“I expect you’ll see a change,” Nina said. She finished off the last cake, licking her fingers with relish, then set the tray outside the door and rang for a maid. “Van Aakster started coming at the end of last week and has been here every day since.”
“Excellent.” Kaz made a mental note to buy up some of the low stock in Van Aakster ’s company.
Even if the man’s mood shift was the result of Nina’s handiwork, business would pick up. He hesitated then said, “You make him feel better, ease his woe and all that … but could you compel him to do something? Maybe make him forget his wife?”
“Alter the pathways in his mind? Don’t be absurd.”
“The brain is just another organ,” Kaz said, quoting Van Eck.
“Yes, but it’s an incredibly complex one. Controlling or altering another person’s thoughts …
well, it’s not like lowering a pulse rate or releasing a chemical to improve someone’s mood. There are too many variables. No Grisha is capable of it.”
Yet, Kaz amended. “So you treat the symptom, not the cause.”
She shrugged. “He’s avoiding the grief, not treating it. If I’m his solution, he’ll never really get over her death.”
“Will you send him on his way then? Advise him to find a new wife and stop darkening your door?”
She ran a brush through her light brown hair and glanced at him in the mirror. “Does Per Haskell have plans to forgive my debt?”
“None at all.”
“Well then Van Aakster must be allowed to grieve in his own way. I have another client scheduled in a half hour, Kaz. What business?”
“Your client will wait. What do you know about jurda parem?”
Nina shrugged. “There are rumours, but they sound like nonsense to me.” With the exception of the Council of Tides, the few Grisha working in Ketterdam all knew each other and exchanged information readily. Most were on the run from something, eager to avoid drawing the attention of slavers or interest from the Ravkan government.
“They aren’t just rumours.”
“Squallers flying? Tidemakers turning to mist?”
“Fabrikators making gold from lead.” He reached into his pocket and tossed the lump of yellow to her. “It’s real.”
“Fabrikators make textiles. They fuss around with metals and fabrics. They can’t turn one thing into another.” She held the lump up to the light. “You could have got this anywhere,” she said, just as he had argued to Van Eck a few hours earlier.
Without being invited, Kaz sat down on the plush settee and stretched out his bad leg. “Jurda parem is real, Nina, and if you’re still the good little Grisha soldier I think you are, you’ll want to hear what it does to people like you.”
She turned the lump of gold over her in her hands, then wrapped her dressing gown more tightly around her and curled up at the end of the settee. Again, Kaz marvelled at the transformation. In these rooms, she played the part her clients wanted to see – the powerful Grisha, serene in her knowledge.
But sitting there with her brow furrowed and her feet tucked under her, she looked like what she truly was: a girl of seventeen, raised in the sheltered luxury of the Little Palace, far from home and barely getting by every day.
“Tell me,” she said.
Kaz talked. He held back on the specifics of Van Eck’s proposal, but he told her about Bo Yul-Bayur, jurda parem, and the addictive properties of the drug, placing particular emphasis on the recent theft of Ravkan military documents.
“If this is all true, then Bo Yul-Bayur needs to be eliminated.”
“That is not the job, Nina.”
“This isn’t about money, Kaz.”
It was always about money. But Kaz knew a different kind of pressure was required. Nina loved her country and loved her people. She still believed in the future of Ravka and in the Second Army, the Grisha military elite that had nearly disintegrated during the civil war. Nina’s friends back in Ravka believed she was dead, a victim of Fjerdan witchhunters, and for now, she wanted it to stay that way.
But Kaz knew she hoped to return one day.
“Nina, we’re going to retrieve Bo Yul-Bayur, and I need a Corporalnik to do it. I want you on my crew.”
“Wherever he’s hiding out, once you find him, letting him live would be the most outrageous kind of irresponsibility. My answer is no.”
“He isn’t hiding out. The Fjerdans have him at the Ice Court.”
Nina paused. “Then he’s as good as dead.”
“The Merchant Council doesn’t think so. They wouldn’t be going to this trouble or offering up this kind of reward if they thought he’d been neutralised. Van Eck was worried. I could see it.”
“The mercher you spoke to?”
“Yes. He claims their intelligence is good. If it’s not, well, I’ll take the hit. But if Bo Yul-Bayur is alive, someone is going to try to break him out of the Ice Court. Why shouldn’t it be us?”
“The Ice Court,” Nina repeated, and Kaz knew she’d begun to put the pieces together. “You don’t just need a Corporalnik, do you?”