𝐎𝐂𝐄𝐀𝐍 𝐄𝐘𝐄𝐒-Kaz Brekker

𝐈𝐕.

𝐎𝐂𝐄𝐀𝐍 𝐄𝐘𝐄𝐒

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑: 𝐈𝐕.

Raisa had been a late bloomer.

She didn't reach her growth spurt until she turned fourteen. She had been at the Little Palace for a year but still looked ten years old, small, scrawny, weak.

Training with Botkin always made the others mock her. She was a child. Smaller than all the others, tripping over her kefta. She would have done anything to prove herself, to stand out above the rest.

Maybe that was why Kirigan chose her. The weakest of the bunch could become his personal Heartrender, could become more, could become powerful.

By fifteen, she would have done anything for him. She killed her first man at his urging. A criminal, he had claimed, a Fjerdan who murdered one of our kind. And the stupid girl believed him, because she knew all the stories, that the Fjerdans kidnapped Grisha and killed them, and if he had murdered one of their own, wasn't this justice?

He had screamed when Raisa killed him. She hadn't been skilled enough to make it instant.

There had been tears. She can still feel Kirigan's hands, holding her shoulders, squeezing her, and telling her that it was the right thing to do.

She's always been late. Late to dinners, earning disapproving looks from the others. And Kirigan would laugh because that's just how children are. Late to meetings with the king when he would send soldiers of the Second Army to fight in the war she hardly knew why they were fighting. Her general was always forgiving because she was just a girl.

But weren't they all like her? Children taken away from everything they knew, trained at the Little Palace, made to fight, made to kill.

What made her different from the others? Be it childish nativity or perhaps something else entirely, Raisa could never figure it out.

After all, she was just a child. Knobbly-kneed and terrified, wanting desperately to fit in.

But now she's here. Across the Fold. Grown, now. And she's not late, she's early, the first to realize that Kirigan isn't what everyone seems to think he is.

She sits at the bar in the Crow Club, trying her best to drink away the anxieties welling within her. Sunrise. They only have until sunrise to figure out a way across the Fold.

She went at it alone the first time. Her power didn't work on the volcra but she had stayed quiet. No sandskiff, no light, only blind ambition and a racing heart that she prayed to all the Saints the volcra couldn't hear above their own screaming.