Flock and Court- SoC

4

KAZ

4 Days, 20 Hours Before THE KETTERDAM TRIAL

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  It's my responsibility. My gift.

   These words flitted through Kaz Brekker's mind as he forcefully wrenched himself from slumber. He'd fallen asleep at his desk again: a grave miscalculation.

Light brown eyes, familiar eyes, remained etched behind his eyelids for a second, full and unblinking. The remnants of a dream not quite shaken. And Kaz was shaken.

   He stood abruptly, bad leg banging against his desk painfully. The movement sent papers cascading to the floor in lazy parables like fat snowflakes. He didn't care. He strode away from his desk and threw open the window of his upper-floor apartment, leaning on his windowsill and scattering a murder of roosting crows. Indignant caws pierced the morning air. Kaz ignored it all, breathing heavily.

   Below the Slat, the street was nearly barren in the early daylight. Kaz wasn't sure what he was scanning for: a culprit, a distraction, a hapless pigeon to con. There would be none of these in the Barrel at this hour. Two old women with hooked noses and knarled fingers peered up at Kaz knowingly. A boy dressed in plain clothes crossed the street with his back to Kaz, the nape of his alabaster neck peeking between his collar and hat like a gleaming bone. Kaz lowered his head.

   He needed to relax. This one hadn't been bad.

   There had been a picture; a crayon drawing of stick figures, some scribbled red, some blue, some purple. It had been the work of Kaz's hands, still fat from childhood and ungloved from innocence. His mother had crouched in front of him on the kitchen tiles. She'd been watching him, whispering parting words. Young Kaz barely looked up from his drawing. He'd been old enough to preoccupy himself but too young to be preoccupied. He had wanted a snack at the time.

    Who is this? His mother had asked instead when nothing had gotten through to her youngest son. She pointed to a figure on Kaz's drawing coloured cherry red. That he could understand. He'd beaten his small fist against his chest as a demonstration for her. She'd smiled, then said those words that meant nothing and amounted to nothing. Then she'd gone. Jordie had been off crying somewhere. His father, tight-lipped and pale-faced. Kaz had never been good at goodbyes.

    The crows had reclustered around Kaz's open window expectantly, and he raised his head to meet their beady eyes. The scent of clover and apples lingered in his nose, no doubt residue from his dream. Kaz could still feel his mother's presence as acutely as if she were in the room with him now. No, not my mother's presence, he realized with a jolt, turning back towards the interior of his room, But someone else's.

    Inej was here. Inej was here. She'd curled up on the left side of his bed, discarding the heavy blankets in favour of a simple sheet more suitable for the season. Her chest rose in time as she lay sprawled on her back. He told himself he was scanning for new scars as his eyes roamed her face; her neck; her arms. She looked a bit older, a testament to the thirteen months shed been away at sea. Her skin was more deeply bronzed than when hed last seen her, tanned by the sea-born, summer sun- the likes of which this city rarely saw.

    Any Ketterdam native knew that if he wished to see sunlight, he best awake at sunrise before the rising sun crept upwards into the city's perpetual embrace of cloud. Soon, the light falling on Ketterdam would be diluted, spotted, grainy. The sky, a slate grey nearly all year round. But not now. Not yet. 

    A finger of golden sunlight extended across Kaz's room, colouring his desk, reaching across the wood panels of his floorboards. The rising sun pooled in the recesses of Inej's face, dipping in the hollows of her clavicles. It set her long hair aglow, dark locks gleaming like spilled ink toppled against the white of his pillow. Her face was utterly serene beneath the light's caressing touch- as if she knew it shone just for her. And how could it not? Inej had always been a creature of the sun: tipping her face back as she sat on his window ledge, climbing gabled rooves hurriedly to bask in its glow, smiling faintly during a job whenever the sky broke open. Kaz felt peculiar at the sight of her swaddled in his sheets, sleeping in his bed. It wasn't quite the satisfaction of a well-devised plan saw to completion, nor the euphoria of a successful heist. It was something warm as the sunlight bathing Inej's face in amber. For the first time in weeks, Kaz felt a sense of momentary peace. Seeing her there wasn't a promise- not like when he'd held her hand on the dock three years ago. It was more like a glimpse of a potential future. Something that could be. He wanted this to be the memory he dreamt of when he closed his eyes. This one, rather than those others. All he could do was admire her, watching appreciatively as the sun touched her skin, daring to do what he could not. He wanted this moment, this girl.