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Her wings unfurled, and the powerful curve and sweep of them surrounded Kaz, stealing his breath as they always did. The dark glory of them filled the spacious room, casting shadows over his face and body, painting the shapes of flight on the walls.
“They're—”
“Don't say beautiful.” Inej's voice was curt, her shoulders drawn with tension. “That's what they all said. Beautiful, exotic Suli wings, just like in the engravings. ‘Are they as sensitive as I've heard? Let's find out. ’ ” She spat out the last words like bile.
“—poking my ear.” Kaz finished his sentence, pushing aside the offending feathers and rubbing his ear.
“... Oh.” Then, awkwardly, “Sorry.”
She was sitting on her bed in the Van Eck house with her wings spread wide, their tips lightly brushing the floor, with Kaz sitting between them in a chair they had pulled over. Inej shifted her wings with a graceful movement, giving him more space.
He hadn't worn his gloves tonight; he could touch her wings bare handed without risking contact with her flesh, though he'd never done it before. Bumped against them dozens of times in the narrow hallways of the Slat, sure. He’d even taken a blow or two from her wings, sparring without weapons, until the time she’d forgotten to pull the strength from the blow and given him a concussion. She’d been careful to keep them mantled during spars after that, but he could still remember that moment of impact, the way she’d batted him aside like a rag doll. Before that, he'd never truly understood how physically powerful they could be.
But there was a tension in the air now. He sat close to her, and her feathers no longer mantled her body like a shield but spread around him, shimmering and vulnerable. She also wasn’t wearing anything above the waist, which he was trying very hard not to think about.
“I… I'm not going to pretend I don’t want you. But that’s my problem, not yours.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Tell me how to start.”
He’d never helped her groom them before. Anika had done it until she'd left the city to run the Dregs’ new money laundering front in Belendt. Inej could have asked Marya to do it, or one of the women in her crew. Instead, she'd asked Kaz, and he recognized it as the precious gift of trust that it was.
He'd never put it into crude words, but she knew how desperately he desired her. She must suspect that her wings were a part of his fantasies. He felt the same longing the men who had visited the Menagerie had, to run his hands over smooth, sleek feathers, to bury his face at the place her wings met her spine and press his mouth against the softness there. But Inej trusted him not to cross that line. She trusted him to look past his fantasies and see the reality: a body that was not his to touch. Wings that were not made to titillate men but to carry her through the sky like a bird of prey. The woman he loved, clinging to a promise he’d die before betraying.
“Straighten the feathers first,” she said quietly. “Any that are tangled or bent, smooth them straight. There’s a couple in particular on the left that I can’t reach.”
Kaz lifted his hand, then paused. “I'm going to touch. Tell me if anything hurts.” He swallowed hard. He could feel his heart pounding in his throat.
Inej nodded. “Okay.”
The long flight feathers at the tips of her wings looked deceptively fragile. But under his hands, they were strong, the center shaft powerful and springy. Every one of them was the same inky black as her hair, and he remembered the first time he’d seen her fly. It had been a little less than two months since he’d brought her from the Menagerie, when her clipped flight feathers had finally grown back. When she’d flown above the streetlights, she’d vanished entirely against the night sky, and when she landed, it had been as if a piece of the night detached and folded itself into a girl. That was when he’d first named her the Wraith. That was the terror she could summon to serve her. It was dark and primal and dangerous, the opposite of the exotic pet she’d been forced to act the part of.
That memory– and the graceful, powerful shape of them as he smoothed each row of feathers meticulously into place– lingered in his mind.
“Am I doing all right?” He had reached the soft, downy feathers near where the wing met her back, and he felt her shiver slightly as he gently combed his fingers through the places they were tangled. She was breathing a little more quickly, but she still hadn't flinched. If he let his fingers linger against the base of the wing, he could feel her heart racing.
He tried not to linger; the way the feathers turned to soft, sleek lines of fur that trailed to form a vee at the base of her spine must have been just as provocative to other men as it was to him. They would have traced it with their unwelcome hands and lips the same way that he ached to. It was unbearably sensual, except that it wasn't. It was no more an invitation to his touch than the curve of her mouth or the hollow of her throat. And no touch could be as intimate as the way she trusted him not to touch before she was ready. She'd chosen to bare her body to him, to let him do this for her—
“You’re doing fine,” she replied, dragging him out of his reverie. “Do you see the pin feathers–the sort of spiky—”
“I see.” He reached out and touched the tip of one hard quill, grown in to replace a molted feather. “You want me to get the sheath stuff off. It’s like hair or fingernails, right? It won’t hurt you?”
“They itch like hell; it’s a relief to get them off–the ones where the sheath’s turned hard and white. The new feather inside is sensitive, but not painful.” She stretched her wings out a little more, and Kaz gently tugged at the outer layer of the pinfeather he’d touched. Suddenly, it came free, revealing a soft, new feather, disarrayed from its confinement. He stroked it wonderingly.
“Now smooth and straighten it out,” Inej instructed, and he did. They were sensitive, she’d said, so he kept his touch as light as he could, stroking the newly exposed feather until it tucked neatly alongside the rest. He ran his fingers along the wing and found the next, and her quiet sigh of appreciation when he tugged it loose sent a thrill all the way down to his bones.
He slipped each feather sheath free, delicately at first, then, gauging her reactions, more confidently, grazing his nails over the itchy skin at the base and stroking them firmly down. Her soft moans of relief did obscene things to his thoughts. Those unintentionally glorious sounds were only his for a few minutes before he'd groomed every one of the offending quills. He wished there were more of them.
“Is that good? I can't find anything else—it looks okay to me?”
Inej reached back to feel the way her feathers lay, and he caught a glimpse of a small, peaked breast as she twisted around in the process. He forced himself to look away.
“Yeah, I think so.” She straightened again and passed him a flask of oil, bumping it gently against his arm to get his attention because he was still staring fixedly at the wall. He took it quickly, feeling his face prickle with heat. The oil was clear, and the label on it was in Shu. It looked as if it was meant to be used for cooking. “Is this what you used at home?” Kaz asked as he poured some into his palm. He smoothed the oil slowly and carefully along a feather, watching in fascination as each filament fit together to form a single, shimmering surface.
Inej laughed softly, bitterly. “No. It’s not. I didn’t need it at home.”
“Why not?”
“Feel along the underside of the wing, where it meets my body.” Inej’s voice had gone flat and expressionless. Kaz hesitated before he obeyed, touching the place where down turned to soft fur, barely breathing.
“Here?”
“Inward just a tiny bit. Now up. There. Do you feel that?”
He did. There was an uneven ridge there, maybe an inch long– a scar.
“It’s where the oil gland used to be. It—it keeps the feathers strong and clean. Waterproof, too. Heleen has them cut out of her ‘Suli blackbirds.’”
Kaz’s hand froze in horror.
“She says it stinks like unwashed hair. You could probably smell the perfumed musk oil she used on them at the Menagerie.” Inej made a small sound of disgust. “Now I just use whatever has the least scent to it. If my wings can’t smell like me, at least they won’t smell like anybody else.”
Lightly, Kaz slid a hand along the inside curve of her wing, swallowing hard as he followed the path he would have taken if he’d been spreading oil from the place the gland had been. It would have been slicked over the feathers at the base of the wing first, smoothing them down flat over the warm skin beneath. Then the smaller, shorter feathers along the top of the wing–he poured more oil onto his fingers, traced a line up from the scarred place, and stroked them smooth. She sighed quietly and he paused.
“Inej?”
“That—” her voice caught in her throat and she cleared it. “--feels like how my mother used to do it.”
“Makes sense to do it like this,” he said a little awkwardly. “If that’s where the oil comes from, they naturally smooth that way. Up from there and along these at the top.”
“The mantle feathers,” Inej supplied the term. “These are the secondaries—” instead of pointing, she just moved the wing up so that his fingers slid against a different row of feathers— “and these are the primaries.” She folded her wings slightly to show him and the tip of one wing brushed over his thigh, then back as she repositioned them to how they’d been before.
He tried to remember how to breathe, committing the terms to his memory, lightly smoothing one of the—“what are the… the feather parts of the feather called?” he made himself ask. Focus on words. Names. But he couldn’t stop his mind from returning to she was comfortable enough to move them against my hand while I was touching her. She felt safe letting them touch my body. She didn’t flinch. She barely even noticed.
“The feather parts of the feather?” He could hear the smile in her voice. “The barbs?”
“Barbs are sharp,” he argued, putting more oil on his fingers and delicately tracing the edge of one, admiring the way each soft length slotted against the next to create a single surface. “These are smooth. Soft.”
Her wings moved slightly as she shrugged. “That’s what they’re called in Kerch. In Suli, they’re—” she said a word that sounded like flowing water.
Like everything else in Suli—or Fjerdan, or Ravkan, or Zemeni—it slipped from Kaz’s brain a moment later. He could remember every card in a deck and every number on a ledger, but foreign languages never stuck. He knew how much it would mean to Inej if he learned Suli, even if it were only a handful of words. He wished he fucking could.
Instead, he memorized the layers of feathers on her wings and the way they slipped like silk between his fingers. He memorized the angle of her bare shoulders as she relaxed more and more, pressing her wings back into his hands and breathing slowly and steadily. Her trust in him warmed him from the inside—a sharp, hot, beautiful ache that he wanted to feel again and again.
Her wings brushed his face, his throat, his wrists as she moved and stretched them so he could reach each part. The muscles under the feathers flexed and relaxed against his hands. One day, would he be able to bear her touch with this much courage? He wanted to. So badly.
Finally he used a rag to wipe the excess oil from the surface of her wings in long strokes. He had to move around them as she spread them to their full span—his arms weren't long enough to reach across the length of them. He worked until they shone neat and perfect, ignoring the pain in his leg and the growing ache in his back. When he could no longer find a stray drop of oil or a feather out of place, he set the rag aside and wiped his hands on his handkerchief. Then he handed her the top she'd discarded, draped out of the way on the clothes press to keep it from becoming soaked with oil.
It was a Suli garment, made to wrap modestly over the front of her body and the curve of her lower back while still allowing her wings to move freely. He had never watched her put it on before, and the sight was fascinating.
He imagined a future where she taught him to put it on her and he had the privilege of covering up each curve and muscle and scar. Imagined finding an oil that smelled like home and safety to her and breathing it in every time her feathers brushed his face.
Even if he could never overcome his fear of touch—even if she decided she never wanted to let another man touch her—even if, like with everything else in life, love wasn't enough to fix the damage done…
More than any pleasure sex would bring, Kaz wanted to feel the same terrifying strength that let her defy her past enough to give him this.
When she turned and slid her legs over the edge of the bed to face him, he reached out and took her hand shakily in both of his, closing his eyes and breathing in the sacred silence of her trust and his own.