The Winner's Crime (16 page)

would need only a few moments. She slipped a hand into

her dress pocket.

Tensen stood before a landscape stolen from the south-

ern isles. Arin wasn’t with him. He was late. Perhaps he

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wouldn’t come at all, given their last conversation.

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The painting of Tensen’s choice showed bleachfi elds,

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where fabric had been stretched out to whiten in the sun,

and crops of indigo fl owers grown for dye. “Lady Kestrel,”

Tensen began, pleased, but she cut him off .

“I see you appreciate a fi ne landscape,” she said. “Did

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you know that these fl owers are painted with actual in-

digo? They represent the thing and
are
the thing at the

same time.” Kestrel began to talk, long and loud, about art.

She watched as nearby courtiers, once interested in eaves-

dropping on this conversation, grew bored and turned away.

Kestrel let her voice gradually lower as Tensen waited, green

eyes curious— and bright with cautious hope. Even if he’d

never seen the note Arin had stolen, it couldn’t be hard for

him to guess that Kestrel wanted to discuss more than art.

She removed her hand from her pocket. “Such exquisite

detail,” she said, pointing. “Look, you can practically see

each petal.” With a brush of her fi ngers, she set a dead

masker moth at the bottom edge of the painting where it

met the frame. The moth clung. It deepened to purple. It

became part of the painting.

Tensen looked at the moth, then looked at her.

Quietly, she said, “I will fi nd out what ever it was that

Thrynne overheard. And when I do, I will leave another

moth here for you. Come to the gallery every morning.

Develop a fondness for this painting. Look for the moth.

That’s how you will know to meet me.”

“Where?”

“Outside the palace.” But her knowledge of the city

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was meager, and she wasn’t sure how to be more specifi c.

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“There’s a tavern in town that serves Herrani—”

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“Then they serve the captain of the guard’s spies, too.

The emperor must know what you are, Tensen. He does

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nothing to get in your way at the moment because he’s

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waiting to see what you know and what you’ll do with it.”

Kestrel glanced again at the emperor. Prince Verex had ap-

proached him and was saying something heated, his face

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fl ushed. The emperor’s profi le showed sardonic boredom.

“Then where?” asked Tensen.

Kestrel watched the emperor take a glass of wine from

a servant who then faded into the background as if she,

too, were a masker moth.
No one looks at a slave,
Arin had

said. This gave Kestrel an idea. “How is fresh food brought

into the palace?”

“The kitchen staff buys it in the city market, from the

grocers’ stalls and the Butcher’s Row.”

“Yes. There. We’ll meet in the Row. If you dress as a

servant, no one will give you a second glance.”

“The prince’s bride is bound to draw more than a few

stares.”

“Let me worry about myself.” She was anxious to sort

out the trickier detail of meeting:
when
. “Look.” She pointed

to the bottom edge of the painting’s frame and explained

how he was to imagine the line was the rim of a clock’s face

straightened, and that time moved along the frame from

dawn to dusk. Where the moth rested would indicate the

hour of their meeting the following day.

“What if someone else notices the moth?” Tensen asked.

“It’s just a moth. A common pest. It doesn’t mean any-

thing.”

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“A servant might fi nd it before I do and sweep it away.”

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“Then that’s what I’ll assume has happened, if I don’t

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see you in the Row at the appointed hour. Really, Tensen.

Do you want my help or not?” She understood his doubt,

yet it rankled, and bothered her all the more because she

had the uneasy feeling of playing a doomed game. The

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winner knows her whole line of play. But Kestrel saw only

one move, and maybe the next.

Verex was getting louder. Kestrel couldn’t hear what he

was saying to the emperor, but heads were starting to turn

even before Verex stormed from the gallery.

“Rumor has it that the prince doesn’t approve of what’s

happening in the east,” Tensen murmured.

Kestrel didn’t want to think about the east.

“Slaves say that the eastern princess is like a sister to

Verex,” Tensen added. “They were raised together— at

fi rst— after her kidnapping.”

Kestrel’s eyes automatically sought Risha then, and

when she saw her, standing at the other end of the long

hall, Kestrel’s blood seemed to pale. She felt her pulse quiet.

Kestrel imagined the blood it pushed through her body

growing pink, then clear. Thin, trickling water.

It wasn’t Risha that made Kestrel go cold, or the tiny

eastern painting the princess gazed at as if it were hung on

the moon. Kestrel told herself it wasn’t the clear loss on

Risha’s face.

But there was nothing else in this gallery that could

strike Kestrel with such guilt.

“There’s been a Valorian victory in the eastern plains,”

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Tensen said. “Have you heard? No? Well, you’ve been ill.

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Your father poisoned the tribes’

horses and seized the

plains. It was swift.”

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She tried not to hear him. She looked at the princess

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standing alone.

Kestrel would go to her. She would leave Tensen and

the indigo moth and cut a path through the courtiers,

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passing between the soapstone sculptures plundered from

the northern tundra, because if Kestrel didn’t go to Risha

now, she was sure that she would become just like the stat-

ues: smooth, cold, hard.

Before she could move, someone else appeared at the

princess’s side.

It was Arin. He spoke softly to Risha. Kestrel had no

real way of telling that his voice was soft, not from so far

away, not with the din of courtiers talking. But Kestrel

knew. She
knew
, she could see compassion in his eyes, in

the tender curve of his mouth. Arin would say nothing but

soft words to this young woman. He leaned toward her.

Risha answered him, and he touched three fi ngers to the

back of her hand.

And why wouldn’t Arin grieve with Risha? He had

lost his family. He had lost everything to the Valorians.

Of course that drew him to her loss. Their shared sorrow

created a shelter around them that Kestrel could never

enter.

What would she have said to Risha anyway?

It was my fault.

Or:
It could have been worse.

That was as stupid as telling Arin the truth. Kestrel

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would have to swallow her words, and be silent, and swal-

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low again until her belly was heavy with everything she

couldn’t say.

She wondered if Arin would lift his gaze and see her

watching them. But his eyes remained on Risha.

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It seemed to Kestrel that her life had taken the shape of

a folded knife, her heart a blade inside a body of wood.

“You’d better go,” Tensen said suddenly. She had for-

gotten that he stood next to her, that they were surrounded

by the court, and that she had meant her conversation with

Tensen to be as brief as possible. She had meant to avoid

the notice of the emperor.

Who was staring across the gallery at them.

His fury boiled. The courtiers nearest to him sensed it.

They edged away.

“Wait,” she told Tensen, though the emperor was bear-

ing through the crowd toward them.

“I don’t think so.”

“
Wait
. Why did my father poison the eastern horses?”

“Why do you Valorians do anything? To win, obvi-

ously. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“Was it his idea? The emperor’s? Or— what do people

say?” How widely known was her role in seizing the

plains?

“The court doesn’t care how or why General Trajan did

it. They rejoice in the result.”

“Thank you,” Kestrel said, but Tensen had already

gone.

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The emperor closed in on her. She tried not to reach for

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her new diamond dagger, or wish for the one her father had

given her and the emperor had taken. The crowd gave

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them a wide berth.

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“I told you to stay away from the Herrani,” the emperor

hissed.

“No, you didn’t.” Her voice was a miracle. Calm.

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Steady. It couldn’t possibly be her own. “I don’t remember

those exact words.”

“I was perfectly clear.” The emperor’s hand came down

on her arm. To the rest of the court, the gesture might have

looked aff ectionate. They didn’t see how he worked his

thumb into her inner elbow and pinched the fl esh there.

At fi rst, the pain was small. Mean-

spirited, almost

childish. It didn’t seem serious, which gave Kestrel the cour-

age to lie. “That’s what I told Minister Tensen. That I’m no

longer the imperial ambassador to Herran. Isn’t that what

you wanted? I thought it only polite to tell the minister in

person.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t tell the governor.”

“I don’t want to talk to the governor.”

“No? You haven’t spoken with Arin?” The emperor’s

nails were sharp.

Kestrel almost saw her error, but another part of her

insisted that there could be no error, not with him. Her

mind fi lled with lead. It said
deny
. And although the

knowledge of what she had done wrong suddenly fi zzed

through her, fear corroded her thoughts, and lied to her,

and told her to lie hard enough to make the lie true. “No,”

she told the emperor. “Of course not.”

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“That,” whispered the emperor, “isn’t what my librari-

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ans say.”

He pinched harder. The pain deepened. It drove into

her fear. It pinned her feet to the fl oor.

“You disobeyed me, Kestrel. You disobeyed me twice.”

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“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

The emperor released her, his thumbnail bloody. “No,

you’re not,” he said. “But you will be.”

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13

YET THE EMPEROR DID NOTHING.

Kestrel’s dread grew. There was a half- moon scab and a

stormy bruise on her inside elbow. That couldn’t be her

only punishment.

Kestrel’s letters to Jess, fi lled with false cheer, went unan-

swered. It occurred to Kestrel that the emperor had inter-

cepted the letters. But this, though it hurt, wouldn’t be

enough for the emperor’s revenge. Something worse must

come.

She’d seen the way he was with others. A soldier had

recently been found guilty of desertion, and his high- society

parents had pled for leniency. Desertion was a form of trea-

son. The punishment for treason was death. Courtiers gos-

siped that maybe, just this once, the soldier would “go

north”— meaning, to the tundra’s work camp. But the par-

ents clearly hoped for even better than that. Their gold

made its way to certain pockets. They regularly petitioned

the emperor to release their son. The emperor had smiled

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and said he would see. It amused him to wait, and watch

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people twist on the knife of his waiting.

Kestrel felt the shame of her mistake. The instinctive

guilt of being caught. And worse: a slippery, eel- like uncer-

tainty in herself. What did she think she was doing, with

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