Six of Crows (Six of Crows #1)(106)
She was going to miss that look.
“Three gates in the ringwall,” Kaz said. “The prison gate is already locked up tight because of Yellow Protocol. The embassy gate is a bottleneck crammed with guests – the Fjerdans aren’t going to get troops through there. Jesper, that just leaves the gate in the drüskelle sector for you and Wylan to handle. You use it to engage Black Protocol, then wreck it. Break it badly enough that any guards who manage to mobilise can’t get out to follow us.”
“I’m all for locking the Fjerdans in their own ‘fortress’,” said Jesper. “Truly. But how do we get out? Once we trigger Black Protocol, you guys will be trapped on that island, and we’ll be trapped in the outer circle. We have no weapons and no demo materials.”
Kaz’s grin was sharp as a razor. “Thank goodness we’re proper thieves. We’re going to do a little shopping – and it’s all going on Fjerda’s tab. Inej,” he said, “let’s start with something shiny.”
Beside the big glass dome, Kaz laid out the details of what he had in mind. If the old plan had been daring, it had at least been built on stealth. The new plan was audacious, maybe even mad. They wouldn’t just be announcing their presence to the Fjerdans, they’d be trumpeting it. Again, the crew would be separated, and again, they would time their movements to the chiming of the Elderclock, but now there would be even less room for error.
Inej searched her heart, expecting to find caution there, fear. But all she felt was ready. This wasn’t a job she was performing to pay off her debt to Per Haskell. It wasn’t a task to be accomplished for Kaz or the Dregs. She wanted this – the money, the dream it would help to secure.
While Kaz explained, and Jesper used the laundry shears to portion out pieces of rope, Wylan helped Inej and Nina prepare. To pass as members of the Menagerie, they would need tattoos. They started with Nina. Using one of Kaz’s lockpicks and copper pyrite Jesper had extracted from the roof, Wylan traced his best imitation of the Menagerie feather on Nina’s arm, following Inej’s description and making corrections as needed. Then Nina sank the ink into her own flesh. A Corporalnik didn’t need a tattoo needle. Nina did her best to smoothe the scars on Inej’s forearm. The work wasn’t perfect, but they were short on time and Nina’s calling wasn’t as a tailor. Wylan sketched a second peacock feather over Inej’s skin.
Nina paused, “You’re sure?”
Inej took a deep breath. “It’s warpaint,” she said, both to Nina and herself. “It’s my mark to take.”
“It’s also temporary,” Nina promised. “I’ll remove it as soon as we’re in the harbour.”
The harbour. Inej thought of the Ferolind with its cheerful flags, and tried to hold that image in her head as she watched the peacock feather sink into her skin.
The finished tattoos wouldn’t bear up under any kind of close scrutiny, but hopefully they would do.
Finally, they stood. Inej had predicted that the Menagerie would arrive late – Tante Heleen loved to make an entrance – but they still needed to be in position and ready to move when the time came.
And yet, they hesitated. The knowledge that they might never see each other again, that some of them – maybe all of them – might not survive this night hung heavy in the air. A gambler, a convict, a wayward son, a lost Grisha, a Suli girl who had become a killer, a boy from the Barrel who had become something worse.
Inej looked at her strange crew, barefoot and shivering in their soot-stained prison uniforms, their features limned by the golden light of the dome, softened by the mist that hung in the air.
What bound them together? Greed? Desperation? Was it just the knowledge that if one or all of them disappeared tonight, no one would come looking? Inej’s mother and father might still shed tears for the daughter they’d lost, but if Inej died tonight, there would be no one to grieve for the girl she was now. She had no family, no parents or siblings, only people to fight beside. Maybe that was something to be grateful for, too.
It was Jesper who spoke first. “No mourners,” he said with a grin.
“No funerals,” they replied in unison. Even Matthias muttered the words softly.
“If any of you survive, make sure I have an open casket,” Jesper said as he hefted two slender coils of rope over his shoulder and signalled for Wylan to follow him across the roof. “The world deserves a few more moments with this face.”
Inej was only slightly surprised to see the intensity of the look that passed between Matthias and Nina. Something had changed between them after the battle with the Shu, but Inej couldn’t be sure what.
Matthias cleared his throat and gave Nina an awkward little bow. “A word?” he asked.
Nina returned the bow with considerably more panache, and let him lead her away. Inej was glad; she wanted a moment with Kaz.
“I have something for you,” she said as she pulled his leather gloves from the sleeve of her prison tunic.
He stared at them. “How—”
“I got them from the discarded clothes. Before I made the climb.”
“Six storeys in the dark.”
She nodded. She wasn’t going to wait for thanks. Not for the climb, or the gloves, or for anything ever again.
He pulled the gloves on slowly, and she watched his pale, vulnerable hands disappear beneath the leather. They were trickster hands – long, graceful fingers made for prying open locks, hiding coins,