Crooked Kingdom

  He hesitated, then said, “You could stay with me and Da. If you want. At the hotel. If you need a place to wait everything out.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure,” Jesper said with a shrug that didn’t feel right on his shoulders. “Inej and Kaz too. We can’t all scatter before the comeuppance is delivered.”

  “And after that? When your father’s loan is paid, will you go back to Novyi Zem?”

  “I should.”

  Wylan waited. Jesper didn’t have an answer for him. If he went back to the farm, he’d be away from the temptations of Ketterdam and the Barrel. But he might just find some new kind of trouble to get into. And there would be so much money. Even after the loan was paid, there would still be more than three million kruge. He shrugged again. “Kaz is the planner.”

  “Sure,” said Wylan, but Jesper could see the disappointment in his face.

  “I suppose you’ve got your future all figured out?”

  “No. I just know I’m going to get my mother out of that place and try to build some kind of life for us.” Wylan nodded to the posters on the wall. “Is this really what you want? To be a criminal? To keep bouncing from the next score to the next fight to the next near miss?”

  “Honestly?” Jesper knew Wylan probably wasn’t going to like what he said next.

  “It’s time,” Kaz said from the doorway.

  “Yes, this is what I want,” said Jesper. Wylan looped his satchel over his shoulder, and without thinking, Jesper reached out and untwisted the strap. He didn’t let go. “But it’s not all that I want.”

  “Now,” said Kaz.

  I’m going to beat him over the head with that cane. Jesper released the strap. “No mourners.”

  “No funerals,” Wylan said quietly. He and Kaz vanished through the door.

  Nina and Inej were next. Nina had disappeared into one of the passages to change out of the ridiculous Fjerdan costume and don practical trousers, coat, and tunic—all of Ravkan make and cut. She’d taken Matthias with her and had emerged rumpled and rosy several long minutes later.

  “Staying on task?” Jesper couldn’t resist asking.

  “I’m teaching Matthias all about fun. He’s an excellent student. Diligent in his lessons.”

  “Nina—” Matthias warned.

  “Has problems with attitude. Shows room for improvement.”

  Inej nudged the bottle of coffee extract toward Jesper. “Try to be cautious tonight, Jes.”

  “I’m about as good at cautious as Matthias is at fun.”

  “I’m perfectly good at fun,” Matthias growled.

  “Perfectly,” Jesper agreed.

  There was more he wanted to say to all of them, mostly Inej, but not in front of the others. Maybe not ever, he conceded. He owed Inej an apology. His carelessness had gotten them ambushed at Fifth Harbor before they left for the Ice Court job, and the mistake had nearly cost the Wraith her life. But how the hell did you apologize for that? Sorry I almost got you stabbed to death. Who wants waffles?

  Before he could ponder it further, Inej had planted a kiss on his cheek, Nina had aimed a single-fingered gesture at the wall of wanted posters, and Jesper was stuck waiting for half past nine bells, alone in the tomb with a glum-looking Kuwei and a pacing Matthias.

  Kuwei began reorganizing the notebooks in his pack.

  Jesper sat down at the table. “Do you need all of those?”

  “I do,” said Kuwei. “Have you been to Ravka?”

  Poor kid is scared, thought Jesper. “No, but you’ll have Nina and Matthias with you.”

  Kuwei glanced at Matthias and whispered, “He is very stern.”

  Jesper had to laugh. “He’s not what I’d call a party, but he has a few good qualities.”

  “I can hear you, Fahey,” Matthias grumbled.

  “Good. I’d hate to have to shout.”

  “Aren’t you even concerned about the others?” Matthias said.

  “Of course. But all of us are out of nursery clothes. The time for worrying is over. Now we get to the fun part,” he said, tapping his guns. “The doing.”

  “Or the dying,” Matthias muttered. “You know as well as I do that Nina isn’t at her best.”

  “She doesn’t have to be tonight. The whole idea is not to get into a fight, alas.”

  Matthias left off his prowling and took a seat at the table across from Jesper. “What happened at the lake house?”

  Jesper smoothed out the corner of one of the maps. “I’m not sure, but I think she choked a guy to death with a cloud of dust.”

  “I don’t understand it,” said Matthias. “A cloud of dust? She controlled shards of bone today—she could never have done that before parem. She seems to think the change is temporary, a residual effect of the drug, but…” He turned to Kuwei. “Could the parem alter a Grisha’s power? Change it? Destroy it?”

  Kuwei fiddled with the latch on his travel pack. “I suppose it’s possible. She survived the withdrawal. That is rare, and we know so little about parem, about Grisha power.”

  “Didn’t carve enough open to solve that riddle?” The words were out of Jesper’s mouth before he thought better of them. He knew they weren’t fair. Kuwei and his father were Grisha themselves, and neither had been in any position to keep the Shu from experimenting on others.

  “You are angry with me?” said Kuwei.

  Jesper smiled. “I’m not an angry type of guy.”

  “Yes, you are,” said Matthias. “Angry and frightened.”

  Jesper sized up the big Fjerdan. “Beg your pardon?”

  “Jesper is very brave,” protested Kuwei.

  “Thank you for noticing.” Jesper stretched out his legs and crossed one ankle over the other. “You have something to say, Matthias?”

  “Why aren’t you going to Ravka?”

  “My father—”

  “Your father could go with us tonight. And if you’re so concerned about him, why weren’t you at his hotel today?”

  “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

  “I know what it is to be ashamed of what you are, of what you’ve done.”

  “You really want to start this, witchhunter? I’m not ashamed. I’m careful. Thanks to people like you and your drüskelle buddies, the world is a dangerous place for people like me. It always has been, and it doesn’t look to be getting any better.”

  Kuwei reached out and touched Jesper’s hand, his face imploring. “Understand. Please. What we did, what my father did … We were trying to make things better, to make a way for Grisha to…” He made a gesture as if he was pressing something down.

  “To suppress their powers?” suggested Matthias.

  “Yes. Exactly. To hide more easily. If Grisha don’t use their powers, they grow ill. They age, tire easily, lose appetite. It’s one way the Shu identify Grisha trying to live in secret.”

  “I don’t use my power,” said Jesper. “And yet…” He held up his fingers, enumerating his points as he made them. “One: On a dare, I ate a literal trough full of waffles doused in apple syrup and almost went back for seconds. Two: A lack of energy has never been my problem. Three: I’ve never been sick a day in my life.”

  “No?” said Matthias. “There are many kinds of sickness.”

  Jesper touched his hands to his revolvers. Apparently the Fjerdan had a lot on his mind tonight.

  Kuwei opened his pack and took out a tin of ordinary jurda, the kind sold in every corner shop in Ketterdam. “Jurda is a stimulant, good for fighting fatigue. My father thinks … thought it was the answer to helping our kind. If he can find the right formula, it will allow Grisha to remain healthy while hiding their powers.”

  “Didn’t quite work out that way, did it?” Jesper said. Maybe he was a little angry.

  “The tests do not go as planned. Someone in the laboratory is loose in his talk. Our leaders find out and see a different destiny for parem.” He shook his head and gestured to his pack. “Now I try to remember my father’
s experiments.”

  “That’s what you’re scribbling away at in the notebooks?”

  “I also keep a journal.”

  “Must be fascinating. Day one: sat in tomb. Day two: sat in tomb some more.”

  Matthias ignored Jesper and said, “Have you had any success?”

  Kuwei frowned. “Some. I think. In a laboratory with real scientists, maybe more. I’m not my father. He was a Fabrikator. I am an Inferni. This is not what I’m good at.”

  “What are you good at?” asked Jesper.

  Kuwei cast him a speculative glance, then frowned. “I never had a chance to find out. We live a frightened life in Shu Han. It was never home.”

  That was certainly something Jesper could understand. He picked up the tin of jurda and popped the lid open. It was quality stuff, sweetly scented, the dried blossoms nearly whole and a vibrant orange color.

  “You think if you have a lab and a few Grisha Fabrikators around, you might be able to re-create your father’s experiments and somehow work your way to an antidote?”

  “I hope,” said Kuwei.

  “How would it work?”

  “Would it purge the body of parem?” asked Matthias.

  “Yes. Draw the parem out,” said Kuwei. “But even if we succeed, how to administer it?”

  “You’d have to get close enough to inject it or make someone swallow it,” said Matthias.

  “And by the time you were within range, you’d be done for,” finished Jesper.

  Jesper pinched one of the jurda blossoms between his fingers. Eventually, someone would figure out how to create their own version of jurda parem, and when they did, one of these blossoms might be worth a very pretty fortune. If he focused on its petals, even a little, he could feel them breaking apart into their smaller components. It wasn’t exactly seeing, more like sensing all the different, tiny bits of matter that formed a single whole.

  He put the flower back in the tin. When he was a little boy, lying in his father’s fields, he’d discovered he could leach the color out of a jurda blossom petal by petal. One boring afternoon, he’d bleached a swear word into the western pasture in capital letters. His father had been furious, but he’d been scared too. He’d yelled himself hoarse chastising Jesper, and then Colm had just sat there, staring at him, big hands clasped around a mug of tea to keep them from shaking. At first, Jesper thought it was the swear his father was mad about, but that wasn’t it at all.

  “Jes,” he’d said at last. “You must never do that again. Promise me. Your ma had the same gift. It can bring you only misery.”

  “Promise,” Jesper had said quickly, wanting to make things right, still reeling from seeing his patient, mild-mannered father in such a rage. But all he’d thought was, Ma didn’t seem miserable.

  In fact, his mother had seemed to take joy in everything. She was Zemeni born, her skin a deep, plummy brown, and so tall his father had to tilt his head back to look her in the eye. Before Jesper was old enough to work the fields with his father, he’d been allowed to stay home with her. There was always laundry to be done, food to be made, wood to be chopped, and Jesper loved to help her.

  “How’s my land?” she’d ask every day when his father returned from the fields, and later Jesper would learn that the farm had been in her name, a wedding gift from his father, who had courted Aditi Hilli for nearly a year before she’d deigned to give him the time of day.

  “Blooming,” he’d say, kissing her cheek. “Just like you, love.”

  Jesper’s da always promised to play with him and teach him to whittle at night, but invariably Colm would eat his dinner and fall asleep by the fire, boots still on, their soles stained orange with jurda. Jesper and his mother would pull them off Da’s feet, stifling their giggles, then cover him with a blanket and see to the rest of the evening’s chores. They’d clear the table and bring the laundry in off the line, and she’d tuck Jesper into bed. No matter how busy she got, no matter how many animals needed skinning, or baskets needed mending, she seemed to have the same infinite energy as Jesper, and she always had time to tell him a story before bed or hum him a song.

  Jesper’s mother was the one to teach him to ride a horse, bait a line, clean a fish, pluck a quail, to start a fire with nothing but two sticks, and to brew a proper cup of tea. And she taught him to shoot. First with a child’s pellet gun that was little more than a toy, then with pistols and rifle. “Anyone can shoot,” she’d told him. “But not everybody can aim.” She taught him distance sighting, how to track an animal through the brush, the tricks that light can play on your eyes, how to factor wind shear, and how to shoot running, then seated on a horse. There was nothing she couldn’t do.

  There were secret lessons too. Sometimes, when they got home late, and she needed to get supper on, she’d boil the water without ever heating the stove, make bread rise just by looking at it. He’d seen her pull stains from clothes with a brush of her fingers, and she made her own gunpowder, extracting the saltpeter from a long-dry lake bed near where they lived. “Why pay for something I can make better myself?” she asked. “But we don’t mention this to Da, hmm?” When Jesper asked why, she’d just say, “Because he has enough to worry about, and I don’t like it when he worries about me.” But Da did worry, especially when one of his mother’s Zemeni friends came to the door looking for help or healing.

  “You think the slavers can’t reach you here?” he’d asked one night, pacing back and forth in their cabin as Jesper huddled in his blankets, pretending to sleep so that he could listen. “If word gets out there’s a Grisha living here—”

  “That word,” Aditi said with a wave of one of her graceful hands, “is not our word. I cannot be anything other than what I am, and if my gifts can help people, then it’s my duty to use them.”

  “And what about our son? Do you owe him nothing? Your first duty is to stay safe so we don’t lose you.”

  But Jesper’s mother had taken Colm’s face in her hands, so gently, so kindly, with all the love shining from her eyes. “What kind of mother would I be to my son if I hid away my talents? If I let fear be my guide in this life? You knew what I was when you asked that I choose you, Colm. Do not now suggest that I be anything less.”

  And like that his father’s frustration was gone. “I know. I just can’t bear the thought of losing you.”

  She laughed and kissed him. “Then you must keep me close,” she said with a wink. And the argument would be over. Until the next one.

  As it turned out, Jesper’s father was wrong. They didn’t lose Aditi to slavers.

  Jesper woke one night to hear voices, and when he’d wriggled out from under his blankets, he’d seen his mother putting her coat over her long nightgown, fetching a hat and her boots. He’d been seven then, small for his age, but old enough to know the most interesting conversations happened after his bedtime. A Zemeni man stood at the door in dusty riding clothes, and his father was saying, “It’s the middle of the night. Surely this can wait until morning.”

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

  “Aditi—”

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

  “No,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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