• Serpent Among Crows • Kaz Brekker

20

Finally free of the Fold and able to breathe clearly for the first time in a while, the Crows all sat around a campfire in a field still in eye sight of the great wall of darkness. It loomed in the background like the storm clouds above, washing out the green grass and trees around them into browns and greys.

When asked, Zhen didn't hesitate to fix them a fire, and did so without a single movement of her hands.

Zoya had been staring at her across the way for quite a while but Zhen was too tired to lift her head, busy staring into the depths of the flames as wood crackled, nearly the only sound breaking the silence between them all.

They were tired.

While Inej and Alina spoke softly to eachother, she zoned out, her mind so transfixed on the flames in front of her that it filled her with warmth.

She was perhaps the only one of them not wrapped in a coat or clutching themselves from the chill in the air.

Kaz was beside her, gloved hands clasped over the top of his cane. He hadn't said a word, simply observing those around him.

She could practically hear the cogs turning in his tired mind.

She finally tore her stinging eyes away and turned slightly where she sat to face the boy beside her.

"What?" She murmured, nodding towards him.

The abruptness of the word had him confused for a moment. His eyebrows pinched together. "I don't think I understand."

"I'll cherish the moment of you saying that," she commented quietly, a tiny smile on her lips. He nearly rolled his eyes. "I know that look on your face."

"Do you?" He asked back humourless.

She hummed in response. "What are you thinking?"

Their knees brushed for the briefest of seconds. She stilled, internally scolding herself for being so fidgety, but his eyes bore into her own just as intently as hers had the fire. The intensity of his stare had her questioning things.

A million answers he could have spewed. A million things that would be too raw, too truthful to say to her face considering they were not alone.

How the image of that volcra about to pounce and tear her apart had his heart racing to an abnormal beat. How it had brought up an instinct he hadn't felt in years, not since they were kids.

Fear. Real fear.

He had been afraid in that second that if he didn't make it to her in time that he would see her die, and it would be his fault for falling from that roof when he was fourteen, his fault for never allowing his leg to heal right, his fault for not getting to her side in time - and he could not have bared to see it nor live with the thoughts afterwards.

When they had been cornered, nothing but a cane and a single knife between them, in the face of creatures he had only seen depicted in stolen paintings before that week - he had considered briefly that it was his mistake to have taken the job offer in the first place.

What he said, instead, after a moment of working his jaw to ponder the right words that didn't taste bitter on his tongue, was not that.

His eyes flickered away from her own, to the fire. His voice was gravelly and low, for only her to hear.

"I'm thinking about what we face when we make it back to Ketterdam."

Zhens hands tightened around fistfuls of her skirt in her lap. She inhaled deeply to calm her own pounding heart, to push away her own nagging anxieties that up until then she had been blissfully and naively ignoring.