𝑮𝑳𝑰𝑻𝑻𝑬𝑹 | 𝑘.𝑏.

44

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R I E T V E L D
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UNRAVELING ONE'S HISTORY IS DANGEROUS. Picking at fraying threads and trailing them back through dark places all in the name of making sure you get it right. You need to be quite sure of the accusations you're making, the life you're wrenching out of the dust.

When Feta was a child fresh out of icy Fjerdan terror and still believing the obelisk to be magical, she could never sleep through the night. Her parents couldn't either. They would pretend to be asleep for her sake, but the truth was they all laid awake sick from the life they'd barely escaped.

Just in time, too. Mere weeks after they'd arrived in Kerch, the island was terrorized by the Queen's Lady Plague, the city below them erupting with panic and the rotten smell of bodies.

It was all by chance, at the end of the day.

Feta left the side of her "sleeping" mother to join her father at the obelisk's stout window that overlooked the True Sea. The water never looked much less murky in the smoggy daylight. Although at least in the dark, one couldn't as easily make out Reaper's Barge, the horrid hazard of corpses just a few miles out from the island.

A member of the Council was to assign that week's supply runs and watch schedule with those in various obelisks along the Lid, and it was between Feta's mother breaking the illusion of rest or Feta's father standing in. The Cadners prided themselves on always committing to an act. Feta's father left her to guard the harbor alone — the plague had halted shipping in and out of Kerch meaning the harbors were deserted save for the occasional flatboat that ventured out to Reaper's Barge. Besides, she was meant to be a council member in training anyway — and not even five minutes after he stepped out did the cries begin.

I'm alive.

Small. Severely hoarse.

It left Feta chilled to the core.

If she'd been considering sleep at all it was no longer an option. Although maybe she was making it up, for her mother didn't flinch and she had been the most sensitive of them all to the moaning of the diseased along the canals.

I'm alive.

So she hadn't been hearing things.

Perhaps her mother had just fallen back asleep. Perhaps her mother figured this wasn't their problem.

The voice was nearly lost in the tumble of the waves, in the commotion of the Staves, but Feta sat unmoving, unable to do anything but listen intently over the pounding of her heart as the sea tossed the message up to her.

The water listens and understands. As Ketterdam's canal rats would later teach her, although it was something Feta already knew, Water has a voice.

Feta didn't move even when her father came back. He took up his post at the window beside her and tried to come to terms with his daughter's bloodshot eyes, her vigilant posture. Believe it or not, despite her wonder and her sparse delights in the small things, Feta didn't laugh much as a child. There was hardly cause for it; her parents had hoped Ketterdam's entertaining clamor might help with that.

Besides feeling the tides tug to their heart's content, Feta and her father didn't have much else to do, and Feta saw to it that they hardly spoke. She was still listening.

Morning approached and Feta was still restless, inconsolable, though she hid it well. She convinced her father to go lay down, get some sleep, assured him that she could finish the night watch. Maybe he was only humoring her, but he left her to it. He knew that sometimes she enjoyed the distraction the Staves had to offer, but she had an acute sense of the water, and was more than capable at the bright age of nine of multitasking her duties with the delight she deserved.

Enter Kaz.

Feta sensed him before she saw him. Something bobbing, desperately kicking through the waves from the direction of Reaper's Barge, where the voice had rolled in from. The tide was being difficult, venturing out while somebody was obviously trying to make it in to shore, but one of the perks of training under an elitist group of Tidemakers was that you could always turn the tides in your favor. It took a couple tries but Feta passed one hand over the other and drew the tides in, drew in whoever was on them.

And in the pale dawn that was sweeping the harbor, Feta saw the boy approaching from maybe a hundred yards out. He kicked gratefully with the tides that had seemingly changed their mind. Even if the boy hadn't been accompanied by a strange looking raft, Feta would've kept him afloat.

Feta watched in awe as he entered the shallows just to the east of her obelisk, not stopping for an instant in his ascent up the dock ladder. He flopped on his back on the wooden slats, frail chest heaving as he looked ready to embrace the sky, should it fall.

It took Feta a long moment to release her grip on the tide. She wanted to hide beneath the waters like a frightened child pulling a blanket up to her nose: the raft the boy was using had been a corpse.

As the boy on the dock rolled over, Feta tried desperately, despite the sick feeling of the water around it, to yank the corpse out of sight. She was so tired from staying up off pure adrenaline and from commanding the tides that the waterlogged body knocked against the pylon a few times before she successfully lured it out to sea.

Only recently had Feta guessed that the corpse had to have mattered to Kaz, had to have been his brother. The boy she'd washed up was a survivor — and would go on to become something worse — but he was still sentimental then. He had not known that sentiment was a weapon against those who had it.

Almost five years would pass before Feta would leave the obelisk. This, too, was in part to Kaz.

It was his face in the newspaper — youngest fella in the Ketterdam jail — that shook her awake. Life was happening without her. Errand runs with her mother could only show her so much. And yet here was this boy her age, vaguely familiar, who was being arrested for petty crimes. Once, then for a second time a few months later. Only the first headshot was tagged under Rietveld.

By the time she'd met Kaz off a string of pure coincidences, he'd gouged out the Rietveld name, replaced it with mechanical, clanky Brekker. Of course it suited him: he'd picked it himself.

But Rietveld was a survivor, or at least he survived first.

Rietveld reminded her of the children of other Grisha families the Cadners had met on the run, those who'd been ambushed after they'd all gone to appeal to the Ravkan King to let them cross the Fjerda-Ravka border, and all of them had been turned away.

Nobody had protected them. Just as, Feta would learn, nobody protected the Rietveld brothers.

The city had forgotten the name Rietveld and it had slipped away from everyone's minds, just another thing this city could blissfully ignore.

And then Feta deserted her post. Picked up a job at the University. Met Jesper. Ran off with him to the sinful Staves, eager to see the action from the ground and not just the fireworks from above. And when Jesper introduced her to the new friend he brought to one of her gigs, the name Kaz Rietveld almost tripped off her tongue in shock.

He even spoke with the same rasp. I'm alive.

Kaz was the catalyst for Feta, and unknowingly, in some ways, Feta had held that boy as a symbol of hope. Perhaps that would've been different if Feta had known of the vendetta-driven bastard he'd become, but nightmares of Fjerda had begun to be interspersed with dreams where Feta brought the boy up through the obelisk window on a giant surging wave and let him sit in the warm orange glow of the obelisk room until he could speak of what happened.

Call it a savior-complex. Whatever.

Young Feta was both aware the world was built on suffering and righteous beyond her years. The scorn of "naive" would follow Feta into her more mature years although Feta would never truly understand what was so naive about doing your best to be the light in the darkness. She didn't believe she could end all suffering, but she certainly wanted to help. She wanted to make things easier.

So that's the shameful truth. The death wish. Feta wanted to spark wonder in the dull and comfort the hurt. She wanted to be too good to be true. Sue her.