Crooked Kingdom (35 page)

Inej waited for the signal from Nina, then scampered up the rungs welded to the side of the silo. One story, two stories, ten. At the carnival, her uncle would have kept the audience entertained during her ascent.
No trick like this has ever been attempted before, and certainly never by one so young! Above you, behold the terrifying high wire.
A spotlight would come on, lighting the wire so that it looked like the frailest skein of cobweb strung across the tent.
Gentlemen, take your lady's hand in yours. See how slender her fingers are? Now imagine if you will, trying to walk across something so slender, so fragile as that! Who would dare such a thing? Who would dare to defy death itself?

Then Inej would stand at the top of the pole and, hands on hips, shout, “I will!”

And the crowd would gasp.

But wait, no, this can't be right
, her uncle would say,
a little girl?

At this point, the crowd would always go wild. Women would swoon. Sometimes one of the men would try to stop the show.

There was no crowd tonight, only the wind, the cold metal beneath her fingers, the bright face of the moon.

Inej reached the top of the silo and looked out over the city below. Ketterdam gleamed with golden light, lanterns moving slowly across the canals, candles left burning in windows, shops and taverns still shining bright for the evening's business. She could make out the glittering spangle of the Lid, the colorful lanterns and showy cascade bulbs of the Staves. In just a few short days, Van Eck's fortunes would be ruined and she would be free of her contract with Per Haskell.
Free.
To live as she wished. To seek forgiveness for her sins. To pursue her purpose. Would she miss this place? This crowded mess of a city she'd come to know so well, that had somehow become her home? She felt certain she would. So tonight, she would perform for her city, for the citizens of Ketterdam, even if they did not know to applaud.

Though it took a bit of muscle, she managed to loosen the wheel of the silo hatch and wrench it open. She reached into her pocket and took out the capped vial of the chemical weevil. Following Wylan's instructions, she gave it a firm shake, then spilled the contents into the silo. A low hiss filled the air, and as she watched, the sugar moved as if something was alive beneath its surface. She shivered. She'd heard of workers dying in silos, getting caught inside when the grain or corn or sugar gave way beneath their feet, being slowly suffocated to death. She closed the hatch and sealed it tight.

Then she reached down to the first rung of the metal ladder and attached the magnetized clamp Wylan had given her. It certainly felt like a solid grip. With the press of a button, two magnetized guide wires sprang free and attached to the silo with a soft
clang
. She removed a crossbow and a heavy coil of wire from her pack, then looped one end of the wire through the clamp, secured it tightly, and attached the guide wires. The other end was fastened to a magnetized clamp loaded into the crossbow. She released the trigger. The first shot went astray, and she had to wind the wire back. The second shot hooked to the wrong rung. But the third shot latched properly in place on the next silo. She twisted the clamp until the tension in the line felt right. They'd used similar gear before, but never on a distance so wide or a climb so high. It didn't matter. The distance, the danger would be transformed upon the wire, and she would be transformed too. On the high wire, she was beholden to no one, a creature without past or present, suspended between earth and sky.

It was time. You could learn the swings, but you had to be born to the wire.

Inej's mother had told her that gifted wire walkers were descended from the People of the Air, that they'd once had wings, and that in the right light, those wings could still be glimpsed on the humans to whom they showed favor. After that, Inej was perpetually twisting this way and that in front of mirrors and checking her shadow, ignoring the laughter of her cousins, to see if perhaps her own wings might be showing.

When her father grew tired of her pestering him every day, he allowed her to begin her education on the low ropes, barefoot, so that she could get a feel for walking forward and backward, keeping her center balanced. She'd been bored senseless, but she'd dutifully gone through the exercises each day, testing her strength, trying the feel of leather shoes that would allow her to grip the stiffer, less friendly wire. If her father got distracted, she would flip into a handstand so that when he turned back to her, she was traversing the rope on her hands. He agreed to raise the rope a few inches, let her try a proper wire, and at each level, Inej mastered one skill after another—cartwheels, flips, keeping a pitcher of water perched on her head. She familiarized herself with the slender, flexible pole that would allow her to keep her balance at greater heights.

One afternoon her uncle and cousins had been setting up a new act. Hanzi was going to push Asha across the wire in a wheelbarrow. The day was hot and they'd decided to take a break for lunch and go for a swim in the river. Alone in the quiet camp, Inej scaled one of the platform rigs they'd erected, making sure her back was to the sun so that she'd have a clear view of the wire.

That high up, the world became a reflection of itself, its shapes stunted, its shadows elongated, familiar in its forms but somehow untrustworthy, and as Inej placed her slippered foot on the wire, she'd felt a sudden moment of doubt. Though this was the same width of wire she'd walked for weeks without fear, it seemed far thinner now, as if in this mirror world, the wire obeyed different rules.
When fear arrives, something is about to happen.

Inej breathed deeply, tucked her hips beneath her navel, and took her first steps on the air. Beneath her the grass was an undulating sea. She felt her weight shift, listed left, felt the pull of the earth, gravity ready to unite her with her shadow far below.

Her muscles flexed, she bent her knees, the moment passed, and then there was only her and the wire. She was already halfway across when she realized she was being watched. She let her vision expand, but kept her focus. Inej would never forget the look on her father's face as he returned from the river with her uncle and cousins, his head tilted up at her, mouth a startled black O, her mother emerging from the wagon and pressing a hand over her heart. They had stayed silent, afraid to break her concentration—her first audience on the wire, mute with terror that felt to her like adulation.

Once she'd climbed down, her mother had spent the better part of an hour alternating between hugging her and shrieking at her. Her father had been stern, but she hadn't missed the pride in his gaze or the grudging admiration in her cousins' eyes.

When one of them had taken her aside later and said, “How do you walk so fearlessly?” she'd simply shrugged and said, “It's just walking.”

But that wasn't true. It was better than walking. When others walked the wire, they fought it—the wind, the height, the distance. When Inej was on the high wire, it became her world. She could feel its tilt and pull. It was a planet and she was its moon. There was a simplicity to it that she never felt on the swings, where she was carried away by momentum. She loved the stillness she could find on the wire, and it was something no one else understood.

She had fallen only once, and she still blamed it on the net. They'd strung it up because Hanzi was adding a unicycle to his act. One moment Inej was walking and the next she was falling. She barely had time to register it before she hit the net—and bounced right out of it onto the ground. Inej felt somewhat startled to discover how very hard the earth was, that it would not soften or bend for her. She broke two ribs and had a lump on her head the size of a fat goose egg.

“It's good that it's so large,” her father murmured over it. “That means the blood is not inside her brain.”

As soon as Inej's bandages came off, she was back on the wire. She never worked with a net again. She knew it had made her careless. But looking down now, she could admit she wouldn't have minded a little insurance. Far below, the moonlight caught the curves of the cobblestones, making them look like the black seeds of some exotic fruit. But the net stashed behind the guardhouse was useless with only Nina there to hold it, and regardless of what Kaz had originally intended, the new plan hadn't been built around someone in plain sight holding a net. So Inej would walk as she had always done, with nothing to catch her, borne aloft by her invisible wings.

Inej slid the balance pole from its loop on her vest and, with a flick, extended it to its full length. She tested its weight in her hands, flexed her toes in her slippers. They were leather, stolen from the Cirkus Zirkoa at her request. Their smooth soles lacked the firm, tactile grip of her beloved rubber shoes, but the slippers allowed her to release more easily.

At last the signal came from Nina, a brief flash of green light.

Inej stepped out onto the wire. Instantly, the wind snatched at her and she released a long breath, feeling its persistent tug, using the flexible pole to pull her center of gravity lower.

She let her knees bounce once. Thankfully, the wire had almost no give. She walked, feeling the hard press of it beneath the arches of her feet. With each step, it bowed slightly, eager to twist away from her gripping toes.

The air felt warm against her skin. It smelled of sugar and molasses. Her hood was down and she could feel the hairs from her braid escaping to tickle her face. She focused on the wire, feeling the familiar kinship she'd experienced as a child, as if the wire were clinging to her as closely as she clung to it, welcoming her into that mirror world, a secret place occupied by her alone. In moments, she'd reached the rooftop of the second silo.

She stepped onto it, retracting the balance pole and returning it to its sling. She took a sip of water from the flask in her pocket, allowed herself the briefest moment to stretch. Then she opened the hatch and dropped in the weevil. Again she heard that crackling hiss, and her nose filled with the smell of burning sugar. It was stronger this time, a sweet, dense cloud of perfume.

Suddenly, she was back at the Menagerie, a thick hand grasping her wrist, demanding. Inej had gotten good at anticipating when a memory might seize her, bracing for it, but this time she wasn't prepared. It came at her, more insistent than the wind on the wire, sending her mind sprawling. Though he smelled of vanilla, beneath it, she could smell garlic. She felt the slither of silk all around her as if the bed itself were a living thing.

Inej didn't remember all of them. As the nights at the Menagerie had strung together, she had become better at numbing herself, vanishing so completely that she almost didn't care what was done to the body she left behind. She learned that the men who came to the house never looked too closely, never asked too many questions. They wanted an illusion, and they were willing to ignore anything to preserve that illusion. Tears, of course, were forbidden. She had cried the first night. Tante Heleen had used the switch on her, then the cane, then choked her until she'd passed out. The next time, Inej's fear was greater than her sorrow.

She learned to smile, to whisper, to arch her back and make the sounds Tante Heleen's customers required. She still wept, but the tears were never shed. They filled the empty place inside her, a well of sadness where, each night, she sank like a stone. The Menagerie was one of the most expensive pleasure houses in the Barrel, but its customers were no kinder than those who frequented the dollar houses and alley girls. In some ways, Inej came to understand, they were worse.
When a man spends that much coin
, said the Kaelish girl, Caera,
he thinks he's earned the right to do whatever he wants.

There were young men, old men, handsome men, ugly men. There was the man who cried and struck her when he could not perform. The man who wanted her to pretend it was their wedding night and tell him that she loved him. The man with sharp teeth like a kitten who had bitten at her breasts until she'd bled. Tante Heleen added the price of the blood-speckled sheets and the days of work Inej missed to her indenture. But he hadn't been the worst. The worst had been a Ravkan man who had chosen her in the parlor, the man who smelled of vanilla. Only when they were back in her room amid the purple silks and incense did he say, “I've seen you before, you know.”

Inej had laughed, thinking this was part of the game he wished to play, and poured him wine from a golden carafe. “Surely not.”

“It was years ago, at one of the carnivals outside Caryeva.”

Wine sloshed over the lip of the glass. “You must have me confused with someone else.”

“No,” he said, eager as a boy. “I'm sure of it. I saw your family perform there. I was on military leave. You couldn't have been more than ten, the barest slip of a girl, walking the high wire without fear. You wore a headdress covered in roses. At one point, you bobbled. You lost your footing and the petals of your crown came loose in a cloud that drifted down, down.” He fluttered his fingers through the air as if miming a snowfall. “The crowd gasped—and so did I. I came back the second night, and it happened again, and even though then I knew it was all part of the act, I still felt my heart clench as you pretended to regain your balance.”

Inej tried to steady her shaking hands. The rose headdress had been her mother's idea. “You make it look too easy,
meja
, scampering around like a squirrel on a branch. They must believe you are in danger even if you are not.”

That had been Inej's worst night at the Menagerie, because when the man who smelled of vanilla had begun to kiss her neck and peel away her silks, she hadn't been able to leave her body behind. Somehow his memory of her had tied her past and present together, pinned her there beneath him. She'd cried, but he hadn't seemed to mind.