Nina
Nina did not rest during the trip to Fjerda. She'd spent the initial trip to Ravka holed up in the cabin where Matthias' body lay, still on the sheets. There were Corporalki on the boat with them, and they used their powers to keep the decay at bay. The journey took weeks, and Matthias's body remained unchanged, frozen as if in ice. She could almost imagine that he was only sleeping.
She lay her head on his broad chest and dreamed of heartbeats.
Zoya, Genya, Kuwei, Colm, the other Grisha on the boat – they tried to coax Nina out of the cabin, tried to speak of grief. She pushed them away. She'd lost her appetite again. Everything inside of her that had begun to mend after her fight with parem had broken again.
It was worse without the other Crows around. She knew she needed to do this – she'd promised Matthias she would bring him home, and she would. She had to. They'd all been planning to split, anyways – Inej to her ship, Kaz to rebuild his empire, Kuwei to Ravka, Jesper and Wylan together in Wylan's mansion, together the way she and Matthias had been meant to. They would have gone to Ravka together, to Fjerda, to the border where they could infiltrate both sides, negotiate peace from the inside.
Nina would still do that. She had to. She'd promised Matthias that as well, and if she couldn't have him, she could at least have his promises.
If she was going to keep her promises, she could not continue wallowing in despair. When they reached Ravka, she kissed his cold forehead softly, then dressed properly, pulled her hair back, squared her shoulders, steeled her features in the way she'd learned from Kaz Brekker, the best liar of them all, and strode out onto the deck of the ship.
"I'll be taking a boat to Fjerda," she announced.
Genya looked up at Nina. She'd been discussing something with the ship's captain, one of Sturmhond's men, and Rotty, who'd come along to report the journey back to Kaz. Nina could see a hint of surprise in Genya's eye – she hadn't seen Nina out of the cabin, standing tall, in weeks.
"You can't take this boat," Genya said. "It took a bit of damage in the last storm and it will need several days, if not weeks, for repairs. And you'll need to move quickly. We can only keep your Fjerdan for so long…"
"I'll take any boat," Nina said. She would. If all they had was a rowboat, she would take the oars herself and row them both to Fjerda.
"I'll find something," Rotty said, his rumbling voice like a promise. "You'll be on your way by tonight." He looked at Nina with sad eyes. Rotty had been there for the Ice Court job and everything that followed. Although Nina didn't know him particularly well, she thought that maybe he, too, was mourning the loss of Matthias in his own way.
"Thank you," Nina said.
Rotty found a small fishing boat that he could rent for the week, and a handful of crew. At dusk, Genya and Zoya helped Rotty haul Matthias's massive body onto the boat.
"His body will not last long without Grisha preservation," Genya said, once he'd been laid out on a cot in the corner of the boat's single cabin. She gave Nina a long look, but she did not say what Nina knew she was thinking – that once upon a time, Nina would have easily had the power to keep Matthias's body from succumbing to decay. Now, she knew she could spread decay as easily as confetti, but she could no longer find the thread of the living cells that would keep the decay away.
Nina had not told the other Grisha what parem had done to her powers, but they could sense it. And she'd needed to ask for help with keeping Matthias's body from rotting – they knew she could not do it herself.
"I know," Nina said simply. She gave Genya and Zoya small smiles, tried not to look weary. "I will return," she told them. She did not say when.
As she turned to climb onto the boat, Kuwei stepped into her path. She started. It had become easier for people to sneak up on her ever since the parem had severed her connection with the living.
"Thank you," Kuwei said in Shu. He bowed his head. "For everything."
"You're welcome," Nina said.
Kuwei lifted his head, but he did not meet Nina's eyes. He shifted, uneasy. "I'm sorry," he said eventually. "That he died because of me."
Something cold caught in Nina's throat. "It wasn't because of you," she said. But she did not know that – none of them knew what had happened, who had shot Matthias. A stadwatch officer, a rival gang, a stray shot? He had died while faking Kuwei's death, though, so in a small way it was because of Kuwei.
But Kuwei had not asked to be brought into any of this in the first place. They'd ripped him from the Ice Court themselves. Nina could not blame anyone, and yet she blamed everyone.
The world had stolen Matthias from her, and despite every kindness and hope she held for the world, that knowledge was like a black rot inside of her, eating away at rationality.
"It wasn't your fault," she repeated. Kuwei looked unconvinced.
"I hope to see you again," he said eventually, and then faded away into the crowd.
Nina climbed onto the boat, and did not look back at the dock as Rotty launched the boat into the sea.
As they made their way to Fjerda, Nina wanted nothing more than to lay beside Matthias once more, unmoving, to give up entirely. Every molecule inside her ached to succumb. It was like her battle with parem all over again, but this time Matthias was not there to talk her through.
Instead, Nina funnelled that desperate, hopeless energy into her powers. In some ways, it was like being back at the Little Palace all over again. She did not know everything she was capable of, and so every new discovery made her feel a little like a child again, amazed at her own abilities. It was a welcome distraction.
She could move her hair, she realized. The dead cells that made up the long strands of her brown hair responded to her command easily. She spent an afternoon sitting on the floor of the cabin, making her hair dance in an invisible breeze, even picking things up with tendrils of her hair like dextrous tentacles.
One night, curled up in a nest of blankets at the floor beside Matthias's cot, half-awake, she realized that she could sense the walls of the cabin. They reached out to her, cold and dead but alive with her power, and she shuddered with cold sweats as she tried to understand what was in the thin wooden walls that she could sense so clearly.
Finally, she stumbled to her feet and lit a lantern, pressing her face close to the chipped red paint that peeled from the walls. She touched the wall with two shaking fingers, and realized that she could leech the colour from the paint as easily as wiping dew from leaves. It was something a Fabrikator could do as a child, a simple trick, but it was not the realm of a Corporalki. Paint colours came from plants, insects, minerals – not from humans. What was in this paint? Blood? Bones?
She felt sick. She did not want to know. It was cruel, how her powers had made her so keenly aware of the death that surrounded her right when she wanted to think about death the least.
She turned to Matthias. She placed the lantern on the side table beside the cot. The flickering yellow light sent shadows dancing across his still face. They had almost reached the shores of Fjerda. Matthias had gone several days without Grisha preservation. A faint scent of decay had begun to float through the cabin. Rotty and the crew now slept outside on nights when it wasn't raining.
Nina reached for Matthias slowly, carefully. Maybe she could push the decaying cells back, or at least halt their progress. She touched his cheek gently with the back of her hand. He was so cold, but it felt natural that he should be icy, with his snowy hair and ice-blue eyes. She longed to see them open again.
"I love you," she murmured. She traced the curve of his jaw. It felt slack, slightly bloated. Nina gagged. She closed her eyes and reached into the deep, cold river that now flowed between her and death. She could sense every spot of decay on the corpse before her. She forced herself not to pull away.
She reached deeper into the river. She could sense how easy it would be to reach out to the decay, to pull it to the surface, to make it blossom across his entire body. Death was alive in Nina's hands, and she was its master.
And a master could make death do her bidding.
Nina grabbed hold of the decay, firmly, and pushed it back. Her stomach tumbled, and her whole body shifted with a sort of rolling sensation. She was reversing the progress of the decay. It felt almost as if she was unspooling time itself.
She pushed until all the decay was gone. She could no longer feel a single black spot on Matthias's body. But she found that this feeling of unspooling, of rolling back time, did not have to end. She continued to push. She was diving deeper, deeper into the rushing black water of her powers. Distantly, she was aware of the cold sweat that had broken out across her body, of her own panting breaths, of the buzz of exhaustion that was washing over her. But more immediately, she felt this great and looming power, and all she had to do was keep pushing.
She pushed back the cold of death, and Matthias's skin flushed warm under her fingers. She pushed back the torn and dying cells in Matthias's stomach that had been ripped through by the bullet.
And then she reached the great, black center that lay at the very depths of her cold river.
She pushed back death itself.
This was not like animating the corpses at Reaper's Barge. This was nothing like making a lump of dead cells follow her commands, nothing like making her hair jump and dance. This was reaching right into the center of the thing – not into the center of Matthias's life, but into the center of his death.
And she reached for it, this big, dark, monstrous thing that felt like ice and fear and peace, and she commanded it. She commanded Matthias's death, and she pushed it far away, to another time, another place.
And she felt Matthias's heart begin to beat beneath her fingertips.
Nina's eyes snapped open with a jolt. She burst through the surface of the dark river, shaking and gasping.
Matthias's eyes fluttered open. In the stuttering light of the lantern, they were ice-blue and endless.
In a voice that was rough and weak and unused, Matthias whispered, "Nina. What have you done?"