Crooked Kingdom

by Leigh Bardugo

  Up ahead, they could see stadwatch swarming over a bridge, two of their boats obscuring the passage beneath.

  “They’re setting up blockades,” said Kaz.

  They ditched the boat there and continued on foot.

  Wylan knew they were headed to another safe house, but Kaz had said it himself: There is no safe. Where could they possibly hide? Pekka Rollins was working with Wylan’s father. Between them they had to own half the city. Wylan would be captured. And then what? No one would believe he was Jan Van Eck’s son. Wylan Van Eck might be despised by his father, but he had rights no Shu criminal could hope for. Would he end up in Hellgate? Would his father find a way to see him executed?

  As they got farther from the manufacturing district and the Barrel, the patrols dwindled, and Wylan realized the stadwatch must be concentrating their efforts on the less respectable parts of town. Still, they moved in fits and starts, passing along alleys Wylan had never known existed, occasionally entering empty storefronts or the lower levels of unoccupied apartments so they could cut through to the next street. It was as if Kaz had a secret map to Ketterdam that showed the city’s forgotten spaces.

  Would Jesper be waiting when they finally got wherever they were going? Or was he lying wounded and bleeding on the floor of the tomb with no one to come to his aid? Wylan refused to believe it. The worse the odds, the better Jesper was in a fight. He thought of Jesper pleading with Colm. I know I let you down. Just give me one more chance. How often had Wylan spoken almost the same words to his father, hoping every time that he could make good on them? Jesper had to survive. They all did.

  Wylan remembered the first time he’d seen the sharpshooter. He’d seemed like a creature from another world, dressed in lime green and lemon yellow, his stride long and loping, as if every step was poured from a bottle with a narrow neck.

  On Wylan’s first night in the Barrel, he’d wandered from street to street, certain he was about to be robbed, teeth chattering from the cold. Finally, when his skin was turning blue and he couldn’t feel his fingers, he’d summoned the courage to ask a man smoking his pipe on the front steps of a house, “Do you know where there might be rooms for rent?”

  “Sign right there says vacancy,” he said, gesturing across the street with his pipe. “What are you, blind?”

  “Must have missed it,” Wylan said.

  The boardinghouse was filthy but blessedly cheap. He’d rented a room for ten kruge and had also paid for a hot bath. He knew he needed to save his money, but if he contracted lung fever the first night, he’d have problems beyond being short of cash. He took the little towel into the bathroom at the end of the hall and washed up quickly. Though the water was hot enough, he felt vulnerable crouching naked in a tub with no lock on the door. He dried his clothes as best he could, but they were still damp when he put them back on.

  Wylan spent that night lying on a paper-thin mattress, staring at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of the rooming house around him. On the Geldcanal, the nights were so silent you could hear the water lapping against the sides of the boathouse. But here it might as well have been noon. Music flooded in through the dirty window. People were talking, laughing, slamming doors. The couple in the room above him were fighting. The couple in the room below him were definitely doing something else.

  Wylan touched his fingers to the bruises at his throat and thought, I wish I could ring for tea. That was the moment he really began to panic. How much more pathetic could he be? His father had tried to have him killed. He had almost no money and was lying on a cot that reeked of the chemicals they’d used to try to rid the mattress of lice. He should be making a plan, maybe even plotting revenge, trying to gather his wits and his resources. And what was he doing? Wishing he could ring for tea. He might not have been happy at his father’s house, but he’d never had to work for anything. He’d had servants, hot meals, clean clothes. Whatever it took to survive the Barrel, Wylan knew he didn’t have it.

  As he lay there, he sought some explanation for what had happened. Surely, Miggson and Prior were to blame; his father hadn’t known. Or maybe Miggson and Prior had misunderstood his father’s orders. It had just been a terrible mistake. Wylan rose and reached into the damp pocket of his coat. His enrollment papers to the music school in Belendt were still there.

  As soon as he drew out the thick envelope, he knew his father was guilty. It was soaked through and smelled of canal, but its color was pristine. No ink had bled through from the supposed documents inside. Wylan opened the envelope anyway. The sheaf of folded papers clung together in a wet lump, but he pried each of them apart. They were all blank. His father hadn’t even bothered with a convincing ruse. He’d known Wylan wouldn’t try to read the papers. And that his gullible son would never think to suspect his father of lying. Pathetic.

  Wylan had stayed inside for two days, terrified. But on the third morning, he’d been so hungry that the smell of frying potatoes wafting up from the street had driven him from the safety of his room. He bought a paper cone full of them and scarfed them down so greedily he burned his tongue. Then he made himself walk.

  He had only enough money to keep his room for another week, less if he planned on eating. He needed to find work, but he had no idea where to begin. He wasn’t big enough or strong enough for a job in the warehouses or shipyards. The softer jobs would require him to read. Was it possible one of the gambling dens or even one of the pleasure houses needed a musician to play in their parlors? He still had his flute. He walked up and down East Stave and along the more well-lit side streets. When it started to get dark, he returned to the boardinghouse, thoroughly defeated. The man with the pipe was still on his steps, smoking. As far as Wylan knew, he never left that perch.

  “I’m looking for a job,” Wylan said to him. “Do you know anyone who might be hiring?”

  The man peered at him through a cloud of smoke. “Young dollop of cream like you should be able to make fine coin on West Stave.”

  “Honest work.”

  The man had laughed until he started hacking, but eventually he’d directed Wylan south to the tanneries.

  Wylan was paid a scraping wage for mixing dyes and cleaning the vats. The other workers were mostly women and children, a few scrawny boys like him. They spoke little, too tired and too ill from the chemicals to do more than complete their work and collect their pay. They were given no gloves or masks, and Wylan was fairly sure he’d be dead of poisoning before he ever had to worry about where he should go with the tiny bit of money he was earning.

  One afternoon, Wylan heard the dye chief complaining that they were losing gallons of dye to evaporation because the boilers ran too hot. He was cursing over the cost he’d paid to have two of them fixed and how little good it had done.

  Wylan hesitated, then suggested adding seawater to the tanks.

  “Why the hell would I want to do that?” said the dye chief.

  “It will raise the boiling point,” said Wylan, wondering why he’d thought it was a good idea to speak at all. “The dyes will have to get hotter to boil so you’ll lose less to evaporation. You’ll have to tweak the formula because the saline will build up fast, and you’ll have to clean the tanks more regularly because the salt can be corrosive.”

  The dye chief had merely spat a stream of jurda onto the floor and ignored him. But the next week, they tried using saltwater in one of the tanks. A few days later, they were using a mixture of seawater in all of them, and the dye chief started coming to Wylan with more questions. How could they keep the red dye from stiffening the hides? How could they shorten processing and drying times? Could Wylan make a resin to keep the dyes from bleeding?

  A week after that, Wylan had been standing at the vats with his wooden paddle, woozy from the dyes, eyes watering, wondering if helping the dye chief meant he could request a raise, when a boy approached him. He was tall, lanky, his skin a deep Zemeni brown, and looked ridiculously out of place on the dying floor. Not just because of his lime p
laid waistcoat and yellow trousers, but because he seemed to exude pleasure, as if there was no place he’d rather be than a miserable, foul-smelling tannery, as if he’d just walked into a party he couldn’t wait to attend. Though he was skinny, his body fit together with a kind of loose-limbed ease. The dye chief didn’t usually like strangers on the dying floor, but he didn’t say a word to this boy with the revolvers slung across his hips, just tipped his hat respectfully and went scurrying off.

  Wylan’s first thought was that this boy had the most perfectly shaped lips he’d ever seen. His second was that his father had sent someone new to kill him. He gripped his paddle. Would the boy shoot him in broad daylight? Did people just do that?

  But the boy said, “Hear you know your way around a chemistry set.”

  “What? I … yes. A bit,” Wylan had managed.

  “Just a bit?”

  Wylan had the sense that his next answer was very important. “I have a background.” He’d taken to science and math and pursued them diligently, hoping they might somehow compensate for his other failings.

  The boy handed Wylan a folded piece of paper. “Then come to this address when you get off work tonight. We might have a job for you.” He looked around, as if just noticing the vats and the pallid laborers bent over them. “A real job.”

  Wylan had stared at the paper, the letters a tangle in front of his eyes. “I—I don’t know where this is.”

  The boy gave an exasperated sigh. “You’re not from here, are you?” Wylan shook his head. “Fine. I’ll come fetch you, because clearly I don’t have anything to do with my time but squire new lilies around town. Wylan, right?” Wylan nodded. “Wylan what?”

  “Wylan … Hendriks.”

  “You know much about demo, Wylan Hendriks?”

  “Demo?”

  “The boom, the bang, the flint and fuss.”

  Wylan didn’t know what he meant at all, but he felt admitting that would be a bad mistake. “Sure,” he said with as much confidence as he could muster.

  The boy cut him a skeptical glance. “We’ll see. Be out front at six bells. And no guns unless you want trouble.”

  “Of course not.”

  The boy had rolled his gray eyes and muttered, “Kaz has got to be out of his mind.”

  At six bells, Jesper arrived to escort Wylan to a bait shop in the Barrel. Wylan had been embarrassed by his rumpled clothes, but they were the only ones he owned, and the paralyzing fear that this was just some elaborate trap concocted by his father had provided ample distraction from his worry. In a back room of the bait shop, Wylan met Kaz and Inej. They told him they needed flash bombs and maybe something with a little more kick. Wylan had refused.

  That night, he arrived back at the boardinghouse to find the first letter. The only words he recognized were the name of the sender: Jan Van Eck.

  He’d lain awake all night, certain that at any moment Prior would smash through the door and clamp his meaty hands around his neck. He’d thought about running, but he barely had enough money to pay his rent, let alone buy a ticket out of the city. And what hope did he have in the country? No one was going to hire him on as farm labor. The next day, he went to see Kaz, and that night, he built his first explosive for the Dregs. He knew what he was doing was illegal, but he’d made more money for a few hours’ work than he made in a week at the tannery.

  The letters from his father continued to arrive, once, sometimes twice a week. Wylan didn’t know what to make of them. Were they threats? Taunts? He stashed them in a stack beneath his mattress, and sometimes at night he thought he could feel the ink bleeding through the pages, up through the mattress and into his heart like dark poison.

  But the more time that passed and the more he worked for Kaz, the less scared he felt. He’d make his money, get out of town, and never speak the name Van Eck again. And if his father decided to have him done away with before then, there was nothing Wylan could do about it. His clothes were ragged and threadbare. He was getting so skinny, he had to cut new holes in his belt. But he would sell himself in the pleasure houses of West Stave before he’d ask for his father’s mercy.

  Wylan hadn’t realized it then, but Kaz had known his true identity all along. Dirtyhands kept tabs on anyone who took up residence in the Barrel, and he’d placed Wylan under Dregs protection, certain that one day a rich mercher’s son would come in handy.

  He had no illusions about why Kaz had looked out for him, but he also knew he never would have survived this long without his help. And Kaz didn’t care if he could read. Kaz and the others teased him, but they’d given him a chance to prove himself. They valued the things he could do instead of punishing him for the things he couldn’t.

  Wylan had believed that Kaz could get revenge for what had been done to his mother. He’d believed that despite his father’s wealth and influence, this crew—his crew—was a match for Jan Van Eck. But now his father was reaching out to taunt him yet again.

  It was well past midnight when they reached the financial district. They’d arrived in one of the wealthiest areas of the city, not far from the Exchange and the Stadhall. His father’s presence felt closer here, and Wylan wondered why Kaz had brought them to this part of town. Kaz led them through an alley to the back of a large building, where a door had been propped open, and they entered a stairwell built around a huge iron lift that they shuffled inside. Rotty remained behind, presumably to keep watch over the entrance. The lift’s gate clanged shut and they rode it fifteen stories up, to the building’s top floor, then emerged into a hallway laid in patterns of lacquered hardwood, its high ceilings painted a pale, foamy lavender.

  We’re in a hotel, Wylan realized. That was the servants’ entrance and the staff elevator.

  They knocked on a pair of wide white double doors. Colm Fahey answered, wearing a long nightshirt with a coat thrown over it. They were at the Geldrenner.

  “The others are inside,” he said wearily.

  Colm asked them no questions, just pointed toward the bathroom and poured himself a cup of tea as they tracked mud and misery across the purple carpets. When Matthias saw Nina, he leapt from his seat on the huge aubergine sofa and clasped her in his arms.

  “We couldn’t get through the blockades to Sweet Reef,” he said. “I feared the worst.”

  Then they were all hugging, and Wylan was horrified to find his eyes filling with tears. He blinked them back. The last thing he needed was for Jesper to see him cry again. The sharpshooter was covered in soot and smelled like a forest fire, but he had that wonderful glimmer-eyed look he always seemed to get when he’d been in a fight. All Wylan wanted to do was stand as close as he possibly could to him and know that he was safe.

  Until this moment, Wylan hadn’t quite understood how much they meant to him. His father would have sneered at these thugs and thieves, a disgraced soldier, a gambler who couldn’t keep out of the red. But they were his first friends, his only friends, and Wylan knew that even if he’d had his pick of a thousand companions, these would have been the people he chose.

  Only Kaz stood apart, staring silently out the window to the dark streets below.

  “Kaz,” said Nina. “You may not be glad we’re alive, but we’re glad you’re alive. Come here!”

  “Leave him be,” murmured Inej softly.

  “Saints, Wraith,” said Jesper. “You’re bleeding.”

  “Should I call a doctor?” asked Jesper’s father.

  “No!” they all replied in unison.

  “Of course not,” said Colm. “Should I ring for coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” said Nina.

  Colm ordered coffee, waffles, and a bottle of brandy, and while they waited, Nina enlisted their help to locate some shears so that she could cut up the hotel towels for bandages. Once a pair had been found, she took Inej into the bathroom to see to her wounds.

  When a knock sounded at the door, they all tensed, but it was only their meal. Colm greeted the maid and insisted that he could manage the cart
so that she wouldn’t see the strange company that had assembled in his rooms. As soon as the door closed, Jesper jumped up to help him wheel in a silver tray laden with food and stacks of dishes of porcelain so fine it was almost transparent. Wylan hadn’t eaten off dishes like these since he’d left his father’s house. He realized Jesper must be wearing one of Colm’s shirts; it was too big in the shoulders and too short in the sleeves.

  “What is this place, anyway?” Wylan asked, looking around the vast room decorated almost entirely in purple.

  “The Ketterdam Suite, I believe,” said Colm, scratching the back of his neck. “It’s considerably finer than my room at the university district inn.”

  Nina and Inej emerged from the bathroom. Nina heaped a plate with food and plunked down beside Matthias on the couch. She folded one of the waffles in half and took a huge bite, wiggling her toes in bliss.

  “I’m sorry, Matthias,” she said with her mouth full. “I’ve decided to run off with Jesper’s father. He keeps me in the deliciousness to which I have become accustomed.”

  Inej had removed her tunic and wore only her quilted vest, leaving her brown arms bare. Strips of towel were tied at her shoulder, both of her forearms, her right thigh and her left shin.

  “What exactly happened to you?” Jesper asked her as he handed his father a cup of coffee on a delicate saucer.

  Inej perched in an armchair next to where Kuwei had settled himself on the floor. “I made a new acquaintance.”

  Jesper sprawled out on a settee and Wylan took the other chair, a plate of waffles balanced on his knee. There was a perfectly good table and chairs in the suite’s dining room, but apparently none of them had an interest in it. Only Colm had taken a seat there, coffee beside him, along with the bottle of brandy. Kaz remained by the window, and Wylan wondered what he saw through the glass that was so compelling.

  “So,” Jesper said, adding sugar to his coffee. “Other than Inej making a new pal, what the hell happened out there?”