#thread: clpdwings003

[carelessgraces]

@clpdwings​ | MATTHIAS HELVAR ( plotted starter )

Kaz had been sparing with the details. Hardly a shock — Kaz Brekker never gave information unnecessarily. She’s starting to understand why: if he had told her that his intention would be to leave her alone with a former drüskelle in chains, she would have laughed and told him to find someone else. 

     ( She is nineteen years old and running, running, snow crunching under her feet, breath coming in sharp, painful gasps, the cold of the air stinging her skin, and voices behind her. )

     Breaking a prisoner out of Hellgate tonight. Be available. Bring bandages. And Astoria had obeyed — because Per Haskell told her that she should, because the indenture she’d negotiated for herself means that when Per Haskell tells her to jump, she asks how high. Which means that she’s done what Kaz asks, and which means, apparently, that she’ll be breaking into the Ice Court. 

     ( The water hears and understands. The ice does not forgive. She’s not sure which she’s meant to be, now. ) 

     She doesn’t interfere when the man — Matthias, they’d said, his eyes afire with fury and every muscle in his body tense, like some great cat prepared to hunt — leaps at Kaz. Kaz doesn’t need her help, would be insulted if she tried, and so she simply waits, hands folded in her lap, clean bandages in a cloth bag beside her, eyebrows raised. When Matthias is shackled and pushed back into the room again, Astoria speaks for the first time since her arrival, defaulting to Fjerdan rather than Kerch. 

     “Are you badly wounded?” she asks, and there’s a comfort she cannot quite describe in speaking her mother tongue again, even to a drüskelle. There’s a jug of tepid water left behind — no doubt intentional, so that she can show him what she can do. Kaz always has a plan. “I am no Healer, but I can offer some help.”