Crooked Kingdom (The Six of Crows Duology #2) - Leigh Bardugo Page 0,107

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