The Winner's Crime (35 page)

bribes the others?” Verex faced her fully now. “You asked

me whether I would have liked to become a physician. Yes.

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I would have. Once. I even had books on the subject. My

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father burned them. Kestrel, I know you think that you’ve

hidden your heart where no one can see it.” Verex’s dark

CRIME

eyes held hers. “But you need to hide it better.”

’S

An arrow fl ew high above its target, its feathers whis-

tling.

“Verex, what has my maid told you?”

THE WINNER

“Not much . . . so far.” He must have seen the worry

she was trying to hide. His expression softened. “Let’s keep

it that way, shall we?”

Kestrel mustered a bright, tense smile.

Verex sighed. “Come on,” he said. “I want to see Risha

shoot.”

Kestrel let him lead her to the archers. She was glad

that she’d made no promise to enter the archery contest.

Her fi ngers would tremble on the bowstring.

Risha notched an arrow. She had a fi ne, strong line.

Kestrel focused on watching the eastern girl. If she watched

Risha with the same intensity that Verex did, she might be

able to forget, if only for a moment, Verex’s warning.

Risha let the arrow go. It soared lazily and hit the tar-

get’s edge. All of her arrows in the target were badly placed.

Kestrel would have thought from the way Risha held her

bow that she would have been able to do better. Then

again, the day was full of sneaky little breezes.

Risha aimed again.

“. . . born fi rst?” Kestrel heard someone saying. “A baby

prince or princess?”

Verex went still beside her. Kestrel spotted the gossip-

1

ing courtiers. She realized they were looking right at her

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and Verex. Their words came clear on the wind. It shouldn’t

SKI

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have taken so long for Kestrel to understand what they

meant. When she did, her cheeks burned.

Risha let the arrow fl y.

It drove deep into the target’s very center.

MARIE RUTK

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32

LEARNING THE EASTERN LANGUAGE MADE

Arin feel like he was remembering something he didn’t

know he knew. Dacran was very similar to Herrani. It had

some of the same patterns, and though the vocabulary was

diff erent, the words didn’t sound completely alien, either.

Arin learned quickly.

If the eastern language felt familiar, much in this new

country was strange. Dacran cuisine focused far more on

color than taste. Clothes were plain but cosmetics were

not, and men as well as women used them. Roshar in par-

tic u lar liked to line his eyes with vivid, dramatic fl air, as if

to show that he knew this drew attention to his mutila-

tions, and he didn’t care.

Arin was allowed to roam the castle and city. “Everyone

knows who you are,” Roshar had said with a shrug. “If you

wander too far away, the city militia will happily shoot you.”

“What exactly is ‘too far’?”

Roshar told him to fi gure it out for himself.

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The queen, meanwhile, kept her distance.

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At fi rst, Arin stayed inside the castle, thinking that the

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structure was a shell that housed not only the queen, but

her internal self. If he knew its hallways and alcoves and

chambers, he might be able to guess at what would per-

suade her to an alliance with Herran.

MARIE RUTK

But the dizzying mix of transparent and opaque walls

gave him no clues. He wandered. Sometimes he heard dis-

tant music played in other rooms. There was an instru-

ment like the Herrani violin, except with a fl atter bridge,

and here the strings were tuned more sharply and played

with a percussive quality: lots of plucked notes and aggres-

sive bow strokes.

Arin rarely saw the queen. When he did, she ignored

him in an icy way that never failed to remind him that

he had no weapon. His parents had thought that openly

carry ing a blade was the height of barbarism. Now, though,

Arin felt strange without Kestrel’s dagger at his hip. Its lack

made him uncomfortable . . . and even more uncomfort-

able about what that discomfort might mean.

The easterners were always well armed. They favored

small weapons. Their crossbows were smaller than Arin

had ever seen. From Roshar, he learned that they weren’t as

powerful as a western crossbow, but more accurate and

easier to load quickly.

The eastern love for the miniature was everywhere

within the castle. Paintings no larger than a handspan

adorned the walls. Basins collecting rainwater that fun-

neled down from the roofs were decorated with tiny mosa-

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ics of dragonfl ies. Shelves in rooms meant for smoking held

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clocks the size of watches, and porcelain eggs that, when

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opened, showed coiled snakes made from jointed green

glass. Some eggs hatched tiny tigers that gnashed their me-

CRIME

chanical teeth.

’S

Once, Arin strayed far into the recesses of the castle

and found a model of the castle on a pedestal. Inside, suites

had details that made Arin wish for a magnifying lens.

THE WINNER

With a fi ngernail, he turned a faucet in a bathing room.

Water fi lled the teacup- size bathtub. It all made Arin feel

too large: thuggish and fumbling.

“I was told that you were here,” said a voice behind

him. It was Roshar.

Arin turned off the bathtub’s water.

“That was my sister’s.” Roshar’s tone made clear which

sister he meant. He stared at a suite of rooms that looked fi t

for a little princess. A chest sat at the foot of a canopied

bed. Arin moved to open it. He expected Roshar to snarl

an objection, but Roshar simply looked at him, black eyes

curious and narrow, like the eyes of the snakes in the por-

celain eggs. With one fi nger, Arin reached inside the chest.

He snatched his hand back. Blood speckled his fi nger.

It felt as if he’d been bitten by a host of tiny fangs.

Roshar took the chest from the small room. He tipped

its contents onto his palm, which he held out for Arin to see.

Miniature weapons. Swords the size of matchsticks.

Daggers like sharp, steel fi lings. Roshar squeezed his hand

around them, then fl ung the bloody little weapons into

Risha’s doll house suite.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

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“A beheading would be spectacular,” Roshar said as Arin

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steered up the canal. It was a clear day. “Don’t you think?

You’re too heavy for a good hanging. Your neck would

break the moment you dropped.”

“Beheading’s quick, too.”

MARIE RUTK

“Not if the ax is dull.”

It was a typical conversation between Arin and Roshar,

who had very helpfully taught Arin his country’s words for

various deaths by execution and reminded Arin on a daily

basis that his life was in the prince’s hands. Usually, this

kind of talk cheered Roshar, who lay settled into his end of

the canoe, his arms crossed over his chest. One leg draped

over the side of the boat. His eyes were on the blue sky. But

the lazy posture looked like a lie today. Roshar’s body was

set with hard lines.

Then his gaze lowered and cast out over the city. Some-

thing caught his attention. It changed his face. It stole all

the pretending from it, and left nothing but the same naked

anger that had made him clench a fi st around Risha’s toy

weapons.

Arin saw what he saw.

A woman wandered near the edge of the canal. She

wore the tapered trousers of the plainspeople. Nestled in

her arms was a cloth bundle of blue, the color worn by Da-

cran children. She held the bundle like a baby. But it had

no face. It had no hands. It was nothing more than a rag

wrapped around itself. She touched it tenderly.

Arin stopped rowing. The water swirled away from his

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Sometimes, Arin almost understood what Kestrel had

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done. Even now, as he felt the drift of the boat and didn’t

fi ght its pull, Arin remembered the yearning in Kestrel’s

CRIME

face whenever she’d mentioned her father. Like a home-

’S

sickness. Arin had wanted to shake it out of her. Especially

during those early months when she had owned him. He

had wanted to force her to see her father for what he was.

THE WINNER

He had wanted her to acknowledge what
she
was, how she

was wrong, how she shouldn’t long for her father’s love. It was

soaked in blood. Didn’t she see that? How could she
not
?

Once, he’d hated her for it.

Then it had somehow touched him. He knew it him-

self. He, too, wanted what he shouldn’t. He, too, felt how

the heart chooses its own home and refuses reason.
Not

here,
he’d tried to say.
Not this. Not mine. Never.
But he had

felt the same sickness.

In retrospect, Kestrel’s role in the taking of the eastern

plains was predictable. Sometimes he damned her for cur-

rying favor with the emperor, or blamed her for playing war

like a game just because she could. Yet he thought he knew

the truth of her reasons. She’d done it for her father.

It almost made sense. At least, it did when he was near

sleep and his mind was quiet, and it was harder to help

what entered it. Right before sleep, he came close to under-

standing.

But he was awake now. He was staring as the glassy-

eyed woman cradled her cloth baby. He saw her caress the

blue folds. He saw the end of understanding.

Arin wished that Kestrel could see what he saw. He

wished that he could make her pay for what she had done.

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33

SPRING PINCHED THE WORLD OPEN. TIGHT

buds split along their seams and spilled out their colors.

Kestrel stayed indoors. It didn’t help. Thoughts, too,

have their seasons, and she couldn’t stop what worked its way

up through the underground of her mind. And what were

her thoughts? What did she gather in secret, in guilt? What

did she hold, and lift to the light to see better, and what did

she drop as quickly as she could, as if it were hot to the touch?

That last kind of thought grew like fl owers with fi re for

petals. They blackened the grass around them. They burned

from root to stamen. Kestrel avoided them.

Except when she didn’t. Sometimes, she went to them

fi rst. Sometimes, she lied to herself along the way.

She thought about the piano she had left behind in

Herran. And it was allowed for her to think about that,

because why wouldn’t she miss the instrument she’d grown

up playing, and had been her mother’s? There was nothing

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wrong with thinking that the palace piano had a rich, ring-

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ing sound, that it was probably the fi ner instrument, but

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that it made her long for the one she’d played almost all her

life. She could practically feel the cool keys.

CRIME

Her piano was in Arin’s house. She knew the house well.

’S

It had been her prison. It had become— almost—her home.

But then she thought that this was not true. She didn’t

know Arin’s house all that well, and her insistence on this

THE WINNER

truth made it clear that she had told herself that earlier lie

only so that she could correct herself. Because wasn’t there

a part of Arin’s home that she had never seen?

This was her correction:

This was the burning fl ower:

Kestrel had never been in Arin’s rooms. Yes, she’d vis-

ited his childhood suite. She’d been there once with him.