Crooked Kingdom (The Six of Crows Duology #2) - Leigh Bardugo Page 0,132

because I can’t speak Suli.”

“I know,” she said. “But think on it.” She glanced toward the sitting room. “Just tell him the truth, Jesper. You’ll both be glad to know where you stand.”

“Every time I think about doing that, I feel like hurling myself out a window.” He hesitated. “Would you tell your parents the truth? Would you tell them everything you’ve done … everything that happened?”

“I don’t know,” Inej admitted. “But I’d give anything to have the choice.”

Jesper found his father in the purple sitting room, a cup of coffee in his big hands. He’d piled the dishes back onto the silver tray.

“You don’t have to clean up after us, Da.”

“Someone does.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Sit down, Jes.”

Jesper didn’t want to sit. That desperate itch was crackling through his body. All he wanted was to run straight to the Barrel as fast as his legs could carry him and throw himself down in the first gambling parlor he could find. If he hadn’t thought he’d be arrested or shot before he got halfway there, he just might have. He sat. Inej had left the unused vials of the chemical weevil on the table. He picked one up, fiddling with the stopper.

His father leaned back, watching him with those stern gray eyes. Jesper could see every line and freckle on his face in the clear morning light.

“There was no swindle, was there? That Shu boy lied for you. They all did.”

Jesper clasped his hands to keep them from fidgeting. You’ll both be glad to know where you stand. Jesper wasn’t sure that was true, but he had no more options. “There have been a lot of swindles, but I was usually on the swindling side. A lot of fights—I was usually on the winning side. A lot of card games.” He looked down at the white crescents of his fingernails. “I was usually on the losing side.”

“The loan I gave you for your studies?”

“I got in deep with the wrong people. I lost at the tables and I kept losing, so I kept borrowing. I thought I could find a way to dig myself out.”

“Why didn’t you just stop?”

Jesper wanted to laugh. He had pleaded with himself, screamed at himself to stop. “It isn’t like that.” There’s a wound in you. “Not for me. I don’t know why.”

Colm pinched the bridge of his nose. He looked so weary, this man who could work from sunrise to sunset without ever complaining. “I never should have let you leave home.”

“Da—”

“I knew the farm wasn’t for you. I wanted you to have something better.”

“Then why not send me to Ravka?” Jesper said before he could think better of it.

Coffee sloshed from Colm’s cup. “Out of the question.”

“Why?”

“Why should I send my son to some foreign country to fight and die in their wars?”

A memory came to Jesper, sharp as a mule kick. The dusty man was standing at the door again. He had the girl with him, the girl who had lived because his mother had died. He wanted Jesper to come with them.

“Leoni is zowa. She has the gift too,” he’d said. “There are teachers in the west, past the frontier. They could train them.”

“Jesper doesn’t have it,” Colm said.

“But his mother—”

“He doesn’t have it. You have no right to come here.”

“Are you sure? Has he been tested?”

“You come back on this land and I’ll consider it an invitation to put a bullet between your eyes. You go and you take that girl with you. No one here has the gift and no one here wants it.”

He’d slammed the door in the dusty man’s face.

Jesper remembered his father standing there, taking great heaving breaths.

“What did they want, Da?”

“Nothing.”

“Am I zowa?” Jesper had asked. “Am I Grisha?”

“Don’t say those words in this house. Not ever.”

“But—”

“That’s what killed your mother, do you understand? That’s what took her from us.” His father’s voice was fierce, his gray eyes hard as quartz. “I won’t let it take you too.” Then his shoulders slumped. As if the words were being torn from him, he’d said, “Do you want to go with them? You can go. If that’s what you want. I won’t be mad.”

Jesper had been ten. He’d thought of his father alone on the farm, coming home to an empty house every day, sitting by himself at the table every night, no one to make him burnt biscuits.

“No,” he’d said. “I don’t want to go with them. I want to stay with