Chapter Text
“I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it’s drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and I know it’s not cheap.”
Mark Z. Danielewski
~*~*~*~
Inej gets herself to Ravka before she gets too big to travel.
She’d tried to pretend it wasn’t happening for as long as possible, wearing loose clothing and putting extra holes in her belt, but the night she’d felt the child move for the first time she’d decided enough was enough. She left Ketterdam the next day. Fled, really, like the coward she is.
She is grown enough to fight her own battles, Saints only know, but she can’t bring herself to be brave about this. For this, she wants her Mama.
She wears her loosest tunic but her mother still knows, instantly, in that way that mothers know. Ishani Ghafa places her hands on either side of Inej’s rounded middle and sighs. Her expression is one part love to one part disappointment - perhaps not at her daughter’s condition in itself so much as her obvious distress.
It is a luxury to run to her mother, one Inej thought she might never have again at one point in her life. She knows that the way her mother’s hands smooth back her hair, wipe the tears from her cheeks, are a gift she owes to Kaz as surely as she owes the thing growing inside to him, and she hates him all the more for it.
So many years, so many battles fought and won, such carefully mapped progress to reach the point where she could spend her time ashore in his bed and be none the worse for it, where he could love her as a man loves a woman and not drown. All unravelled so quickly. The warmth in his eyes had vanished the instant she’d told him. The way he’d snatched his hand out of hers had hurt worse than a knife to the gut. Inej had thought her decision made, then. With his feelings on the matter eminently clear, there wasn’t anything else to talk about. She would have it taken care of, and go on with her life.
Kaz had not offered any assistance along those lines. Had not broached the subject at all, in fact, but Inej knew well enough what to do. Any whore in Ketterdam knows, any unfortunate girl caught out, any mother with too many mouths to feed already. There were plenty of resources, in the Barrel, if you knew where to go. Corporalnik if you could afford it, and if you couldn’t then any midwife would turn her hand to it for a favour or what little extra coin you could give under the table, out of sight of the men, in places where women whispered women’s secrets and did women’s work.
And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet.
Inej went back and forth, paralysed by indecision. Just a little longer, she’d thought, no need to rush. She’d debated with herself, and then wavered, and then avoided, and then without warning she’d recalled her crew and gone to sea for several months, where she’d pursued every sniff of a slaver relentlessly, thrown herself into the thickest of the fighting and hoped the violence would make the decision for her. But the thing inside stuck fast, claws hooked in her, stubborn, Brekker, and she’d emptied her stomach over the side of the ship every morning while Specht watched her like a hawk, eyebrows drawn tightly together.
When she’d returned to Ketterdam, Kaz had said nothing and would not be drawn on the subject no matter how many times she tried. He’d seemed furious with her but when she’d asked, equally furious, if he wanted her to leave he’d said no and the rage in his eyes had been so intense that, for the first time in many years, she’d dropped the argument. So she’d stayed, and they’d circled each other like wounded animals, slept in the same bed with their backs stubbornly turned, while he ignored her and she ignored her swelling belly. Until it had moved inside her and she couldn’t ignore it any longer, and then she’d done what she thought she never would again.
She ran home.
.
Her final months are hard, even in the comfort and familiarity of the caravan, where her mother fusses over her and her father forages the winter berries she so craves and chucks her under the chin, as though she is still a child and not growing a child herself. As she gets bigger, her centre of gravity shifts and the innate balance on which she has always been able to rely is lost. She may just as well have cut off one of her limbs, she mourns it just as acutely.
For the first time in a very long time, Inej’s body is no longer her own. The wound inside herself that she has spent all her adult life stitching together splits open. She bleeds internally.
Her moods swing violently. Sometimes she feels almost herself, almost normal. Sometimes she sits next to her mother before the warm glow of the fire, rubbing her hands over her growing bump, talking of motherhood and futures and names. Other times, her fingers itch to take one of her knives and carve it out of herself. In these times, she cannot think of it as a baby, only something that has invaded her without her knowledge or her consent. She escapes the thing wriggling in her belly the way she used to escape the men at the Menagerie, by going somewhere else. She loses whole days lying in her bed, outside of herself, and comes back to find her mother holding her hand or stroking her hair, weeping silently.
Inej prays, in those times, and finds that even her Saints give no comfort. She cries to herself, then, and wonders bitterly why, after all the misery she has endured in her life, this has been inflicted on her too.
She’d been warned, of course, that the bitter white powder she swallowed to prevent conception wasn’t entirely foolproof, but it had never failed her in so many years that she’d come to be sure it never would. She’d wondered briefly if she’d been given a bad batch, had half a mind to slit the throat of the apotheker who’d sold it to her, but in the end she supposes luck and the law of averages had simply caught up with her.
Inej is no blushing maiden, nor has she ever been in the entire time Kaz has known her. She’s always known this was a possibility, from the first moment she went to his bed. A risk she’d assessed and accepted and assumed she would deal with if the time ever came.
She hadn’t anticipated how she would actually react. Had never dreamed that she might choose, in the end, to keep the child, and be tormented over whether she’d made the right choice. She hadn’t known that she would be alone.
Kaz Brekker keeps to any deal he strikes, and he has welded himself to her for ten years with every intention of dying before he let her go, by his own admission. Inej had believed him with all her stupid, sentimental heart. That he would forsake her like this, when she needs him most, she could not have imagined.
Even after all these years, every now and then, Kaz Brekker occasionally manages to catch her by surprise.
.
He arrives at the caravan on a cold spring morning when Inej is near her time, so huge that she can no longer put on her shoes without assistance. She moves slowly, now, heavy and more unbalanced than ever, and she is coming slowly down the steps of her parents wagon, being careful not to slip, when she looks up and sees him limping through the camp towards her.
The shock of seeing him there is so complete that for a moment she cannot process it. She simply stares. Which means she sees the look that comes over his face the moment his eyes catch on her.
He hasn’t seen her in months, and there’s no hiding her condition under loose clothing now. Even under the heavy coat she wears, the shape of her belly is clear, unmistakable as she rests a hand lightly on top of it. He casts his eyes over her, and it’s not revulsion on his face, exactly, but something perhaps analogous to it, an odd sort of discomfort as his eyes slide off her again to some point over her shoulder.
She no longer has the energy to be angry. Like everything else now, it just hurts.
“Inej,” the familiar rasp of his voice carves into her when he speaks. A long pause. “Are you well?”
“As well as can be expected,” she says coldly, and he can’t quite mask a flinch. Good, she thinks with a savage kind of pleasure. “What are you doing here?”
He looks back at her then, eyes flicking down to her middle and back up again. “It’s almost time, isn’t it? I came to be with you.”
He says it as though it is the most obvious thing in the world, like she’s the unreasonable one for asking, and she wonders that he doesn’t choke on the words. Perhaps she does have the energy to be angry after all.
“Well, nice as it is that you’ve finally decided to acknowledge the situation, you’ve had a wasted trip.” For all her months of longing for him, in that moment Inej can hardly recall a time when she wanted to see him less. “I don’t need you.”
He scowls at her. “It’s my child.”
“It’s my child,” she snaps, and for the very first time, she knows that it’s true. She has an odd feeling, a rush of what she supposes might be motherly instinct, and she rubs her hands over her belly, cradling the weight of it in her hands. His eyes track the movement, and then dart away again.
Damn Kaz Brekker and whatever saintsforsaken idea he took into his head that brought him here. He does not belong here, but she does. This is her country, her people, her home. Her baby can belong here, too. Here or anywhere else Inej chooses to be. She is a spy and an assassin and a pirate. She is the Wraith, she is the Sankta of the Sea. She can be a mother, too.
“Inej—”
“Do whatever you want, Kaz,” she interrupts, and shoulders past him. “You always do.”
He doesn’t try to follow her, and she doesn’t look back. She trudges through the wet grass as quickly as she is able, grinding her teeth, unsure whether to scream or cry.
She has taken to walking circuits around the wagons twice a day. In truth she does not feel much like walking these days. She is beyond exhausted most of the time, and she aches all over. Her legs hurt, her back hurts, her breasts hurt, and she has started to experience dull, cramping pains in her abdomen. Her mother tells her, though, that the walking is good for her, and will hurry the child along. More than anything, Inej is ready to get this thing out of her.
So, she walks. And fumes. And walks and walks and walks.
It is only when she’s sweating under her coat, hair sticking to the back of her neck, that she realises she might have pushed herself a bit too far. She’s out of breath, too, and her feet ache, and her jaw aches from where she’s been grinding her teeth, and her belly is so heavy, and this whole situation is so stupid—
Kaz is beside her, offering his arm. When had he got there? She doesn’t know, and the thought chills her. For a moment, she thinks of taking out one of the many knives she still carries on her person and stabbing him with it. Shaking her head, she takes another step forward, but she really is very tired and her parents' wagon is all the way over on the other side of the camp. He holds his arm out to her again. Furious, she takes it, though she does derive some satisfaction from digging her fingers in as hard as she can and watching as his jaw clenches.
.
Her parents are as pleased by Kaz’s arrival as Inej herself is, which is to say, not at all. Her father in particular is more furious than Inej has ever seen him, and he spends a decently long time shouting at Kaz, cursing him for his immorality and his faithlessness, calling him unworthy and a scoundrel and a pig.
Inej sits on the wagon steps with her mother hovering nearby and watches as Kaz absorbs his dressing down stoically, both hands folded neatly atop his cane. His Suli isn’t perfect, but he’s picked up enough over the years that she judges he probably grasps the bulk of what is being said to him. A few times, her father gets a little too close to Kaz, jabs a finger in his face, and Inej tenses, moves her hand to the blade strapped to her thigh. She may not be agile on her feet at the moment, but her aim is undiminished. If that cane moves a fraction of an inch, Inej’s knife will get there before he has time to swing it. But Kaz remains unmoving and, seemingly, unmoved.
Inej feels no particular need to advocate for him and no particular desire to have him with her at this point, but she recognises the expression on his face, the set of his shoulders. He’s set himself on a course of action, and if he cannot achieve it through diplomacy then violence will follow. If he’d caught her even a few weeks earlier, she might have made a good attempt at carving his liver from his body before sending him on his way. As it stands, she’s too exhausted now for bloodshed.
“Papa,” she says quietly, and her father stops mid-rant to turn to her, softening immediately. She says nothing further, but he reads her expression well enough. Relents.
Inej sleeps in her parents’ wagon but they will not permit Kaz to do the same, not that she wants them to. Ordinarily, he might be given a bed roll and a tarp and relegated to sleep outdoors but even spring in Ravka is far too cold for that, and so some of Inej’s cousins shuffle around to make a wagon available for him. A wagon to a single person is an unbelievable luxury in the caravan, and he doesn’t deserve it, but at least it keeps him out of Inej’s way. She shuts herself in her parent’s wagon and sets about ignoring him.
.
Kaz turns out to have been just in the nick of time, because her pains begin in earnest a day and a night after his arrival. She suffers them with gritted teeth for a full morning before she allows her mother to usher her gently to the birthing place.
The tent has been erected and ready for some weeks now, in the trees a distance from the caravan. Made of the same bright silk as the circus tent, the floor well rushed and matted against the damp. A large bed in the centre with rope to pull on while she labours, and plenty of space for the women to gather.
And gather they will, they already are, as Inej paces the grass outside the tent, rubbing her lower back and pausing every so often to squat and grind her teeth when a pain comes. It feels such a strange thing to do, but nobody looks at her strangely. All the women of the caravan are here, from the elderly to the girl-children still at the breast, bound to their mothers with slings of cloth. They are shaking out bedsheets, and lighting candles, praying and singing. They are setting pots of water to boil on three large fires banked up between the trees, and raking over coals which will be removed once glowing red-hot to braziers inside the tent for warmth. All of this activity for Inej’s sake, a well-practised dance ready to spring into action the moment word went round that the time was near.
If Inej had never been taken, she would have seen this dozens of times over by now, would have attended her aunts and cousins and friends, just as they will attend her now. The business of childbirth would be no mystery to her, and she would have gone to her own birthing bed armed with that knowledge and experience. It might have been a comfort. She might not have been so afraid.
Because she is afraid, now. She has no knowledge of birth save for what her mother has told her, and her memories of a few Menagerie girls who’d managed to hide their pregnancies long enough that there was nothing to be done but carry to term. They had been sold over and over to men with a fancy for that sort of thing, before giving birth in screaming isolation under Heleen’s beady eye and the care of the old medik she kept on retainer, only to have their children snatched from their arms and sold on again for a profit.
For a moment Inej thinks she is vanishing. She could be standing back in the parlour of the Menagerie, the sense memory is so strong, but she realises that someone has lit incense. The cloying, sweet smell of it catches in the back of her throat and she sinks to her knees and vomits onto the grass. Her mother makes a sound of alarm, and there are women hurrying towards her with water and cloths, and Inej is crying and all she can do is say the incense, the incense, over and over through her tears. It’s enough, though. The call is taken up by the women like sailors calling over the lines, and the incense is whisked away from her.
“Mama,” she gasps, and grips her mother tightly by the forearms, fingernails digging in. “Promise me that no one will take my baby. Promise.”
It’s a nonsensical thing to say. Her mother can’t promise her that, Inej knows, nobody can. It’s a cruel thing to ask of a woman who’d had her own child stolen from under her nose, but the fear has gripped Inej by the guts and it will not leave her.
Ishani grips Inej back just as tightly, though. “I promise, meja,” she says, and there is fire in her voice that Inej has never heard there before. “I promise you, by my life, nobody will take your child.”
Stillness has fallen over the women, Inej is vaguely aware. If she were more in her right self, she would be humiliated by the weeping mess she has become, but all she can do is clutch at her mother like she had when she was young and the world seemed like it would end if she let go.
“You are strong, Inej,” her mother’s hand is cool against her skin as she strokes her hair back from her forehead. “So much stronger than me. You will protect your child where I could not protect you.”
The Wraith, thinks Inej, clinging to the words. Sea Captain. Spy. She clutches her mother’s hands tighter as a pain comes, and slumps forward as it subsides. “I’m scared, Mama.”
“So are we all, when our time comes,” her mother croons, cradling her face, kissing her cheeks. “My sweet daughter, my Inej. Do not be frightened, we will help you.”
.
Calm comes back to Inej in stages, as activity resumes around her and the women begin to sing again. She is allowed to pace the grass until her water comes, and then she is ushered inside the tent where she strips her heavy clothes and is given a thin linen chemise to wear instead. The relief is instant, she had not realised how uncomfortable, how restricting her clothes were until she removed them.
Inej paces until she feels like her legs can no longer hold her up, and then she gets on the bed, rocking slowly on her hands and knees. The pains come stronger, and closer together. She is aware and not aware of her surroundings. Someone places a damp cloth scented with lavender on the back of her neck, but she doesn’t know who. Someone else holds a cup of water to her lips, tells her to sip slowly, and she obeys. There is a loop of rope bound right around the bed, and she twists it in her hands and pulls when the pains come. She had thought she would do this quietly, she is the Wraith after all, but she cannot help the sounds that escape her, moans and cries that come from some deep animal place inside her.
Her whole world is reduced to pure sensation, the ebb and flow of the pains, the feel of damp cloths wiping at her face, the low murmur of female voices telling her breathe and good and nearly there. There is nothing outside the tent, nothing outside Inej and her labour and the women around her. She is no longer afraid, but strong. Her body knows how to move, how to breathe, what noises to make, and Inej lets it carry her.
The peaceful atmosphere is broken as a commotion comes from outside. Cries go up from the women tending the fires, and male voices rise over them. There is a flutter of alarm inside the tent - childbirth is women’s work, and the men do not approach. They remain inside the circle of the wagons, calling prayers to the Saints and distracting the soon-to-be father with tales of when their own offspring were young. Inej blinks out of her trance-like state, coming back to herself sluggishly as a dull stab of fear goes through her. She bitterly regrets discarding her blades with her clothing, wishes she had kept one in her hand. Some of the women inside hurry toward the entrance of the tent, but her mother remains with her, rubbing her back soothingly, and the shouting outside gets even louder—
Kaz.
She recognises the grating timbre of his voice above the cacophony, along with that of her own father’s. Kaz is demanding, in heavily-accented Suli and typically blunt fashion, to be allowed entrance to the tent. Inej feels both sagging relief and the most intense, all-consuming annoyance she has ever experienced.
The shouting builds as more women rush outside to join the fray, and Inej can hear her father using words she wasn’t even aware he knew, threatening holy retribution and bodily harm, and at one stage she thinks she hears him say he’s going to castrate Kaz, and her mother curses and gets to her feet, striding purposefully toward the entrance, and Inej has had enough—
“Kaz!” Inej yells, and silence falls sudden as a lightning strike. “Just shut up and go away!” Her voice sounds ragged even to her own ears, and her words trail off into an almighty scream as the most intense pain yet rips through her.
Her mother is back at her side in an instant, and she feels someone else pulling at her chemise, rucking it up around her hips. The mood inside the tent changes palpably, becoming heavy, expectant.
Ishani smooths Inej’s sweat-soaked hair. “It’s time, meja. You must push now.”
The next time a pain comes, Inej twists her hands in the rope and pulls, and she bears down, and she screams.
When the wave passes, she sags forward on her hands, gasping for breath. There are women rubbing her back and massaging her legs, speaking with encouraging voices, telling her good girl and rest a moment.
The shouting has not resumed, and a woman comes flustering back inside. “He is not trying to come in, but he will not leave.”
“That’s as good as you’re going to get from him,” Inej pants through gritted teeth, even as she gathers the rope again and draws her breath to push.
Inej never quite makes it back to that trance-like state she’d been in before, but she finds the rhythm of push and scream and breathe and rest and push and she sinks into it. She has no sense of how much time has passed, it seems to go on forever.
At one point she feels like her body has nothing else to give. “Mama, I can’t do it, I can’t do it,” she sobs, arms and legs trembling, sweat dripping down her neck.
“You can, meja, you will,” her mother is beside her still, and her words are chorused by the other women. “You’re so close now, my darling. A few more minutes.”
A few more minutes, Inej holds onto those words. A few minutes and it will all be over. When the pain comes again, Inej screams louder than she’s ever screamed, and she feels a gush of hot liquid and a strange slippery, slithering sensation and then it’s done, and many hands are easing her onto her back against a huge pile of pillows as a reedy cry fills the tent. The women are jubilant, and her mother is crying as she places a wet, wriggling little creature onto Inej’s chest.
Inej’s hands come up automatically to hold it to her, and its little body is slippery, marbled as it is with blood and womb grease. She can’t quite process it. How is it that just a moment ago she was labouring on her hands and knees and now this thing is here, it’s on her, and it’s a person and it’s alive.
“It’s a girl,” her mother laughs, tears streaming down her face.
A girl. A daughter. Inej has a daughter. She is a mother. A choked sound escapes from her, half laugh, half sob, and her vision goes blurry with tears.
Another commotion rises outside, and a moment later the silk flap of the tent is swept harshly aside, and then Kaz is in among them. The women shriek in outrage, but his eyes have fixed upon Inej and his face has gone the sickly, waxy shade of old tallow.
“It’s okay,” croaks Inej, unheard by all except her mother, who gets to her feet to shoo the women away from Kaz.
Inej cannot take her eyes off him as he crosses the short distance between them, and his eyes are roving, slipping from Inej, to the baby on her chest, further down and then back up. She feels strangely serene. Doesn’t care that her legs are still open, chemise around her hips, thighs coated with blood. Doesn’t care that there is sweat slick on her skin and tears on her face. She finds she can’t care about anything except her baby girl, red and angry at being born, squalling in time to the beat of her heart.
Had she been angry with Kaz before? She cannot recall.
He stops at her bedside and looks down at her for a moment, and she has never, never seen that expression on his face before.
“Kaz, look,” she says, barely above a whisper, but silence reigns now and he hears her loud and clear. “It’s a girl.”
He goes slowly to his knees beside her, one gloved hand rising to cover his mouth as he looks at the baby. She waits, for what she doesn’t quite know. For him to speak, for him to leave. After a long moment, his hand drops from his mouth, landing with a dull thump on the bloody sheet beside her hip.
“Inej,” he rasps, and his voice is strangled, like it’s an effort to get the words out. “What have we done?”
.
Now that he’s made it in, there’s no removing Kaz. He plants himself like a tree and refuses to budge, so the women give up and continue their work, skirting around him, bewildered at his continued presence.
Inej kneels on the floor to deliver the afterbirth, arms reaching across the bed to where Kaz still kneels on the other side, gripping his hands tightly. She keeps one hand in his when she is placed back onto the bed, the other hand holding onto her mother as one of the caravan elders massages her belly deeply to slow the bleeding. It’s unpleasant, but nothing compared to the birth, and Inej endures it quietly, her gaze fixed on the other side of the tent where her baby is being wiped clean with a damp cloth. When the old woman is satisfied with her bleeding, Inej is pulled gently back to her feet. She goes willingly, limbs loose, docile as a lamb. She thinks dreamily that these women could lead her right over a cliff and she would go without question, so complete is her trust, her sense of safety.
When the bloody chemise is stripped from Inej’s body, there are scandalised gasps from some of the younger women, pointed looks in Kaz’s direction. Inej’s mother waves them away.
“How do you think he got a child on her in the first place?” Ishani says, tossing the bloodied garment to one of them. “Modesty has no place in the birthing tent. Stop your twittering and do something useful.”
The soiled sheets - along with the thick mattress topper - are stripped off the bed for burning and replaced with fresh bedding while Inej is washed with more of the lavender-scented water brought in from the fires. Now that the exertion has passed and her sweat is cooled on her skin, Inej feels chilled and the hot water is heavenly, soothing. She allows her head to loll, eyes closed, luxuriating.
When Inej is clean, she is wrapped with thick padding between her legs, a fresh nightgown is slipped over her head, and she is put back into a clean bed piled high with pillows. She reaches out her arms, and her baby is brought to her - now clean, and wrapped in the same blanket that her mother had once wrapped her in. Tears come to her eyes again.
Someone has found Kaz a low stool, and he sits beside the bed now, watching her silently as she settles the child into her arms. He doesn’t ask to hold the baby, and she doesn’t offer. Now that the girl is sleeping, and not covered in blood, Inej can study her little face. She’s never really thought that babies looked like anything other than babies, not that she’d ever looked at them that closely. Not so, now. The child has Inej’s coloring, bronze skin and a thatch of thick black hair. Inej can see Kaz running strongly through her features, though, the sharp angle of the eyebrows, the upturned nose, the wide mouth. How fascinating, she thinks, to see such a blend of the two of them in another person.
The women trickle out, until only her mother remains, puttering in the background, giving them space. The tent is warm, and quiet, and Inej notes that the light filtering through the flap has turned the soft gold of early evening. She laboured the entire day.
She is so tired.
She looks at Kaz, blinking at him sleepily. He is still watching her quietly, leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees and hands clasped loosely between them. He’s regained some of his colour, no longer looks as though he may pass out at any moment. His steely composure is firmly back in place, too, face expressionless.
“She looks like you,” she tells him.
“Poor thing,” his voice betrays no emotion.
The corner of her mouth twitches, but she’s too tired to engage in any kind of banter with him. Tired in her bones, and sore. Her head feels foggy, and she is starting to remember that she is unhappy with him, but she can’t quite bring herself to feel what she should be feeling about it.
There’s always tomorrow.
She looks down at the baby again. “What shall we call her?”
It’s a relatively one sided conversation, mostly Inej suggesting names and Kaz shooting them down, though he does make a few suggestions of his own, all of which Inej hates. She doesn’t know why she even cares about his opinion, really. It’s her baby, she grew her and birthed her, she should get to name her and damn what Kaz thinks. Inej knows that if she declares she has picked a name and will not be moved, he will accept it without argument. But, she realises, she wants him to show some kind of ownership over his role in this, any kind of interest, she wants them to do this one thing together. So they continue a seemingly endless debate. Suli names, Kerch names, Ravkan names, even a few Kaelish names thrown in for good measure. Time ticks by. They agree on nothing.
“Kaz…” a thought occurs to Inej, and she looks slowly up at him, weighing her words, wondering if she really dares to ask what she’s about to ask. “What was your mother’s name?”
His eyes do not move from the baby in her arms. He is silent for so long she thinks he is not going to answer her at all. Eventually, though, he speaks. It seems to take great effort, as though he has to dredge it up from some deep place inside of himself, like so much water from a well. “Genna.”
“Genna,” she repeats softly, and looks back down at her daughter, speaking the name over and over, rolling it around in her mouth, testing the shape of it. “Genna.”
She looks back to Kaz, eyebrows raised in silent question. He looks back steadily and she does not know what he is thinking at all.
He nods once.
Inej looks back to the child, stroking a finger down her tiny cheek. “Genna Brekker.”
A long pause.
“Rietveld,” says Kaz.
~*~*~*~