TROUBLE , kaz brekker

xiv. let's go catch ourselves a grisha

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SIX RATHER LARGE GLASSES of whiskey and a healer later, Echo was starting to feel a little better.

The corporalki had taken one look at the purple blossom of her torso and turned a violent shade of green ( how that one ever survived a war was a mystery ). But to his credit, he had stitched the broken bonds of skin back together with astounding ease and even offered to erase the more heinous scars that had long since found a home in her flesh.

But Echo declined. She liked her scars. It reminded her that she was a canvas for the nefarious and false, that love was not kind. It had teeth and claws and left scars that could never truly heal. How could she doubt the perverse nature of affection when the evidence was carved into her skin?

At the beginning, when Echo had rather close her eyes than let Kaz see the pain in them, she had been too distracted to notice how feverishly close the grisha's hands where to her skin. It was a condition of their business: no touch, lest a rumour spread about a rather powerful amplifier washing up in Kribirsk. But that condition was forgotten and Echo learnt exactly how delicate Kaz was when he used his cane to halt her travels. One swing of the thing but a heavy dent in the wood on which she lay, a mere hair's width from the healer's hands.

"Keep your hands to yourself." He'd muttered. The healer didn't object.

From then on, she knew Kaz was watching. She could feel his sharp gaze on her like a red-hot brand and if it hadn't been for the agony of fusing her bones back together, Echo might have had the energy to say something, anything, rather than simmer in his gaze any longer. She hated being seen. It was a curse. Being seen did dangerous things to the soul, it made fools out of clever men.

But, on the bright side, Kaz did foot the rather extortionate bill and Echo could breathe again without emptying her savings into the hands of a squeamish imbecile with a tendency to break the rules.

When the pair entered the tavern again, covered in blood and sporting a suspicious lack of injuries, they found Inej, Jesper and Arken pouring over the blueprints to the Little Palace.

Echo could have kissed that scrap of paper as she slipped into the beside Inej. "You got it! Good to know I didn't almost die for nothing."

The sharpshooter turned a violent few shades darker as he inhaled the contents of his crystalline glass. "Almost what?"

"I'll tell you later." Echo replied, smuggling her words amidst sharp jabs between Jesper's collarbones as he spluttered and coughed. Near death experiences should hardly shock him now. If Jesper got a kruge for every time one of the Crows nearly died, he'd be able to pay off that gambling debt of his.

Finally, his heaving stopped and Echo was faced with the arduously long process of figuring out how the Little Palace blueprints could ease their passage to the Sun Summoner. Despite his frantic demeanour, Jesper was quite the intellect and so, the four Crows spent hours pouring over each fine detail of the ink pressing, hoping that a pathway would appear if they said the right words.

Four hours later to little avail. Outside, the sun was peaking in the pale Ravkan sky and daylight had never been so unwelcome in all of Echo's life. Daylight meant time was wasting away, time they didn't have.

Sometimes Jesper would point to a hallway or passage. "What about-"

"No." Echo would sigh.

"Or-"

"Not going to work." That was Kaz.

"Can I finish my-"

"Ideally not." Both of them this time, in chorus.