Crooked Kingdom

  “I’m alive, Da,” Jesper gasped. “But if you keep squeezing me like that, I won’t be for long.”

  His father laughed and released him, holding him at arm’s length, big hands on Jesper’s shoulders. “I swear you’re a foot taller.”

  Jesper ducked his head. “Half a foot. Um, this is Wylan,” he said, switching from Zemeni to Kerch. They’d spoken both at home, his mother’s language and the language of trade. His father’s native Kaelish had been reserved for the rare times Colm sang.

  “Nice to meet you. Do you speak Kerch?” his father practically shouted, and Jesper realized it was because Wylan still looked Shu.

  “Da,” he said, cringing in embarrassment. “He speaks Kerch just fine.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mister Fahey,” said Wylan. Bless his merch manners.

  “And you too, lad. Are you a student as well?”

  “I … have studied,” said Wylan awkwardly.

  Jesper had no idea how to fill the silence that followed. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected from this meeting with his father, but a friendly exchange of pleasantries wasn’t it.

  Wylan cleared his throat. “Are you hungry, Mister Fahey?”

  “Starving,” Jesper’s father replied gratefully.

  Wylan gave Jesper a poke with his elbow. “Maybe we could take your father to lunch?”

  “Lunch,” Jesper said, repeating the word as if he’d just learned it. “Yes, lunch. Who doesn’t like lunch?” Lunch felt like a miracle. They’d eat. They’d talk. Maybe they’d drink. Please let them drink.

  “But Jesper, what has been happening? I received a notice from the Gemensbank. The loan is coming due, and you’d given me to believe it was temporary. And your studies—”

  “Da,” Jesper began. “I … the thing is—”

  A shot rang out against the walls of the courtyard. Jesper shoved his father behind him as a bullet pinged off the stones at their feet, sending up a cloud of dust. Suddenly, gunfire was echoing across the courtyard. The reverberation made it hard to tell where the shots were coming from.

  “What in the name of all that is holy—”

  Jesper yanked on his father’s sleeve, pulling him toward the hooded stone shelter of a doorway. He looked to his left, prepared to grab hold of Wylan, but the merchling was already in motion, keeping pace beside Jesper in what passed for a reasonable crouch. Nothing like being shot at a few times to make you a fast learner, Jesper thought as they reached the protective curve of the overhang. He craned his neck to try to see up to the roofline, then flinched back as more shots rang out. Another smattering of gunfire rattled from somewhere above and to the left of them, and Jesper could only hope that meant Matthias and Kaz were returning fire.

  “Saints!” his father gasped. “This city is worse than the guidebooks said!”

  “Da, it isn’t the city,” Jesper said, pulling the pistol from his coat. “They’re after me. Or after us. Hard to say.”

  “Who’s after you?”

  Jesper exchanged a glance with Wylan. Jan Van Eck? A rival gang looking to settle a score? Pekka Rollins or someone else Jesper had borrowed money from? “There’s a long list of potential suitors. We need to get out of here before they introduce themselves more personally.”

  “Brigands?”

  Jesper knew there was a good chance he was about to be riddled with holes, so he tried to restrain his grin. “Something like that.”

  He peered around the edge of the door, peeled off two shots, then ducked back when another spate of gunfire exploded.

  “Wylan, tell me you’re packing more than pens, ink, and weevil makings.”

  “I’ve got two flash bombs and something new I rigged up with a little more, um, wallop.”

  “Bombs?” Jesper’s father asked, blinking as if to wake himself from a bad dream.

  Jesper shrugged helplessly. “Think of them as science experiments?”

  “What kind of numbers are we up against?” asked Wylan.

  “Look at you, asking all the right questions. Hard to tell. They’re somewhere on the roof, and the only way out is back through the archway. That’s a lot of courtyard to cross with them firing from high ground. Even if we make it, I’m guessing they’re going to have plenty more thunder waiting for us outside the Boeksplein unless Kaz and Matthias can somehow clear a path.”

  “I know another way out,” said Wylan. “But the entrance is on the other side of the courtyard.” He pointed to a door beneath an arch carved with some kind of horned monster gnawing on a pencil.

  “The reading room?” Jesper gauged the distance. “All right. On three, you make a break. I’ll cover you. Get my father inside.”

  “Jesper—”

  “Da, I swear I’ll explain everything, but right now all you need to know is that we’re in a bad situation, and bad situations happen to be my area of expertise.” And it was true. Jesper could feel himself coming alive, the worry that had been dogging his steps since he’d gotten news of his father’s arrival in Ketterdam falling away. He felt free, dangerous, like lightning rolling over the prairie. “Trust me, Da.”

  “All right, boy. All right.”

  Jesper was pretty sure he could hear an unspoken for now. He saw Wylan brace himself. The merchling was still so new to all this. Hopefully Jesper wouldn’t get everyone killed.

  “One, two…” He started firing on three. Leaping into the courtyard, he rolled for cover behind the fountain. He’d gone in blind, but he picked out the shapes on the roof quickly, aiming by instinct, sensing movement and firing before he could think his way clear of a good shot. He didn’t need to kill anyone, he just needed to scare the hell out of them and buy Wylan and his father time.

  A bullet struck the fountain’s central statue, the book in the scholar’s hand exploding into fragments of stone. Whatever ammunition they were using, they weren’t messing around.

  Jesper reloaded and popped up from behind the fountain, shooting.

  “All Saints,” he shouted as pain tore through his shoulder. He really hated being shot. He shrank back behind the stone lip. He flexed his hand, testing the damage to his arm. Just a scratch, but it hurt like hell, and he was bleeding all over his new tweed jacket. “This is why it doesn’t pay to try to look respectable,” he muttered. Above him, he could see the silhouettes on the roof moving. Any minute, they were going to circle around the other side of the fountain and he’d be done for.

  “Jesper!” Wylan’s voice. Damn it. He was supposed to get clear. “Jesper, at your two o’clock.”

  Jesper looked up and something was arcing through the sky. Without thinking, he aimed and fired. The air exploded.

  “Get in the water!” Wylan shouted.

  Jesper dove into the fountain, and a second later the air sizzled with light. When Jesper poked his soaked head out of the water, he saw that every exposed surface of the courtyard and its gardens was pocked with holes, tendrils of smoke rising from the tiny craters. Whoever was up on the roof was screaming. Just what kind of bomb had Wylan let loose?

  He hoped Matthias and Kaz had found cover, but there was no time to stew on it. He bolted for the doorway beneath the pencil-chewing demon. Wylan and his father were waiting inside. They slammed the door shut.

  “Help me,” said Jesper. “We need to barricade the entrance.”

  The man behind the desk wore gray scholar’s robes. His nostrils were flared so wide in effrontery that Jesper feared being sucked up one of them. “Young man—”

  Jesper pointed his gun at the scholar’s chest. “Move.”

  “Jesper!” his father said.

  “Don’t worry, Da. People point guns at each other all the time in Ketterdam. It’s basically a handshake.”

  “Is that true?” his father asked as the scholar grudgingly moved aside and they shoved the heavy desk in front of the door.

  “Absolutely,” said Wylan.

  “Certainly not,” said the scholar.

  Jesper waved them on. “Depends on the
neighborhood. Let’s go.”

  They pelted down the main aisle of the reading room between long tables lit by lamps with curving necks. Students huddled against the wall and under their chairs, probably thinking they were all about to die.

  “Nothing to worry about, everyone!” Jesper called. “Just a little target practice in the courtyard.”

  “This way,” said Wylan, ushering them through a door covered in elaborate scrollwork.

  “Oh, you mustn’t,” said the scholar rushing after them, robes flapping. “Not the rare books room!”

  “Do you want to shake hands again?” Jesper asked, then added, “I promise we won’t shoot anything we don’t have to.” He gave his father a gentle shove. “Up the stairs.”

  “Jesper?” said a voice from beneath the nearest table.

  A pretty blonde girl looked up from where she was crouched on the floor.

  “Madeleine?” Jesper said. “Madeleine Michaud?”

  “You said we’d have breakfast!”

  “I had to go to Fjerda.”

  “Fjerda?”

  Jesper headed up the stairs after Wylan, then poked his head back into the reading room. “If I live, I’ll buy you waffles.”

  “You don’t have enough money to buy her waffles,” Wylan grumbled.

  “Be quiet. We’re in a library.”

  Jesper had never had cause to enter the rare books room while he was at school. The silence was so deep it was like being underwater. Illuminated manuscripts were displayed in glass cases lit by golden falls of lamplight, and rare maps covered the walls.

  A Squaller in a blue kefta stood in the corner, arms raised, but shrank back as they entered.

  “Shu!” the Squaller cried when he saw Wylan. “I won’t go with you. I’ll kill myself first!”

  Jesper’s father held up his hands as if gentling a horse. “Easy, lad.”

  “We’re just passing through,” said Jesper, giving his father another push.

  “Follow me,” said Wylan.

  “What is a Squaller doing in the rare books room?” Jesper asked as they raced through the labyrinth of shelves and cases, past the occasional scholar or student crouched against the books in fear.

  “Humidity. He keeps the air dry to preserve the manuscripts.”

  “Nice work if you can get it.”

  When they reached the westernmost wall, Wylan stopped in front of a map of Ravka. He looked around to make sure they weren’t being observed, then pressed the symbol marking the capital—Os Alta. The country seemed to tear apart along the seam of the Unsea, revealing a dark gap barely wide enough to squeeze through.

  “It leads to the second floor of a printmaker’s shop,” said Wylan as they edged inside. “It was built as a way for professors to get from the library to their homes without having to deal with angry students.”

  “Angry?” Jesper’s father said. “Do all the students have guns?”

  “No, but there’s a long-standing tradition of rioting over grades.”

  The map slid closed, leaving them in the dark as they shuffled along sideways.

  “Not to be a podge,” Jesper murmured to Wylan, “but I wouldn’t have thought you’d know your way around the rare books room.”

  “I used to meet with one of my tutors here, back when my father still thought … The tutor had a lot of interesting stories. And I always liked the maps. Tracing the letters sometimes made it easier to … It’s how I found the passage.”

  “You know, Wylan, one of these days I’m going to stop underestimating you.”

  There was a brief pause and then, from somewhere up ahead, he heard Wylan say, “Then you’re going to be a lot harder to surprise.”

  Jesper grinned, but it didn’t quite feel right. From behind them, he could hear shouting from the rare books room. It had been a close call, he was bleeding from his shoulder, they’d made a grand escape—these were the moments he lived for. He should be buzzing from the excitement of the fight. The thrill was still there, fizzing through his blood, but beside it was a cold, unfamiliar sensation that felt like it was draining the joy from him. All he could think was, Da could have been hurt. He could have died. Jesper was used to people shooting at him. He would have been a little insulted if they’d stopped shooting at him. This was different. His father hadn’t chosen this fight. His only crime had been putting his faith in his son.

  That’s the problem with Ketterdam, Jesper thought as they stumbled uncertainly through the dark. Trusting the wrong person can get you killed.

  6

  NINA

  Nina couldn’t stop staring at Colm Fahey. He was a bit shorter than his son, broader in the shoulders, his coloring classically Kaelish—vibrant, dark red hair and that salt-white skin, densely clouded with freckles by the Zemeni sun. And though his eyes were the same clear gray as Jesper’s, they had a seriousness to them, a kind of sure warmth that differed from Jesper’s crackling energy.

  It wasn’t only the pleasure of trying to find Jesper in his father’s features that kept Nina’s attention focused on the farmer. There was just something so strange about seeing a person that wholesome standing in the stone hull of an empty mausoleum surrounded by Ketterdam’s worst—herself among them.

  Nina shivered and drew the old horse blanket she’d been using as a wrap more tightly around her. She’d started tallying her life in good days and bad days, and thanks to the Cornelis Smeet job, this was turning out to be a very bad day. She couldn’t afford to let it get the best of her, not when they were this close to rescuing Inej. Be all right, Nina willed silently, hoping her thoughts could somehow cut through the air, speed over the waters of the Ketterdam harbors, and reach her friend. Stay safe and whole and wait for us.

  Nina hadn’t been on Vellgeluk when Van Eck had taken Inej hostage. She’d still been trying to purge the parem from her body, caught in the haze of suffering that had begun on the voyage from Djerholm. She told herself to be grateful for the memory of that misery, every shaking, aching, vomiting minute of it. The shame of Matthias witnessing it all, holding back her hair, dabbing her brow, restraining her as gently as he could as she argued, cajoled, screamed at him for more parem. She made herself remember every terrible thing she’d said, every wild pleasure offered, each insult or accusation she’d hurled at him. You enjoy watching me suffer. You want me to beg, don’t you? How long have you been waiting to see me like this? Stop punishing me, Matthias. Help me. Be good to me and I’ll be good to you. He’d absorbed it all in stoic silence. She clutched tight to those memories. She needed them as vivid and bright and cringe-inducing as possible to fight her hunger for the drug. She never wanted to be like that again.

  Now she looked at Matthias, his hair coming in thick and gold, long enough that it was just starting to curl over his ears. She loved the sight of him, and she hated it too. Because he wouldn’t give her what she wanted. Because he knew how badly she needed it.

  After Kaz had settled them on Black Veil, Nina had managed to last two days before she’d broken down and gone to Kuwei to ask him for another dose of parem. A small one. Just a taste of it, something to ease this relentless need. The sweats were gone, the bouts of fever. She could walk and talk, and listen to Kaz and the others hatching their plans. But even as she went about her business, drank the cups of broth and tea heaped with sugar that Matthias set before her, the need was there, a ceaseless, serrated sawing at her nerves, back and forth, minute to minute. She hadn’t made a conscious decision to ask Kuwei when she’d sat down beside him. She’d spoken to him softly in Shu, listened to him complain about the dampness of the tomb. And then the words were out of her mouth: “Do you have any more?”

  He didn’t bother to ask what she meant. “I gave it all to Matthias.”

  “I see,” she’d said. “That’s probably for the best.”

  She’d smiled. He’d smiled. She’d wanted to claw his face to shreds.

  Because she couldn’t possibly go to Matthias. Ever. And for all she knew, he?
??d thrown whatever supply of the drug Kuwei had into the sea. The thought filled her with so much panic that she’d had to race outside and vomit the spare contents of her stomach in front of one of the ruined mausoleums. She’d covered the mess with dirt, then found a quiet place to sit beneath a trellis of ivy and wept in jags of unsteady tears.

  “You’re all a bunch of useless skivs,” she’d said to the silent graves. They didn’t seem to care. And yet somehow the stillness of Black Veil comforted her, quieted her. She couldn’t explain why. The places of the dead had never held solace for her before. She rested for a while, dried her tears, and when she knew she wouldn’t give herself away with blotchy skin and watery eyes, she’d made her way back to the others.

  You survived the worst of it, she had told herself. The parem is out of reach, and now you can stop thinking about it. And she’d managed for a while.

  Then last night, when she’d been preparing to cozy up to Cornelis Smeet, she’d made the mistake of using her power. Even with the wig and the flowers and the costume and the corset, she hadn’t quite felt up to the role of seductress. So she’d found a looking glass inside Club Cumulus and attempted to tailor the circles beneath her eyes. It was the first time she’d tried to use her power since her recovery. She’d broken into a sweat from the effort, and as soon as the bruised color faded, the hunger for parem hit, a swift, hard kick to her chest. She’d bent double, clutching the sink, her mind filled with breakneck thoughts of how she could get away, who might have a supply, what she could trade. She’d forced herself to think of the shame on the boat, the future she might be able to make with Matthias, but the thought that had brought her back to sanity was Inej. She owed Inej her life, and there was no way she was leaving her stranded with Van Eck. She wasn’t that person. She refused to be.

  Somehow, she had pulled herself together. She splashed water on her face, pinched her cheeks to pinkness. She still looked haggard, but with resolution, she’d hitched up her corset and flashed the brightest smile she could muster. Do this right and Smeet won’t be looking at your face, Nina had told herself, and she’d sailed out the doors to snag herself a pigeon.