have been given a weapon at the time, but in the years since, it has been her first line of defense whenever she needs it. She’d named it for the demon-slayer renowned for his bravery, knowing that if she would need to be anything to survive the Barrel, it was brave.

Running her fingers over their cool steel, her breathing begins to slow and return to normal. These blades and the Saints they are named for have protected her from thugs, killers, and no-good merchers alike, and they remind her now that she is not helpless.

Now that the panic has subsided, she is overcome by exhaustion. She leans forward, pressing her palms to the table and hanging her head, her eyes closed. The worst is over.

“Ah,” a voice behind her says, and she whirls around, knife in hand, only to come face to face with her great-grandmother. When she realizes who it is, Inej’s eyes widen in shame and she drops Sankt Petyr back to the table, where it clatters horribly in the silence.

“Naniji, I—” she begins, feeling sick with contrition, but Naniji just continues as nearly being stabbed by her great-granddaughter is nothing out of the ordinary.

“I was wondering where you’d been hiding your teeth,” is all she says.

All the words Inej might have said—the apologies, the promises of no echo, the pleas to forget this ever happened—leave her immediately. All she can do is stare, dumbfounded, as Naniji closes the door to the wagon behind her and lowers herself painstakingly into one of the seats around the table. Her wizened old fingers float above the knives lined up in front of her, back and forth, before settling on Sankta Lizabeta. She picks it up and holds it out before her, perusing it as if it were a particularly well-arranged bouquet, rather than killing steel.

“Exquisite craftsmanship,” she says conversationally.

Inej cannot speak, her throat completely closed up, waiting for some sort of pronouncement, some judgment from this woman, the matriarch of their caravan, venerated for her age and wisdom.

“It is something, isn’t it?” Naniji continues, as if Inej is not standing there gaping like a fish out of water. “For a thing to be both beautiful and dangerous? Just like you.”

The word washes over her, and she clings to it like driftwood in a shipwreck. She remembers Kaz's rasping voice saying,You’re obviously dangerous. She’s often wondered, in the time since, how he knew, looking at her with her kohl-lined eyes, standing there barefoot in flimsy silks. Whatever it was he’d seen, she realizes, Naniji sees it, too.

“I…” Inej squeaks out, completely dumbfounded that the one person who sees her clearly is her ninety-year-old great-grandmother, a woman she has long been so intimidated by that she’s only had a handful of conversations with her throughout her entire life.

“I am not naive, child. I know the reputation that city has; I know it would not return you without a few scars.” Naniji reaches out a wizened hand and grips Inej’s wrist firmly, but not harshly. She flips her hand around, revealing a puckered starburst scar from Dunyasha’s throwing stars. The skin of her wrist below it is smooth, thanks to Nina’s tailoring, but Inej remembers the mess of scar tissue it used to be, and before that, the black ink of the peacock feather.

Naniji’s thumb, her skin cool and callused, brushes over the starburst as she says, “And I know these are not the worst of the scars you bear from your time away from us.” And when Inej finds her eyes, she can see, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Naniji knows.

“How do you…” Inej asks, but trails off when Naniji’s eyes fall from hers. She can see her take a deep breath, and square her shoulders. Like she’s about to perform, Inej realizes. We have the same tell.

“Sit,” Naniji says, and Inej does as she’s told, kneeling on the floor before her, her feet tucked beneath her, skirts an ocean of green silk around her. “I was just about the age you are now,” Naniji begins, her gaze focused on some point over Inej’s head. “I was on the trapeze then. After a show, a handsome Ravkan boy came up to me and told me he loved my act, with that flirtatious look in his eyes. You know. He invited me out with his friends. I was young, and he was handsome, so I went.”

Naniji’s gnarled hands curl in her skirts, and Inej, sensing what comes next, reaches out her own hand, placing it on top of her great-grandmother’s. “He handed me a drink,” Naniji continues, seeming to draw some strength from Inej. “I don’t remember anything else.”

Inej closes her eyes, and unbidden, a series of images comes to her. The crow head of Kaz’s cane caving in a man’s cheek on the floor of the Crow Club. Pim and Keeg, hauling the man’s limp form out to the alley, leaving him there with the trash. Inej and Jesper, pulling the arms of the unfortunate university student over their shoulders and half-carrying her upstairs to a private room to sleep off whatever had been slipped in her drink. The girl had woken up hours later in a daze, confused and scared, and Inej had been there to assure her nothing had been done to her while she was unconscious. She’d fallen into Inej’s arms and wept, called her a guardian angel. Naniji had had no such angel.

“When I woke, I was in a strange room. Alone, but my skirt had been pulled up to my waist and there was this…ache. I knew…” Naniji trails off and Inej squeezes her hand with both of her own, trying with all her might to convey that she understands, that there is no need to explain further. She knows that ache, that pain, both physical and mental. She would not wish it on her worst enemy, and a bone deep sorrow fills her at the thought of Naniji knowing that pain as intimately as Inej herself. Naniji squeezes back and continues, “I picked myself up and went back to the caravan. I told no one.”

“Not even your parents?”

“No,” Naniji says, “Not even your great-grandfather, in all the years we were married. I was so ashamed, Neja, so ashamed. Because I’d gone with him, you see, and flirted with him, and I thought I’d brought it on myself.”

“That’s not true!” Inej says fiercely, her blood boiling. “That man, what he did was vile, and—”

“I know that now, my fierce girl,” Naniji says, “But for many years I did not see it that way. I walked around with this horrible shame in my belly, thinking I’d been defiled. And I learned to recognize that shame in others. I’ve seen it in the eyes of more than one Suli girl over the years. I saw it in your eyes, when you returned to us, meja.”

Inej closes her eyes, as if that will stop Naniji from reading the truth there. But the damage is already done.

They sit there in silence for a while, hands gripped around each others’, feeling the weight of that handsome Ravkan boy, of the man who smelled of vanilla, of all the others. And in the silence, Inej finds her mouth opening, and the words finally come spilling out.

“It was a brothel.”

The only response from Naniji is another squeeze of the hands, and Inej finds the strength to open her eyes and meet her great-grandmother’s. The understanding she sees there unlocks the floodgates.

When Inej had told her parents, she’d done so in the sitting room of the Van Eck mansion. Wylan had shown her parents in, given Inej a squeeze on the shoulder, and dragged Jesper away down the hall, toward the music room. Shortly after, soft piano music had filtered back to them. Inej appreciated the attempt to provide them privacy.

Kaz had been there as well, having come back from the harbor with them. While her parents had gone to take a seat on the sofa, she and Kaz had stopped just outside the doorway. They exchanged no words; he had simply looked at her with a raised eyebrow, his question obvious. She’d shaken her head, and said, “I need to do this on my own.” It had been all the explanation he’d needed. He’d simply nodded and given her hand a firm squeeze. She held on a moment longer, the leather of his gloves (back in place by the time he’d shaken hands with her father on the quay) cool and comforting against her skin. There were times, she’d realized, when armor came in handy.

She’d entered the sitting room alone, and Kaz had closed the door behind her, and she’d heard his cane tapping away down the hall in the same direction Wylan and Jesper had disappeared. Inej had sat herself in an armchair across from her parents and taken a deep breath. She’d explained the whole thing from start to finish in an even, methodical tone, at a distance from herself, as if the story belonged to someone else. Her parents had begun to cry early, but Inej had held off until she reached the end, until they’d pulled her into a hug and they’d all ended up in a heap on the floor together.

The story that comes out now is the same, but the method of delivery is not. Inej breaks down into tears nearly immediately, and falls into senseless rambling, sobbing her way through tales of men and what they’d done to her, of Heleen and her constant torment, of the perversion of her culture she was forced to perform. Of Kaz showing up in the salon like a storybook hero (even in the midst of her hysterics, she can imagine the way he’d roll his eyes to hear her describe it this way). Tales of the Dregs, of learning to be a spider, of her initial refusal to kill and the way those principles had slipped through her fingers so, so quickly. Of the knife she’d sunk into the back of a Razorgull’s head when he’d had Kaz on his knees, a garotte around his throat. Of the hours of agonized sobbing afterwards, of the certainty that she would forever be forsaken by the Saints. Of all the people she’d killed in the time since, and the prayers she’d said over their bodies, each one feeling more hollow than the last. Of the Ice Court, of Van Eck, of Dunyasha.

In the midst of it, she can’t help but brace herself for what comes next. She imagines the words Naniji might say—kadema mehim, the same curse that she had uttered to Bajan while in Van Eck’s captivity. She waits to be forsaken for all she has done, to be banished from showing her face here again, ousted from among her people. There is a part of her that thinks it might be a relief.

But Naniji says nothing of the sort. She simply waits for Inej to exhaust herself, for her words to fizzle out, before taking her tear-streaked face in those cool, callused hands.

“My brave girl,” she says, and there’s a hitch in her voice that tells Inej she is not unaffected by the tale she has just heard. “You are forgiven.”

It’s not what Inej expects. She shakes her head, not understanding.

Naniji repeats herself. “You are forgiven. By the Saints, and by me. The things you have done, the things that have been done to you, these are burdens far too great for anyone to bear. And yet you have. You will not be condemned for doing so. You are forgiven.”

Inej had thought she’d run out of tears to cry, but her face crumples and a new round of sobs work themselves up from her belly.

Her parents had hugged her, comforted her, assured her that they still loved her. But deep down, she had not known, nor had she been brave enough to ask if they forgave her. If she could be forgiven.

But here, on the floor of the wagon where she grew from a baby to a toddler to a girl, where she was stolen before she could finish that journey, she finds the absolution she hadn’t realized she was looking for. Naniji sits there, a rock unmoved by a raging river, her hands on Inej’s shoulders as she buries her face in her skirts and cries anew.

The weight lifts off her shoulders, and Inej is finally home.

Chapter Text

Soora Ghafa notices when her daughter runs from her own birthday celebration.

How could she not? From the moment Inej was born, Soora has felt as if a part of her own soul walks the earth independent of her. That horrible summer day, when she’d returned from the market in Os Kervo to discover the wagon ransacked and no sign of her teenage daughter, a hollowness had settled inside her, not to be filled until she’d seen her flying up a Ketterdam quay toward them.

Since being reunited, she has been hyper aware of her daughter’s location at all times, hesitant to let her out of her sight. It had nearly given her a heart attack back in that wretched city, all those nights Inej had snuck out of the mansion to see that boy of hers, but she is trying her best to allow her daughter the freedom she so desperately needs.

So, at the celebration, this Pandrahavaan given two years too late, Soora keeps her distance, mingling with the rest of the family, receiving compliments on what a beautiful daughter she has raised, sharing tearful praises that she has come back to them. She allows Inej to face this on her own, trying her best not to smother her, but always keeping a watchful eye.

She can see that she is tense, uncomfortable with all the attention directed toward her. This, perhaps, is the starkest change she has observed in her daughter in the months since her return to them. The girl Soora knew was a shining beacon of joy, always happiest as the center of attention, basking equally in the roar of a crowd and the gentle praises of her father. But this young woman she has become is quiet and reserved, seeming most comfortable in the shadows and on the sidelines. It has been an adjustment for all of them, Soora thinks, understanding who they have become in the absence of one another.

Inej is passed around from grandparents to aunts to uncles to cousins, and on to other members of the caravan who share no blood, yet who are family all the same. She smiles and nods and accepts compliments, and Soora watches the line of her shoulders get more and more tense as the night goes on.

She sees Sorina pull her into a circle of aunties, and can only imagine what her younger sister might be saying. The first day Inej was back, when she’d gone to see Tezaria about getting new clothes made, Soora had pulled Sorina aside and instructed her to hold her tongue around Inej, to be only the most polite version of herself. Sorina had gotten offended in the way unique to spoiled youngest children everywhere, but she had agreed. She’s been on her best behavior this past week, but Soora can tell her self-restraint is wearing thin. She’s about to pull herself from the dreadfully boring conversation she’s been having with Marik’s aunt Charithra, in order to go rescue her daughter, when Inej bolts from the conversation, stumbling across the green in the direction of their wagon.

Soora cuts Aunt Charithra off mid-sentence and hurries after her daughter, silk skirts fisted in her hands. She finds Marik’s eyes across the crowd and knows he saw it, too.

Before they can leave the crowd behind, however, a gnarled hand grips her hard by the elbow and brings her to a stop. The hand and the grip are familiar, although she’s not sure what her grandmother could possibly want with her now.

“I’m sorry, Nani, I can’t—”

“Let her go,” Nani says, with the same no-nonsense tone Soora recognizes from childhood. “I’ll speak with her.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Nani,” Marik says respectfully, his eyes focused on the direction Inej disappeared in. “She needs—”

“Your coddling has not worked so far, has it? Perhaps that is no longer what she needs.”

Marik’s eyes return to the conversation, and Soora can see the way he bristles at those words. When he speaks, his tone is respectful, but there is an edge of steel to it. “Respectfully, Nani, you don’t understand what she’s been through.”

“Don’t I?” Nani says, her voice serious and her eyes dark and flinty. There is something in them that gives Soora pause. She doesn’t know what exactly, but for perhaps the first time she views her own grandmother not as a pillar of the community or someone to be feared and venerated, but as a woman with her own past and, perhaps, her own demons.

It is that something that allows her to place a hand on Marik’s arm, and nod to her grandmother. “We’ll be here if she needs us,” is all she says. Nani nods, and heads off into the dark in the direction of their sunny orange wagon.

When she is gone, Marik turns an incredulous look on her. “We’re just going to stand here and do nothing?”

“Maybe Nani is right,” Soora admits, a pang in her chest as she does. “Maybe Inej needs something other than what we can offer.”

Her husband looks pained at that, but he doesn’t argue. He has always doted on Inej, given her everything he could, and it is a sobering thing, she knows, to realize that sometimes all you can give is just not enough.

“And besides,” she adds determinedly, “we’re not going to do nothing. We’re going to go kill my sister.” Marik gives her an unamused look, then thinks about it and simply nods his head in acquiescence and steps out of her way.

When she approaches the circle of women, she can see Zina chastising Sorina, while the others look after Inej with concern. Soora barrels into the middle of them, grabbing Sorina roughly by the arm and pulling her around to look at her. “What did you say to her?” she growls.

“Nothing!” Sorina says defensively, which earns her a skeptical look from Zina and a murderous one from Soora. “I just—well, we were all just saying how beautiful she looked.”

“You were pestering her about finding a husband,” Zina says, unimpressed. “Well, you were pestering me, and using Inej to do it.”

Sorina puts on a persecuted look. “Well, you can’t fault me for that, Zina! You’re not a child anymore, and you should be thinking about securing a future. And now that Inej is back, she should be, too.”

“And if she wants something different? If I want something different? Honestly, Mama—” Zina’s tone speaks to an argument that has been had a thousand times, and Soora doesn’t care to hear it.

“Inej can secure her own future, sister, but thank you for your concern.”

Sorina turns a flabbergasted look on her. “Soora, I know you mentioned that boy in the city, but certainly Inej can’t be serious about that! For one, he’s shevrati, and for another, he’s across the True Sea. Now that Inej is here to stay, she needs to look for a future here, among the caravan.”

“She’s not here to stay!” Soora cries, all the anger and frustration and heartbreak of the last three years bubbling up to the surface. “She’s leaving tomorrow, and you are ruining the last night I have with her!”

Sorina and the other women fall into a stunned silence, and the volume of Soora’s outburst has drawn the attention of others around them. The sudden quiet feels tangible, and Soora feels tears in her eyes as the reality of her own words sinks in.

Inej had told them of all that had happened to her in Ketterdam on that first day, but she had kept her ambitions to herself for nearly a week, before sitting Soora and Marik down and telling them in a measured tone that while she would come with them to visit the caravan, she would not be staying, but would instead be captaining a vessel named for her deadly alter ego and sailing the True Sea in search of slavers to bring to justice.

In that week, Soora had allowed herself to hope, to envision the future she had thought lost forever, of her daughter safe again in their wagon, the three of them a unit once more. Of a glorious return to the high wire, of days spent chatting over the washing, laughing while chopping vegetables, of the calm assurance of another set of lungs breathing behind the tapestry on the wagon’s far end. Hazier visions of a young man asking Marik for their daughter’s hand, of Inej dressed in bridal silks, of the joyous heartbreak of her moving from their wagon to her own, of the new family Inej might begin there.

But that is not the life Inej desires. It may once have been, but the direction of her daughter’s life was irrevocably altered on that horrible summer’s day, and perhaps Soora was naive for imagining it could be put back on its old course.

Still, she has been dreading the moment her daughter will leave her again, afraid that hollowness will return. She has held out some measure of hope that she will simply change her mind, put away those knives, and become the daughter Soora remembers. A foolish notion, and worse—one that has deliberately ignored the way Inej has drawn even further into herself this past week, the way she has walked on eggshells around everyone, not because she is graceful, but because she is afraid.

What a disservice all that wishing has done to her own daughter.

“What do you mean she’s leaving?” Sorina asks, breaking the silence and Soora’s reverie.

“Inej is only here for a visit,” Soora says resolutely, now determined to defend her daughter’s choices in a way she has failed to do even to herself. “She has a ship, and she plans to sail the True Sea liberating those in bondage and bringing slavers to justice.”

Sorina lets out a disbelieving laugh. “Inej? The same little girl who couldn’t kill a spider? Hunting slavers on the True Sea?”

“No,” Soora says, sadly. “Not the same girl at all. Not anymore.”

And with that, she turns and walks away.

—

Any plans Inej had of slipping out before sunrise are thoroughly derailed. After sobbing her heart out in Naniji’s skirts last night, she had been so exhausted that she’d crawled into bed, still in her silks and jewelry and with her ruined makeup still on her face. She’d fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep, clutching Sankt Petyr to her chest.

When she finally wakes, the sunlight filtering through the tapestry on her right is the bright of mid-morning. She rolls to her back and scrapes the heel of her hand over her eyes, swollen from tears and sleep. When she manages to open them, she finds herself staring up, not at the smooth wooden beams and geraniums she has woken to for the past week, but at a sight she hasn’t seen since she was fourteen.

She is lying, she realizes, only now noticing the tapestry is strung up on the wrong side of her, in her own childhood bed. She’d been so tired and so out of sorts last night that she had crawled in, not thinking of the morning she’d been roused from it by a group of men, but thinking only of the safety and warmth it had provided her for fourteen years before that. Now that she’s here, she wonders what it was about this bed that has seemed so insurmountable all these days.

The mattress is thin but soft, the pillows beneath her head stuffed with goose down. She lies on top of the quilt her mother had spent months sewing for her tenth birthday, all blues and greens and purples. It smells of Papa, who has been sleeping here the last several nights, and the comforting familiarity of it makes the memory of those men seem a thousand miles away.

The beams above her face are covered in scrawled drawings in her own hand, a map of her childhood, the person she once was.

Her name scrawled out in laborious child’s script, all capitals, the j backwards.

Hearts that look more like two-toed feet, looping flowers, a stick figure family labeled MAMA, PAPA, and ME.

And as she got older, the hearts more precise, the flowers more detailed, messages like Inej and Zina were here followed by a date.

A catalog of childhood crushes, scratched into the surface with her fathers pocket knife, as if they would last forever, then scored out whenever a new fancy took her.

IG + JM

IG + FO

IG + AK

She runs a finger over these last letters, trying to remember the girl who’d carved them there.

That girl had been thirteen going on fourteen, and she’d taken notice of Hanzi’s friend Alafair Kabudji, a tumbler from one of the other long-time circus families in their troupe. He was eighteen, and certainly thought of her as something of a little sister, if he thought about her at all, but Inej, hormones raging, was taken by the strength of his arms and the beginnings of facial hair on his jaw. She'd been certain that if he’d just look at her, he’d see she was really quite grown up and fall madly in love with her and they’d get married just as soon as she was old enough and have a gaggle of perfect, acrobatically-inclined children.

That girl had talked her mother’s ear off about him, and rolled her eyes at Mama’s suggestion that he was perhaps a bit too old for her. That girl complained to her cousin Zina even as they sat brushing out the hair of the dolls they were both convinced they were too old for, but couldn’t bear to give up. That girl had lived her life for another walk of the wire, had beamed out at the adoring crowd, had soaked in all their applause and thought that there could never be anything more fulfilling than this.

That girl had not even known just what she had to fear when the men broke into her wagon and pulled her from her bed.

Inej has been so certain that that girl died in the hold of a slaver ship. But wouldn’t that be the easy way to think of it? To spare that girl all the hardship and pain that came afterwards, to keep her preserved like a fly in amber, perfect and untouched and unharmed?

That girl is not dead, she realizes. She is the same girl who survived the Menagerie and the Dregs and the Ice Court and Jan Van Eck and Heleen Van Houden. She has come out the other side with scars, both physical and mental, but she remains alive. Bruised and broken, but alive.

IG + AK

There is no shame in being the girl who once carved those letters, full of hope and light and dreams of the future, just as there is no shame in being a girl who has suffered and killed and survived. Inej thinks she can be her again, if only for a little while.

She takes Sankt Petyr in her hand and carves one decisive line through the letters, before finding an empty space and etching a new hope into it.

IG + KB

It may not last forever, for very little does. She cannot know the storms she will weather in this life, the places the winds will take her. But there is something to be said for hope. Hope is all she has, and Inej will shelter it within herself like a tiny flame against a brutal killing wind.

—

Zina doesn’t see her cousin again the night of the disastrous party. It’s not until mid-afternoon the next day that she finds her alone in the pavilion, papers strewn around her.

Relief floods through her. Aunt Soora had said she was leaving, and after how terrible last night went, she wasn’t sure if she’d stop to say goodbye.

Inej looks up as Zina approaches and gives her a tired but genuine smile. Her hair is braided over one shoulder, and she’s dressed in a casual blouse and an orange skirt, but Zina sees a glint of metal when she lifts her hand in a wave. As she gets closer, she sees it’s a dagger, sheathed and strapped to her forearm.

“I thought you might already be on your way,” Zina says cautiously, settling herself down on the cushion across from Inej.

“Yes, well,” Inej says, meeting her eyes briefly before turning her gaze back to the sheet of paper in her hand. Zina can see the tips of her ears starting to turn pink, her telltale sign of embarrassment since childhood. “Last night didn’t exactly go as planned, and I didn’t get an early enough start this morning. I’ll leave tomorrow.”

Zina nods, and the silence that descends around them is heavy and unfamiliar. Since they were children, she and Inej had always been of one mind, often pretending they were sisters, twins even. Inej had no siblings, and Zina had only a rotten little brother, so they’d latched on to each other early and never let go. When she’d been taken, it had felt like her other half had gone missing. She’d thought, naively, perhaps, that when Inej returned—for she’d always had faith that she would—everything would go back to normal. It hasn’t.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” Zina asks, unable to hide the hurt in her voice at being kept in the dark. She’s tried her best not to be bitter that her cousin came back changed, but to not even be given the dignity of a goodbye stings too much to let it go.

Inej sighs, closing her eyes as if plagued by a headache. She shakes her head sadly. “I can’t stay here.”

“I understand that,” Zina says, and it’s true, even if she doesn’t know the specifics of what it is that’s pulling Inej away from the caravan. “But I don’t understand why you let us all think you’d be staying when you aren’t. Now I’ve wasted this week trying to give you space, and you’re off to Saints-know-where—”

“Novyi Zem,” Inej says, cutting her off.

“What?”

“I’m off to Novyi Zem. Or at least in that direction. I received word,” she says, holding up a sheet of paper covered in slashing script that Zina can’t read, “that there is a ship,The Painted Lady, that left port three days ago from Weddle en route to Ketterdam, carrying a cargo bay full of slaves. I intend to intercept it.”

“Intercept it,” Zina repeats, unable to reconcile the stoic girl in front of her with the cousin she teased and laughed with all through her childhood. “With what?”

“I have a ship,” Inej says, putting that sheet of paper down, and rifling through the mess to find another one. Zina has the distinct impression she’s doing it to avoid looking her in the eyes. “The Wraith. I’m going to use it to hunt slavers and bring them to justice. And also to return those they’ve stolen back to their homes.”

Zina eyes the knife strapped to Inej’s arm, takes in the new stiffness in her posture and seriousness of her face, the casual way she talks about hunting slavers and justice, and draws the inevitable conclusion.

“I suppose you were right,” she says carefully, tracing a finger along the edge of a leather notebook. “You really weren’t on a pleasure cruise.”

Inej looks up, and there is a deep ache in her eyes, all at once so similar to Zina’s own and yet now so different. “No,” she says. “I wasn’t.” She looks wary, as if expecting Zina to pry. Zina supposes it's not an unwarranted feeling, given prying has always been one of her greatest strengths.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she says.

Inej smiles then, and there’s something in it Zina recognizes, a glimmer of the girl she’d worried lost forever. “Thank you. I will, someday. I think.” She sighs, looking off into the distance. “I’ve changed, Zina. For the better, in some ways, and for the far worse in others.”

Zina reaches out and grabs her hand. “You’re still my cousin. Still Inej. Nothing can change enough to negate that.”

Inej squeezes her hand, her eyebrows pulling together in an expression Zina recognizes as gratitude.

After a moment, Zina looks back at the papers strewn about. “So what is all this?” she asks, her tone deliberately casual. She picks one up. “Is this Kerch? What an ugly script.”

Inej laughs. “The script itself isn’t that bad, his handwriting is just exquisitely awful.”

Zina looks up at her, and clocks the pink in the ears again. Things have changed between them, and she may not yet know her place beside this new Inej, but she settles easily back into the familiar teasing tone of childhood, thinking maybe Inej wants some sense of normalcy as much as she does. “His handwriting, hm?” she says, examining it closer. “Is this really information on a slaving ship, or is it actually a sappy love letter you don’t want me to know about?”

Inej flushes more and snatches the paper back. “It’s really information on a slaving ship,” she says, but the tone of her voice is not annoyed, but fond. Zina takes the opening for what it is. She paws through Inej’s things the way she used to when they were children, going through each other’s drawers for blouses to borrow or trinkets to covet. It’s mostly just a lot of sheets of paper Zina can’t read, but Inej lets her do it, going back to reading her information (love letter) in relative peace.

Eventually, Zina happens upon a sheet of paper with a word she can read on it. Wanted, it says in Ravkan, one readable block of text among other languages, for the kidnapping of Wylan Van Eck. It’s a drawing of a severe looking young man with dark eyes and a scowl on his face.

“Ooh,” she says, holding it up to look more closely. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the way Inej blanches. “Is this one of the bad men you’re going after?”

“No,” Inej says, her voice strained, hands reaching for it and then pulling back as if she’s been burned. “It’s, uh…”

Zina gives her cousin a scrutinizing look. The flush that began in her ears has spread across her cheeks, and her eyes are darting between Zina and the wanted poster in her hand in a way that seems almost guilty. Zina looks back at the poster, noticing now just how young the young man really is. She can’t make out the name, given that it’s written in Kerch, but she’s got a pretty good idea. She looks back to her cousin and raises an eyebrow.

“He gave it to me as a joke,” Inej says, her voice almost pleading.

“A joke,” Zina repeats skeptically. “So it’s a fake.”

“I—not exactly.”

Zina shakes her head in amused disbelief, handing it back over to a more and more distressed looking Inej. Her cousin’s time in Ketterdam really wasn’t what she let on. Zina’s endlessly curious, but she supposes if she can’t know the truth of it now, she'll have to settle for this little, if concerning, detail. “You know, cousin, most people keep their sweetheart’s likeness in a locket.”

Inej gives a sheepish grin, her fingers folding the poster along well-worn lines. “Well, I guess I’m not most people.”

There’s a beat of silence, and then the two of them fall apart laughing, the way they used to when they were children. Inej has changed in her absence, but Zina supposes she's changed as well. They cannot go back to the way things were, but perhaps the way things are now is not so dire either.

—

On her last night in the caravan, Inej attends the evening performance, and stays the entire time. She sits between her parents and Naniji, and though the sight of Zina’s silks and the bells on her ankles still sends a spike of panic through her, she squeezes her mother’s hand and her great-grandmother’s, and weathers the storm.

It’s quite the show, and a part of her laments at missing it all these nights out of fear. But as she gets to her feet for the standing ovation at the end, a thought comes to her clear as day. I’ll catch it again next time.

It catches her off guard, almost, this surety that she will return and see the show again. A part of her, kept secret even from herself, had, up until this moment, not been sure that she would ever return to the caravan. But Naniji’s absolution, her parent’s unconditional love, even the easy grace with which Zina accepted that Inej’s path now lies elsewhere, have all provided her with the hope that she can come back, that she will be whole here once more.

She is not done with Ketterdam, but she’s not done with the Suli caravans either.

After the performance, she hugs aunts and uncles and cousins goodbye. News of her leaving has spread after her disastrous Pandrahavaan, and even though most of the caravan seems not to understand her mission, they wish her safe travels all the same. The Suli are a nomadic people, and if there is one thing they understand, it is the need to wander.

She hugs Naniji tightly, and whispers thank you, thank you, thank you into her shoulder. Naniji strokes her hair and gives her a rare smile when she pulls back. “May the Saints guide you, and may your Saints”—she glances as the knife strapped to Inej’s wrist— “aim true.”

Inej smiles back and pulls her into another hug. The others in the caravan may not understand what she has been through, and she doesn’t need them to. It is enough to know there are a select few who know and accept every facet of who she is now.

When she and Mama and Papa finally make their way back to the wagon, it is well past midnight. Just like she had the first night back with them in the Van Eck mansion, she climbs into their bed and nestles between them, knowing the months of solitude that await her and needing to bask in the nearness of them one last time before she sets sail.

—

Marik Ghafa sits on the steps of the wagon he has called home for more than half his life, listening to the quiet sounds of movement inside and the stillness of the night around him. There is a faint pink on the horizon, signaling dawn’s imminent arrival, and with it, the departure of his only daughter.

He has lived his entire life within this caravan, this troupe of acrobats, and while every once in a while someone decides to leave, to join another caravan or to make their way in the world of shevrati, he never imagined having to say goodbye to his little girl. He knows Soora feels the same way, but unlike her, he has not tried to convince himself she will change her mind; he has simply been quietly grieving her loss even while rejoicing in her return.

She was their miracle child—he and Soora had grown up together, both of them from circus families going back several generations, and they’d fallen in love young and stayed that way ever since. They’d married at eighteen—not considered terribly young in the Suli community—and had expected to be growing their family within the year. It had not happened. They’d tried for many years, endured multiple failed pregnancies, watched in pain as their peers and younger siblings became parents, and eventually had resigned themselves to being a family of two.

Until, at the age of thirty—practically ancient, if you asked their mothers—Soora had fallen pregnant again. They’d waited with bated breath through the first month, two months, three, and the baby had stubbornly hung on. Eventually, they’d begun to hope, to plan, and Inej had come barrelling into the world—too early, too small, but healthy and blessedly alive—in the middle of a hot summer night. In the joy of her arrival, he’d begun to forget the fear of losing her.

Until of course, he did.

The door to the caravan opens behind him, and she slips up next to him on silent feet. “What are you doing out here, Papa?” she asks, lowering herself next to him on the stoop.

He turns to look at her. Her hair is braided back in that coil she’d worn in Ketterdam, and her clothes are the dark, hooded things she wears to fade into the shadows. In the dark of the early morning, she almost fades into the background, and a part of him wonders if she really is a wraith, if she was ever here at all. He shakes the notion off, accepting the mug of tea that she holds out for him.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he says simply, taking a sip, the earthy flavor of the tea coursing through him.

She hums, and sips her tea herself. She has always been so like him, a fact which drove Soora mad, and much of her childhood was spent in companionable silences just like this one. There are some lessons parents and children teach each other, and this was one of them—that with the right person, words are unnecessary.

Except, these last two months, since they have been reunited, there are words he has been choking on. Words he hasn’t been able to bring himself to say, even though he has felt the truth of them for three long years. He’s been a coward, unable to say them to her, but he must, before she disappears into the morning toward the sea that took her once. He has to say them, for the chance that the sea may not give her back this time.

“It was my fault,” he says quietly, strained, forcing them past the lump in his throat.

Inej turns to him, her big brown eyes confused, eyebrows pulling together. “What was your fault, Papa?”

“All of it. The last three years,” he says, tears forming in his eyes as he looks away from her, unable to bear looking at her knowing all that his mistake has put her through. “I let you sleep in that day.”

“Papa—”

“Your mother had gone to the market in Os Kervo, and you were supposed to be helping me with the nets. It was your punishment, for mouthing off to your mother.” She huffs a little laugh at the memory. “But I let it go. You know I’ve always been a pushover with you. I let you sleep, mended the nets myself. When you didn’t show up, even though it was getting to be midday, I…I wasn’t even worried.” The shame creeps up in him and the tears spill over. He puts his head in his hands. It has eaten at him day and night for three years, this shame. That his failure as a father allowed it to happen, that he didn’t realize sooner that she was gone. He should have known, should have sensed it.

What good is a father who doesn't even know his daughter has been taken from him?

“I thought you’d run off with Zina—gone swimming, or to the markets. It wasn’t until your mother came home, that she saw the state of the wagon—”

“Papa,” Inej says, gently, pulling at his wrist and forcing him to look at her. She has tears of her own in her eyes. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it was,” he insists. He should have made her get up, should have noticed she was late, should have stopped them from taking her. “It was my failure as a father. My greatest duty in life was to protect you, to shield you from harm, and I have failed. Forgive me, meja.”

She shakes her head, holding his hand in both of her own. “You have done nothing in need of forgiveness,” she says, her tone calm and measured, her eyes serious. He shakes his head and opens his mouth to protest, but she speaks over him. “But I forgive you anyway. If that is what you need.”

He pulls her into his arms, his miracle girl, and weeps softly into her hair. They stay that way for a long time, wrapped in a tight embrace as the sun creeps over the horizon. Eventually, he pulls back, holding her face in his hands.

“I do not know what I did,” he says solemnly, tracing his thumbs over the apples of her cheeks, “to deserve a daughter like you.”

She smiles, placing her hand over his and leaning her cheek against him. “I would not be the daughter I am without the father I have.”

He pulls her to him and places a kiss on her forehead. “I am so proud of you meja. I wish with all my heart that you did not have to leave, but I understand why you must.”

“The heart is an arrow,” she says, and he smiles against her hairline.

“Yes,” he says, “and if your target is out there on the high seas, bringing the people who caused us such pain to justice, preventing other fathers from the pain I have known, other girls from the suffering that you have endured…then I can only pray that your arrow fly straight.”

—

Inej arrives in Os Kervo two days later, to find her crew gathered on the docks, loading up her ship. As she climbs the gangplank, they begin to take notice of her, calling out greetings of “Captain!” and “Wraith!” She gives them all warm smiles, and finds Specht on the foredeck, supervising the rigging of the sails.

“Captain,” he nods at her in greeting. “How was home?”

She leans against the railing and scans the deck below. Her crew, some of them long-time sailors recruited by Specht, others with more personal vendettas against the slave trade, are bustling around, laughing and joking even on the precipice of this great and perilous new adventure. She feels the same excitement bubble up within her.

She has faced what she left behind, and she is ready for what comes next.

“It wasn’t what I expected,” she says, in answer to Specht’s question. “But it was what I needed.”