Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

All of Kaz's worst anxieties come boiling to the surface when Genna learns to walk.

It's charming at first. Genna begins to pull herself upright, hanging onto furniture, sidestepping along. Kaz and Inej are excited, encouraging. They spend hours between them walking her up and down, holding onto her hands as she practises the mechanics of putting one foot in front of the other.

Their baby takes her very first steps unaided in their kitchen, tottering the short distance from where Kaz lets go of her hands to fall into Inej's waiting arms.

Inej simply dissolves into tears right there on the kitchen floor, overwhelmed with pride, laughing as she presses kisses into Genna's little cheeks. When she looks at Kaz, he has a slightly dazed, faraway look in his eyes but the expression on his face is one she generally interprets as 'happy'.

Their enthusiasm is short-lived.

Inej feels they've only just managed to get the hang of parenting a child who will reliably stay where she has been placed for a few minutes. Now that Genna is mobile, all bets are off. She's into everything, curious little hands grabbing at anything within her reach, more often than not shoving it into her mouth shortly thereafter. She must be watched every instant. Doors must be kept carefully shut, or else she wanders off into other rooms, unseen mischief.

If Inej feels frazzled by this latest development, Kaz becomes almost incoherent with paranoia. Weapons stashed all over the house are removed to high locations, out of even Inej's reach - though of course she requires nothing but her own knives - and only just within Kaz's. Bookshelves and any other items of furniture that Genna could conceivably pull onto herself are bolted to the walls. The stairs become a particular point of contention; Inej loses her patience when Kaz attempts to lock the door of Genna's room at night, arguing that the child has never once escaped from her cot, and even if she did, she would not be able to reach the door latch.

His worry regarding the creek resurfaces with renewed aggression, too. Where Inej has been in the habit of leaving doors open to allow air to move through the house, Kaz can no longer tolerate it, and they suffer a few weeks of doors being opened and closed eighteen times a day in a passive aggressive battle for dominance.

The solution is one that Inej herself had suggested many months before, after a fashion.

Kaz does not fence the creek, but he does spend several weeks constructing a low wall that completely encircles their house. Timber is scarce where they have settled, must be transported long distances from the temperate forests to the north, but bricks made from the loamy earth are plentiful and cheap.

He spends a few hours a day working on the wall, in the mornings and evenings when it's coolest. Inej helps by turns while Genna plays in the garden, though one of them must always hurry to scoop her up when she toddles too far on unsteady legs. It's hard work, but rewarding to see the direct result of their labour, the way the wall grows steadily day by day. The completed structure stands around waist-height to Kaz, solid, no gaps for a little person to slip through, too tall for the same little person to climb over.

For now, thinks Inej.

The wall is finished with two gates to the front and back - purchased to order rather than built - and she is confused when four gates show up, until Kaz explains his intentions. So now they must go through two gates every time they wish to go up or down the stairs - one at the top, one at the bottom. It's somewhat inconvenient, but it does eliminate the worry of Genna toppling down them, and Kaz remarks that it will save him a grey hair or two, to which Inej must smother a laugh.

Kaz has been going prematurely grey for a few years now, much to his chagrin. Inej found his first grey hair when he was twenty-five, carding her fingers gently through it one evening. Back then it had been a strand here and there, practically unnoticeable to all except the keenest of observers, unlikely to even catch the light in the dull streets of Ketterdam. Now, though, his dark hair is shot through with silver at the temples, all the more obvious for having grown out of the severe haircut he used to wear. Inej teases him about getting old but she likes it, truthfully, thinks it makes him look rather distinguished. She can picture him ten years from now, gone fully salt-and-pepper.

This is the first time she's allowed herself to imagine that he might live long enough to do so.

There's safety here, in a way they've never had before. For so long, she has not allowed herself to think beyond the next voyage, the next raid, their lives too dangerous, tomorrow too uncertain to count on. Here, the future unspools before her, sunbleached and unhurried. She can see it, now. She can think of Kaz growing old, of growing old beside him. She can picture Genna at ten, and fifteen, and twenty, though it makes her heart ache savagely to think of her baby growing up.

It should be enough.

She should be happy here, in her acres of rolling farmland, in her pretty house with its whitewashed walls and its trellis of creeping honeysuckle, watching her little girl grow every day.

Kaz, against all odds and anything she could have predicted, has settled into seeming contentment. But then, she muses, he's a man of routine in his bones. He likes to inhabit a place, master it, make it his own.

Not Inej, though.

Inej is a born wanderer. She has a restless heart, and she longs for her freedom.

When Genna is newly two years old, Inej returns to the sea.

.

Kaz is sour about it, and he only gets worse as the time for her departure approaches, but she knows he'll never make any move to stop her from going. As if he could. As if she would let him.

There is salt water in her blood, now, in her marrow. She has spent ten years upon the ocean chasing slavers to every far horizon. Perhaps in another life she could have remained all her days on the little patch of land deep in the Zemeni countryside, content to be a farmer's wife. Perhaps some long-dead version of her might have been willing to stay with Kaz always, sharing his bed and raising his children.

Perhaps that version of her is braver, in a way.

That's another life, though.

This version of her makes her preparations. Sends letters and arranges to meet her ship in Shriftport, packs a bag and puts a lethal edge on her blades. A not-insignificant part of her brain screams at her, every instinct fighting against leaving her child far behind, where she cannot see her and hold her and protect her. The rational part of Inej battles against those instincts, knows that she must go, for her own sake. And, too, she feels something about this place. She knows that even though she goes to blood and danger, this place will hold Kaz and Genna, protect them, keep them for her until she returns. And she fully intends to return.

But first, she must go. It will be better for them all, in the long run, if she goes.

Kaz's mood is apocalyptic, though, surly and sulky and wounded. As though, by leaving, Inej has somehow hurt his feelings. It makes her feel sick and unhappy, like she could peel her own skin off. She can go head-to-head with Kaz's anger any day of the week, but she finds she doesn't really know how to cope with the idea that she's hurting him.

She cannot leave him like this.

There is an easy way and a hard way to deal with Kaz's moods, she has found over the years; either wait for them to pass on their own, or give him something else to chew on and face whatever consequences may present themselves.

Well, Inej doesn't have the time to wait him out. She opts for the hard way.

The day before she leaves, they sit at the breakfast table as they always do; Inej facing Kaz, sharing sections of the newspaper while Genna sits at the head of the table between them eating her porridge. They discuss Inej's impending departure in clipped tones over the top of her head.

“I might stop in Ketterdam, this voyage,” she tells him.

Kaz takes a large gulp of his coffee, and the cup lands back in the saucer with a clatter as he sets it back down a little too hard. “How pleasant for you.”

“It might be,” she says, eyeing him over the top of the paper. “I might put in for a week or so, see Jes and Wylan.”

“The harbour levies will be crippling this time of year,” he grumbles.

Springtime, he means, when the tulips are in full bloom and harbour berths are charged at double - or even triple - rate for the ships bearing droves of foreign tourists who come to the city for the express purpose of taking day trips to see the colourful fields. Yes, the levies will be crippling indeed. Even in Dregs-controlled Fifth Harbour, where The Wraith has never worried about paying them because Kaz kept berth twenty-two open and waiting for her all the long year, at great personal expense.

But, of course, he's no longer there.

Sensing an opening, Inej shrugs one shoulder. “You'd know more about that than me these days, I'm sure.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I know you keep a hand in Dregs business,” she chides, gently mocking. She rolls her eyes at his expression. “You employed me as a spy, Kaz, what exactly did you imagine you could hide from me in my own home?”

He acknowledges that with a slight incline of his head, but otherwise only gives her a wary, assessing look. Historically, she has not reacted well to having things deliberately kept from her. “You seem remarkably unperturbed by that.”

Inej sniffs lightly, turns the page of the newspaper, and deploys the ace up her sleeve. “It’s alright, you didn't tell me you still have one foot in Ketterdam, I didn't tell you that Joss Meijer is ex-Razorgulls.”

Kaz's hand jerks so sharply that he knocks his coffee cup clean off the table, and Inej feels an uncharitable kind of satisfaction as it shatters on the flagstone floor. It's been years since she was last able to take him so thoroughly by surprise - at least eight if she doesn't count the night she told him she was carrying Genna, which she does not because it's so deeply unimaginative.

He places both hands on the table, palms down, and she meets the fury in his eyes calmly, waiting for him to speak.

“What.” The word is flat, calm, so precisely enunciated that the 'T' carves the air like a gunshot.

It is his most dangerous tone.

There are many who mistake Kaz's habit of not raising his voice for safety, to their peril. Where most men bluster and shout, he goes still and quiet, a snake coiled to strike. She cannot count those she has seen peacock in the face of his anger and realise too late they have walked directly into the jaws of the beast.

Inej feels the ground solidify beneath her. Yes, she can go head-to-head with his anger any day of the week.

She arches an eyebrow. “You heard me.”

There is a long, long moment where nothing happens. Kaz stares at Inej. Inej stares at Kaz. The only sound in the room is Genna singing an off-key, wordless tune to herself as she concentrates on her breakfast.

“How long have you known this?” Kaz's voice is still flat, and calm, and quiet.

Inej is equally calm. “Since the first moment I saw him.”

Kaz is holding himself so rigid that the muscle in the side of his neck is standing in high relief. His eyes have taken on a dark quality that she has not seen in some time. “And you didn't feel this was something you ought to share with me?”

“No,” says Inej. “I didn't.”

He bares his teeth. “Why?”

“Because he's not a threat,” she pulls back her shoulders, but otherwise makes no reaction. “But that wouldn't have stopped you putting a bullet between his eyes the first chance you got.”

There is no expression at all on Kaz's face as he looks at her. His jaw works, he's grinding his teeth - a sure sign that mind of his is working at full-tilt. Terrible habit, one she's often told him to stop, but he does it in his saints damned sleep—

Kaz stands abruptly, snatching his cane from where it rests against the table. He looks as though he has a few choice words he'd like to say to her, at the very least, but Genna is looking at him with her big dark eyes. He glares a moment, then turns on his heel and walks right out of the room.

Inej takes a deep breath, in and out. Then, she goes back to her tea.

.

She does not see him for the rest of the day. Not at lunch, not for dinner, not when she bathes Genna and puts her in her little nightgown ready for bed.

It is not until Inej is sitting on the back step watching Genna toddle about the garden in the fading light, letting her burn the last of her energy, that he appears. Inej hears him approach from behind, scoots to one side on the step to give him the space to step out. She thinks he might berate her for allowing Genna to play outside in her nightgown but he only stands and watches as their baby potters about, picking flowers and peering at insects, fully absorbed in her little two-year-old world.

When she notices her father, Genna hurries towards him on unsteady legs, little fist held out in front of her. Kaz holds out his hand, and she deposits a handful of leaves and tiny pebbles into his palm, watches as he dutifully puts them into his pocket.

She's a little collector of things, their daughter, and Kaz is her appointed trustee. He used to toss them away the moment her back was turned, but the day she returned ten minutes later and demanded one of her treasures back, his inability to produce the desired item precipitated a meltdown so complete that Koltan Zadi, passing on his horse, had turned down the farm track to investigate her agonised shrieking, convinced that Kaz and Inej had somehow both been hurt or incapacitated. So now Kaz must empty his pockets of twigs and rocks and crushed flowers every night before he gets undressed, scattering them out the window. Thankfully, Genna seems to forget about them while she sleeps.

Satisfied that her father has safely stored her haul, Genna toddles off again to resume her hunt.

Inej waits.

“You should have told me,” says Kaz, and the fury in his voice is muted and tightly controlled, but very much still present.

“Perhaps,” she acknowledges, keeping her eyes on her daughter, now back to rummaging around in a bed of spring greens, raking through the loose earth with her fingers. “But I was still very angry with you, at the time. It felt good to have something over you.”

“Are you still angry with me now? About all of that?”

“Of course not,” she says, and she realises - perhaps for the first time - that it's true, that she honestly no longer bears any resentment toward him.

“And yet, in all this time, it never crossed your mind to mention it?”

His tone is caustic. Inej looks at her hands, picking at one fingernail. “In all honesty, it just seemed like the sort of thing that would cause more problems than it solved.” He makes some noise, some huffing sound laced with disgust, and she bristles. “Anyway, you haven’t been exactly forthcoming about your…activities.”

He does look at her, then, a whip of his head over his shoulder. “That's different.”

“How is it different?” Inej hisses.

But.

As one, they both look to Genna, still digging around in the dirt, happily oblivious to the rising tension only a few feet away from her.

They'd promised they would never fight in front of her.

Inej clings to a suspicion that half the reason Genna was such a wretched infant was the poisonous atmosphere in their house during the first months of her life, and she is determined that they must never allow that to happen again. Oh, they still fight, because Kaz's default state is ill-tempered and Inej is incapable of not rising to the occasion when he's being, well, himself. But they have their disagreements well out of sight and earshot of their girl. They will not allow raised voices and slamming doors to be the ambient noise of her childhood.

They promised it to each other, made a deal when Genna was still a babe in arms and, for better or worse, they have held fast to that deal.

Sighing, Kaz lowers himself heavily onto the step beside her, resting his cane across his knees. “It's different,” he continues in a tightly measured tone, “because an ex-Razorgull in our midst represents a clear and present threat.”

Inej pauses, until she's sure that her tone can match his. “Are you telling me that you don't consider letters going back and forth to the Barrel a clear and present threat?”

He takes one breath in through his nose, and releases it slowly through his mouth. “There are several layers of failsafes in the routes those letters take—”

“And I'm supposed to just take your word for—”

“Yes, you are,” he says, flexing his fingers around his cane. “I have assessed the threat and found it negligible. You, on the other hand—”

“I also assessed the threat, and found it negligible,” she parrots, and this time she doesn't give him the opportunity to come back at her, speaks over him again, tone determinedly matter-of-fact. “It's been two years, Kaz. He's not going to hurt us. I made the choice I made. I will not spend any more time justifying it.”

“Nor I,” he grinds out immediately.

“Fine,” she says.

“Good.”

There is a long stretch of silence where they both stare resolutely ahead, until it seems that Kaz simply cannot help himself. “Why now?”

Because you're easier to deal with when you're angry, she thinks, but she cannot tell him that. “Because you should have all the facts. Because—”

She cuts herself off. It's an excuse, yes, but there's truth in it. The smallest chance that she was wrong, that there is a threat where she has not recognised it, and she'd told Julia Meijer that Kaz didn't know who Joss was.

“Because you're leaving.” Kaz hears what she does not say. “Because you may not come back.”

There's always a chance she might not come back, from the sea, but they never say it. Never. “Yes, that.”

Silence again, less tense. Inej watches Genna. She watches the small flying insects that are caught like dust motes in the last rays of evening sunlight. She looks about her garden, that she raised up from a patch of scrubby barren earth to be rich and fertile and fragrant. She and Kaz are pressed against each other, arm and hip and thigh, and she can feel the heat of him through their layers of clothing.

She looks at him. "What happened to the Dregs?"

She can ask now. Now that he can admit to knowing.

"Nothing happened to them," grumbles Kaz, slowly stretching the bad leg out in front of him. "Anika leads them."

Inej makes a small sound of acknowledgement. That comes as no particular surprise to her. "You took a risk, leaving like you did. It must have created a power vacuum."

“The Dregs were much too established for that, as long as they held together,” Kaz shakes his head. "The bigger risk was an internal struggle, a leadership challenge."

"Was there?"

"Not that I ever heard. And if there had been, Anika would have put it down."

There is something that she thinks might be pride in his voice. Anika had been Kaz's creature right from the beginning and, after Inej left, his second. Always at his shoulder, diligent in carrying out even his most unpleasant orders, eager to prove herself. A far more willing protégé than Inej herself had ever been.

“Far more bloodthirsty than me, then,” she quips, recalling a time when he'd lamented her lack of violent instinct.

She expects him to needle her gently, join in the joke, but he only slides his eyes sideways to her, eyebrow raised. “I might have said so, once.”

.

Her plan has not worked as well as she'd hoped, because Kaz has circled back around to being bitter over her imminent departure by the time they go to bed.

Oh well, she thinks. Never let it be said that he doesn't have a firm grasp on his priorities. She supposes he'll have plenty of time to stew over Joss Meijer - or possibly to murder him - while she's gone.

She has more practical things to worry about, now. As they move around their bedroom, getting ready to go to sleep, she reels off every kind of useful fact she can think of. Things like make sure she eats her vegetables and keep on top of the laundry, don't let her run out of underthings. She can see that it's making Kaz steadily more irate, but, well. She has to say these things, she just has to. Just to know they've been said. She's a mother, after all.

Turned into your mother, more like, something in the back of her mind whispers to her, and she stubbornly does not dwell on that.

“I do actually live here too, Inej,” Kaz bites out after she's told him that Genna doesn't like to go down for a nap with the curtains closed for the second time, when she knows full well he didn't need to be told the first. “I am also possessed of cognitive function somewhat above that of the average five-year-old.”

“I know,” she says, fidgeting with the covers. She chews on her lip a moment, hesitates, decides to say what she was going to say anyway. “You can wear the gloves, you know.”

On the other side of the bed, Kaz's shoulders stiffen. “What?”

“If you need to. If Genna—” she cuts herself off abruptly. If Genna what? If she's wet. If she's dribbly. If she has sticky fingers. If, if, if. She sighs. “If you need to. That's all.”

“If you don't trust me to take care of my own daughter, perhaps you shouldn't be leaving her alone with me,” he says testily, shoving back the sheets with more force than is strictly necessary.

“Of course I trust you to take care of her,” says Inej as she puts out the lamp, leaving them in darkness. “I just wonder if you trust you to take care of her.”

“What a patently ridiculous statement.”

Inej sighs heavily but does not respond. They lie there for a time in the dark, both tense, neither sleeping. Inej has spent enough years sharing a bed with Kaz to know the rhythm of his breath when he finally succumbs to sleep, but he is holding himself rigid, his temper keeping him apart from her.

Eventually though, he exhales and she feels the slow, deliberate release of tension as he forces himself to relax. “I don't want to fight.”

His voice is sullen, as it always is when he makes the first move toward conciliation. He's gotten better at it over the years, but it always sounds like it costs him something to concede the high ground.

“We’re not fighting, you foolish man.” Inej gives a little shake of her head, though he cannot see her. “You make everything harder than it needs to be.”

He says nothing. Clearly, he's gone as far as he's going to go toward making peace.

Inej sighs. “I'll be gone a month, maybe two. It won't be long.”

“I'll be sure to explain that to Genna when she's crying for her mama,” comes the muttered reply.

The guilt curls sour in her stomach once more. There's nothing she can do where her baby is concerned that doesn't make her feel guilty in some way or another. A part of her wants to cry, a part of her wants to lash out and hurt Kaz back. She clenches her fist into the blankets and grinds her teeth instead.

“Don’t do that,” she says quietly.

It is all she says.

Silence reigns between them for a long while. Inej feels wounded and annoyed and defiant and resigned. She is leaving him by mutual agreement; however hurt or angry he wants to be about it now, there had been a discussion, and he'd agreed that she should do what makes her happy. He has no right to be this way with her, and she is of a mind to light the damn lamp again and have it out with him right now.

The reason she does not is because she is almost positive that his renewed unpleasantness has less to do with her impending absence than it does the realisation that he will soon be parenting Genna alone.

She wants to tell him not to worry, that help is close at hand should he need it; Anathi Zadi on one side, Julia Meijer on the other. In truly dire straits, Colm Fahey would come when called, she knows he would. She also knows that Kaz would sooner set himself on fire than suffer the indignity of admitting to needing help, never mind asking for it. Bringing it up can only put him further inside his head, and Inej doesn't want to fight either.

And besides, while Kaz might be worried, Inej herself is not. What she told him is true; if she had any real concerns about leaving Genna with him, she simply would not do it.

Eventually, she feels the tell-tale dip of the mattress as he turns on his side to face her.

“Come here,” he says.

Slowly, Inej scoots over, under the arm he's lifted for her to tuck close against his body. There's still tension in him, and she winds her arm over his waist to press her fingers into the notches of his spine at the same time that she presses her face into his neck, breathing him in, soaking in the warmth of him. Even now, she is so grateful for this.

She’s grateful for it all, really, but especially this. She cherishes every kiss, every night of tangled limbs and panting mouths, but if all he ever did for the rest of their lives was hold her close like this, then it would still be enough.

Kaz tightens his arms around her for a moment, and she feels him press his nose into her hair, inhale deeply. She’s going to have to have severe words with him when she gets back; he cannot behave like a petulant child every time she leaves or it's going to be exhausting for both of them. Not tonight, though. Tonight, she just drifts. Safe. Loved.

.

She goes before dawn, while Genna is still sleeping.

Call it habit or call it cowardice, but whatever it is, Inej fears that if she has to look into her child’s face she will not have the strength to leave her.

And she must leave her. Inej has come to accept that in order to be a good mother, she must be a whole person, and the only way to be a whole person is to give every part of herself what it needs.

She knows that Kaz is awake, but he does her the courtesy of pretending he is not. Allows her to make her pantomime of painless separation, no tears, no farewells.

She slips away from them in the darkness, like the Wraith he named her.

.

With a brisk wind in her hair and salt spray on her face, Inej feels something she hadn't thought to feel again, sharp and hard and thrilling. It's the easiest thing in the world to step back onto the deck of The Wraith and inhabit her legend again, become Captain Ghafa, the Sankta of the Sea once more.

Oh, it's different of course, but also not. Specht grips her arm in respectful greeting when she walks up the gangplank, and then pulls her into a one-armed hug that lifts her clear off her feet. On the open sea, they are less Captain and First Mate, more equals. Specht has been in command on this ship for two years now, and seems to have settled well to the role. He offers her the captain’s cabin out of courtesy, but Inej takes a hammock on the gun deck with the rest of the crew, unwilling to turf him out for the short time she will be aboard.

It's good to be down there, among the crew, still mostly known to her even after her years away. Crewing aboard The Wraith is more a calling than a job; Inej thinks they couldn't stand the savagery if it weren’t. Crew stay a long while and leave when they can no longer stomach it, never to return. Inej, for her part, enjoys lying in her hammock between watches, catching up with them, listening to their tales. She sleeps well, with her knives strapped on and her hat pulled low over her face, the fatigue of a long day deep in her bones. Not the seemingly depthless exhaustion of new parenthood that still occasionally haunts her, but the satisfaction of hard-worked muscles and sea air.

And, of course, the work remains. A decade, more, of burning slave ships has done infuriatingly little to discourage the trade. Even Kaz's efforts at dismantling the indenture system in Ketterdam only went so far - he was just one man, after all, even with a criminal empire at his back. As demand in Kerch itself dwindled, it soared in the Southern Colonies, the moral squalor of Ketterdam flourishing anew in the tropical heat, where the rich men who exploit the local resources crave a taste of home. Inej still struggles to make peace with the fact that she has not obliterated the slavers, but every life saved, every man, woman and child who comes blinking out of the hold of a slaver ship is a victory, and she must hold onto that. They can only do what they can do.

Now, Inej stands atop the forecastle, scanning the horizon through a long glass. They are tracking hard straight across the sea toward Ketterdam on the tail of a slaver, riding the trade winds. The Wraith travels lightly, faster than anything else on the True Sea, even now. Inej has every confidence they will catch the ship before it reaches Kerch waters and, if their intelligence is good and based on the intercept course she has plotted, they should be upon it any time now.

She hears Specht before she sees him, measured footsteps approaching from her left, surefooted as always on the rolling deck. He comes to stand at her side, both hands resting lightly on the bulwark, and Inej feels a little shiver of familiarity, of rightness. How many times have they stood like this, shoulder to shoulder? The voyage thus far has been such a flurry of frantic activity, they’ve barely had time to speak.

“So, how fares our daughter?”

Her eyebrows shoot up as she slides her eyes sideways at him. “Unless I’ve suffered a terrible lapse in both memory and judgement, I’m not entirely sure what you’re referring to.”

“Co-captains,” says Specht, gesturing between them and winking. “By the law of the sea, we’re essentially married. What’s yours is mine.”

Inej snorts inelegantly. “I don't think that’s how it works.”

“It definitely is,” he says, nodding sagely. “So?”

“She’s well,” says Inej, thinking of the last time he saw her baby, when she was barely a few weeks old. “Walking, talking. Into absolutely everything. Probably prematurely ageing Kaz by about ten years even as we speak.”

Specht laughs, loud and long. “How is the old bastard, anyway?”

“Up to his ears in intrigue and making a lot of money.”

He barks another laugh. “Business as usual, then.”

He's not wrong. Kaz might have transplanted himself from Ketterdam to another continent, but, as evidenced by recent discussions, he carries on much as he always has. He would probably die if he didn't have at least four concurrent schemes running. Inej shrugs. “You know how he is.”

“That I do,” he says ruefully, and she marks his tone. Specht has always been faintly disapproving of her romantic entanglement with Kaz, and vocal in his opinion that she could do better. Inej wonders what he'd make of the idea that Kaz would likely agree with him. He sighs heavily, now. “I still can't believe you had a baby with that monster.”

Inej grins as she finally sights her target through the long glass, baring her teeth. Collapsing the long glass in one smooth, satisfying motion, she repeats a sentiment she's heard from Kaz many times over the years. “We're all someone's monster, Specht.”

.

Little Erik Meijer chatters away on his father's knee as the cart jolts over the rutted road towards home. He's a sweet, sunny lad, and Inej finds it easy to smile and nod and make interested noises from her position beside Joss on the bench of the cart. She'd caught them in town and begged a ride back towards the farm.

The sun is high overhead, beating down with no breeze to temper it. All occupants of the cart are well-used to the heat, bar one: poor Wylan is hiding under a wide brimmed hat in the back, misery incarnate, as Jesper carries on a very loud and very one-sided conversation beside him.

A not-so-small part of her regrets bringing them. After burning three ships, The Wraith had indeed made a whirlwind stop in Ketterdam to resupply, and Inej had seen her dear friends for the first time in near enough three years. If they'd been upset with her they'd been good enough not to show it, but there had been tears and a lot of wine, and Wylan had professed that he and Jesper were desperate to visit but weren't certain if they'd been welcome, and then Inej had cried again, and then Jesper had cried, and before she knew what she was doing the invitation was out of her mouth.

Whatever restlessness had been bubbling in her blood, itching under her skin, is quiet now. Now, she can only feel deep contentment at the blue sky and the warm sun and the rolling farmland. The dusty, rutted road is charming to her - how had she ever loathed it before? She tips her face to the sun, letting her head loll as she closes her eyes, her body moving easily with the jerking motion of the cart.

On the crossing, she'd tried to rationalise it; she has been gone the whole summer, longer than she intended, and she'd thought perhaps Jesper and Wylan would make a decent buffer between herself and what is sure to be a fraught reunion with Kaz. Now, though, she wishes she hadn't. She wants to kiss her baby, wrap herself around Kaz if he's not feeling too prickly, and tuck away for a good long while in the safety and comfort of the place they've made together. She doesn't want intruders, no matter how dearly she loves them. Sighing slightly, she opens her eyes again.

Beside her, Joss is sweating bullets in a way that has nothing to do with the heat.

In the back of the cart, Jesper has made himself comfortable. He is half reclined, legs splayed and elbows resting on the box board behind him, collar open and sleeves rolled to his elbows. The crow and cup tattoo on his forearm is on full display.

Inej feels a decent amount of pity for Joss. He can be a bit of a fool, but he's not a bad person. He doesn't really deserve the anxiety that must come from having Dirtyhands move in next door. He is plainly still unaware that they know his identity - Inej is somewhat pleased to see that Kaz has managed to refrain from shooting him and burying him underneath her vegetable garden - and part of her wants to put him out of his misery, tell him that if Kaz wanted to do him harm he'd have done so already. But she notes that his wife has done nothing to disabuse him of that notion, either, so Inej continues to let him sweat. She'll let Julia keep that one in her pocket.

When they come to the dusty track that branches off toward the Meijer farm, Inej hops down, tells him they can walk the rest of the way. Wylan glares at her from under his hat as he and Jesper climb down beside her, but Inej ignores it. She's not certain poor Joss will be able cope with a whole murder of Crows in one place.

She assures Wylan that the walk is a short one, and it is, but she can see that he's suffering in the heat. Jesper takes his bag from him and slings it over one shoulder, hefting his own bag over the other. So far on the journey he has been relaxed, untroubled by the weather, easy in his homeland. Now, as they approach the farm, for the first time Inej marks tension in his shoulders, a jittery energy in the slightly shortened length of his stride.

She says nothing, but she thinks that perhaps it's not just her own reunion with Kaz that's going to be uncomfortable.

Inej feels a tingle of something nameless as they turn onto the rutted farm track, finally stepping onto Rietveld land. She looks at her surroundings and realises that she had not understood how familiar this place had become to her, how dear, until she left it.

All is as it was, but also not. Time has passed here as it did on the ocean. Inej sees that the broken fencepost has been mended while she's been away. In the meadows to either side of the track, the grass has been scythed and raked into neat windrows for drying, and the air is sweet with the scent of it. It must have been in the last day or so, thinks Inej, perhaps even that very morning. Haymaking is a chaotic business, in her experience, a fine balance between decent growth and good timing, getting it in before the autumn rains come. They'd got it wrong last year, lost the bulk of it to damp. Kaz has waited longer this year, he must be confident in his window.

All chatter among their little group has ceased, and while Inej is cataloguing the changes around her, she also observes Jesper and Wylan looking about with interest. She wonders what it looks like through their eyes. Does it seem a likely place for she and Kaz to wash up? Is it what they expected? Had they expected anything at all?

Her questions die in her throat as the house comes into view and, with it, Kaz and Genna. Jesper stops dead in his tracks, mouth agape, and Inej and Wylan stop with him instinctively. Kaz, hunched over the front gate doing something that involves a hammer, seems to sense her presence in that peculiar way of his. He glances over his shoulder half a second before she opens her mouth to call out to him.

Their eyes meet, and Inej is suddenly breathless. Every single thing she thought she would do or say leaves her mind, replaced by the warm joy of seeing his face again. It doesn't make sense - Inej has spent far longer periods away from him in the past. But that was before.

Genna is kneeling by his feet, face close to the ground and bottom in the air, examining something very closely. Kaz leans down to her, one hand braced on his good knee, speaks. Genna looks up at him. And then he points, and she looks at Inej.

The excited squeal that Genna lets out cuts something loose inside her. She drops her bag and runs.

In the next instant, Inej is on her knees in the dirt pressing kisses to Genna's fat little cheeks, her little hands, hefting the weight of her in her arms as she smacks kisses into her belly and her girl shrieks in delight. All the while she murmurs to her in jumbled Suli, words tumbling over themselves, my darling, my little precious, my very own heart.

In the background she becomes aware of a great ruckus, all flapping wings and vicious honking and the distinctive sound of Wylan yelling fuck, fucking fuck!

Twisting to look over her shoulder, Inej sees that her friend has retreated a fair distance up the track and is climbing the fence, beset by geese and still shouting obscenities. Jesper, following after and betraying no particular urgency in coming to his husband's aid, calls, “Wylan no, darling, they can fly—”

She turns back to look up at Kaz, watching the proceedings with an air of resigned indifference, and all she can think is how much she's missed him. When he glances at her, she grins up at him, gleeful. He doesn't smile back, but the way he looks at her sitting in the dust with Genna tight in her arms, like she's the most valuable thing he's ever laid eyes on, is welcome enough for now.

.

While Jesper and Wylan get settled in the back bedroom where Kaz had once slept, Inej cleans the dirt of the road off herself, changes into the loose linen clothing she prefers to wear at home. Genna sticks to her like glue, keeping close at her feet as she moves about the bedroom, clutching her trouser leg when she goes back downstairs, forcing her to take slow, halting steps to keep pace with little legs.

In the kitchen, Inej pulls open the back door to let the afternoon light in and is hit by the fragrant air of her garden - which, she notes with some satisfaction, is lush and green despite Kaz's ill-tempered insistence that he would have neither the time nor the inclination to maintain it while she was away.

The man in question has sequestered himself in his study for the time being. It would be easy for Inej to feel annoyed with him, that he would rather hide away among his books than be with her after so many months apart, but she understands him too well for that. Kaz can adjust a plan at a moment's notice on a job - for all his dark legend, his true genius is his unparalleled ability to pivot in a crisis - but emotional adjustments take him longer. It was perhaps not entirely fair of her to bring Jesper and Wylan down on him with no warning, but it's a reckoning that needed to be had. Of anyone aside from Inej herself, Kaz has the most emotional ties to Jesper, and the messiest. Whether he would admit it or not, he draws strength from Jesper, leans on him in ways he wouldn't lean on Inej, and though she knows they've corresponded some, he'd cut that support off at the knees when he'd removed them to Novyi Zem.

She will not begrudge him the time he needs to get his head straight. She leaves him to his own devices.

Genna has dirt smudged across the bridge of her nose, and her hair - not yet long enough to braid - is escaping from the tufted little ponytail atop her head. Inej feels so much love for her that she could simply gather her close and hold her for hours and just weep with the joy of it. She elects to give her a bath instead, despite the early hour. She won't have their friends think that she and Kaz are dragging up some feral urchin.

She fills the deep kitchen sink with water warmed on the stove, scents it with lavender and lemonbalm pulled from her garden, spends a long time there getting Genna clean, scrubbing behind her ears, lathering up her hair.

Kaz comes in, at last, while Genna is having the time of her life sloshing the water around so that it spills over the side of the sink and onto the floor. He sits at the table and scratches numbers into the columns of one of his ledgers, and Inej is struck all over again by that sudden sense of rightness, the three of them being together again. She feels - insanely - like singing, like her contentment will burst right out of her skin unless she does something to express it, and she thinks she understands now why her mother would always be humming some nothing tune while Inej and her father were close by.

“So,” she says lightly, tone casual. “How have things been?”

“Fine,” says Kaz, still writing diligently. “We cut the hay yesterday, and we'll begin the harvest proper in about two weeks, I think. The oilseed has done especially well this year, and half the Ravkan crop failed so the price has shot up. We'll do well on it.”

“Oh,” says Inej, frowning a little as she rinses Genna's hair. The question he's answered is not quite the one she was asking, and she wonders if that is by accident or design. She tries again. “How have you been?”

“As you can see, I am perfectly well.”

Design, then.

She sighs. “And Genna?”

“As I'm sure you can also see, she too is perfectly well.”

Inej chances a look over her shoulder but he's sitting with his back to her, head still bowed over whatever he's brought to work on to facilitate this conspicuous display of ignoring her. She fights the urge to wring out the wet washcloth straight down the back of his shirt.

Evidently, she's going to have to drag base facts out of him piecemeal until he's done punishing her for her absence. “She's been eating well?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Sleeping well?”

A grunt is all she gets in response to that, which she takes to mean that Genna has regressed slightly in her sleeping habits. Her mother had warned her it might happen; it's unfortunate that Kaz has had to deal with it alone.

She scrubs a particularly stubborn patch of dirt on Genna's elbow. “And you've bathed her, while I've been away?”

“Of course I've bathed her, what kind of question is that?”

Kaz's tone could not possibly be more offended, but he is a study in contradictions, as always. For all his griping about bad habits, all his fastidious neatness when it comes to himself and his environment, he has some ingrained idea from his youth that childhood means grass stains on clothes and dirt under fingernails. He struggles with bathtime, too. For all his progress over the years, wet skin and pruned fingertips are something he simply cannot tolerate. The very few times he's lifted Genna from her bath, he's worn the gloves to do so. While Inej knows that he would never let their child go uncared for, she'd be prepared to wager good money that he's done little more than scrub Genna with a wet cloth while she's been at sea.

She looks over her shoulder again. “You've physically submerged her in water?”

“She's clean, isn't she?” he snaps.

Inej fights a grin, vindicated. It's debatable how clean Genna actually is, but only the cloistered children of aristocrats and rich merchers - who spend much of their days in unhappy isolation being neither seen nor heard, if Wylan is anything to go by - are kept in a state of scrubbed sterility at all times. She might tease, but she remembers fondly her own childhood of scraped knees and dirty feet. She is content for her child to be ruthlessly clean only some of the time.

When the water has turned a soupy grey, Inej lifts her baby out of the sink and sets her on the cool flagstones, unconcerned about the chance of catching a chill in the heat of the afternoon, and turns to collect the fresh towel draped over one of the kitchen chairs. She assumes that Genna will wait to be dried off, as she always has, but the child is as slippery as her father. Overexcited, Genna flees as soon as Inej's back is turned - runs giggling out of the room, stark naked and dripping water everywhere - forcing Inej to give chase, brandishing the towel in one hand.

She catches her just before she races out of the open front door, throwing the towel over her like she's attempting to trap a skittish cat and scooping her up, utterly bewildered.

“Oh,” says Kaz absently as she walks back into the kitchen, not looking up from his ledger. “She's started to do runners.”

“Thank you, Kaz, I see that,” huffs Inej, flustered, Genna wriggling in her arms. She notes Kaz's distinct lack of panic over his daughter's flight toward a vulnerable point of egress. “You seem to have let go of the worst of your paranoia.”

“Benefits of having her to myself the past few months,” he says, tapping his pen against the edge of the ledger. “I can't keep my eyes on her every second of every day.”

His tone is detached but he looks up as Inej kneels on the floor to roughly towel dry their child, and when she meets his eyes there is the very barest suggestion of humour there.

She raises her eyebrows in response. “Well, she evidently hasn't come to any mischief.”

“It turns out that small children are quite resilient, actually.”

That does not sound at all reassuring. Her eyebrows creep even higher. “Meaning?”

Kaz gives her a level look. “They bounce.”

For a long moment, they simply eyeball each other across the kitchen, before Inej looks at Genna again warily. There is precisely no chance she would not have noticed evidence of injury on her child immediately, but she scans her quickly anyway; aside from a small yellowing bruise on her shin, she is as perfect as the day Inej left her.

She flicks her eyes back to Kaz. “This feels like something I would rather not know the details of.”

“I would trust that feeling,” says Kaz, dropping his eyes to his ledger once more.

She is trying to decide whether or not he's teasing her, and whether to push him a little more, when Jesper chooses this moment to appear, sauntering into the kitchen with his hands clasped behind his back. “Good to see that discipline reigns in the House of Brekker.”

“Rietveld,” say Inej and Kaz in unison.

“Right.” Jesper grimaces slightly, eyes flicking between them. “Need to get used to that.”

Inej resumes towelling Genna's hair, and sniffs primly. “There's plenty of discipline in this house, thank you.”

“Oh, I'm not criticising, I thought that was excellent,” he says, placating. “I'm going to bring it up in my speech at her wedding.”

Inej snorts, but Kaz looks up sharply. “What makes you think you'll be giving any speeches at her wedding?”

“As her favourite uncle, it's my right.”

“As a perfect stranger, you mean.”

“Soon-to-be favourite uncle,” Jesper shrugs. “Detail.”

Kaz closes his ledger book with a snap and stands abruptly. “Well, she doesn't like strangers, so don't hold your breath.”

Gathering the ledger in one hand and his cane in the other, he walks stiffly out of the room and a moment later the study door shuts loudly. Jesper looks down at Inej, bewildered and a little hurt.

Inej opens her mouth to make excuses for him, but then she thinks of Specht with the baby sling bound to his chest. She thinks of Colm Fahey bouncing the baby in the crook of his arm. She thinks of Kaz and his poisonous jealousy and his resentment of any potential father figure that might give Genna whatever he thinks he cannot. So she closes her mouth, smiles a little, shrugs.

Jesper shrugs back, and a whole lifetime of silently communicating behind Kaz's turned back passes between them. Years of it's Kaz and he doesn't mean it and he means it but it doesn't matter because he's a miserable prick and it's only Kaz and he cares about you really and who's Jordie and it's Kaz it's Kaz it's Kaz—

“Uh, don't look now, but I think your child has disappeared,” he says in a stage whisper.

Startled, Inej whips her head back to Genna, but finds that she has simply sunk down all the way inside the towel she is still wrapped in, hiding her face.

“Well, it's true,” Inej says, apologetic. “She's always shy with new people.”

“That's alright, I'm not above bribery,” says Jesper, unbothered, as he crouches down beside them.

Genna leans instinctively into Inej, curling the fingers of one hand tightly into her shirt, and peers out from under her towel. Jesper smiles wide, and he produces a small stuffed rabbit with long floppy ears from behind his back with a flourish. Then, as they watch, he bleeds the colour from his own waistcoat, slowly turning the toy a vibrant chartreuse.

Genna's mouth falls open, and her dark eyes go huge with wonder. It is the first time she has seen a grisha - a zowa - in action, and Inej desperately wants to call Kaz back to them so that he can see her reaction, but it will ruin the moment.

Jesper holds the rabbit out and slowly, slowly, Genna reaches out to take it. The toy vanishes underneath the towel as Genna clutches it close, gazing at Jesper in wide-eyed wonder.

“Hello, little lady,” he says, grey eyes twinkling, full of triumph. “I'm Uncle Jesper, and I've been waiting a very long time to meet you.”

.

Dinner is a relatively quiet affair.

It is much earlier than civilised adults typically eat, because Inej and Kaz have grown accustomed to arranging their daily lives around the needs of a toddler, but it's just as well for those exhausted by a long journey.

Wylan carries the conversation valiantly, while Jesper mostly eyes Kaz across the table. Kaz for his part does not participate at all, but occupies himself with giving Genna her supper. Inej cannot take her eyes off them.

They are different together. Kaz is easy with Genna in a way he wasn't before Inej left. He's always been a dutiful father - after those first, rocky months, at least - but now there is something almost unconscious about the way he nudges vegetables across her plate, which she obediently shoves into her mouth. It's the way she chatters away at him as though he is the only other person in the room, baba this and baba that, and the way he listens to her, nodding and making the occasional noise of acknowledgement.

Inej is captivated. She can imagine their little routine, while she's been at sea, can picture them spending every evening at the table just like this. She has a sudden stab of guilt for neglecting her friends, but when she looks to them, Jesper is still staring at Kaz in frank fascination. Wylan, though, is watching Inej, faint smile on his face.

Kaz leaves the table first, lifting Genna seemingly without thought to take her up to bed, and something in her heart clenches at the sight. The way Genna grows is most noticeable to Inej when she's in Kaz's arms. She remembers watching him hold her for the very first time, how small she was in his hands. It seems almost impossible to draw a line between then and now.

The rest of them do not linger, long journeys making for tired bones. Inej hopes that she is not bound for an argument; she's found it hard to get a good read on Kaz since she got back, and it would be a far more pleasant state of affairs to simply slip into bed and fall asleep beside him.

.

She hears him long before he enters the room, tracks the sound of his uneven footsteps and the thump of his cane as he makes his customary circuit of the house, checking doors and windows, before coming slowly upstairs.

Inej remains where she is, standing beside the dresser, slowly brushing out her hair. She hears his footsteps pause briefly, the sound of Genna's bedroom door creaking quietly as he looks in on her before he comes the rest of the way to the room they share.

“A month, maybe two,” his voice comes from behind her, parroting the words she'd spoken in the springtime.

Here it is, the inevitable confrontation. They're going to fight with Wylan and Jesper just down the hall after all.

Inej sighs, puts her hairbrush down. “I'm sorry.”

“Are you,” he says, crossing the room to stand in front of her, and he doesn't sound as angry as she thinks he should. “What for exactly? That you stayed away for so long, or that you said you wouldn't?”

It's so like Kaz to interrogate her. It will never be enough for her to issue a blanket apology, he will always demand to know what, precisely, she is apologising for. A little rich, she thinks, when Kaz has never once apologised to her for anything. He shows contrition by his actions, but words - real words, from his heart, not the circles he dances around his enemies with sharp mind and sharper tongue - never come easy for him.

What is she sorry for? Not that she left, but that's not what he's asking. She had never intended to stay away for so long, but the work demands what it will. She'd been very aware of what she was doing while she was doing it, guilt sharp in her every time they put to sea headed in the wrong direction. But the opportunities had been too good, the whole operation like a house of cards - once they pulled one, the rest tumbled neatly after.

Forty-eight men, women and children cut free of their shackles. Forty-eight lives against one summer away from her child. A child safe in her father's care. No, Inej does not regret staying away.

But she had said a month.

“The second one, I suppose,” she sighs, looking up at him through her lashes. “I wrote to you.”

“It never arrived.”

“So I gather,” she says ruefully. “Forgive me.”

She's not asking. They are well past that, by now.

Kaz reaches out a hand to brush her hair behind her ear. His fingers find her chin, tilting her head up slightly, and his skin is warm against hers. She doesn't expect it - in the past, he has often needed to warm up to touching her again, having retreated back into himself during her long absences. Evidently caring for Genna has not allowed him to retreat this time.

“You are what you are,” he says, rubbing his thumb lightly across a fading scar on her cheek, and she leans into it. “I know it well enough.”

He drops his hand, but she catches it in both of hers.

“She looks well. She's been well, I can see it. I knew she would be.” Inej worries at his hand, runs her fingers over the tan line from where he still wears his shirtsleeves stubbornly buttoned to the wrist, even on the hottest day of summer. “I don't want you to think that it was easy, to leave her. It wasn't. It…it hurt.”

She doesn't want to look at him, not in this moment, but he's silent for so long that she finds she must. When she looks into his eyes, they are so dark that for a moment she forgets to breathe.

“And what about me?” he says, voice low and rough.

She winds their fingers together and squeezes his hand, once, twice. Doesn't he know? Surely he must—

“It was never that it didn't hurt to leave you, Kaz,” she says, and her heart is in her throat suddenly. How can she make him understand? “It just hurt more not to.”

They stand like that a long moment, and then Kaz gives her hand a light tug, pulling her toward him.

Inej goes willingly, steps fully into his space. Lays her head on his chest, and listens to the beat of his heart. Just as for him, it might have been an easy thing for her to shy from his touch after returning from the sea, when she has witnessed so much cruelty and violence. But there's a truth that lives in her that, no matter the difficulties they have faced, she has never forgotten: these hands, bloodsoaked as they are, will never harm her.

In his arms again (finally, finally) she answers her own question from long ago: what can there ever be for her here, in this hot, dry land, too far from the ocean to be of any comfort?

Family, her heart whispers. Home.

.

She wakes in the night, overheated and uncomfortable, with something sharp digging into her side. When she cracks an eye open, she finds Genna wedged between her and Kaz, limbs akimbo.

The window sits open, letting in the cool night air and the sound of crickets, and the light from the full moon casts a pale glow over the room. She looks up and meets Kaz's eyes - he is not sleeping, just watching her quietly.

“You've been letting her get into bed with you,” she says after a moment.

He doesn't try to deny it. “She's been clingy while you've been away.”

She could tease him for this erosion of rules and boundaries, ask him about bad habits, tell him he's going soft. Instead, she gently removes Genna's elbow from her kidney and winds an arm around her, cuddling close.

“Hmm,” she says, and closes her eyes again.

.

When Inej next wakes, the sun is over the horizon and birdsong fills the room. She is alone in an empty bed, sheets rumpled where Kaz and Genna had slept beside her, and she stretches her arms over her head, luxuriating in the large bed after the cramped confines of ship and stagecoach.

She cannot hear Genna's distinctive chatter anywhere in the house, likely meaning that Kaz has already gone out and taken her with him, so she takes her time getting washed and dressed. The door of the back bedroom sits open and it seems that, for once, Inej is the last in the house to rise. She feels sluggish and heavy, but in a good way. In a way that comes after a long, deep rest.

She finds Jesper and Wylan in the kitchen, with coffee and fruit and the dense black bread that is Kaz's staple contribution. They look vaguely like children caught with their hands in the biscuit jar when she enters.

“We made ourselves at home, I hope you don't mind,” says Wylan, making a show of contrition but continuing to spoon thick cream into his coffee.

Inej doesn't mind, saints know she has spent enough mornings doing exactly the same in their home. She communicates her feelings with a wave of her hand, making a beeline for the pantry and her tea jars.

They exchange pleasantries, how did you sleep and you have a lovely home. They tell her the preserves are delicious, and she thanks them. They tell her the bread is also very good, and she tells them that Kaz made it, and watches as they try to process that information.

“Where is Kaz this morning, anyway?” asks Wylan.

“I haven't seen him,” she says absently, setting the copper kettle back onto the stove to boil. "Probably out communing with his sheep.”

Jesper's coffee cup stops an inch from his mouth as he stares at her. “He's what now?”

Inej's eyebrow twitches at shock in his voice, and bites the inside of her cheek to keep the grin from spreading over her face. Kaz does go out to the sheep each morning, it's true, but only to check if any of the flock have been lost overnight. He takes Genna with him because she likes to look at them, and if he lingers at all it's only because it delights her and not because of any fondness he bears them, despite how Inej teases him for it.

Truthfully, Kaz holds the sheep somewhat in contempt, frequently complains that their only purpose in the world is to attempt to die at every available opportunity in increasingly creative ways. They have had sheep in ditches, and sheep stuck in fences, sheep wandering off and getting lost. Just before lambing, especially, the sheep frequently get stuck on their backs and must be rolled back over to save their lives, with Kaz muttering furiously as he takes two handfuls of fleece that any creature stupid enough to get itself into such a state should simply be left to perish.

He still does it, though.

It had been an offhand comment, a joke that would have landed with Kaz, but Jesper has missed for lack of context. The opportunity is too good. “Oh yes,” she says now, spooning loose leaves into her teapot. “He goes out every morning. I think it's meditative for him.”

As she turns back toward the pantry, she winks at Wylan, who hides a smile behind his hand.

“Excuse me,” says Jesper, standing stiffly, sounding slightly dazed. “I have to go for a walk.”

By the time Inej has finished putting the tea away in the pantry, Jesper has left the kitchen. A moment later, they hear the front door open and close.

Wylan spoons some sugar into his coffee. “I take it that Kaz has not suddenly developed an affinity for livestock.”

“Obviously not,” says Inej.

Before she takes her seat at the table, she reaches over to the spiky aloe plant sitting on the window ledge, snaps off one of the leaves and hands it to the redhead, gesturing to his sunburnt nose.

.

That evening is not as tense as the previous one, aided largely by the two bottles of kvas that Jesper brought with him from Ketterdam. It's the cheap, astringent, gut-rot stuff that Inej and Kaz and Jes used to drink in Kaz's attic rooms at the Slat, when they were fifteen and too old for their years but mostly just so, so young.

“Barrel bought,” says Jesper, holding one of the bottles aloft before taking a swig. “Little taste of home.”

Kaz snorts beside her, taking another drink from the other bottle and handing it to Inej. She takes her own drink and says nothing, feeling the familiar burn of the liquid as it settles in her belly. Was the Barrel ever really home to any of them, or just somewhere they landed after falling from a very great height?

Across from her, Wylan coughs. “I can't believe we're voluntarily drinking this swill.”

“We're recapturing our youth,” says Jesper, clapping him on the back. “It's called nostalgia.”

There's not much to be nostalgic about from that time, thinks Inej, but those evenings in the attic, the very first stirrings of camaraderie…well. If there's anything at all, it would be that.

They are under the stars this evening, around a low fire. Another way to 'recapture their youth', apparently, though Inej likes to think they are not actually old yet. Kaz had objected to setting fires on his land, but after much wheedling he had grudgingly assisted Jesper in clearing a patch of earth to the side of the house.

Inej is warm. Too warm, really, between the mild evening and the fire and the drink in her veins. She glances back toward the house, all quiet. She'd kept Genna in her lap until her baby fell asleep in her arms, and put her to bed still smelling of smoke. They'll all stink of smoke - probably the whole house will by morning after they've thoroughly smothered their bed linen in the scent - but it's worth it, for evenings like this.

She lets her head tip onto Kaz's shoulder, gazing across the fire where Jesper and Wylan are now bickering over whether the label on the bottle is genuine or has been lifted from a bottle of better quality liquor. While their attention is elsewhere, she feels Kaz turn his head and press a kiss into her hair.

When she is so tired she can no longer keep her eyes open, she leaves them to it and trails up to bed. Before she falls asleep, she hears Wylan call his goodnights, and then his footsteps on the stairs. Kaz and Jesper must remain outside. Good. Her last thought as she drifts off to sleep is that she hopes they will have a good, long talk, and do away with this tension between them.

.

Inej wakes suddenly to a loud thud, sits bolt upright in bed. She has fallen asleep with the lamp still burning, and in the dim glow she can see Kaz leaning heavily against the door, wearing what, on him, might pass for a sheepish expression.

She blinks at him, bleary eyed. “Kaz?”

Rather than respond, Kaz levers himself off the door and sways too far in the opposite direction, staggering slightly. He is very, very drunk. Inej rubs her eyes tiredly. He is not a man given to drink to excess, but on the very few occasions she has known him do so, he snores tremendously. She's about to tell him that he can take himself back downstairs to sleep in the sitting room, thank you very much, when he turns toward her and she sees that his right shirt sleeve is soaked with blood.

She is out of bed and reaching for him in an instant but he sways away from her, just a little. It's enough to stop her dead, hand frozen in midair. “You're hurt.”

“No,” he says.

She squints at him in the low light, assessing. His pupils are blown wide and he is sweating, deathly pale except for two spots of colour high on his cheeks. Drunk, yes, but that's not all.

“Sit down, Kaz,” she says, gesturing to the bed.

He shakes his head. “It's nothing.”

“Sit down.”

Her tone brooks no argument, but he obliges more easily than she thought he would - a concern in itself - dropping heavily onto the mattress. She steps slowly into the space between his knees, watching for any sign he doesn't want her there. When he doesn't move away from her, she reaches for his right arm, taking him by the wrist. He is watching her with unfocused eyes, but he lifts the arm for her, holds it level with his chest.

His cuff is undone, so she is able to peel the bloody shirt gently back from his arm, still holding his wrist in one hand. She expects a wound, but there is nothing. Where the blood has not been smeared by his shirt, it beads, little scarlet droplets on a canvas of pale skin.

That's when she realises what's so wrong with what she is seeing. Heart hammering in her chest, she swipes her thumb through the blood, across the unblemished skin of his forearm.

His tattoo is gone.

“Kaz,” she breathes, horrified. “What have you done?”

“Jesper—”

The shock goes right through her. “Jesper did this?”

Her eyes snap to his face, to the usually sharp eyes now clouded with alcohol and pain and something that she cannot quite identify but is certain that she hates. He nods and, almost unthinkingly, she balls her free hand into a fist and smacks him in the shoulder as hard as she can.

“Idiot,” she hisses through clenched teeth, suddenly as angry as she can ever remember being with him. “You complete and incomprehensible fool.”

He scowls at her, and opens his mouth to say something in response, but she drops his wrist and stalks out of the room, making for the back bedroom to, she doesn't even know, but—

She gets two-thirds of the way down the hall before stopping. Muffled voices float through the door, an odd mirror of the conversation which just took place in her own bedroom. She can hear Wylan, voice thick with sleep and tight with fury, pitched low for the sake of decorum and the child sleeping next door. “...idiot…could have been badly hurt…both of you…completely irresponsible…” and Jesper's voice, conciliatory and also unmistakably drunk.

Inej stands in the dark of the hallway and lets out a slow breath, and forces herself to be calm. She won't make anything better by wading into the middle of that argument. She's not even sure what she would say. Mostly that one or both of them could have suffered irreparable damage, but Wylan seems to have that angle covered.

She lingers a moment longer, and then turns away and leaves them to it.

On her way past, she pokes her head into Genna's room, finds her fast asleep and entirely oblivious to the absurdity going on around her, and she casts a quick prayer to the saints that it will always be so.

When she returns to the bedroom she shares with Kaz, she finds that he's removed his ruined shirt and used it to wipe away the remaining blood, leaving an expanse of perfect - if red and angry looking - skin. The black 'R' on the inside of his bicep remains, but the crow and cup that he's worn on his forearm as long as Inej has known him is no more.

She cannot quite absorb it. She thinks of the first time he removed his shirt in front of her, how her eyes had been drawn immediately to the contrast of black ink and pale skin, before being drawn to…other things. She thinks of muscle flexing underneath it the first time he allowed her to trace the design with her bare fingertips. She thinks of a decade of watching him undress for bed, the tattoo so much a part of him that she failed to consciously register it most of the time.

She registers its absence, now. It's jarring. It looks wrong.

Kaz is watching her quietly. He's recovered some of his composure, no longer deathly pale although his eyes are still glassy and bloodshot. It seems perhaps the shock of it is what did for him, more than anything.

“I didn't know Jesper could do that,” she says eventually.

“Neither did he,” says Kaz, looking down at his arm, clenches and unclenches his fist, flexing the muscle. “Drew the ink right out of the skin. Quite extraordinary to watch.”

Inej closes her eyes as worst case scenarios flash through her mind, and dares not dwell too hard on whether it was Jesper's remarkable skill or his unrivalled ability to hold his drink or just sheer dumb luck that stopped things from going disastrously wrong.

“You scare me when you do things like this, Kaz,” she whispers.

“I know,” he says, because he's a bastard. But then, “I'm sorry.”

She opens her eyes, shocked, but he is still looking at his arm. He glances up again when she steps close to him, back in between his knees. He is loose-limbed and sleepy, so unlike himself that she wants to take him by the shoulders and shake him until his teeth rattle. “Why did you do it?”

“I'm here.”

She frowns, shaking her head. “What?”

“I'm here, Inej.” He takes her wrist and, whether intentionally or not, his long fingers wrap over the place where she once bore the peacock feather of the Menagerie. “All of me. With you. With Genna. I don't have one foot in Ketterdam.”

She stares at him a moment, uncomprehending, before she recalls the accusation she'd hurled at him in the spring, when she'd been trying to make him angry. She hadn't thought he would dwell on it, hadn't thought it would penetrate his thick hide at all. She really ought to know better by now.

His fingers shift over her wrist, not quite a caress, and her breath catches as she thinks of the similarities, of the differences. Her, with a butcher in a back alley, blood and cheap alcohol and the burning, cleansing pain. He, in the company of a friend, who drew out with love what had been marked in fear. In anger. In grief.

Can erasing the mark of a former life wipe that life entirely away? No, in her experience. No. But it's a start. It's something. It means you don't have to look at it every day. It means that other people don't look, and make the connection between you and it, before knowing anything else about you. And when the outward tether is gone, that's when you can start untangling the ones inside you.

Perhaps, after all, them being all the way out here is as much about Kaz as it is about Genna and herself. About what he wants, not only for their child, but also for himself. About the life he wants to have. With Inej.

She lets out a shaky exhale, and her voice absolutely does not wobble when she speaks. “I'm still upset with you for doing it this way.”

“I know.”

She swallows, hard. Puts on her best stern tone. “You're in big trouble when you've sobered up, Kaz.”

“Yes,” he says, but his voice is muffled because he has pressed his face to her abdomen, hands slipping to her waist, holding her to him.

She sighs, but cannot stop her hands from finding his shoulders, smoothing over the defined muscle of his upper back as the warmth of his breath seeps through her nightgown.

When she gets him into bed - still in his trousers and socks, but minus his belt and boots - he snores like a congested pig.

.

She catches Jesper in the hall the next morning, just before he enters the kitchen. The knife she throws embeds itself into the wood of the doorframe less than an inch from his nose.

He sways back a hair as his eyes focus on the blade in front of his face, before turning his head slowly to look at her.

“Inej,” he says, voice cautious.

She walks up to him, wraps one hand around the hilt of the knife and yanks it out of the doorframe, flipping it in her fingers so the blade is pointed threateningly toward him.

He does look truly grim. Worse than Kaz, even. His eyes are bloodshot, and there is a fine sheen of sweat over his high forehead. She almost relents out of pity, but when he brings a hand to the back of his neck, sheepish, she sees that his fingertips are stained purest ink-black.

“If you ever,” she says, quiet, threatening, “ever do drunken, experimental Fabrikation on my family again…” she trails off, allows the unspoken threat to hang in the air. Truthfully, she doesn't know what she'll do, but whatever Jesper can imagine is likely scarier than anything she can come up with.

He shakes his head, eyes wide. “Never again, promise.”

She stares at him long enough to make him visibly nervous, a tactic that serves her as well here as it does on the deck of her ship, and thinks about scolding him, about making more threats, about telling him he'd frightened her.

But he's swaying slightly on the spot, looking distinctly green around the gills. She thinks of Kaz, who she just passed in the study with his head on the desk and an untouched cup of coffee at his elbow.

She can think of a hundred ways to vent her anger, but perhaps coaxing Genna into some kind of excitable squealing fit at close range might be more punishing. Perhaps Wylan would like to help her.

Flipping the knife again in nimble fingers, she sheaths it neatly at her belt and, with one last pointed glare, turns on her heel and walks away.

“Fix that,” she calls over her shoulder, gesturing to the divot in the doorframe where the knife cut in.

Jesper is plainative. “Uh, wood isn't really my thing, to be honest.”

“Make an exception.”

.

Jesper finds her late in the afternoon, walking through the orchard, watching her baby run ahead of her. Genna has truly found her legs while Inej has been away, and goes everywhere at full speed. It's wonderful, but exhausting, and she finds she is developing a new appreciation for Kaz managing this alone.

She can see Kaz, through the trees, down by the creek. Wylan is with him, and they are engaged in what seems to be a very involved conversation. They are much too far away for Inej to hear what they're saying but Wylan becomes suddenly animated, and now he is crouching down, and Kaz is gesturing to something with his cane, and—

“What do you think they're talking about over there?” Jesper appears at her shoulder, looking much, much better than he had the last time she'd laid eyes on him.

She shakes her head. “Either something extremely dangerous, or something extremely boring.”

“Probably both,” snorts Jesper.

Kaz and Wylan's shared interests can be boiled down to essentially two topics: things that make other things go boom, and extremely niche areas of economic theory. If they really get into it, they can go back and forth on a given subject for hours, well past the point that any others in the room have checked out of the conversation.

Inej smiles a little and turns away from them, following Genna as she meanders through the dappled sunlight on her own little adventure. Jesper keeps pace, one stride of his long legs for Inej's every two.

“I am sorry,” he says, uncharacteristically sombre. “For last night. For what I…well. For all of it.”

“I know,” she says, and she does. Jesper is very good at being sorry after he's done a thing. She supposes that's another thing that connects them, the Crows. They are all very good at seeking forgiveness, less concerned with whether they should be doing the things that require forgiveness in the first place. “But that was stupid and dangerous to do while drinking, Jes. You could have hurt Kaz badly.”

“I know.”

“You could have hurt yourself—”

“I know, Inej. And if I didn't, then Wylan has already hauled me over the coals well and good, don't you worry about that.”

But she does worry. She is worried. She wants to tell him - what? That the blood had alarmed her, but Kaz is whole and unharmed? That she'd been shocked by the disappearance of the tattoo, but it was Kaz's body to do with as he pleased? She wants to rail at him for his irresponsibility, about the stupid, stupid risk but, well. Who knows the risk more than Jesper? Who knows more than he does exactly what he's capable of? He's already acknowledged it was a foolish thing to do.

“Why did you do it?”

Jesper shrugs. “He asked me to.”

“You should have said no.”

“Never been very good at that, where Kaz is concerned.”

Inej scoffs. Which of them has? She takes his hand, running her thumb over the pads of his fingers, still stained the colour of pitch. “Will it come out?”

“Yes,” he says, and there is easy confidence in his voice. “I can get it out. I just…” he trails off, sighs, looks away.

“What?”

When he looks back at her, the expression on his face is almost shy. "I almost don't want to. Get rid of it, I mean. It's like having a piece of him with me."

Her heart constricts. Dear Jesper. She feels a dull stab of guilt. She and Kaz have both struggled in their own ways with the weight of what they left behind. She never thought about it from the other side. In his own way, Jesper had also lost something profound.

Something of her thoughts must show on her face because Jesper gives her fingers a gentle squeeze. “Hey, none of that.”

Inej lifts their clasped hands to her mouth and presses a kiss to his knuckles, and then he's folding her tightly into his arms, resting his chin on the top of her head. She lets it happen. Dearest, most darling Jesper. Her very first friend in the Barrel, who'd been so kind to her, looked after her so well. She winds her arms around his middle and holds on tight.

“Inej,” he says into her hair after they've stood for a long while. “That kid is really fucking cute.”

She laughs into his chest. “I know.”

“She looks so much like Kaz, and yet she is so cute…”

Inej smacks him lightly on the back, a token gesture in defence of the father of her child, but there's nothing behind it, not really. “Nina said she was proud of us,” she says, because it had touched her, and she just wants to tell someone who will know why.

“As she should be,” says Jesper seriously. “As am I. I'm proud of all of us, actually.”

“Oh?”

“Look at us. You might have had to drag that stubborn bastard out by his balls, but in the end, all of us made it out of the fucking Barrel.”

Inej thinks of Matthias, who she has not thought of in so very long. “Most of us.”

“Yes,” agrees Jesper, stumbling slightly as though he has remembered something very suddenly. “Yes, most of us.”

.

Jesper and Wylan are with them a fortnight before departing for Cofton to visit with Colm. Before they go, Inej gives them a letter for him, along with several jars of last season's peach jam.

A part of her wonders what they will tell him, about what they've seen here. She wants them to say that she and Kaz are well, their business grows, their child thrives. That everything is different from the abject misery he encountered when he came here.

She will miss them, but a large part of her is glad to see them go, to be alone with her little family once more. The restlessness in her wandering heart has eased, now. She feels snug and content, stubborn in her urge to burrow down and remain here all her days. It won't last, she knows. Sooner or later the urge to roam will take her. But she thinks she can stay for a good long while before she has to go again.

.

The harvest passes in a blur of activity, as it always does, and then comes the cooler weather, the winter rain. Long evenings find them before the fire in the sitting room, Genna curled into Kaz's side as he reads to her, finger tracing along the words as he goes. Genna is yet too young to read but she follows the path of his finger diligently, chewing on the ear of her bright green teddy.

(“What the fuck is that?” Kaz had asked in horror the first time he'd laid eyes on it.

“It's a rabbit, Kaz,” Jesper had responded with theatrical patience.)

Inej can tell already that their child is going to be clever, and she doesn't think it's a mother's bias. Genna is bright as a button, curious. She is a delight and an exhaustion to them both in equal measure during these winter evenings; into everything, constantly questioning, talking a million miles a minute. Inej marvels at how far she's come since the spring, all the new words she expresses in her garbled toddler-speak - including one that sounds suspiciously like fuck, to which Kaz pointedly averts his gaze while Inej glares at him.

With Kaz beginning the earliest stages of Genna's education, Inej occupies herself with teaching her more practical skills. Swimming lessons will wait for warmer weather, but now that Genna is walking well, it is time for her to learn to climb.

Inej begins as she remembers being taught, with a plank of wood on the ground. Balance and precision comes first, the rest will follow with time - strength, and speed.

It shouldn't be necessary. Genna should be safe here, in this peaceful place, this idyllic land.

But Inej had once thought herself safe. Her parents had thought her safe. None of them could have imagined the cruelty that awaited her. Inej has a new and devastating insight into what it must have been like for her parents, when she was taken. The horror of not knowing where your child was or if you would ever see them again. If they were even alive. If somebody was hurting them.

Genna will never have those same cruelties inflicted on her, Inej vows. She is not foolish enough to believe she can protect her, she has seen too much, plucked too many children from the holds of too many ships, and travelled too widely to think that slavers are the only danger a young girl faces in the world. Inej cannot be with Genna every moment of her life, but if it kills her she will give her daughter the tools to protect herself. She knows that Kaz will, too. The unspoken agreement sits in the silence between them, a promise more binding than any they have ever made to each other.

Genna will never be caught and caged, because she'll learn to climb, to make impossible leaps, to melt into shadows. Genna will never be kept in chains, because she will learn to pick locks like a master thief, slip bindings like an illusionist.

Between herself and Kaz, they can make Genna formidable, even dangerous. Inej wishes anything but violence for her little girl, but she will learn to fight. She will shoot, and if she loses her gun she will fight with blades, and if she loses those, well. Kaz is a brutal and pragmatic hand-to-hand combatant. He taught Inej to fight, he can teach their daughter, too.

They'll give Genna every tool and dirty trick that's kept both of them alive this long, and then they will give her a life where she never has to use any of it.

This will be their gift to her. In this way will they have succeeded.

It's how it should be, Inej muses. It's the duty of every parent to pass on what they know, to prepare their children as best they can for the world.

Inej's parents had not taught her combat or lockpicking or intrigue. But they had taught her the acrobat's skill that secured her place in the Dregs and so, her freedom. And they'd taught her faith, from which she drew her greatest strength.

And Kaz's parents had taught him...what? She knows so little of them. Kaz guards his past jealously, even from her, even now. She doesn't know what they gave him. A thread of humanity, perhaps, stretching all the way from the child he'd been to the man he is today. A thread stretched taut enough to snap, but there all the same. The thing that made him just less than a monster. The thing he'd pulled himself along to make his way to her.

.

Kaz has begun to keep some of the little rocks that Genna fills his pockets with in a large glass jar on his desk, and he's developed a habit of taking one out and worrying it between his fingers when he is particularly deep in thought. Inej is charmed, but also a little perplexed. He has never been a man inclined toward overt sentimentality and, as far as she has noticed, fatherhood has done little to change him in that regard.

She asks him about it one afternoon, when she catches him with one in his hand, thumb rubbing slow circles over it. He holds it out to her in response.

“Take a look at that,” he says, dropping it into the palm of her hand as she comes to perch on the corner of his desk.

Frowning, she examines the small stone, tipping it back and forth so that it catches the light. It's small and uneven, warm from Kaz's skin, one out of thousands upon thousands of such rocks littering the land, she imagines. She's not sure what she's meant to be looking at, besides the mottled blue-green on one side - does he like the colour?

“Pretty,” she comments, puzzled.

“It's copper,” says Kaz.

Her eyes tick up to him, but she does not speak, waiting for him to elaborate.

He obliges. “It's possible there's a vein of it under the property.”

She blinks. “You are joking?”

“Not at all,” he says, leaning back and resting his chin on his hand. “Wylan confirmed it while he was here. His visit was quite timely, really, I ought to thank you.”

“You ought to thank me for a great many things,” grumbles Inej. Her eyes go to the jar by her hip. “You're telling me you only keep these because they contain a potentially valuable material?”

“Why else should I keep them?”

Why, indeed. Inej doesn't know what she expected. She hands the rock back to him, sighing. “If you're waiting for your daughter to make you another fortune by collecting pebbles, you'll be waiting a long time.”

Something that might be a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “She's got the rest of her life.”

Inej rolls her eyes, and hops off the desk. “You are the worst person I know.”

He barks one sharp laugh, unoffended. “There's a high degree of probability that's factually correct, but you're still here so, really, what does that say about you?”

“Saints, let's not examine that too closely, hmm?” She's going to leave him be, but she hesitates in the doorway, looks back at him, a slight twist of unease in her stomach. “Did you know when you bought the place? That there might be copper?”

“I had an idea,” he says, meeting her eyes. “Some old surveys included with the land registry...”

He trails off, letting the words hang in the air between them, and Inej starts to feel a sinking sort of disappointment. She doesn't know why this, of all things, disappoints her. Kaz never does anything without multiple hidden agendas - there's no reason that this time should have been any different.

And yet, she'd hoped it was. Just this once, she'd hoped perhaps his only agenda was the welfare of his family. She doesn't count the interest he maintains in Dregs business, because - despite his words, despite the removal of his tattoo - she cannot expect him to change his entire personality. But she'd really thought that his primary goal was to build something with her, to give their child the happy home that they had both been taken from far too young. Not to turn that home into yet another money making scheme.

In the still of the afternoon, Inej can hear the birds chirping in the trees. She can hear the ticking of the clock in the hallway, and the creak of the old rope on the swing that Kaz hung for Genna as it sways in the breeze. It's one of the things she loves best about this place - their home - the quiet tranquillity of it. She can hear herself think. She has space to breathe.

She imagines that tranquillity broken, the air filled with dust and the sound of pickaxes, the clear waters of their little creek choked with slurry. It makes her feel faintly sick. “So, are you planning to start strip mining?”

She wonders what he hears in her voice, sees in her face, because he looks at her for a very long time, black eyes glittering.

He shakes his head, once. “Not today, my love.”

“You're really going to sit on a valuable resource and not exploit it?” She raises her eyebrows at him. “Just leave it there, untouched?”

He looks back to the jar on the desk, filled with the little blue-tinted stones that their baby girl had picked up off the ground and gifted to him with trusting hands.

Eventually, he rolls one shoulder in a lazy shrug, drops the pebble back into the jar with the others. “When you and I are both dead, Genna can do what she likes with the place.”

Inej stands in the doorway and considers him. He meets her eyes, untroubled, unchallenging. A man who likes to inhabit a place, she thinks, and in her mind she rearranges a few things in the place marked 'Kaz'. She looks at him, his relaxed stance, the hair that has long grown out on the sides, the sleeves rolled to his elbows displaying the unmarked skin of his forearms, and feels a warm surge of inescapable fondness for him. She walks back to him, because she can.

He tilts his head as she approaches. “Such little faith in me, darling.”

“Oh, just enough I should think,” she murmurs against his mouth just before their lips meet.

It's true, what she thought so long ago. Every now and then, Kaz still manages to surprise her.

.

Though the crops sleep quietly in the ground, the winter is never idle. Kaz sinks deep into oilseed futures, the business of selling off their harvest. The letters continue to go back and forth from the Barrel, too, but now he shares their content with Inej; he is currently advising how best to strategise a territory expansion. He'd left Anika suddenly, well before she was fully ready to step into his shoes. The least he can do is guide her, he explains, the way no one had ever done for him.

Inej corresponds with Specht, plots routes, deciphers whispers and snatches of intelligence. Their ploughs are serviced - Kaz is meticulous in their maintenance - and they have someone come to fell the tree at the top of the farm track that had been struck by lightning the previous winter and was displaying signs of instability. They dry herbs and cure meat and this year Kaz helps Inej with her winter planting in the garden.

Their neighbours fare busily, too. The Zadis have acquired more land and, with it, an additional two thousand head of sheep. Joss Meijer goes to Shriftport on a buying trip, leaving the running of their enterprise solely in Julia's hands.

Out of this bustle and chaos, an informal clutch of children develops, being passed from home to home dependent on who has the time in the day to care for them. Genna and Erik Meijer and little Effi Zadi, so much younger than her brothers, make quite the little unit. A whirlwind of shrieking chaos and dirty faces and skinned knees. Genna has always played nicely with the others - especially Erik, to whom she is so close in age - but with each full day they pass in each other's company, a deeper bond begins to develop.

So, on the days when it is Inej and Kaz's turn to host the three of them, she watches Genna play with the others. She watches the way they are together, the way they look out for each other. The way they sit in a row like little ducklings to eat their lunch and chatter in their own secret language, words bubbling over each other. Their deeply involved games of make believe, that can keep them occupied from dawn until dusk.

When it is time to retrieve their offspring from one house or another, the adults congregate and someone brings a basket with bread and pickles, and someone else brings a bottle of good wine, and they stand in someone's farmyard and toast another day's work done well and watch their children play together, and even though everyone is so very busy, everything seems just a little bit easier.

And Inej begins to think.

.

She's never imagined having more children, really. She never even imagined having the one she's got. If someone had come to her even a few years ago and told her that both she and Kaz would give up everything they'd ever worked for to sit on a farm and raise a child - raise their child - she would have dismissed that person as a raving lunatic and given it no further thought.

Genna had been a surprise (Inej does not like to think of her as an accident, and has certainly never thought of her as a mistake). She changed their lives, in far more ways than the choices they had made to accommodate her existence. She has challenged them, ripped them apart in some ways, healed them in others. She has rewritten their story, set them so far off course that they have had to reevaluate everything they thought they knew about themselves and each other and the way they thought their lives would unfold. It hasn't always been pleasant. It's certainly never been comfortable.

Inej will never, never regret Genna, but she'd also felt absolutely no desire to ever do any of it again.

But.

It's hard to see Genna play with other children and not think of her with a younger brother or sister. It occupies idle moments when Inej’s mind is otherwise unfocused, when she is washing a dish or pulling weeds in her garden or brushing her hair. Would another child favour Kaz as strongly as Genna does, or might they have Inej's nose, her eyes? If they had another daughter, would she be like Genna, sunny and bold, or would she be different? If they had a son would he be tall and lean like Kaz, or small and wiry like Inej's own father?

Kaz, she thinks, will probably not even consider the possibility. Genna has been the making of him in a lot of ways, but it would be fair to say that she has also been his undoing. He has had to come further than Inej. In many respects, he still has much further to go. How can she ask him to add even more disturbance to his life?

She keeps her thoughts to herself.

But they won't leave her. She can see them, all these imaginary children, every possible combination of features and personality traits. She can picture them toddling beside Genna, smaller, holding her little hand. She can almost feel the weight of them in her arms. They haunt her dreams.

The only thing for it, she decides, is to just ask Kaz about it directly. She can drive herself insane trying to divine his thoughts on having more children but, for all that she knows him well, she does not live inside his head. And even if he is entirely unwilling, as she suspects he will be, at least she'll know, and she can put the matter to bed once and for all.

.

“I've been thinking…” she says to Kaz one evening.

He hums slightly in acknowledgement but does not look up from his book. She is laying with her feet in his lap, her own book closed and resting on her stomach. She had joined him on the couch intending to read, but instead had found herself drifting in and out of a light sleep almost immediately. And while dozing, she had dreamed again of their imaginary children.

He is relaxed, in a good mood after a productive day. Now is as good a time as any to ask.

She watches him carefully now, trying to gauge his reaction. “How would you feel about having another baby?”

For a moment, she thinks he has not heard her at all, he remains so perfectly still. But then he turns his head to look at her, a sharp, hard-eyed stare that almost makes her flinch.

It takes him a solid minute to speak. “You struggled, last time.”

Inej scowls, an almost automatic reaction. “Whose fault is that?”

He winces slightly at that, chastened, but holds to his point. “Before, I mean. With the pregnancy.”

She chews her lip. He's not wrong. A little of it he'd seen for himself, the rest he'd heard either screamed in his face by her father or, much later, when she told him what she could in fits and starts. The loss of ownership over her own body had been awful, difficult to cope with in a way that had taken her completely by surprise. Childbearing is what a woman's body is designed for, after all. It had never occurred to Inej that it would be so upsetting to experience.

“I know,” she says, slowly, thoughtfully. “I think it would be better this time, though. Now I know what to expect.”

Now the feeling of something wriggling around inside her won't be such a horrible shock.

Kaz looks dubious, though. He's still got that hard look in his eyes. It's not an expression she sees often, anymore. It's a very Brekker look. One he wears when he's trying to work out a particularly difficult puzzle.

“Why?” he says, eventually. “Isn't she enough?”

“Of course she's enough,” says Inej. “Of course she is.”

“Then why?” Kaz asks again, shaking his head a little.

His tone is one of complete incomprehension, and it is clear that her desire for another child is something that he'd neither considered nor anticipated. His questions are not rhetorical either; he is watching her expectantly, waiting for an answer.

How to make him understand when she doesn't rightly know herself? It's just something she feels inside of herself, a surety that this is the road she wants to go down, if only he will follow. As a rule, Kaz does not normally respond well to emotional appeals when someone is trying to request something of him, but then, this is not a normal request. And an emotional appeal is the only one she's got.

“I just want one. I just do,” she says, picking at the corner of the book still resting on her belly. “And I think it would be nice for Genna to have someone.”

His eyebrows draw down sharply. “What do you mean someone?”

“Someone to play with, someone to grow up with. Someone for after we're gone…so she won't be alone.” She looks up at him through her eyelashes, and she's playing a bit of a dirty game now, appealing to his memories. But she does think that, truly. It comforts her. “I mean, don't you think that would be nice?”

The silence that follows is perhaps the longest of her life, the clock on the mantel ticking away the beats of her heart. She had not realised how badly she wanted him to say yes until she was staring the possibility of his refusal in the face.

After so much time has passed that Inej is sure that the only answer that can be coming her way is no, Kaz clears his throat somewhat uncomfortably. “Let me think about it.”

She had never been intending to do anything else, but she nods anyway. “Of course.”

He returns his attention to his book, but she notes that he does not turn the page for the rest of the night.

.

They do not speak of that conversation again for several weeks. Inej is perfectly willing to give Kaz time to get used to the idea, because saints know that's what he'd wanted before, but he behaves so resolutely as if their conversation never happened that she thinks his silence might be a tactic, that he might simply try and wait until she changes her mind of her own accord.

So Inej wonders how long is reasonable to wait before she prods him for an answer, and the weeks roll by.

Genna, usually one to rise with the sun, sleeps late one morning, and they do not have the heart to wake her, basking in the silence. Parents must take advantage of these moments of peace, and it is a pleasant thing indeed for Inej to push Kaz gently onto his back and settle her weight onto him as the morning sun streams through the open window.

Later, when Genna is up, and she and Kaz are manoeuvring around each other in the kitchen as they prepare for the day, Inej pulls down the small jar of bitter white powder from the highest shelf of the pantry. As she prepares to spoon some into a glass of water, Kaz catches her wrist.

She looks up at him, and he looks at the jar in her hands, and the two of them remain like that a moment, silent and still as Genna chatters in the background waiting for her breakfast and the kettle whistles on the stove.

"Don't," says Kaz eventually, squeezing her wrist once before releasing it. "If you want."

Her breath catches in her throat as his meaning settles over her. And then she smiles, nods once, and screws the lid tightly back on the jar.

.

Everything is different this time. She's never wanted anything like this. Never hoped like this.

Once the decision is finally made, nobody can say that Kaz doesn't apply himself to the task. Perhaps a little too well, in fact, almost past the limits of his own boundaries - at one stage, he unsettles himself so badly he has to spend several days sleeping in the back bedroom once more.

He's not the only one who meets with bumps in the road. Trying for a baby adds weight to activities that already carried a lot of weight for both of them, and sometimes it's so excruciating that Inej simply cannot bear for him to touch her

But they forge a path forward together, the way they've done so many times before, with patience and compassion and no small amount of much-needed good humour. They snatch moments where they can, late nights and early mornings and the hour that Genna goes down for her nap. They don't put pressure on themselves, they only lean into each other when they find themselves both ready and wanting, and sometimes that's in their bed but sometimes it's the couch, it's the high-backed chair in the study, it's the back bedroom when they haven't made it all the way up the hall.

Later, Inej couldn't say exactly where or when the child was conceived but she likes to imagine it was the time on the kitchen table while the kettle boiled on the stove, when they were almost caught by Julia Meijer coming by with some fresh butter. If nothing else, it makes for a good story.

.

It is the beginning of spring, just before Genna's third birthday, when Inej misses her bleeding.

She notes it but does not put too much stock in it, otherwise. She has never been precisely regular, it's how she was so slow in realising the first time she was with child. Or in denial about it, a nasty part of her mind whispers.

Either way, it means nothing. But a week passes, and then another, and then another, and still she does not bleed. Her breasts grow tender, and she is tired all the time. One morning, when Kaz has taken Genna out to check the sheep, Inej sets a pot of coffee to boil on the stove and the smell catches at the back of her throat. She only just makes it to the sink, retching painfully until tears are streaming down her face, and she knows for certain.

What she has not expected, but supposes she shouldn't be all that surprised by, is the fear that grips her at the prospect of telling Kaz. As she stands before him in their bedroom that night, the only thing running through her mind is the night she told him about Genna. It is for this reason that she does not hold his hand as she delivers the news this time; she couldn't bear for him to pull away. Instead, she twists her fingers together in front of her, palms sweaty, as she waits for his reaction.

“You're certain?” he asks, and there is no expression on his face or in his voice.

“Yes.”

He nods once. Swallows. Inej waits.

Slowly, he places his hands on her upper arms, draws her towards him, and presses his lips to her forehead. The tension goes out of Inej so quickly, her knees almost give out. She honestly thinks for a moment that his hands are the only things keeping her upright.

“Okay,” he whispers, and there is something wrecked in his voice. “Okay.”

Another dull stab of fear goes through her, then, an urgency. “Kaz, you can't disappear again, you have to be here. You have to help me this time.”

“I will.” His hands tighten on her arms, and he sounds angry that he even has to say it but. Well.

She needs to know.

“I will,” he says again. “I'm not going anywhere.”

.

Genna turns three, and they have a little party. It's nothing fancy, just their neighbours, and the children, and a cake that Inej only just gets through the making of, dry heaving and nibbling on a corner of bread as the smell of chocolate turns her stomach.

Birthdays are such fun though, now that Genna is old enough to understand the concept. She gets chocolate all round her mouth, and plays games with her friends, and twirls in a new dress that Inej's mother has made and sent all the way from Ravka. She is very lucky indeed to be gifted with some new toys, though she clings stubbornly all day to her favourite grubby green rabbit.

When they bring out the cake, Inej manages to hold it together long enough for Genna to blow out the candles, before she must excuse herself to discreetly empty her stomach again.

When she returns to the party, she doesn't think anyone has taken notice of her absence, but Anathi slides up to her with sparkling eyes and a knowing smile. No words are spoken, just the raise of an eyebrow and an expectant expression, and then Julia is there on her other side with the same look on her face. It's too early to tell people yet, really, but Inej gives one confirmatory nod all the same, cheeks aching with the failed effort of trying to contain her grin. There is no commotion, and no congratulations. Women know well enough the time to celebrate and the time to be discreet, when there's a baby on the way. They only stand either side of her while they watch the children play, arms around her waist, squeezing her tight.

Inej is struck by the contrast with her first pregnancy, when the news was met with disappointment and sympathy at every turn, and suddenly there are tears in her eyes, and oh no not the fucking crying—

They try to spread Genna's gifts throughout the day, so in the evening, when everyone has left, she has another little pile. These have arrived from Ketterdam, from Cofton, and even a mysterious, unsigned little parcel postmarked from somewhere in Fjerda. The most special gift, though, is the magnificent wooden rocking horse that Kaz had ordered almost a year previously, hand carved and painted by the finest Kerch artisans, and shipped with exquisite care across the sea.

Inej had been annoyed with him when he told her, and thoroughly gobsmacked by the cost - imagine ordering such a thing for a child - but the way that Genna falls silent in wide-eyed wonder, the way she trails her little fingers through its genuine-horse-hair mane and tail, and looks at her parents with a trembling lip…well. The hormonal tears make their second appearance of the day, that's for certain.

“You'll have to get her a real pony next year,” she tells Kaz wetly, as he stands beside Genna while she rocks back and forth.

His only response is a non-committal grunt, hand on their daughter's back to steady her, and all is right in Inej's world.

.

Explaining to Genna that she's going to be a big sister is easier and more difficult than anticipated. Through the Zadis, she is familiar with the concept of siblings and is excited at the prospect of having someone new to play with. Kaz and Inej are at pains to explain to her that the baby will not be able to play right away, and she nods, but it doesn't seem like the information really sinks in.

The greater difficulty is when she starts asking questions.

Is it a brother or a sister? We don't know yet. When is the baby going to be here? Not for a long while. Why? Because it has to grow and get ready. Where is the baby now? In Mama's belly.

At that last one, Genna looks at them with a frankly sceptical expression on her face, as though she suspects one or both of her parents of lying to her.

They prepared in advance for how they were going to answer the question of how the baby came to be there in the first place, and are mutually quite proud of how they handle it. Tragically, though, they failed to anticipate the perhaps inevitable follow up: how is the baby going to get out of Mama's belly?

It's here that Kaz gets somewhat lost in an overly literal comparison to the only frame of reference Genna has - the spring lambing, just finished. The poor child begins to alternate between paying attention to her father and sneaking wide-eyed, alarmed looks at her mother, and this gives way to a whole new barrage of questions. It's a seemingly endless interrogation, every question followed up with Genna's very favourite word - why.

Will the baby be born in the pasture? No. Why? Because Mama will have the baby inside. Why?

Will there be more than one baby? We don't know. Why?

Will the baby be able to walk right away? No. Why?

Will there be blood? Maybe. How much blood? We don't know. Why?

Eventually, mercifully, she loses interest in the conversation. When she runs off to find one of her toys, Inej and Kaz remain on the couch, mildly dazed.

“I think that went well,” says Inej.

Kaz puts his face in his hands.

.

Kaz takes great interest in the pregnancy, and the force of his attention is almost startling. The first time, setting aside the fact that they were apart for much of the time she was carrying, Inej had taken great pains to hide the symptoms from him, the changes in her body. As though drawing his attention any further to the situation would drive him further away or, conversely, bring him closer and force her to confront her own denial.

This time, she makes no such effort. She lets him see her sickness and her exhaustion. She notices him notice where she hurts and what she craves and the things that make her feel unwell.

She has begun to swell already, much more quickly than with Genna, and when she undresses Kaz's eyes go directly to her belly, tracing the visible signs of his child growing inside her. There is frank interest in his gaze; a sort of piercing, analytical look that she's not sure what to do with. It's been a long time since she has been so aware of his eyes on her body, but something about the way he looks at her now makes her feel like an insect pinned under a magnifying glass. It's not a feeling she entirely enjoys.

When the child quickens, Inej is pulling a book down from the shelves in the sitting room, and she almost drops it as she feels the movement, gasping, hand flying to her abdomen. Kaz is on his feet like a shot, halfway to her before she can even open her mouth to tell him what happened.

“What's wrong?” he demands, all the colour drained from his face. “Should I send for someone? A midwife, or—”

“It's alright.” She holds up a hand to silence him. “I felt it move.”

“Oh,” he says, pulled up short, eyes going to her middle like he can see straight through her skin.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to alarm you. I was just surprised.” Inej smooths a hand over the gentle curve of her belly thoughtfully. “I don't think you'll be able to feel, yet, but I can.”

Frowning slightly, Kaz takes her elbow, guides her to the armchair. He always wants her to sit down these days, you look tired Inej and you should be resting Inej and let me do that Inej, like she's unwell rather than simply with child.

She'd fought one of the most vicious battles of her seafaring career when she was about this far along with Genna, but she thinks that telling him that is probably not going to improve the situation.

“Do you need anything?”

“No, Kaz,” she waves him away, huffing in irritation.

He settles in the other armchair, and she pulls her feet up underneath her, opens the book…as before, now that it's started, it keeps coming. She closes her eyes, resting her hand lightly on her belly, waiting for each tiny movement.

“What does it feel like?” Kaz asks after a while.

“It feels like…like a kind of fluttering,” she says, eyes still closed. “It's difficult to explain.”

“It's a good sign though?”

She opens her eyes, startled by the question, about to tell him that obviously it's good Kaz, but the words die in her throat. He looks tense, a little awkward. He's got a firm enough grasp on what to do with a child once it leaves the womb, but no real concept of anything that comes before. She's well past assigning blame for why that happens to be, but it's also not something she's really given proper consideration. The fact that this is all new for him.

She taps a finger against her belly thoughtfully. She'd had her mother's patient guidance to placate her anxieties regarding pregnancy. Kaz only has her.

“Yes, it's a good sign,” she says, more patiently than before. “It means things are progressing as they should.”

He nods, taking that in. “And you don't need anything?”

“No, thank you.”

She smiles at him in what she hopes is a reassuring manner and, seemingly satisfied, he goes back to the newspaper he'd been reading.

She smiles, but in her heart, the first sliver of cold seeps in.

.

A heavily coded missive is dispatched to Jesper and Wylan in Ketterdam, deliberately vague despite the elaborate cipher they have developed between them: new cropping expected in the autumn.

.

Inej writes to her mother.

.

It's not that she expected things to be easy, precisely, but…she'd thought a large part of why it was so hard the first time was the shock of it all. The shock of a child, the shock of Kaz's reaction, the sickness and the unfamiliarity and the whole thing not her choice.

This time is her choice. She'd wanted it. She'd asked for it. They had tried for it, together.

So why does she feel like this?

She feels wrong, she feels off-balance, she feels outside of herself. Every movement inside her makes her skin crawl. She wants to cry all the time and it's not the hormones, it's the bitter, crushing disappointment because she'd thought that this time would be okay. She'd thought that she could have this.

She'd thought she could have another baby, and her beautiful daughter. She'd thought she could sleep beside Kaz every night, and have their home, and have her ship, and have everything she ever wanted, but she can't because she's weak. She's greedy and she's weak—

Kaz's eyes follow her everywhere. He is constantly asking if she's okay, and she tells him yes, she's fine, just tired, but he knows, he always knows, and he's always looking at her.

She lies in bed every night with the same thoughts chasing round and round inside her skull until she wants to scream, exhausted. She doesn't. One night, she sits up, swings her legs out of bed, pads up the hall in her nightgown and bare feet.

Genna is sleeping soundly, clutching her green rabbit. They have exchanged her high-sided cot for a narrow bed - so grown up - and Inej sinks onto the wooden floor beside it, gazing at her first baby in the dull glow of the moonlight. She is so perfect, so pure, and Inej counts the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes, matches her own breath to it.

She hears him, uneven footsteps on the floorboards. He cannot move silently the way she can, but he always knows when she's gone.

“Inej?” His voice from the doorway, pitched low to avoid waking Genna. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” she whispers, not looking at him. “I'm going to stay here tonight.”

“Here,” he repeats, like he's not quite sure he's heard her right.

“Here,” she says, emphatic.

There is a long, long pause before he steps into the room. “You're pregnant, Inej, you can't sleep on the floor.”

“Of course I can, it won't do any harm.”

Another long pause. This time when he speaks, his voice is cold. Cold the way it used to be. Cold like it's giving her an order. “I want you to go back to bed.”

It's a nice try. At one time, it would have worked. Her head is all a muddle, and she wants to scream at him to leave her alone, and she wants to beg him never to leave her at all, but the one thing she does know is that she does not want to go back to bed.

“I want to stay here,” she says, stubborn. And then, shakily, less sure, “I just want to look at her, Kaz. Let me be.”

At some length she hears him give a long sigh, and then the sound of his footsteps retreating up the hall. He really has left her, she thinks, the way he did before, but - no - she hears the footsteps coming back, and then something soft and warm is draped over her shoulders. The blanket from the end of their bed.

She clutches at it, pulling it tightly around herself, desperate to hang onto something as Kaz eases himself into the old rocking chair in the corner of the room, settling in for the night.

Inej keeps her eyes focused on Genna, sleeping peacefully, and repeats to herself like a mantra, this is what you get at the end. Holds onto it, a tiny precious golden thread of light in all the darkness that threatens to drown her.

It doesn't matter. She sinks anyway.

.

She doesn't know until much later, but Kaz writes to her mother as well.

Come as soon as you are able, he writes, and he sends money for the fare. She needs you.

.

The next months are hard. Some days she can get up and go about her business, but a lot of days she loses herself, cannot get out of bed - not sleeping, but not truly awake. It's worse than last time, though, because now she has a daughter and she is neglecting her. Now Genna cries for her, and she can hear Kaz explaining, placating - Mama's very tired, Mama's not well - and Inej closes her eyes and leaves that behind because she cannot bear to hear the evidence of her miserable failure.

Kaz is angry, she knows. Angry at her, angry at himself, angry at the whole world and anyone in it who ever hurt her. She wishes she could be angry too - she was angry once, she's sure of it - but she is so, so heavy and she cannot find the strength. She wishes she could be like Kaz.

All Kaz knows is the fight.

Not Inej.

Inej's first instinct when she's in pain has always been to disappear.

.

She blinks awake to Kaz kneeling on the floor beside the bed. The room is dim, but there is light behind the curtains and the birds are loud outside. Kaz's hand hovers an inch from her shoulder.

He is reluctant to touch her, these days.

“I brought you something to eat,” he says, and over his shoulder she can see a bowl of something steaming on the nightstand, and it smells good but she's not hungry, and she tells him so.

His voice is ragged. “You need to eat.”

“I know,” she says, because she does know. She does. She needs to eat for herself, and for her baby. “I know,” she says again, more strongly, and levers up on one elbow.

The stew is her own recipe - heavily spiced, exactly the sort of thing Kaz hates, but he still made it for her - and it's hot and comforting, and it makes her feel a little more awake. A little more alive. She's glad she ate some.

“More,” he says, when she sets the bowl aside.

“Not right now,” says Inej.

He scrubs at his face with one hand, pushing his hair back from his face. His eyes are red, she notices, and he wears the shadow of two-day stubble on his jaw. It's possibly the most unkempt she's ever seen him when he was not actually shot or beaten or otherwise in some self-inflicted dire straits.

“I don't know what to do for you, Inej,” he says roughly, and she can see that it pains him to admit it. “Tell me what to do.”

She blinks at him tiredly, and brings a hand up to trace his jaw - stops halfway and lets it fall back into her lap. Kaz Brekker does not admit to not knowing. Kaz Brekker does not ask for help. Kaz Brekker would never. But Kaz Rietveld…

But Inej can't tell him how to help her. She doesn't know. What can he do? If she knew the way out of this, she would tell him how to reach down for her and pull her up. She would.

She would.

She is about to tell him so, but what she says instead, unintended and raw, is: “Tell me you love me.”

“I love you,” he says, immediately.

Her heart thuds painfully in her chest. It's always hurt her, in a way, to hear him say it. She swallows, hard. “Tell me you won't leave me.”

“I will never leave you,” he says, and the intensity in his eyes is almost frightening.

“Tell me...tell me…” she closes her eyes. She doesn't know what she wants him to tell her. What can he promise? What can he say? She doesn't know what she needs to hear from him.

But Kaz has picked up the thread of her thoughts, clever mind two steps ahead as always. He tells her that she is brave. He tells her that she is strong. He tells her that she is safe.

It's not much. It's only words. But she does believe him. With all her stupid, sentimental heart.

It doesn't make it easier, but at least she is not alone. Not this time.

.

What's different from before is that, as time passes, Inej does start to feel a little stronger.

Kaz is with her. Unlike her mother, he cannot sit with her all day and hold her hand - he has a farm to manage, after all, and their daughter needs at least one of her parents to actively parent her - but on the bad days he throws the windows wide to let in the sunlight, brings her meals to her in bed, tells her all the sweet and reassuring things that are not in his nature to say but that she needs so desperately to hear.

She has precious, perfect Genna, who picks little bunches of brightly coloured meadow flowers and brings them to her, who climbs into bed with her in the early morning and cuddles close and lets Inej rub her nose into her hair and tickle her so that she can hear her lovely laugh.

Most of all, as her belly swells and the creature inside her gets larger, its movements get stronger, more defined, more baby-like. The feeling no longer fills her with panic, with dread. Some kind of sense memory takes over. Oh, we know this, her body tells her. This is a baby, this is okay.

Anathi comes to her, and helps her to wash her hair, combs sweet scented oil through the lengths of it. It's such a simple thing but it makes Inej feel so cared for, and she does not have the words to express what it means to her.

Her friend helps her in other ways, too. Though she could not possibly know the reasons behind Inej's distress, she takes it in stride. She offers no judgement, only support. “Some women just don't like being pregnant,” she says, squeezing Inej's hand with gentle understanding. “There's nothing wrong with that.”

It's an offhand comment, but it hits Inej like a well-landed punch to the gut.

Inej has shed tears and bitter recriminations for the damage that was done to her that has made her useless for the one thing her body was made for. She has railed against her past, against the people who hurt her, against her weakness and her wretched, saintsforsaken luck. And all of that has its place, undoubtedly, but underneath it there is something else she has not quite recognised.

She doesn't like it.

She doesn't like feeling sick and tired. She doesn't like the way her emotions fluctuate, and the way she cries at the slightest provocation. She doesn't like having bloated ankles, and losing her balance, and feeling slow and encumbered. Inej had thought there was something essential missing inside her, stolen like her childhood, that prevented her from joyfully embracing pregnancy the way she has seen other women do. It had never once occurred to her that the experience of carrying a child is something that she simply does not enjoy. And that it is okay.

Inej has relative confidence that she is a good mother. She would do anything to keep Genna safe and happy. She would kill for her. She would die for her. She loves Genna with everything she has, but all that came only after she had vacated Inej's body.

She knows, then, that although she had wanted this desperately, she will never bear another child.

She sits in bed one night, rubbing a hand over her swollen middle. The thing inside is restless, and the shape of her belly moves and distends as it shifts, little feet and elbows fighting for space inside, visible even through the thin cotton of her nightgown.

When she glances at Kaz beside her, she finds him watching with a faintly unnerved expression on his face.

“This is the last one,” she tells him.

“Yes,” he agrees, keeping his eyes on her belly. “The last one.”

And so, although they do not disappear entirely, the bad days become less frequent. Inej sets her mind on that hazy, not-too-distant finish line, and counts the days.

.

Her parents arrive at the end of summer, when the True Sea is calm and Inej is round and heavy with child.

There's something to be said for carrying out a pregnancy in the frozen depths of a Ravkan winter, thinks Inej. The heat of the Zemeni summer has been particularly difficult to bear this year. She wears loose linen dresses, goes barefoot, takes herself down to the creek at every available opportunity though it sends Kaz into fits of furious paranoia at the possibility of her slipping. Nothing helps. She feels uncomfortable every minute, flushed and overheated, strands of hair clinging to her damp skin.

Her temper frays accordingly. She and Kaz have petty, whispered arguments late at night about what Inej should or shouldn't be doing, about how she should or shouldn't be taking care of herself, about how Kaz is a bothersome son of a bitch who should or shouldn't mind his own fucking business.

Mostly, they make preparations for the new baby. Kaz fetches the old cradle from where it has been gathering dust in the Meijers' barn, cleans it up and gives it a new coat of paint. Inej pulls out Genna's old clothes, sorts them into piles; the smocks and bonnets she'd worn when she was very small will do for either a boy or a girl, and they'll see about the rest after the birth.

This is how Ishani and Ettan Ghafa find them, on a sunny morning under an intense blue sky.

Inej is out collecting goose eggs, Genna at her heels. She no longer has to employ stealth tactics to get at them, which is just as well because she can't in her present condition, as long as the beasts are a decent distance away from the clutch. Genna is a busy child, and eager to help her mama with all little tasks, so all Inej must do is hold out her basket and say carefully, carefully while the little girl places the eggs into it with both hands, face screwed up in concentration.

She is walking back to the house when she sights her parents coming down the track, large packs on their backs, and she almost drops her basket. Her mother cries out, shoulders off her pack, and runs toward her - as Inej had once run down that very track to Genna. Inej raises a hand in greeting - large as she is, she cannot do much more than waddle rapidly - but her mother is nimble despite her age, and Inej is in her arms within seconds. Her father joins them quickly, both of them raining kisses onto her face and talking over each other as Inej laughs and laughs and says, “Mama, Papa, let me have some air, please!”

They step back, and her mother takes her face in her hands. "It's good to see you like this, meja."

Inej grins, perplexed. "Enormous and sweaty?"

"Happy," says Ishani. "Healthy. Ripe as a fresh plum."

She remembers the last meeting between them, when she was heartbroken, and frightened, and so alone. She is glad for them to see her this way, too.

Looking about, Inej finds that her child has vanished. No, not vanished - crouched down in the long grass to the side of the farm track. She would be quite well hidden, but the bright orange ribbon in her hair gives her away. Inej calls out to her encouragingly, holding out a hand, and her little girl emerges slowly, carefully, big eyes watching these new strangers as she comes to press close beside her mother.

Ishani gasps, presses her hands to her heart, eyes bright with tears as she looks at the grandchild she has not seen since she was just weeks old. “Oh, Inej,” she whispers, voice shaking, and Inej feels tears come to her own eyes. “She's so big, and so beautiful.”

Her father makes to bend down, perhaps tweak his granddaughter's nose the way he used to do to Inej when she was small, but Genna squirms away from him, reaches both her arms up to Inej.

Sighing, Inej sets the basket down, hauls her daughter with some difficulty into her arms. She's too round, really, and Genna too big - the only thing that Inej can do is hold her awkwardly on her hip.

“She's a little shy,” she says by way of explanation, apologetic.

“It's alright, meja,” says her mother, smiling kindly at Genna, who gazes steadily back at her. “She does not know us.”

A moment of sadness passes between them, the shadow of another life, where Inej made a different choice and Genna grew up in the colour and bustle of the caravan, performing for crowds and swimming in the river with the ponies, just like her mother had done before her. It might have been a good life, but Inej would not trade what she has now for anything, and anyone who tried to take it from her would have to pry it from her cold, dead fingers. She wants her parents to see that. She wants them to know that she made the right choice.

After a moment, Ishani seems to shake herself off, presses her hand to Inej’s cheek once more. “Now, where is that awful man?”

.

The atmosphere in the house is distinctly chilly for a few days. Inej's parents have not forgiven Kaz for the myriad crimes they feel he has committed, not the least of which is spiriting their daughter and only grandchild to the opposite side of the world.

It doesn't last, though. By the end of their first week, her mother, at least, has considerably warmed up to Kaz.

Inej is bemused. She forgets, sometimes, how ruthlessly charming Kaz can be if he sets his mind to it. Mostly because she's never been on the receiving end of that charm. There's no hard feeling in that, though, because she recognises it for what it is: a con.

He's not desperate for her parents' approval, because Kaz is desperate for no one's approval, save perhaps her own. In fact, he's not even chasing her parents' approval, because his charm offensive is directed only at her mother, although he treats her father with perfect civility. Inej doubts it's for her sake, either, though he is well aware she would like him to have a good relationship with her parents. No, he's decided he wants something, decided that Inej's mother is the best route to getting it, and the what and the why of the situation are mysteries known only to himself.

Still, Inej does not interfere - not yet, anyway. It makes for a peaceful home.

How long it will make for a peaceful home is another matter, if the way her father grinds his teeth every time Kaz speaks is any indication.

One evening after dinner, when Ettan has stepped out into the garden to play with Genna, Inej goes out to join them. Genna has developed a fast friendship with her grandfather, who indulges her and tickles her and tosses her squealing into the air, arms as strong as Inej remembers from her own childhood. She smiles as she approaches them, fingers laced together over her belly.

“Don't excite her too much before bed, please,” she says, with a stern tone that she doesn't really mean.

Her father is unaffected anyway. “Ah, meja, it is a grandfather's prerogative. Boring things like bedtime are yours to worry about.”

He winks at her and she can't help laughing, coming to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as Genna runs toward the bottom of the garden.

“I remember when you were that age,” sighs her father, a nostalgia in his eyes that she has never really seen there. “She is very like you, you know.”

“Really?” Inej is surprised. She's never really seen anything of herself in Genna, besides the obviously Suli colouring that she bestowed upon her, and she says so.

“There is something of you in her manner, in the way she moves. She is joyful, like you were as a child.” His smile then is tinged with sadness. “Her laugh is your laugh.”

That thought warms her through, that she might have given her child the very purest things about herself, the things she thought she lost. She doesn't know how to say that, though, not to her father who blames himself so heavily for losing her, so she just shrugs one shoulder. “I always thought she was Kaz's child, through and through.”

“She looks like him,” her father agrees, nodding. “Thankfully she wears his face better than he does.”

“Papa!” says Inej, scandalised, and he laughs again, wrapping an arm around her, pulling her close. She leans into him, presses her nose into his shoulder, inhaling the familiar scent of cigar smoke and the peppermint oil he uses for his joints.

“This is a good place,” he says, pressing a kiss to her temple. “You have done well, Inej. You have done very well indeed.”

.

“Anika has a son.”

Inej looks up in surprise from where she is washing a dish, as Kaz walks into the kitchen, open letter in his hand. If he'd come in and informed her that he was the rightful king of Fjerda, he could not have delivered less expected news.

“Oh,” she says, nonplussed.

Kaz reads her face, as he always does. “The Dregs succession is secure, it seems.”

Ah. Well, that makes a little more sense. She grimaces. “How mercenary.”

She gets a flash of that old Dirtyhands smile, then, all teeth and no warmth. A strychnine grin, she's always thought. A corpse grin.

It's there and gone in his face, a second and nothing more before his features smooth out again and he drops the letter on the kitchen table for Inej to read, if she wants. He comes around the table, absently stroking a hand over the back of Genna's head as he passes, and takes the dish from Inej's hands to dry it.

“Does it bother you?” Inej asks with genuine curiosity, leaning a hip against the sink, cocking her head to one side. “That your children won’t inherit the empire you built?”

“No,” says Kaz. He sets the dish aside and places a hand lightly on the curve of her belly, in a way he had never touched her when she'd been carrying Genna. She places her hand over his, holding it there. “I'm building something else for them.”

.

When Inej answers the front door one morning, she's not sure who shrieks the loudest. Herself, at the sight of Nina standing on her doorstep, or Nina, at the sight of Inej's by now unmistakable condition.

They are clutching each other tightly - and somewhat awkwardly, with Inej's belly in the way - when the study door flies open so hard the doorknob makes an almighty bang as it bounces off the wall, and Kaz steps into the hallway.

Inej is very near her time, now, and he is hyper alert to any sign of labour coming on. The stricken look on his face morphs into irritation at lightning speed the second he lays eyes on Nina. “Oh, for fuck—”

“Hello, Kaz!” Nina crows, grinning widely, arms still tight around Inej. “I'm delighted to see you, too!”

He scowls at her - at them both, really, which Inej thinks is slightly unfair - and disappears back into the study. “Just keep the screaming to a minimum!” he calls, right before the door slams shut again.

“It's comforting, in a way, to know that he will never, ever change,” says Nina, unbothered by Kaz's temper. Her hands are hovering over Inej's belly, fingers wiggling like she cannot contain herself. “May I?”

Inej is grateful beyond measure that Nina thought to ask permission before laying her hands on her, but then, of course she did. It's extraordinary how many people feel entitled to touch a pregnant woman, but then, Inej is no longer surprised by such things. A sharp glare and a sharper knife, she has found, make for quite a good deterrent.

She nods her permission and Nina settles her hands on either side of Inej's middle, feeling for kicks. The little creature inside obliges - it kicks Inej so much that her insides feel bruised.

“How did you know?”

“I didn't, I was just in the vicinity and thought I would stop by,” says Nina, and Inej knows that there is no point in asking what sort of work brought her close, because she will never reveal it. She is still grinning, gleeful. “Another one! Are you mad?”

“Probably,” says Inej. A thought grips her, then, and she clutches Nina's wrists, voice urgent. “Nina, will you stay with me? Until it's over?”

If Nina is alarmed by her sudden intensity, she does not show it, but her grin softens into something more genuine. “Of course I will. I’d be honoured.”

It's tight quarters, in the house. With Inej's parents occupying the back bedroom, Nina takes up residence on the couch in the sitting room, and Kaz grumbles constantly that he cannot move freely in his own home. But Inej feels a happy, warm, burrowing feeling with all of her loves gathered close to her, exactly where they should be.

.

Kaz isn't the only one feeling jittery. It's the waiting that gets to Inej, with so little time left.

She knows she's close. She has the same familiar dull pains as last time, in her abdomen and low down in her pelvis. The weight of her belly has shifted low, too, a sign the child has 'assumed the position', as her mother puts it. Inej feels like she's going to vibrate right out of her skin, impatient to get on with it.

Any day now, she'll have her new child in her arms and she will never have to be with child ever again. It cannot come soon enough.

She takes up her walks again, twice per day just as before, and she is never without an arm to lean on. She adds enough spice to her food to make even her father's eyes water. Nina tells her that sex can bring on labour, a notion Inej suggests to Kaz one night, though he resolutely will not oblige her with so many people in the house. Not that she feels like it, anyway. She is exhausted and achy and she's heard anecdotally that her feet are the size of small melons, though it's been so long since she saw them for herself that their normal appearance is only a distant memory.

Mostly, her brain irritates her with stupid things at stupid times. Just before Genna was born, Inej had been so irate with Kaz and so focused on avoiding him that it had occupied her every waking thought. Now, with Kaz being only his usual level of bastard, her mother and Nina making all the preparations for her labour, and her father occupying Genna much of the time, Inej has nothing to think about except has she washed the baby linen and does she have enough bonnets and perhaps there's still time to get more. It is starting to drive her mad. It's also starting to drive Kaz mad, because he is the one most often subjected to these inane thoughts.

In the middle of the night, she struggles upright in bed, not for the first time.

“Kaz,” she says, voice urgent.

“What?” He jerks awake beside her, levering up on one elbow. “Is it time?”

“You put the order in for the saffron, didn't you?”

It's too dark for her to see his expression, but he drops back onto the pillows and his voice is muffled when he speaks, like he's got a hand over his face. “For the love of Ghezen and all your cursed Saints—”

“Kaz,”

“Yes, I ordered the fucking saffron,” he grinds out.

Inej takes umbrage at his tone. “Don't be like that, I'm only asking—”

“It's in the pantry, you saw it yourself—”

“If you want to be up all night with a colicky baby again—”

“If you're not actively about to give birth, go back to sleep,” snaps Kaz, finality in his voice, and the bed shifts as he turns over.

Inej fumes in the darkness for a few moments before resigning herself to the ridiculousness of the situation. She's still annoyed when she lies back down, trying to get comfortable, and she sighs heavily as she rubs a hand over her belly.

“Any time now, little one,” she whispers.

.

Their second child comes with the dawn.

.

Inej is restless the whole day, anxious, for no reason she can explain. Her back aches savagely. When she goes to bed, she tosses and turns as well as she is able with her enormous belly, and she cannot find a position to rest in. If she lies on her back, she cannot breathe comfortably. If she lies on her side, the ache in her back gets worse. She is too hot, so she throws the covers off. Then she is chilled, so she pulls them back to her chin.

She huffs, and puffs, and feels annoyed at everything and everyone, and she falls asleep without being aware of doing so.

She has not been asleep very long when the familiar pain comes, rolling slowly through her like thunder, pulling her unwillingly back to consciousness. She lets out a quiet moan that comes from deep inside her chest, fisting her hand into her pillow and drawing her knees up as far as she is able.

“Inej?” Kaz's voice, awake despite the fact she had not made much noise. His voice comes from above her, his breath is on her neck, he's leaning over her. “Should I wake your mother?”

She breathes deeply, riding the pain out until her body relaxes again and she can unclench her jaw. “Yes.”

.

This time, Kaz refuses to be barred from the delivery room. Not under his own roof.

“Not this again,” says her mother, anger and disappointment in her voice. “In the name of all the Saints, I thought you had learned…”

All activity in the room stills.

Nina is there, and Anathi, and Julia. Come as soon as they were summoned, the way Inej had once left her bed in the middle of the night to attend to Julia. They are doing all the good, bustling busywork that happens while waiting for the birthing to get truly underway; stripping the good linen from the bed and manoeuvring the mattress topper into place, readying towels, telling jokes and offering good company.

Inej, pacing the floor in her nightgown and rubbing the small of her back, turns with the rest of the women to watch the showdown happening in the bedroom doorway.

Ishani Ghafa stands with her feet planted and one hand gripping each side of the doorframe, drawn up to her full height, entirely blocking entrance to the room. Kaz stands just over the threshold in the hallway, jaw stubbornly set, and Inej can see her father hovering just behind him, wearing an expression that is surprisingly more resigned than angry.

Inej has a moment of startling clarity, that this is the reason Kaz has been so deferential since her parents arrived, so solicitous, so oozing with false charm. To ease his way into the birthing chamber when the time came. There is no band of Suli women brandishing fire irons here to stand in his way, now, only Inej's mother, who it seems has not been so taken in by him that she has forgotten every belief and custom of her people.

Kaz clearly expected it to be otherwise. Poor deluded fool. Inej rolls her eyes, and gets a strange look from Anathi. She supposes most women would be upset by a fight breaking out like this while they were in labour, but Inej has been half expecting it. He was so determined, the last time. And this is nowhere near as dramatic as that.

Kaz looms threateningly in a way that Inej has seen bring grown men to the point of tears, all efforts at charm and tact seemingly abandoned. “Now listen, you belligerent old—”

“It's not your place,” snaps her mother, uncowed. “Nor the place of any man.”

It's the worst possible thing she could have said to him. His eyes go practically black with fury, and poor Julia - who's never really gotten over her abstract terror of Kaz - gives a frightened squeak.

“Not my place?” he seethes through gritted teeth. “It's my house, and my child, and my wife.”

“It's women's work.”

“Hang your women's work!”

Inej's father chooses that moment to place a hand on Kaz's shoulder to try to draw him away, and Kaz shrugs him off violently, half turning, cane hefting in his hand—

— Nina steps forward, hands raised, “Why don't we—”

“Stop,” says Inej, and everyone does, immediately.

Well, she thinks, it's good to see that in the birthing chamber, the woman doing the actual birthing holds some sway.

“Is nobody going to ask what I think?” She looks to her family, who have the grace to look slightly shame-faced - with the exception of her father, who determinedly will not look at her at all, trying so hard to give her the respect that he clearly feels she is not being accorded by the father of her child. “It's my house as well—” here she raises an eyebrow at Kaz and he drops his eyes “—and I am the one actually giving birth here. I think what I want should really be the only thing that matters, don't you?”

There is a short, tense pause, and then her mother's face softens, her shoulders relax. “Yes, of course, meja,” she says, apology in her voice. “Of course it is. What do you wish?”

“I want him to stay,” says Inej, giving her mother a firm look before she can even open her mouth to protest. Then, she meets Kaz's eyes, snapped back to hers, holds his gaze. “I want him to stay.”

She feels like the look he gives her then could burn her up until there was nothing left of her, but she cannot return it because another pain comes and she has to lean forward and grip the bedpost and grind her teeth. But she hears the tap of his cane on the floorboards as he enters the room, hears her mother direct him to the chair in the corner.

“Sit there and stay there and do not get in the way,” Ishani instructs, sounding slightly flustered. Then, presumably for want of a better outlet for her frustration, she rounds on Inej's father, still hovering in the hallway. “And you most certainly know better, away with you,” she shoos him. “Do something useful and get some water boiling downstairs.”

.

Once again, her thoughts turn to how different everything is than before. Inej had wondered if she would miss the safety of the caravan, the comfort of the women around her with their prayers and their strength and their combined years of knowledge. But she has her own little community of women here with her, women she loves, women she trusts. Anathi, Julia, darling Nina. And her mother, travelled across the ocean to see her second grandchild safe into Inej's waiting arms.

She is not with the caravan, it's true. She is somewhere better. When Genna was born, Inej had no home. It's not something that hurts her to think of, just a fact. Where should she have called home? The captain’s cabin on The Wraith? Kaz’s rooms at the Slat? Her parents’ wagon? Home was people, a feeling of being close to the ones she loved most. She was a wanderer and she'd decided long ago she didn't need a home.

She is still a wanderer, but she has a place to call her own now. This baby will be born in her own bedroom, in her own bed, in the home she and Kaz have suffered and fought and cried and loved in. The place that has been Genna's home. The place that Inej can always return to.

When things start moving more quickly, she gets on her hands and knees and pays little mind to Kaz on the sidelines, though in between the pains, she can find it in herself to be amused at the reactions to his presence. Her mother has adopted an air of resigned acceptance and Nina will never be fazed by anything that Kaz does, ever, but Anathi and Julia seem oddly wrongfooted by it.

Joss had certainly never demanded such a liberty, and Inej can only wonder at what a picture it must make, Dirtyhands demanding to be present for the birth of his child. Anathi, on the other hand, is not shocked by his presence but seems rather taken aback at the manner in which he'd achieved it. She knows nothing of Kaz Brekker. She knows Kaz Rietveld, generally acknowledged to be prickly, but a solid sort of fellow nonetheless. A responsible employer, well respected in the community if not necessarily well liked. Diligent with his taxes and a clever head for numbers, a man who could be relied upon for sound financial advice should you happen to catch him in the right mood.

Inej wonders idly how long it will take the story of him strongarming his way into the birthing room to circulate around their small community of farmers and rural tradespeople, but then the pains are coming faster, and stronger, and her legs are shaking, and she has no focus to spare anymore.

.

So little time has passed that the sun has not fully risen when Inej feels a familiar, almost unbearable pressure in her lower back.

She had needed so much help, when Genna was born, so much guidance. Not this time. She has done this before, and her body remembers. She recognises what it's trying to tell her.

“I have to push,” she gasps.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Kaz sit up straight.

“Surely it's too soon?” Julia says, whirling from where she is wringing a cloth over the washbasin.

“No,” says Inej through gritted teeth. “I have to.”

A hand between her legs, feeling, checking. Anathi's voice from somewhere over her shoulder. “She's right, it's time.”

Her mother, comforting and solid beside her, smoothing her hair back from her face just as she had before. “Ok, sweetheart, you know what to do.”

She does. She pulls herself upright, onto her knees, loops one arm around her mother's shoulders and the other around Nina's. When she bears down this time, she pulls everything inside of herself, and makes no sound.

If it kills her, Inej will not have Genna wake to the sound of her mama screaming.

This, too, goes far more quickly than she remembers, or perhaps she is just too focused to note the passage of time. Before she knows it, she feels that hot, stinging gush of fluid, and the child is slipping out of her, and a voice cries it's a girl! and she slumps into her mothers arms, sobbing and laughing, equal parts exhaustion and elation.

Then she is on her back again, and a wet weight is on her chest, and a high, furious cry fills the room.

She does not look for Kaz, not yet, because this is still the women's time, laughter and tears and useful, loving hands. But she can feel him, a steady, still presence just out of her sight.

At this moment she has eyes only for her little daughter, brand new, streaked with gore. Born in blood, as all women are, over and over and over through their whole lives. This will be her burden, and her gift.

“Hush little one, ” Inej croons as the baby squalls angrily on her chest, pressing her lips to her sticky head. “Mama's here. We've been waiting for you.”

.

While they wait for the afterbirth to come, when Inej's nightgown has been unbuttoned and she has been covered over with a towel to keep the baby warm while she rests a moment against her bare chest, she does look to Kaz.

He is still sitting in his chair - where he has remained obediently, observing the proceedings - elbows propped on his knees. His hands are clenched together as if in prayer, partially obscuring his mouth. His face is utterly expressionless but his eyes are bright, fixed on her, intensely focused.

Inej lets her head loll to the side as she gazes at him, tears still leaking slowly from the corners of her eyes. There is so much she wants to say to him, in this moment. Not here, though, not with everyone listening. The words are only for him.

Watching him now as he watches her, the look in his eyes, she wonders if he already knows.

She notices her mother frowning at him, troubled by his lack of visible reaction, but Nina brushes a hand across his shoulder, just briefly, as she passes.

.

As before, Inej is stripped and washed, the bed is stripped and remade, and while this is happening the baby is made clean and dry. And this time, the tiny wrapped bundle is passed directly into her father's hands.

Kaz looks at his new little daughter with something like awe, and something like fear, and he holds her so, so carefully as he crosses the room. Before he places her into Inej's arms, he bends and brushes the softest possible kiss to her tiny forehead.

“She looks like you,” he says as he passes her over.

“Really?” Inej peers into her tiny face. “Do you think so?”

“She's got your nose. And your chin.”

There is a chorus of agreement around the room, and Inej feels unreasonably pleased though she cannot quite see it herself. For certain, the child resembles Kaz less strongly than Genna - though Inej would perhaps argue the chin is more his than her own.

“Are you two going to argue about names for the next three hours?” asks Inej's mother, cleaning her hands in a basin of water.

Of course, Ishani had been in the tent with them all that time ago in the forests of Ravka. The other women assembled are looking at her with interest, and she laughs. All tensions, all arguments, all resentments have been forgotten now that Inej is safely through the birth with a living child in her arms. “It was unbelievable. I thought there would be bloodshed before the end.”

Kaz glowers, but Inej laughs a little too. “We have a name for her already.”

“Well, don't keep us in suspense,” says Nina, perched at the foot of the bed.

Inej looks to Kaz, checking in one last time, are we sure? He nods. She nods back.

“Livija,” says Kaz, with something like reverence in his voice, the first time he has spoken the name aloud with his child there to receive it.

All assembled seem to let out a collective sigh, crooning over the baby again, saying her name to her, saying hello.

“How beautiful,” says Ishani, nodding approvingly. “What does it mean?”

Inej looks down at the child in her arms. Clean, now, and only half awake, drifting off into that deep newborn sleep. Coming into the world is tiring work.

“Life,” she says.

.

The others trail out one by one. Anathi and Julia leave her with kisses on her cheeks and blessings on her new baby. Nina wraps Inej in her arms and cries a little - and she makes an odd, abortive motion like she wants to hug Kaz but then thinks better of it - and then she goes to get some sleep. Ishani wanders in and out, as she had before, cleaning up but letting them have their space.

Kaz brings her some tea, and if she hadn't already, Inej thinks she would declare herself ready to bear his children all over again.

He looks as though he could do with some tea himself, truthfully. Even now, already a father, he looks a little bit sickly. He hadn't been present for Genna's birth, she supposes, only the immediate aftermath.

Inej has heard childbirth described as a lot of nonsense things. Beautiful, magical, even spiritual. Pretty words all, but in her experience, when it comes down to it, it's a grim and bloody business. What do men know of that, if they haven't seen for themselves. She pats his hand comfortingly, and laughs when he glares at her.

When Inej is well settled into bed, and the baby is sleeping soundly in her arms, Kaz goes to fetch Genna.

Their daughter - their eldest daughter - woke to the sound of her sister's first cries, and there was a short, frozen moment when they heard her calling groggily in the hallway. As is custom with the Suli, she would ordinarily have been in the birthing room with them, but Inej had not wanted to wake her while she laboured through the night.

The sight of her mother in the birthing bed, covered in tears and sweat and blood, is perhaps not the best first introduction to childbirth for a little girl, and so Anathi had raced into the hallway to intercept her, and Inej's father had kept her safely away, distracted her and fed her breakfast and taken her outside to play.

Kaz returns with her on his hip, still in her nightgown, and she is looking at the bundle in Inej's arms with wide, uncertain eyes.

Excitement over a new sibling is all very well and good until you're confronted with the reality that you are no longer an only child, thinks Inej.

Kaz sits down on the edge of the bed, arranges Genna in his lap. Inej lifts her arm slightly, moves the blanket aside a fraction so that she can see the baby.

“Look, sweetheart,” she says, smiling softly at her firstborn. “This is your sister, Livija.”

Slowly, slowly, Genna's eyebrows draw down into that frown she inherited directly from Kaz, and she turns her face into her father's neck and remains there.

Inej bites the inside of her cheek hard to keep from laughing. “Oh dear.”

Kaz rubs Genna's back with one hand, tries to nudge her out of his neck. “Don't you want to see her?”

But Genna shakes her head and burrows deeper, little fingers clutching hard at Kaz's shirt, and she will not move no matter how much he tries to disentangle her.

Kaz looks to Inej, eyebrows raised, but she just shrugs helplessly, so he pats Genna on the back again and lets her hold onto him.

“I'm sure they'll be firm friends in no time,” says Inej, reaching out to stroke Genna's hair with one hand. She hopes they will, anyway.

Inej looks around her. There is a pile of linen tossed in the corner of the bedroom. Genna has not been dressed, and there is dirt on her feet and grass stains on her nightgown. Kaz, with stubble on his chin and his shirt tails untucked and his sleeves rolled haphazardly to the elbow. Inej is grateful there is not a mirror in her direct line of sight, for she knows how she must look: hair in disarray, bags under her eyes.

It's all a mess. It's messy. Just like their life. Messy and perfect and theirs.

"Hey," she whispers.

Kaz's eyes flick from his new daughter to Inej and she feels her heart somersalt in her chest, as stupidly, breathlessly in love as she'd been at seventeen.

She feels the grin spread over her face, wide and unguarded. "Look what we did."

~*~*~*~

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Ursula K. Le Guin

~*~*~*~

This is not the end of a story, but the beginning.

~*~*~*~