Six of Crows

by Leigh Bardugo

  Grisha Squallers could control current. She’d even seen them play at tossing each other into the air at the Little Palace, but the level of finesse and power it took to maintain controlled flight was unthinkable—at least it had been, until now. Jurda parem. She hadn’t quite believed Kaz. Maybe she’d even suspected him of outright lying to her about what he’d seen just to get her to do the job. But unless she’d taken a blow to the head she didn’t remember, this was real.

  The Squaller turned in the air, stirring the storm into a frenzy, sending ice flying until it stung her cheeks. She could barely see. She fell backward as another slab of rock and ice shot from the ground. They were being corralled, pushed closer together to make a single target.

  “I need a distraction!” shouted Jesper from somewhere in the storm.

  She heard a tinny plink.

  “Get down,” cried Wylan. Nina flattened her body to the snow. A boom sounded overhead, and an explosion lit the sky just to the right of the Squaller. The winds around them dropped as the Squaller was thrown off course and forced to focus on righting himself. It took the briefest second, but it was enough time for Jesper to aim his rifle and fire.

  A shot rang out, and the Squaller was hurtling toward the earth. Another slab of ice slid into place. They were being trapped like animals in a pen, ready for the slaughter. Jesper aimed between the slabs at a distant stand of trees, and Nina realized there was another Grisha there, a boy with dark hair. Before Jesper could get off a shot, the Grisha rammed a fist upward, and Jesper was thrown off his feet by a shaft of earth. He rolled as he fell and fired from the ground.

  The boy in the distance cried out and dropped to one knee, but his arms were still raised, and the ground still rumbled and rocked beneath them. Jesper fired again and missed. Nina lifted her hands and tried to focus on the Grisha’s heart, but he was well out of her range.

  She saw Inej signal to Kaz. Without a word, he positioned himself against the nearest slab and cupped his hands at his knee. The ground buckled and swayed, but he held steady as she launched herself from the cradle of his fingers in a graceful arc. She vanished over the slab without a sound. A moment later, the ground went still.

  “Trust the Wraith,” said Jesper.

  They stood, dazed, the air strangely hushed after the chaos that had come before.

  “Wylan,” Jesper panted, pushing to his feet. “Get us out of here.”

  Wylan nodded, pulled a putty-colored lump from his pack, and gently placed it against the nearest rock. “Everybody down,” he instructed.

  They crouched together in a cluster as far away as the enclosure would permit. Wylan slapped his hand against the explosive and dove away, careening into Matthias and Jesper as they all covered their ears.

  Nothing happened.

  “Are you kidding me?” said Jesper.

  Boom. The slab exploded. Ice and bits of rock rained down over their heads.

  Wylan was covered in dust and wearing a slightly dazed, deliriously happy expression. Nina started to laugh. “Try to look like you knew it would work.”

  They stumbled out of the corral of slabs.

  Kaz gestured to Jesper. “Perimeter. Let’s make sure there aren’t more surprises.” They set off in opposite directions.

  Nina and the others found Inej standing over the body of the trembling Grisha. He wore clothes of olive drab, and his eyes were glassy. Blood spilled from the bullet wound in his upper thigh, and a knife jutted from the right side of his chest. Inej must have thrown it when she’d escaped from the enclosure.

  Nina knelt beside him.

  “I need a little more,” the Grisha mumbled. “Just a little more.” He grabbed at Nina’s hand, and only then did she recognize him.

  “Nestor?”

  He twitched at the sound of his name, but he didn’t seem to know her.

  “Nestor, it’s me, Nina.” She had been at school with him back at the Little Palace. They’d been sent to Keramzin together during the war. At King Nikolai’s coronation, they’d stolen a bottle of champagne and gotten sick by the lake. He was a Fabrikator, one of the Durasts who worked with metal, glass, and fibers. It didn’t make sense. Fabrikators made textiles, weapons. He shouldn’t have been capable of what she’d just witnessed.

  “Please,” he begged, his face crumpling. “I need more.”

  “Parem?”

  “Yes,” he sobbed. “Yes. Please.”

  “I can heal your wound, Nestor, if you stay still.” He was in bad shape, but if she could stop the bleeding …

  “I don’t want your help,” he said angrily, trying to push away from her.

  She tried calming him, lowering his pulse, but she was afraid of stopping his heart. “Please, Nestor. Please be still.”

  He was screaming now, fighting her.

  “Hold him down,” she said.

  Matthias moved to help, and Nestor threw up his arms.

  The ground rose in a rippling sheet, thrusting Nina and the others back.

  “Nestor, please! Let us help you.”

  He stood up, staggering on his wounded leg, pulling at the knife buried in his chest. “Where are they?” he screamed. “Where did they go?”

  “Who?”

  “The Shu!” he wailed. “Where did they go? Come back!” He took a wobbling step, then another. “Come back!” He fell face forward into the snow. He didn’t move again.

  Nina rushed to his side and turned him over. There was snow in his eyes and his mouth. She placed her hands on his chest, trying to restore his heartbeat, but it was no good. If he hadn’t been ravaged by the drug, he might have survived his wounds. But his body was weak, the skin tight to his bones and so pale it seemed transparent.

  This isn’t right, Nina thought miserably. Practicing the Small Science made a Grisha healthier, stronger. It was one of the things she loved most about her power. But the body had limits. It was as if the drug had caused Nestor’s power to outpace his body. It had simply used him up.

  Kaz and Jesper returned, panting.

  “Anything?” asked Matthias.

  Jesper nodded. “A party of people heading south.”

  “He was calling out for the Shu,” Nina said.

  “We knew the Shu would send a team to retrieve Bo Yul-Bayur,” said Kaz.

  Jesper looked down at Nestor’s motionless body. “But we didn’t know they’d send Grisha. How can we be sure they aren’t mercenaries?”

  Kaz held up a coin emblazoned with a horse on one side and two crossed keys on the other. “This was in the Squaller’s pocket,” he said, tossing it to Jesper. “It’s a Shu wen ye. The Coin of Passage. This is a government mission.”

  “How did they find us?” Inej asked.

  “Maybe Jesper’s gunshots drew them,” said Kaz.

  Jesper bristled and pointed at Nina and Matthias. “Or maybe they heard these two shouting at each other. They could have been following us for miles.”

  Nina tried to make sense of what she was hearing. Shu didn’t use Grisha as soldiers, and they weren’t like the Fjerdans; they didn’t see Grisha power as unnatural or repulsive. They were fascinated by it. But they still viewed the Grisha as less than human. The Shu government had been capturing and experimenting on Grisha for years in an attempt to locate the source of their power. They would never use Grisha as mercenaries. Or at least that had been the case before. Maybe parem had changed the game.

  “I don’t understand,” said Nina. “If they have jurda parem, why go after Bo Yul-Bayur?”

  “It’s possible they have a stash of it, but can’t reproduce his process,” Kaz said. “That’s what the Merchant Council seemed to think. Or maybe they just want to make sure Yul-Bayur doesn’t give the formula to anyone else.”

  “Do you think they’ll use drugged Grisha to try to break into the Ice Court?” Inej asked.

  “If they have more of them,” said Kaz. “That’s what I would do.”

  Matthias shook his head. “If they’d had a Heartrender, we’d
all be dead.”

  “It was still a close thing,” replied Inej.

  Jesper shouldered his rifle. “Wylan earned his keep.”

  Wylan gave a little jump at the sound of his name. “I did?”

  “Well, you made a down payment.”

  “Let’s move,” said Kaz.

  “We need to bury them,” Nina said.

  “The ground’s too hard, and we don’t have the time. The Shu team is still moving toward Djerholm. We don’t know how many other Grisha they may have, and Pekka’s team could already be inside.”

  “We can’t just leave them for the wolves,” she said, her throat tight.

  “Do you want to build them a pyre?”

  “Go to hell, Brekker.”

  “Do your job, Zenik,” he shot back. “I didn’t bring you to Fjerda to perform funeral rites.”

  She lifted her hands. “How about I crack your skull open like a robin’s egg?”

  “You don’t want a look at what’s inside my head, Nina dear.”

  She took a step forward, but Matthias moved in front of her.

  “Stop,” he said. “I’ll do it. I’ll help you dig the grave.” Nina stared at him. He took a pick from his gear and handed it to her, then took another from Jesper’s pack. “Head due south from here,” he said to the others. “I know the terrain, and I’ll make sure we catch up to you by nightfall. We’ll move faster on our own.”

  Kaz looked at him steadily. “Just remember that pardon, Helvar.”

  “Are we sure it’s a good idea to leave them alone?” Wylan asked as they moved down the slope.

  “No,” replied Inej.

  “But we’re still doing it?”

  “We trust them now or we trust them later,” Kaz said.

  “Are we going to talk about Matthias’ little revelation about Nina’s loyalties?” asked Jesper.

  Nina could just make out Kaz’s reply: “Pretty sure most of us don’t have ‘stalwart’ or ‘true’ checked off on our résumés.” For all that she wanted to pummel Kaz, she couldn’t help being a bit grateful, too.

  Matthias walked a few steps away from Nestor’s body. He heaved the pick into the icy earth, wrenched it free, plunged it in again.

  “Here?” Nina asked.

  “Do you want him elsewhere?”

  “I … I don’t know.” She gazed out at the fields of white, marked by sparse groves of birch. “It all looks the same to me.”

  “You know our gods?”

  “Some,” she said.

  “But you know Djel.”

  “The wellspring.”

  Matthias nodded. “The Fjerdans believe all the world is connected through its waters—the seas, the ice, the rivers and streams, the rain and storms. All feed Djel and are fed by him. When we die, we call it felöt-objer, taking root. We become as roots of the ash tree, drinking from Djel wherever we are laid.”

  “Is that why you burn Grisha instead of burying them?”

  He paused, then gave a brief nod.

  “But you’ll help me lay Nestor and the Squaller to rest here?”

  He nodded again.

  She took hold of the other pick and attempted to match his swing. The ground was hard and unyielding. Every time the pick struck the earth it sent a rattling jolt up her arms.

  “Nestor shouldn’t have been able to do that,” she said, her thoughts still churning. “No Grisha can use power that way. It’s all wrong.”

  He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Do you understand a little better now? What it’s like to face a power so alien? To face an enemy with such unnatural strength?”

  Nina tightened her hold on the pick. Nestor in the grip of parem had seemed like a perversion of everything she loved about her power. Was that what Matthias and the other Fjerdans saw in Grisha? Power beyond explanation, the natural world undone?

  “Maybe.” It was the most she could offer.

  “You said you had no choice at the harbor in Elling,” he said without looking at her. His pick rose and fell, the rhythm unbroken. “Was it because I was drüskelle? Were you planning it all along?”

  Nina remembered their last real day together, the elation they’d felt when they’d crested a steep hill and seen the port town spread out below. She’d been shocked to hear Matthias say, “I am almost sorry, Nina.”

  “Almost?”

  “I’m too hungry to really be sorry.”

  “At last, you succumb to my influence. But how are we going to eat without any money?” she asked as they headed down the hill. “I may have to sell your pretty hair to a wig shop for cash.”

  “Don’t get ideas,” he’d said with a laugh. His laughter had come more easily as they’d traveled, as if he were becoming fluent in a new language. “If this is Elling, I should be able to find us lodging.”

  She’d stopped then, the truth of their situation returning to her with terrible clarity. She was deep in enemy territory with no allies but a drüskelle who’d thrown her in a cage only a few weeks earlier. But before she could speak, Matthias had said, “I owe you my life, Nina Zenik. We will get you safely home.”

  She’d been surprised at how easy it was to trust him. And he’d trusted her, too.

  Now she swung her pick, felt the impact reverberate up her arms and into her shoulders, and said, “There were Grisha in Elling.”

  He halted midswing. “What?”

  “They were spies doing reconnaissance work in the port. They saw me enter the main square with you and recognized me from the Little Palace. One of them recognized you, too, Matthias. He knew you from a skirmish near the border.”

  Matthias remained still.

  “They waylaid me when you went to speak to the manager of the boarding house,” Nina continued. “I convinced them I was undercover there, too. They wanted to take you prisoner, but I told them that you weren’t alone, that it would be too risky to try to capture you right away. I promised I would bring you to them the next day.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  Nina tossed down her pick. “Tell you there were Grisha spies in Elling? You might have made your peace with me, but you can’t expect me to believe you wouldn’t have revealed them.”

  He looked away, a muscle twitching in his jaw, and she knew she’d spoken truth.

  “That morning,” he said, “on the docks—”

  “I had to get us both away from Elling as fast as I could. I thought if I could just find us a vessel to stow away on … but the Grisha must have been watching the boarding house and seen us leave. When they showed up on the docks, I knew they were coming for you, Matthias. If they’d captured you, you would have been taken to Ravka, interrogated, maybe executed. I spotted the Kerch trader. You know their laws on slaving.”

  “Of course I do,” he said bitterly.

  “I made the charge. I begged them to save me. I knew they’d have to take you into custody, and bring us safely to Kerch. I didn’t know—Matthias, I didn’t know they’d throw you in Hellgate.”

  His eyes were hard when he faced her, his knuckles white on the handle of his pick. “Why didn’t you speak up? Why didn’t you tell the truth when we arrived in Ketterdam?”

  “I tried. I swear it. I tried to recant. They wouldn’t let me see a judge. They wouldn’t let me see you. I couldn’t explain the seal from the slaver or why I’d made the charges, not without revealing Ravka’s intelligence operations. I would have compromised Grisha still in the field. I would have been sentencing them to death.”

  “So you left me to rot in Hellgate.”

  “I could have gone home to Ravka. Saints, I wanted to. But I stayed in Ketterdam. I gave up my wages for bribes, petitioned the Court—”

  “You did everything but tell the truth.”

  She’d meant to be gentle, apologetic, to tell him that she’d thought of him every night and every day. But the image of the pyre was still fresh in her mind. “I was trying to protect my people, people you’ve spent your life trying to extermina
te.”

  He gave a rueful laugh, turning the pick over in his hands. “Wanden olstrum end kendesorum.”

  It was the first part of a Fjerdan saying: The water hears and understands. It sounded kind enough, but Matthias knew that Nina would be familiar with the rest of it.

  “Isen ne bejstrum,” she finished. The water hears and understands. The ice does not forgive.

  “And what will you do now, Nina? Will you betray the people you call friends again, for the sake of the Grisha?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t tell me you intend to let Bo Yul-Bayur live.”

  He knew her well. With every new thing she’d learned of jurda parem, she’d been more certain that the only way to protect Grisha was to end the scientist’s life. She thought of Nestor begging with his last breath for his Shu masters to return. “I can’t bear the thought of my people being slaves,” she admitted. “But we have a debt to settle, Matthias. The pardon is my penance, and I won’t be the person who keeps you from your freedom again.”

  “I don’t want the pardon.”

  She stared at him. “But—”

  “Maybe your people would become slaves. Or maybe they would become an unstoppable force. If Yul-Bayur lives and the secret of jurda parem becomes known, anything is possible.”

  For a long moment, they held each other’s gaze. The sun sat low in the sky, light falling in golden shafts across the snow. She could see the blond of Matthias’ lashes peeking through the black antimony she had used to stain them. She’d have to tailor him again soon.

  In those days after the shipwreck, she and Matthias had formed an uneasy truce. What had grown up between them had been something fiercer than affection, an understanding that they were both soldiers, that in another life, they might have been allies instead of enemies. She felt that now.

  “It would mean betraying the others,” she said. “They won’t get their pay from the Merchant Council.”

  “True.”

  “And Kaz will kill us both.”

  “If he learns the truth.”

  “Have you tried lying to Kaz Brekker?”

  Matthias shrugged. “Then we die as we lived.”

  Nina looked at Nestor’s emaciated form. “For a cause.”

  “We are of one mind in this,” said Matthias. “Bo Yul-Bayur will not leave the Ice Court alive.”