Chapter Text
Inej wonders sometimes if she was born in the wrong place.
Her powers are a source of joy for the family, entertainment for the younger ones, and quench the thirst of the rest. She is a tidemaker, can bring forth water with a snap of her fingers and will of her mind. Surely, she would be better suited to the Fjerdan ice or the Ravkan oceans.
It isn’t until her mother takes her to a river valley in Novyi Zem, where people like her are hailed as blessed that she realises what a boon they are. Water holds memory, holds incredible strength, the strength to break mountains and give life. There is not a life form in their home that does not need water to survive.
Her mother's words come to her in the slaver ship, and she breaks down her walls by chipping at them every single day, soaked in sweat as her hands work. They weather down, the creaky old doors, and then she does the same for the chains of the little girls and little boys that the slavers have locked up. She douses them, washing them of their grime and trickling water down their throats with a careful hand until their eyes gleam not with hunger, but revenge.
She sits with the older children, the other Grisha, and together they figure out a plan. One red-headed Heartrender, Nina, says she was stolen off the ship from Os Kervo. Says she was a Ravkan soldier before she ran, ran from the war that wages on Ravkan soil. She says they are headed towards Ketterdam, their bodies to be sold in the barrel.
Inej purses her lips, making eye contact with a lanky teenage boy who, like her, is a tidemaker. “That,” she says, “Will simply not do.”
She touches her left ear, where her fish-tooth amplifier sits. “We are currently quite far from land. Does anyone know when we’re to reach?”
Nina closes her eyes. “Are any of you amplifiers? I have one but if one of you, er, cut yourselves or cut me a little, I can sense heartbeats rather far.”
Inej holds her hand out as Nina makes a tiny cut to her finger, then closes her eyes as Nina presses her finger to the blood welling from it. Inej can feel the water all around them, the unforgiving sea, and the humidity in the air.
The liquid in their bones, skin, brains. The sheen of water over everyone’s eyes.
Nina drops her hand. “No human heartbeats. It’ll be at least a week before land.”
A Zemeni Squaller nods determinedly, an arm around her younger brother. “I can discreetly push the winds a bit with some help. Inej, can you sneak out and get us some extra food?”
Inej nods, and by nightfall, she’s managed to steal a pile of food from the kitchens. They feast, the lot of them, telling stories around a carefully controlled fire. She learns that the Squaller’s name is Nadia, that she and her brother were captured from the Ravkan army. That Nina’s lover, a fjerdan named Matthias, is hanging in chains, barely alive and awaiting Hellgate prison.
Adrik, Nadia’s brother, makes a hopeful face. “If Nina can tell us when heartbeats are near, suppose we come across another ship, then when we escape, we can take him with us.”
Inej wipes her fingers on her filthy tunic. “I’ll do it. I just need a pin to unlock the chains.”
A week later, there’s a knock on the adjoining wall between the room she shares with some of the girls. Nadia presses her ear to it.
Her eyes widen. “Inej, there’s a ship nearby. Can you feel it?”
She closes her eyes, folds her arms in front of her chest, and focuses. In the water, she can feel something large, something obstructing the water flow. The other ship is right next to theirs, rapidly approaching.
Inej scrambles to her feet. “We have to go. Now. they’re right here, Nadia, and we may very well be killed if we don’t move.”
Nadia throws her a fond look even as she helps some of the younger kids to the doors. “You’re starting to sound like Nina.”
Inej rolls her eyes and slinks to the other end of the ship with one of Nina’s stolen hairpins, grinning when she sees a rather bulky Fjerdan man in chains. “ Matthias, ” She hisses, and his eyes fly open. He looks at her with wide eyes as she undoes his chains.
He rubs his wrists. “I owe you my life.”
“Not just yet. Come, Nina is this way.” He flushes red and hurries to follow her.
“Also,” She throws over her shoulder, “If we run into anyone older than twenty, knock them out. We’re being boarded, and we don’t know by who.”
She ties up the wrists of everyone that they run into on the way as soon as Matthias knocks them out cold with one hit to the backs of their heads, throwing doors open and stuffing any valuables she can find into her pockets. She comes across two knives in a bedroom, its occupant lying face down in a pool of blood, and she tosses one to Matthias and keeps the other for herself.
The rest are gathered at the deck. Her fellow Grisha are standing ramrod-straight with their hands folded, the others with sticks and knives and axes in their hands.
Matthias and Nina embrace tightly for a moment before he joins them, his knife held out.
The other ship stops abruptly, and a Shu teenager with the biggest arms Inej has ever seen steps forward. He takes in their ragged appearances, the men tied up at their feet, then drops his sword. “We’re here to rescue you.” He says. “We mean you no harm.” His hand comes up once to his forehead, then his chest, then he spreads his palm over it. A sign of respect.
Someone pushes Inej forward, and she doesn’t know when she became their leader, the one they look up to, but she will not fail them now.
“My name is Inej Ghafa,” She says. “We were stolen from various places and were to be sold into slavery in Ketterdam.”
“Tolya Yul-Bataar,” He introduces. “Sturmhond’s right-hand man.”
Murmurs arise within her crowd, and Inej turns back. Adrik’s eyes find her. “A privateer.” He says quietly. “We can trust them.”
Inej wants to protest, wants to find some sort of proof, but a bone-deep weariness weighs down on her.
“We’ll board,” She says after a few quick minutes of discussion with the rest of the group. “The children are to be safely delivered to their houses. The rest of us have no home. If you take us on, we will not be your slaves. Or your whores.”
Tolya looks horrified. “Miss Ghafa, you have my word. As a man of honour and as a Grisha. No harm will come to you by my crew.”
Well. She can’t argue with that. The stands behind and counts as every single child and teenager she was with boards the ship. When she is the only one left, she tosses a coil of rope to Nina. “Tell Matthias to hold on to that,” She commands.
She hands them all the rations, all the valuables, every single weapon on the ship as they look on in confusion. Finally, she kneels down on the unforgiving wooden floors of the ship that took her from her family, and says her prayers to her saints.
Then, she folds her arms in front of her and pulls, yanking the waves upwards until they cover the ship, until she’s completely drenched, shaking from the cold. She lets them fall, jumping back into the icy water. She flails for a second, the air knocked out of her, before she pulls again, propelling herself upwards.
Inej grabs onto the rope, hauling herself up and collapsing against the warm wood of Sturmhond’s ship, leaning on Nina as they watch the ship go down.
She only closes her eyes once the ship is completely out of sight.
“May the saints receive you and forgive what can be forgiven,” She whispers, and Tolya echoes it. He hauls her upward, “Come, all of you. We have fresh clothes, hammocks to sleep in, and you must all meet the crew.”
Matthias approaches Inej as she lies on the deck, eyes closed and soaking in the sunlight. She can tell it’s him by his footsteps, and she turns towards him as he sits next to her.
He looks better now, stronger with colour in his face like the rest of them after a month with Sturmhond. All the younger kids are gone, though they all plan to visit them, and it’s only Nina, Adrik, Matthias, and Nadia, who struck up a rapid romance with Toyla’s twin sister and the other shipmate, Tamar.
“Tired?” He asks her.
Inej leans back on her elbows. “Exhausted,” she admits. “But it’s the good kind.”
Matthias makes a grunt of agreement. The two of them spent the morning hauling barrels, then he spent the rest of the morning learning how to use a sword while Inej climbed up the deck with Adrik and helped push the boat faster across a storm.
“Where’s Nina?”
“Helping Tolya fix up some wounds,” Matthias answers, voice heavy and accented in a way Inej has come to adore. Despite being taught his entire life that Grisha and Women are inferior, he’s come around incredibly fast and slotted into place in her heart as one of her best friends. He’s near twice her size, but he has a heart of gold, and their shared faith has them praying together every sunrise and sunset.
He reaches out and touches the corner of her ear. “What is that?”
Inej runs a finger over the three gold hoops in her upper-right ear. “Tamar helped me put them in. One of the ship’s durasts, Maria, helped me melt down the gold we found and pierce my ear with it.” Her throat closes up, but she continues, “Family tradition. If I was at home, this is how we would have celebrated my fifteenth birthday.”
Inej rests her feet on the table, idly twirling a knife in her hand.
“Are you not sad that he’s leaving?”
She looks up at Nina and sighs. “Not really. I’m seventeen, there are plenty of, well,” she lets out a laugh, “-fish in the sea.” Nina doesn’t look like she believes her so she hops to her feet and clasps her shoulder. “It was just a fling, Nina. I knew it wasn’t going to last, and I wasn’t expecting it to. He always said his stay with us was temporary. Come, we’re needed to haul supplies.”
Nina grumbles but rolls off her bed, only brightening when she sees Matthias waiting for them.
“Darling,” he greets, kissing Nina. Inej coughs and he rolls his eyes, patting her head. “Inej, light of my life.”
“That’s more like it. Come on, it’s time to put our muscles to use.”
They spend the hour hauling barrels full of dried meat and grain from the entry point to the storage room. When they’re done, Nina tugs Matthias to their room with a look Inej tries not to think about. She stretches out on the deck, letting the cool air and light drizzle soothe her.
She’s always loved cool weather, loved rain and clouds because the water feels so much like home to her.
Sturmhond settles next to her soon enough. “Done setting up supplies?”
“Supplies are in the storage room.” She answers, “And we’re all set to take tomorrow off to celebrate in town.”
He looks out at the dock and beyond that, the ocean. “I knew her, you know? Alina. Tomorrow is about celebrating her victory, but she wasn’t a saint to me. She was just a lost girl who let her power consume her.”
Inej looks down at her hands, her knife Sankta Alina burning a hole against her calf. “Maybe so. But she was hope for a lot of us. I was still with my family when the war started. I feared for my life. There are no other Grisha in my family. Maybe she wasn’t born a saint. But she became one.”
He nods, his fair fluttering in the wind. “I know. I just miss her, is all.”
Inej leans against him. She understands loss, understands grief. “I’m sorry for your loss. If you prefer to stay here during the festivities, I don’t mind keeping you company.”
He turns to her with a sideways grin. “Is that an invitation to your bed, Miss Ghafa?”
She shoves him, laughing. “It was an offer for company. You’re too old for me, Nikolai.” He really isn’t that much older than her, nineteen to her seventeen.
Nikolai shrugs, turning fully toward her when she uses his first name. “Well, if it was, I’d be happy to join you. Not for anything serious of course, just an occasional tumble.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time I tumbled with someone from the crew,” she admits. “And if you hadn’t saved us from the ship all those years ago, I’m sure we would have all been tumbling far earlier and with much more trauma.”
“Well, I’m glad that I did.”
“Me too,” She stands up and holds her hand out. He takes it with raised eyebrows, and she jerks her head toward her room. “Now’s a good time as any, isn’t it?”
“You’re sleeping with Captain? ” Tolya hisses as they chop vegetables in the kitchen.
Inej points her knife at him. “It’s only happened a few times. Don’t look at me like that, you know you would too.”
“ Obviously . But I had to ask at least once.”
She shrugs and goes back to her chopping. “It’s not really that big of a deal. It doesn’t happen very often and neither of us expect any more from it.”
“You realise you’re sleeping with an heir to the Ravkan throne?”
“ Yes. What do you want me to do, call him my prince in bed?”
“That would be funny,” he admits. “Tamar and Nadia are getting married, by the way. Next time we’re in Shu-Han.”
“I’m only surprised that it took them this long.”
They empty all the vegetables into the pot and sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor as the pot bubbles.
“How do you feel about leaving your family so soon after you found them?”
Inej stiffens. “I spent a month with them.” She fiddles with her scabbard. “I’m not who they wanted me to be anymore. They were happy to see me, of course. But I’m a different person now. We’ll always be family but we don’t fit together like we used to.”
They watch the pipe for a few minutes.
“You’ll always have a family with us.”
“Sure.”
“No, really. You’re one of us, Inej. Always will be.”
She smiles at him. Finding out her family didn’t approve of who she was now stung, but they had done their best to welcome her back. She spent long hours climbing with her mother, talking to her father, but something had shifted. Something in her changed from the moment she decided to use her powers on that slaver ship, something that snapped, a part of her that was molten and bruised and trained to fight for survival. Inej would never be the girl who carelessly performed acrobatics in front of a crowd anymore.
Her days consisted of hard manual labour at sea, swordwork, and brutal murder of those she firmly believed deserved it, and though she still believed fiercely in her saints, she believed in other things too. Like her fellow crewmates, her friends, and the power that coursed through her hands.
“Tamar and Nadia look so happy, don’t they?”
Inej turns to Adrik, who’s nursing his own cup of watered-down beverage. Nadia and Tamar, freshly married, are cheerfully dancing in the middle of the ship, various couples around them. The normally-stoic Matthias is twirling Nina around, and Inej has no doubt that they’ll be next.
“They do,” She agrees. Soon enough, Adrik is pulled onto the dance floor, and Inej leans back against the ship walls, content. The sun is setting, her prayers are already said, and she is pleasantly tipsy from the various drinks that have been shoved into her hand.
“Don’t like to dance, Inej?”
“Not sure my balance can handle it,” She says.
Sturmhond laughs. “Not sure I can either, to be honest.”
“You’re a prince,” She says flatly. “Weren’t there dance lessons?”
“Dance lessons, balance lessons, walking lessons,” He admits with a sigh and a wink. “But I’d like to dance now, however shoddy my balance. Join me?”
Inej downs the rest of her drink, swallowing with a grimace, and follows him, sliding their hands together as they fall into a traditional Ravakan dance. Nikolai had taught them all how to dance once with Nina’s help, on a cool day in the middle of the ocean when all the work was done and they were bored out of their minds.
As they dance, he slides a hand into his pocket and pulls out a chain, before unceremoniously pulling it over her neck. Without breaking step, Inej looks down at it. The heavy golden chain ends in a thin, circular pendant with a green stone that hangs right above her breasts. Her dress is low cut, baring her shoulders, so the necklace is in full view.
“What’s this?” She asks curiously.
“A belated eighteenth-birthday present,” He says cheerfully, winking at her. “And a gift to soften the blow of what I’m going to ask you.”
She narrows her eyes at him. “What do you want?”
He twirls her, her skirts flaring out as she whirls across the floor, her hair free falling down her back.
“I am needed at home,” He says quietly after a few minutes. Inej glances at the crew and makes a split-second decision, pulling him toward her room.
She ignores the wolf whistle someone sends in their direction, locking the door behind them and pulling her scabbard off as she turns to him. Nikolai is already sitting against her headboard, and she leans against the door.
“At home,” She whispers, “You mean the Palace?”
He gives her a tight nod. “Tensions are running thick now that the anniversary of, well.” He shrugs, referencing the war that ravaged Ravka only two years ago. “My father is not handling it well. My country needs me, Inej. I can’t keep running from my responsibilities.”
“What can I do?”
He looks up at her. “A ship needs a captain. When I’m gone, I intend for it to be you.”
Inej crosses her arms across her chest and laughs incredulously. “ Me? I’ve been here not four years. Why not Tolya? Or Tamar, for that matter?”
“You know all there is to know and I can train you before you leave. The crew is loyal to you, and you have earned their trust ten times over. And you know the ocean.” He pauses, shifts to the side, and Inej accepts the invitation for what it is, sitting shoulder to shoulder with him.
“Tolya was the one who recommended I choose you. Tamar too. They both are happy with being your first mates, but neither has the desire to be captain.”
“Neither do I.”
“No,” Nikolai agrees, “But you have the potential to.”
Inej looks up from the map at the sounds of the door knocking. “Come in.”
Nadia hands her a folded-up piece of paper. “From Ravka,” She calls as she closes the door behind her, heading to the kitchens.
From Ravka usually means from Nikolai, so Inej opens it up and lays it flat on her desk. The note is short and to the point, requesting her to come to Ravka for the end-of-season celebrations with the crew, stamped with the crest of the Ravkan Royal family.
She stands up, stretches her arms above her head, and buckles her scabbard at her waist. Her clothes are peppered with knives, well hidden unless one knows where to look, but the sword has remained her favourite weapon ever since Toyla taught her how to use it five years ago when she joined the crew.
“Nina,” she greets, sliding into place at the head of the dinner table, her crew already joking around and digging into their dinner. She didn’t know she would love life at sea this much, but it is her home now, her feet steady on the rocking ships. She wears her three-point hat with pride, fiercely protective of her little family.
“Nina Helvar, ” Nina says giddily, and even Matthias is smiling next to her.
“Yes,” Inej teases, “I was at the wedding. I officiated it. And I heard the two of you going at it all night. Saints, Nina, we share a wall.”
“And my room is below theirs,” Tolya says darkly. “And next to Tamar and Nadia’s. It’s a wonder I get any sleep.”
Inej points her steak knife at him. “You spend all night reading either way. Don’t think I didn’t see you half-asleep while hauling barrels in the afternoon.”
“I would apologise,” Matthias says, accent strong but less thick than when he first joined them along with Inej, “But it was my wedding night.”
They all laugh.
“Also,” Nina says loudly a few minutes later, effectively silencing the crew, “I asked about that brothel in Ketterdam in the morning. I can have a report drawn up, but the entirety of the barrel seems to be controlled by one man. Or most of it, at least.”
Inej puts her cutlery down. They’ve been docked in Novyi Zem for almost a week now to replenish their supplies and visit some of the children, now teenagers, who were with her, Nina, Matthias, and Adrik when they saved, but Ketterdam has been on her mind for weeks now. It’s where she and parts of her crew would have ended up had they not staged a bloody riot and been saved by Sturmhond, and the brothel is where they would have most likely spent the rest of their days, Grisha or not.
“We’ll leave for Ketterdam tomorrow.”
“Aye, Captain,” her crew choruses.
“What’s the name of the man, Nina?”
“Kaz. Kaz Brekker.”