#it took a while to flesh this chapter out because I'm finding Maya a difficult perspective right now

[she-posts-nerdy-stuff]

Daughter of the Rain and Snow

Concept: Around ten years after the events of Crooked Kingdom, 25-year-old Captain Inej Ghafa frees Maya Olsen from a pleasure house in Ketterdam. Maya is looking for revenge against the man who put her in her position, a man who she knows nothing about except his name: Kaz Brekker.

Tags: @wraith--2 @lunarthecorvus @just2bubbly @real-fragments7 @ethereal-maia @cartoon-clifford @origami-butterfly @lady-a-stuff

Content Warnings: in more general terms I want to remind people to be aware of the nature of Kaz and Inej's experiences and relationship since even if I'm not directly addressing these things they tend to be implicit in any writing about them, but specifically to this chapter there's death, gore (including burning bodies), descriptions of dead bodies, blood, ptsd references/responses, loss of a parent, implied abuse, and sorry I don't know how to word this but if you don't like/are specifically squeamish about eyes there is a reference in the gore that is specific to eyes so I thought it might be worth mentioning.

Chapter 21 - Maya

Maya was twelve when she first discovered she was Grisha. Little things started… happening. Things she didn’t mean. Or at least, they started happening much more frequently than usual. It wasn’t until then that Stephen Olsen had taken his daughter by the hand, and told her the truth.

Maya hadn’t cried, when she learned her mother had been Grisha. Had been killed for it. She didn’t know how to mourn a woman she’d never met. But she cried when she learnt that they had burned her.

“You told me she was with Djel,” she’d said, “That she died in childbirth and you buried her, to take root,”

Her father had looked down.

“Because I cannot think of the alternative,”

“Is that what will happen to me?”

He had wrapped his arms around her.

“Never,” he’d whispered, “I would fight a thousand armies before they reached you, little wolf,”

Her father hadn’t known that she was Grisha, he told her, or he would have got her out sooner. It didn’t occur to Maya, at 12 and in what was soon to become a perpetual state of fright and shock, to ask why her mother hadn’t been able to get out. To ask the entire circumstances of her loss. The next thing she knew they were making plans. They moved to Ketterdam, and the world ended before her eyes. 

That fucking ledger had set the wreckage on fire.

Maya tried to imagine the feeling of her father’s arms around her shoulders. She was his little wolf, and Djel had given her a gift to make him proud. But it was an untouchable memory, sinking beneath the waves just out of reach, tangled and bleeding and mixed up with the messy scrawl that set the last thing she clung to ablaze. 

Maya had left Inej telling herself that the ledger was a lie, but if that was true then why was she still thinking about it? Like the words were scarring her. Like they were smoke and she was choking on them.

The world was buzzing from a great distance. 

Maya didn’t know what she was doing.

She could feel the shadows of Aimee and Kiada’s hands throbbing across her own. It wasn’t quite pain, but it was excruciating. She heard everything muffled through a barrier of rushing blood, her head spinning and her stomach threatening to empty its contents into the canal. Real pain split her shoulder, pain worth feeling, piercing through the din of everything else. The kind of pain that meant you were alive. Her vision blurred, just for a moment.

Maya was realising what she’d done.

Kiada was on her knees, holding herself up with shaking arms. She looked at Maya like a rabbit staring down the barrel of a gun. There was a graze on her cheek. Maya felt herself choke, stumbling backwards and shaking her head.

“I don’t-”

The girls looked at her in silence.

Djel, what had she done? She was meant to protect them. She was meant to be brave for them. She wanted to be brave for them. 

“No, I didn’t - I -”

She stumbled a little as she stepped backwards, and she saw Aimee inch towards her before freezing in place. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, the words scratching her throat, “Oh, Djel, Kiada I’m so sorry. I didn’t…”

She couldn’t breathe.

“I…” 

She was choking on the smoke. She was burning.

What had she done?

“Maya?” said Aimee, looking between her and Kiada

Maya realised dimly that Aimee didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know if she was safe to help Kiada.

Maya had done that too.

She’d made her afraid.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m sorry,”

Aimee helped Kiada to her feet.

“Do you want to go?” she asked, staring at them, “You can. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t - I’m so sorry,”

“We need help, Maya,” said Aimee, moments before Maya thought the silence would become too much, “We have to go back. She said if you went back she’d help you,”

She shook her head.

“I can’t,”

“Inej did nothing to you,”

Maya’s shoulder screamed its disagreement, but she knew that wasn’t what Aimee meant. Still, she didn’t know that she believed it. If she was supposed to believe that her father had… no. One page of a gambling parlour record wasn’t going to cut it. She needed proof. There had to be someone she could make pay. She needed it, before it ate her alive.

And even if Kaz Brekker wasn’t to blame for this sickness inside Maya, his death would pay for Celina’s. Wonderful, wonderful Celina, dreaming of going home. Dreaming of the ice and the semla from the bakeries and her mother doing her hair for a village dance. Maya had seen the Reaper’s Barge only a few times; even from the shore the flames were high and bright enough to be visible. She imagined Celina, 6 slashes on her throat, a tulip on her cheek, lying at a broken angle with pale, twisted limbs tangled amongst a thousand others. She imagined the flames swallowing her, her glassy eyes still staring to the very last moment. Still full of their fear. Their guilt. Their blame. What happened to eyes, when they burned? Maya didn’t know. In her head they remained the longest, watching everything else burn away, and then they melted. Slow and grotesque.

She hoped that was what would happen to Yennefer. Maybe it already had. Maya thought of Yen's blood on her hands, congealing slowly beneath her fingernails. She'd wanted to be sickened by it, but she hadn't. She'd felt empowered - she'd felt high. She wanted to feel like that again.

Yen was to blame for Celina's death, and she'd got what she deserved. But Kaz Brekker was responsible for it as well. He would pay the price.

Kiada stood in dazed silence, half leaning on tiny little Aimee for support. 

“You shouldn’t trust her,” she told them, “She lied to us,”

Aimee’s little face was hard. Her arm hooked around Kiada’s waist to hold her up, and she reached to brush gravel off the graze blooming on the older girl's cheek. Even looking at it happen, Maya felt tension in her back and rushing all the way down her spine. She squared her shoulders. Holding Aimee through the makeshift blanket had been her limit - and she hadn’t managed that for long. The girl lifted her chin, a kind of shadow in her eyes that should not have belonged to a child so young. 

“She didn’t hurt us,”

That was all Aimee said before she turned away.