Page 50 of Crooked Kingdom (Dregs 2)
When Colm had finished, the last notes drifting up into the cherry tree’s branches, Jesper said, “Was Ma a witch?”
Colm laid a freckled hand on his son’s shoulder and drew him close. “She was a queen, Jes,” he said. “She was our queen.”
Jesper had made dinner for them that night, burnt biscuits and watery soup, but his father ate every bite and read to him from his Kaelish book of Saints until the lights burned low and the pain in Jesper’s heart eased enough for him to sleep. And that was the way it had been from then on, the two of them, looking after each other, working the fields, bundling and drying jurda in the summers, trying to make the farm pay. Why hadn’t it been enough?
But even as Jesper had the thought, he knew it could never be enough. He could never go back to that life. He hadn’t been built for it. Maybe if his mother had lived, she would have taught him to channel his restlessness. Maybe she would have shown him how to use his power instead of hiding it. Maybe he’d have gone to Ravka to be a soldier for the crown. Or maybe he would have ended up right here anyway.
He wiped the stain of the jurda from his fingertips and placed the lid back on the tin.
“The Zemeni don’t just use the blossoms,” he said. “I remember my mother soaking jurda stalks in goat’s milk. She gave it to me when I’d been out in the fields.”
“Why?” asked Matthias.
“To counteract the effects of inhaling jurda pollen all day. It’s too much for a child’s system, and no one wanted me more excitable than I already was.”
“The stalks?” repeated Kuwei. “Most people just dispose of them.”
“The stalks have a balm in them. The Zemeni drain it for ointments. They rub it on babies’ gums and nostrils when they’re burning jurda.” Jesper’s fingers drummed on the tin, a thought forming in his mind. Could the secret to the antidote for jurda parem be the jurda plant itself? He wasn’t a chemist; he didn’t think like Wylan, and he hadn’t been trained as a Fabrikator. But he was his mother’s son. “What if there’s a version of the balm that would counteract the effects of jurda parem? There still wouldn’t be a way to admin—”
That was when the window shattered. Jesper had his guns drawn in less than a breath, as Matthias shoved Kuwei down and shouldered his rifle. They edged to the wall and Jesper peeked outside through the smashed stained glass. In the shadows of the cemetery he saw lanterns raised, shifting shapes that had to be people—a lot of people.
“Unless the ghosts just got a lot more lively,” Jesper said, “it looks like we have company.”
PART FOUR
THE UNEXPECTED VISITOR
17
INEJ
At night, the warehouse district felt like it had shed its skin and taken on a new form. The shantytowns at its eastern edges crackled with life, while the streets of the district itself became a no-man’s-land, occupied only by guards at their posts and stadwatch grunts walking their beats.
Inej and Nina moored their boat in the wide central canal that ran up the center of the district and made their way down the silent quay, keeping close to the warehouses and away from the streetlamps that lined the water’s edge. They passed barges loaded with lumber and vast troughs piled high with coal. Every so often, they’d glimpse men working by lantern light, hefting barrels of rum or bales of cotton. Such valued cargo could not be left unattended overnight. When they had almost reached Sweet Reef, they saw two men unloading something from a large wagon parked by the side of the canal, lit by a single blue-tinged lamp.
“Corpselight,” whispered Inej, and Nina shuddered. Bonelights, made from the crushed skeletons of deep-sea fishes, glowed green. But the corpselights burned some other fuel, a blue warning that allowed people to identify the flatboats of the bodymen, whose cargo was the dead.
“What are the bodymen doing in the warehouse district?”
“People don’t like to see corpses on the streets or canals. The warehouse district is nearly deserted at night, so this is where they bring the bodies. Once the sun goes down, the bodymen collect the dead and bring them here. They work in shifts, neighborhood by neighborhood. They’ll be gone by dawn, and so will their cargo.” Out to the Reaper’s Barge for burning.
“Why don’t they just build a real cemetery?” Nina said.
“No room. I know there was some talk of reopening Black Veil a long time ago, but that all stopped when the Queen’s Lady Plague struck. People are too afraid of contagion. If your family can afford it, they send you to a cemetery or graveyard outside Ketterdam. And if they can’t…”
“No mourners,” Nina said grimly.
No mourners, no funerals. Another way of saying good luck. But it was something more. A dark wink to the fact that there would be no expensive burials for people like them, no marble markers to remember their names, no wreaths of myrtle and rose.
Inej took the lead as they approached Sweet Reef. The silos themselves were daunting, vast as sentinel gods, monuments to industry emblazoned with the Van Eck red laurel. Soon everyone would know what that emblem stood for—cowardice and deceit. The circular cluster of Van Eck’s silos was surrounded by a high metal fence.
“Razor wire,” Nina noted.
“It won’t be a problem.” It had been invented to keep livestock in their pens. It would present no challenge for the Wraith.
They took up a watch beside the sturdy red-brick wall of a warehouse and held their position, confirming that the guards’ routine hadn’t changed. Just as Kaz had said, the guards took almost twelve minutes exactly to circle the fence that surrounded the silos. When the patrols were on the eastern side of the perimeter, Inej would have roughly six minutes to cross the wire. Once they passed to the west side, it would be too easy for them to spot her on the wire between the silos, but she’d be almost impossible to see on the roof. During those six minutes, Inej would deal with depositing the weevil in the silo hatch and then detach the line. If it took her longer than six minutes, she’d simply have to wait for the guards to come back around. She’d be unable to see them, but Nina had a powerful bonelight in hand. She would signal Inej with a brief flash of green light when she was clear to make the crossing.
“Ten silos,” Inej said. “Nine crossings.”
“They’re a lot taller up close,” said Nina. “Are you ready for this?”
Inej couldn’t deny they were intimidating. “No matter the height of the mountain, the climbing is the same.”
“That’s not technically true. You need ropes, picks—”
“Don’t be a Matthias.”
Nina covered her mouth in horror. “I’m going to eat twice as much cake to make up for it.”
Inej nodded wisely. “Sound policy.”
The patrol was setting out from the guardhouse again.
“Inej,” Nina said haltingly, “you should know, my power hasn’t been the same since the parem. If we get into a scuffle—”
“No scuffles tonight. We pass through like ghosts.” She gave Nina’s shoulders a squeeze. “And I know no fiercer warrior, powers or not.”
“But—”
“Nina, the guards.”
The patrol had disappeared from view. If they didn’t act now, they would have to wait for the next cycle, and it would put them behind schedule.
“On it,” Nina said, and strode toward the guardhouse.
