THE HOLLOW , ( grishaverse )

eight: THE HEIST

THE HOLLOW
eight: THE HEIST

        LILIA MISSES EVERYTHING about Kavatero, except for her family.

She misses the morning sun, bright and golden, flooding in through her windows, illuminating the courtyard. She misses the shapes it creates, bold fractures of colour — sea green, royal blue, coral pink and dusky orange — scattered across the pale marble floors. She misses it's jagged white cliffs, and the way they fall into the sea, and the emerald blue seas that lash against them, tearing them down in their might. She misses the swooping claw rooftops of the houses she used to look over from the height of her window, and their white and coral walls turned by the sea breeze, jutting out of the rock, standing tall and proud like soldiers standing to attention. She misses the fountains in the courtyard, five leaping dolphins carved of once-pristine white marble chasing each other through cascades of water, iridescent blue tiles glittering at its base.

Kavatero is a flurry of bright colours and soft edges. A watercolour painting of a place. Ketterdam is a smudge of faded grey and blotted white, all spiked and bleeding edges. Like water spilt across that once-great watercolour painting.

If going back was so easy, she never would have left. But there's a darkness in her home that rivals that of Ketterdam.

Lilia isn't scared of anything. She's trained herself not to be. At her brother's rage, the father's passiveness. She's ignored the terror that rose up before her, a monster beneath the bed of a child, the ghostly shadow of a tree beyond the window. Fear was weakness and if there was one thing her father hated — loathed and destroyed — was weakness. He'd pick it apart, each broken part of her mind that sung with weight of worry and reluctance.

Fear gets you killed.

And especially in the backstreets of Ketterdam, where the wretched play, and fear makes you weak. Lilia doesn't have time to be scared; if she stops, looks back, measures her worries, there'll surely come for her.

Lilia isn't scared of anything anymore. But Kaz Brekker angry comes close.

It's a silent kind of anger. One which twists his mouth and furrows his brow, lingers upon the air like the stench of the Ketterdam harbours. The kind of anger that lies in wait, ready to tear and bite and consume.

It's not as if she even did anything wrong. She'd hopped from one public house to another, one she was more familiar with, to meet with an old friend, while Kaz tried to figure out their route into the Little Palace. Inej, Jesper and Arken were sitting around when she'd left — drinking and eating and recovering after their long (and incredibly stressful) journey from Ketterdam — so Lilia moving from one public house to another was hardly a great loss. It's not as if she'd be missed.

She's not even sure why Kaz asked her to come in the first place. He and his Crows seem perfectly capable without her.

The sound of his cane, clear and insistent against the cobblestone streets carves their way through the busy streets. He's scowling, she can see it every time he glances back to check that she's still following him; her footsteps get so lost amongst the noise of the street — of merchants calling to the crowd, peddling their wares, of people going about their daily business — that, if she wanted to sneak away, she could. She could melt into the crowd and make her own way to the little palace from here, now they've made it past the Fold.

But Kaz has a way into the Little Palace, or so he was trying to find, and it seems wiser to stick with him until they have their way inside. And her father isn't here, in Ravka; there's no need to run.

At least, not for Lilia.

Maybe the Crows have a thousand untold secrets, and maybe Arken does too. And they're all running from a reality that's even more terrible than the worst of nightmares. Problems that are so unimaginable in their magnitude that Kruge cannot solve, but would surely come close to solving.