Six of Crows (32 page)

“I’m exhausted,” she said angrily. “And once I fall asleep, all we’ll have is that fire to keep us warm. I can see you shaking from here. Are all Fjerdans this prudish?”

No. Maybe. He didn’t really know. The
drüskelle
were a holy order. They were meant to live chastely until they took wives – good Fjerdan wives who didn’t run around yelling at people and taking their clothes off.

“Are all Grisha so immodest?” he asked defensively.

“Boys and girls train side by side together in the First and Second Armies. There isn’t a lot of room for maidenly blushing.”

“It’s not natural for women to fight.”

“It’s not natural for someone to be as stupid as he is tall, and yet there you stand. Did you really swim all those miles just to die in this hut?”

“It’s a lodge, and you don’t know that we swam miles.”

Nina blew out an exasperated breath and curled up on her side, burrowing as close as she could get to the fire. “I’m too tired to argue.” She closed her eyes. “I can’t believe your face is going to be the last thing I see before I die.”

He felt like she was daring him. Matthias stood there feeling foolish and hating her for making him feel that way. He turned his back on her and quickly sloughed off his sodden clothes, spreading them beside the fire. He glanced once at her to make sure she wasn’t looking then strode to the blankets and wriggled in behind her, still trying to keep his distance.

“Closer,
drüskelle
,” she crooned, taunting.

He threw an arm over her, hooking her back against his chest. She let out a startled
oof
and shifted uneasily.

“Stop moving,” he muttered. He’d been close to girls – not many, it was true – but none of them had been like her. She was indecently round.

“You’re cold and clammy,” she complained with a shiver. “It’s like lying next to a burly squid.”

“You told me to get closer!”

“Ease up a bit,” she instructed and when he did, she flipped over to face him.

“What are you doing?” he asked, pulling back in a panic.

“Relax,
drüskelle
. This isn’t where I have my way with you.”

His blue eyes narrowed. “I hate the way you talk.” Did he imagine the hurt that flashed across her face? As if his words could have any effect on this witch.

She confirmed he’d been imagining things when she said, “Do you think I care what you like or

don’t like?”

She laid her hands on his chest, focusing on his heart. He shouldn’t let her do this, shouldn’t show his weakness, but as his blood began to flow and his body warmed, the relief and ease that coursed through him felt too good to resist.

He let himself relax slightly, grudgingly, beneath her palms. She flipped over and pulled his arm back around her. “You’re welcome, you big idiot.”

He’d lied. He did like the way she talked.

He still did. He could hear her yammering to Inej somewhere behind him, trying to teach her Fjerdan words. “No, Hring-kaaalle. You have to hang on the last syllable a bit.”

“Hringalah?” tried Inej.

“Better but – here, it’s like Kerch is a gazelle. It hops from word to word,” she pantomimed.

“Fjerdan is like gulls, all swoops and dives.” Her hands became birds riding currents on the air. At that moment, she looked up and caught him staring.

He cleared his throat. “Do not eat the snow,” he counselled. “It will only dehydrate you and lower your body temperature.” He plunged forward, eager to be up the next hill with some distance between them. But as he came over the rise, he halted dead in his tracks.

He turned round, holding out his arms. “Stop! You don’t want to—”

But it was too late. Nina clapped her hands over her mouth. Inej made some kind of warding sign in the air. Jesper shook his head, and Wylan gagged. Kaz stood like a stone, his expression inscrutable.

The pyre had been made on a bluff. Whoever was responsible had tried to build the fire in the shelter of a rock outcropping, but it hadn’t been enough to keep the flames from dying out in the wind. Three stakes had been driven into the icy ground, and three charred bodies were bound to them, their blackened, cracked skin still smouldering.

“
Ghezen
,” swore Wylan. “What is this?”

“This is what Fjerdans do to Grisha.” Nina said. Her face was slack, her green eyes staring.

“It’s what criminals do,” said Matthias, his insides churning. “The pyres have been illegal since—”

Nina whirled on him and shoved his chest hard. “Don’t you dare,” she seethed, fury burning like a halo around her. “Tell me the last time someone was prosecuted for putting a Grisha to the flames. Do you even call it murder when you put down dogs?”

“Nina—”

“Do you have a different name for killing when you wear a uniform to do it?”

They heard it then – a moan, like a creaking wind.

“Saints,” Jesper said. “One of them is alive.”

The sound came again, thin and keening, from the black hulk of the body on the far right. It was impossible to tell if the shape was male or female. Its hair had burned away, its clothing fused to its limbs. Black flakes of skin had peeled away in places, showing raw flesh.

A sob tore from Nina’s throat. She raised her hands but she was shaking too badly to use her power to end the creature’s suffering. She turned her tear-filled eyes to the others. “I … Please, someone …”

Jesper moved first. Two shots rang out, and the body fell silent. Jesper returned his pistols to their holsters.

“Damn it, Jesper,” Kaz growled. “You just announced our presence for miles.”

“So they think we’re a hunting party.”

“You should have let Inej do it.”

“I didn’t want to do it,” Inej said quietly. “Thank you, Jesper.”

Kaz’s jaw ticked, but he said nothing more.

“Thank you,” Nina choked out. She plunged ahead over the frozen ground, following the shape of the path through the snow. She was weeping, stumbling over the terrain. Matthias followed. There were few landmarks here, and it was easy to get turned around.

“Nina, you musn’t stray from the group—”

“That’s what you’re going back to, Helvar,” she said harshly. “That’s the country you long to serve. Does it make you proud?”

“I’ve never sent a Grisha to the pyre. Grisha are given a fair trial—”

She turned on him, goggles up, tears frozen on her cheeks.

“Then why has a Grisha never been found innocent at the end of your supposedly fair trials?”

“I—”

“Because our crime is
existing
. Our crime is what we are.”

Matthias went quiet, and when he spoke he was caught between shame for what he was about to say and the need to speak the words, the words he’d been raised on, the words that still rang true for him.

“Nina, has it ever occurred to you that maybe … you weren’t
meant
to exist?”

Nina’s eyes glinted green fire. She took a step towards him, and he could feel the rage radiating off her. “Maybe you’re the ones who shouldn’t exist, Helvar. Weak and soft, with your short lives and your sad little prejudices. You worship woodsprites and ice spirits who can’t be bothered to show themselves, but you see real power, and you can’t wait to stamp it out.”

“Don’t mock what you don’t understand.”

“My
mockery
offends you? My people would welcome your laughter in place of this barbarity.” A look of supreme satisfaction crossed her face. “Ravka is rebuilding. So is the Second Army, and when they do, I hope they give you the fair trial you deserve. I hope they put the
drüskelle
in shackles and make them stand to hear their crimes enumerated so the world will have an accounting of your evils.”

“If you’re so desperate to see Ravka rise, why aren’t you there now?”

“I want you to have your pardon, Helvar. I want you to be here when the Second Army marches north and overruns every inch of this wasteland. I hope they burn your fields and salt the earth. I hope they send your friends and your family to the pyre.”

“They already did, Zenik. My mother, my father, my baby sister. Inferni soldiers, your precious, persecuted Grisha, burned our village to the ground. I have nothing left to lose.”

Nina’s laugh was bitter. “Maybe your stay in Hellgate was too short, Matthias. There’s always more to lose.”

I
can smell them.
Nina batted at her hair and clothes as she lurched through the snow, trying not to retch. She couldn’t stop seeing those bodies, the angry red flesh peeking through their burned black casings like banked coals. It felt as if she was coated in their ashes, in the stink of burning flesh. She couldn’t take a full breath.

Being around Matthias made it easy to forget what he really was, what he really thought of her.

She’d tailored him again just this morning, enduring his glowers and grumbling. No,
enjoying
them, grateful for the excuse to be near him, ridiculously pleased every time she brought him close to a laugh.
Saints, why do I care?
Why did one smile from Matthias Helvar feel like fifty from someone else? She’d felt his heart race when she’d tipped his head back to work on his eyes. She’d thought about kissing him. She’d wanted to kiss him, and she was pretty sure he’d been thinking the same thing.
Or maybe he was thinking about strangling me again.

She hadn’t forgotten what he’d said aboard the
Ferolind
, when he’d asked what she intended to do about Bo Yul-Bayur, if she truly meant to hand the scientist over to the Kerch. If she sabotaged Kaz’s mission, would it cost Matthias his pardon? She couldn’t do that. No matter what he was, she owed him his freedom.

Three weeks she’d travelled with Matthias after the shipwreck. They hadn’t had a compass, hadn’t known where they were going. They hadn’t even known where on the northern shore they’d washed

up. They’d spent long days slogging through the snow, freezing nights in whatever rudimentary shelter they could assemble or in the deserted huts of whaling camps when they were lucky enough to come across them. They’d eaten roasted seaweed and whatever grasses or tubers they could find.

When they’d found a stash of dried reindeer meat at the bottom of a travel pack in one of the camps, it had been like some kind of miracle. They’d gnawed on it in mute bliss, feeling nearly drunk on its flavour.

After the first night, they’d slept in all the dry clothes and blankets they could find but on opposite sides of the fire. If they didn’t have wood or kindling, they curled against one another, barely touching, but by morning, they’d be pressed together, breathing in tandem, cocooned in muzzy sleep, a single crescent moon.

Every morning he complained that she was impossible to wake.

“It’s like trying to raise a corpse.”

“The dead request five more minutes,” she would say, and bury her head in the furs.

He’d stomp around, packing their few things as loudly as possible, grumbling to himself. “Lazy, ridiculous, selfish …” until she finally roused herself and set about preparing for the day.

“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?” she asked him on one of their endless days trekking through the snow, hoping to find some sign of civilization.

“Sleep,” he said. “Bathe. Pray for my lost friends.”

“Oh yes, the other thugs and killers. How did you become a
drüskelle
, anyway?”

“
Your
friends slaughtered my family in a Grisha raid,” he’d said coldly. “Brum took me in and gave me something to fight for.”

Nina hadn’t wanted to believe that, but she knew it was possible. Battles happened, innocent lives were lost in the cross fire. It was equally disturbing to think of that monster Brum as some kind of father figure.

It didn’t seem right to argue or to apologise, so she said the first thing that popped into her head.

“
Jer molle pe oonet. Enel mörd je nej afva trohem verretn.
” I have been made to protect you. Only in death will I be kept from this oath.

Matthias had stared at her in shock. “That’s the
drüskelle
oath to Fjerda. How do you know those words?”

“I tried to learn as much about Fjerda as I could.”

“Why?”

She’d wavered, then said, “So I wouldn’t fear you.”

“You don’t seem afraid.”

“Are you afraid of me?” she’d asked.

“No,” he’d said, and he’d sounded almost surprised. He’d claimed before that he didn’t fear her.

This time she believed him. She tried to remind herself that wasn’t a good thing.

They’d walked on for a while, and then he’d asked, “What’s the first thing you’re going to do?”

“Eat.”

“Eat what?”

“Everything. Stuffed cabbage, potato dumplings, blackcurrant cakes, blini with lemon zest. I can’t wait to see Zoya’s face when I come walking into the Little Palace.”