The Winner's Crime (44 page)

his ear. “Yes,” she murmured. “But not yet.”

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41

HE KISSED HER. HER MOUTH PARTED BENEATH

his. Her hands were on him, and it was curious, it felt alien.

He relaxed— shouldn’t he relax? She seemed to think he

should.

He remembered his hunger. Not for this. But she gave,

and he took, and gave back, even while knowing what he

really wanted instead. He didn’t want to want it, and the

thought of Kestrel, of that monstrous want— so stupid, so

wrong
— made him stop. He pulled away. He gritted his

teeth once, hard, in a held breath, bright fury at himself.

“Arin?” said the queen.

He kissed her again, more deeply. This time, he lost

himself in it a little. It fi lled him. It pulled him away from

himself. That was good. He was tired with the way he had

been. He forgot it all.

Except . . . he remembered other kisses, other times. It

was impossible not to.

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This was the truth: in his mind, Kestrel touched his

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scarred face. This was her mouth moving against his. This

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was the truth: what he imagined was a lie. The truth and

the lie held him tight.

CRIME

It made him think. The queen leaned into him, brush-

’S

ing his bruised shoulder, and he winced. He recalled his

own soot- covered face after fi ring the weapon. What had

Arin thought earlier? That he looked like he’d been in a fi re.

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Something in his mind began to burn. Arin saw again

that pair of gloves in the fl ames. He remembered telling

Roshar to burn the plains.
You’re lucky the general didn’t do

that to begin with
.

Wait, wait. Why hadn’t he?

Because Kestrel had off ered him a diff erent plan. The

poisoned horses.
I can explain,
she’d said to Arin. He’d re-

fused to listen.
I had no choice,
she’d said.
My father would

have—

Tentatively, with a dread that hissed into him along its

quick fuse, Arin imagined the disaster that didn’t happen

and the one that did. He imagined fi re and the plains-

people burning . . . or dead horses and an exodus south.

The kiss went cold on his lips. Arin was numb with

understanding. He broke away from the queen.

Arin imagined Kestrel. He saw her considering a choice:

fi re and annihilation, or poison and survival. He knew

what he’d choose. He began to wonder if Kestrel had made

the very same choice.

He grew pale. He felt the blood leave him. His warring

heartbeat was loud in his ears.

The queen was staring. He’d pulled away from her; he

remembered doing that as if it were a lifetime ago. Arin

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couldn’t be sure if she’d touched him again after that. She

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wasn’t touching him now. She eyed him warily. He saw

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himself as she must: hunched, seeming suddenly ill. Or as if

he’d been assaulted. Cuff ed across the head, or knocked

back like when the explosion in the kitchen yard had kicked

the breath out of him. “Arin,” she said, “what’s wrong?”

MARIE RUTK

Arin’s shoulder ached, his throat ached.
He
had been

wrong, he had been kissing a lie. It would have sweetened,

he would have kept doing it. He would have kept pretend-

ing the queen was Kestrel. But who
was
Kestrel? He’d been

so sure, once. And then she’d appeared outside his besieged

city walls with the emperor’s treaty in her hand and an en-

gagement mark on her brow, and his certainty became a

wretched, crippled thing. He’d been a fool, he had told

himself as he stood in the snow outside his city, back to the

wall, cold to the bone. He’d been a fool of the worst kind:

the one who can’t see things for what they really are.

Arin raised a sudden fl at hand, palm out, as if stopping

someone. He remembered again how the siege had ended.

But this time, he changed the way he saw it. This time, in

his memory, he ignored that mark on Kestrel’s brow. He

saw only what she held in her hand: the treaty. It had saved

his life and spared his country. In his memory, Kestrel of-

fered him the folded, creamy paper. He took it, he opened

it. In his mind, he now saw a meaning in that treaty, and

the way she had given it to him, that he hadn’t before. Sud-

den understanding made Arin’s hand fall, and clench.

“I need to leave,” Arin told the queen. “I need to leave

right now.”

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42

KESTREL LOOKED LIKE SHE’D BEEN DIPPED IN

blood.

In the end, she hadn’t actually given any orders for her

wedding dress to be altered. The water engineer had al-

ready changed her bet, and although Kestrel wasn’t sure if

the emperor knew this, or what the consequences might

be, she dreaded the malicious attention it would attract if

she did anything more to upset the emperor’s plans. He

expected her to wear red, so the dress was red after all, in

stiff , glossy crimson folds of rich samite. It was heavy.

Structured in the bodice— it hurt when Kestrel breathed

too deeply— with full skirts whose pintucked shadows cre-

ated even deeper shades of red, almost black. The train was

bustled now, but when Kestrel entered the great hall it would

pour in a river behind her.

The new dressmaker’s hands fl uttered over Kestrel. “Is it

too tight? Or . . . perhaps you’d like more embellishment?

Crystals sewn onto the hem?”

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“No.” It was the last fi tting before the wedding— barely

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more than a week away. What Kestrel really wanted was

for the dress to be burned.

“Oh, but you haven’t even seen it with the gold yet.”

The dressmaker gathered handfuls of golden sugarspun

MARIE RUTK

wire and began to weave it through Kestrel’s braids and

around her neck, trailing it in chilly patterns over her bare

shoulders. The pain in Kestrel’s lungs grew worse. Her eyes

burned.

“Isn’t that better? Isn’t it?” the dressmaker’s voice was

high. “You are so beautiful!”

Kestrel suddenly heard the suppressed panic in the

girl’s voice. Kestrel saw her refl ection. She wasn’t beautiful.

Her face was pinched and white, eyes shocked and wide.

She looked ill. Kestrel pressed hands to damp eyes, pressed

hard, and looked again. Kestrel didn’t know what the dress-

maker saw in her expression, but she realized that what ever

it was, the girl read it as her own doom. She was a late- hour

replacement for Deliah: a simple seamstress elevated to

the role of imperial dressmaker. The girl was afraid. Why

wouldn’t she be afraid of Kestrel’s dissatisfaction? The last

imperial dressmaker was dead.

Kestrel turned from the mirror to face the brown-

haired girl. Kestrel stepped down from the block, careful of

the hem, and gently rested a hand on the girl’s arm.

The new dressmaker quieted. “Do you like it?” she whis-

pered.

“It’s perfect,” Kestrel said.

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Her father was healed. He would leave the morning after

the wedding to resume command of the eastern campaign.

CRIME

He would have left already if it weren’t for the emperor’s

’S

orders. Kestrel sometimes thought that the general would

have stayed no matter what for her birthday recital and the

wedding, but she tended to believe this only when not in

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his company. The moment he stood before her, his eyes

increasingly restless, she knew that she’d been deluding

herself.

He invited her for a walk. The wind was loud and brisk

enough to make Kestrel’s ears ache.

It seemed at fi rst that Kestrel and her father wouldn’t

speak. Then he said, “I don’t know what to give you for the

wedding.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I wish”— he squinted at a wheeling falcon high above

the Spring Garden—“I wish I’d held back something of

your mother’s that I could give to you. I’d say that I’d been

saving it for this.” On the day she’d come of age, Kestrel

had inherited all of her mother’s possessions. He had

wanted none of them.

A few months ago, Kestrel would have found another

way—

light, negligent, maybe witty—

to repeat that it

didn’t matter. But now she felt keenly the damage of how

they never really said what they meant to each other. Yes,

they came close. They had understandings, such as the

one that regularly brought the general to the secret space

behind the music room’s screen— if not into the music room

itself— to hear Kestrel play. This was a kind of honesty, she

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supposed, but it wasn’t
plain
, it wasn’t true, and she couldn’t

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help the hurt that came with the thought that she was just

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like him. She, too, couldn’t say what she meant. She wanted

to. She tried. The words struggled inside her.

Kestrel said, “Would you give me something if I asked

for it?”

MARIE RUTK

Carefully, he said, “That would depend.”

“Stay. Don’t go to the east.”

“Kestrel . . .”

“Stay one more week, then,” she pleaded. “Or a day.

Stay one more day after the wedding.”

He kept looking at the sky, but the hunting bird was

gone.

“Please.”

He fi nally turned to her. “Very well,” he said. “One

more day.”

Events for the court continued. There was the spring tour-

nament. There were masques, dances, feasts. More than

once, Kestrel caught Tensen’s gaze from across a room. She

averted her eyes. She knew that he wanted to speak with

her. He would press her for more information. He would

urge her to take more risks, all for a very uncertain gain.

But she’d made her decision. She would marry. She would

rule. This was how she would change things. Her attempts

at skullduggery seemed almost silly now: the games of a

child who doesn’t want to grow up. Worse— in her starkest

moments, when Kestrel was most honest with herself, and

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honesty showed itself like a skeleton, bones clean and jut-

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ting, she knew that her eff orts to be Tensen’s spy had been

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a way to prove herself to Arin . . . even as she insisted that

he never know.

CRIME

It made no sense. Its senselessness was painful. How

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had Kestrel become someone who didn’t make sense?

Two days before her birthday recital, which was two

days before the wedding, Verex stopped the emperor on the

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palace grounds after a horse race where one of the imperial

mounts had taken the prize. The prince had approached

his father precisely at the moment when the emperor had

his back to Kestrel. The emperor didn’t see how close she

was.

“Should we be concerned that the Herrani governor

hasn’t returned for the wedding?” Verex asked. His gaze

fl ickered over his father’s shoulder to light on Kestrel.

The emperor laughed.

“There’s only one representative from that territory,”

Verex said. “It will look a little strange. Maybe the gover-

nor ought to be here.” His eyes asked Kestrel’s wish. She

shook her head.

“Oh, the Herrani.” The emperor chuckled again. “No

one cares about the Herrani. Honestly, I had forgotten all

about them.”

When Arin arrived in the capital’s harbor, he reined him-

self in. During the sea journey, he’d let himself pace the

ship’s deck, or curse faint winds. The waves didn’t make him

sick, not this time. He was too intent on the movements of

his thoughts. Arin was incandescent, nervy, sleepless, and

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possibly mad.

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