Six of Crows (Six of Crows #1)(88)

Inej locked Matthias’ collar and stood on tiptoe to place the hood on his head. But when she moved to pull Nina’s hood down, the Grisha fluttered her eyes rapidly, bobbing her head towards the wagon door. She still wanted to know how Kaz was going to lock them in.

“Watch,” Inej mouthed.

Kaz signalled to Inej, and she leaped down. She shut the wagon door, fastened the padlock, and slid the bolt home. A second later the opposite side of the door pushed open. Kaz had simply removed the hinges. It was a trick they’d used plenty of times when a lock was too complicated to pick quickly or they wanted to make a theft look like an inside job. Ideal for faking suicides, Kaz had once told her, and she’d never been sure if he was sincere.

Inej took a last look at the road. The men had finished with the tree. The big one was dusting off his hands and slapping the horse’s back. The other was already approaching the front of the wagon.

Inej gripped the lip of the door and swung herself up, squeezing inside. Immediately, Kaz started replacing the hinges. Inej shoved a hood over Nina’s surprised face, then took her place beside Jesper.

But even in the dim light, she could tell Kaz was moving too slowly, his gloved fingers clumsier than she’d ever seen them. What was wrong with him? And why had he frozen at the wagon door?

Something had made him hesitate, but what?

She heard the ping of metal as Kaz dropped one of the screws. She peered at the wagon floor and kicked it back to him, trying to ignore the pounding of her heart.

Kaz crouched down to replace the second hinge. He was breathing hard. She knew he was working

in low light, by touch alone, in those cursed leather gloves he always insisted on wearing, but Inej didn’t think that was why he seemed so agitated. She heard footsteps on the right side of the wagon, one guard shouting to another. Come on, Kaz.  She hadn’t taken the time to sweep away their footprints. What if the guard noticed? What if he pulled on the door, and it simply fell off its hinges, revealing Kaz Brekker, unhooded and unchained?

She heard another ping. Kaz cursed once under his breath. Suddenly, the door shook as the guard gave the chained padlock a rattle. Kaz braced his hand against the hinge. The crack of light beneath the door widened. Inej sucked in a breath.

The hinges held.

Another shout in Fjerdan, more footsteps. Then the crack of the reins and the cart surged forward, rumbling over the road. Inej let herself exhale. Her throat had gone completely dry.

Kaz took his place beside her. He shoved a hood over her head, and the musty smell filled her nostrils. He would put his own hood on next, then lock himself in. Easy enough, a cheap magician’s trick, and Kaz knew them all. His arm pressed along hers from shoulder to elbow as he locked the collar around his neck. Bodies shifted against Inej’s back and side, crowding up against her.

For now they were safe. But despite the rattle of the wagon’s wheels, Inej could tell Kaz’s breathing had got worse – shallow, rapid pants like an animal caught in a trap. It was a sound she’d never thought to hear from him.

It was because she was listening so closely that she knew the exact moment when Kaz Brekker, Dirtyhands, the bastard of the Barrel and the deadliest boy in Ketterdam, fainted.



The money Mister Hertzoon had left with Kaz and Jordie ran out the following week. Jordie tried to return his new coat, but the shop wouldn’t take it, and Kaz’s boots had clearly been worn.

When they brought the loan agreement Mister Hertzoon had signed to the bank, they found that –

for all its official-looking seals – it was worthless paper. No one knew of Mister Hertzoon or his business partner.

They were evicted from the boarding house two days later, and had to find a bridge to sleep under, but were soon rousted by the stadwatch. After that, they wandered aimlessly until morning. Jordie insisted that they go back to the coffeehouse. They sat for a long time in the park across the street.

When night came, and the watch began its rounds, Kaz and Jordie headed south, into the streets of the lower Barrel, where the police did not bother to patrol.

They slept beneath a set of stairs in an alley behind a tavern, tucked between a discarded stove and bags of kitchen refuse. No one bothered them that night, but the next they were discovered by a gang of boys who told them they were in Razorgull territory. They gave Jordie a thrashing and knocked Kaz into the canal, but not before they took his boots.

Jordie fished Kaz out of the water and gave him his dry coat.

“I’m hungry,” Kaz said.

“I’m not,” Jordie replied. And for some reason that had struck Kaz as funny, and they’d both started laughing. Jordie wrapped his arms around Kaz and said, “The city is winning so far. But you’ll see who wins in the end.”

The next morning, Jordie woke with a fever.

In years to come people would call the outbreak of firepox that struck Ketterdam the Queen’s Lady Plague, after the ship believed to have brought the contagion to the city. It hit the crowded slums of the Barrel hardest. Bodies piled up in the streets, and sickboats moved through the canals, using long shovels and hooks to tumble corpses onto their platforms and haul them out to the Reaper ’s Barge for burning.

Kaz’s fever came on two days after Jordie’s. They had no money for medicine or a medik, so they huddled together in a pile of broken-up wooden boxes that they dubbed the Nest.

No one came to roust them. The gangs had all been laid low by disease.