The Winner's Crime (56 page)

god, who ruled love.
My soul is yours,
he had said.
You

know that it is
. His expression had been so open, so true.

Frightened, even, of what he was saying. And she had

been frightened, too, by how he had spoken what she felt.

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It frightened her still.

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The coin. Kestrel forced her attention again to the coin.

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There was nothing honest about the god of money. She

recalled that now. This god was two- faced, like this piece

of gold. Sometimes male, sometimes female.
He rules buy-

ing and selling,
Enai had said,
which means she rules negotia-

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tion. And hidden things. You can’t see both sides of one coin at

once, can you, child? The god of money always keeps a secret.

The god of money was also the god of spies.

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5

ARIN REMEMBERED.

It had been easy at fi rst, the promise to be Cheat’s spy.

“I trust you most,” the leader of the rebellion had mur-

mured in Arin’s ear after his sale to the general’s daughter.

“You are my second- in- command, lad, and between you

and me we will have the Valorians on their knees.”

Everything had slid and locked into place along well-

oiled grooves.

Except . . .

Except.

The general’s daughter had taken an interest in Arin. It

was a gods- given opportunity, yet even in those early days

as her slave, Arin had had the misgiving— uncomfortable,

low, electric, like sparks rubbed off clothes in winter— that

her interest would lead to his undoing.

And Arin was Arin: he pushed his luck, as he always

did.

His habit was worse with her. He said things he

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shouldn’t. He broke rules, and she watched him do it, and

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said little of the breaking.

It was, he decided, because she didn’t care what he did.

Then came an impulse whose danger he should have

seen—
would
have seen, if he had been able to admit to

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himself what it was that made him want to shake her awake

even though her eyes were open.

Why should she care what a slave did?

Arin would
make
her care.

Arin remembered.

How he couldn’t sleep at night in the slaves’ quarters

for the music that needled its way through the dark, across

the general’s grounds from the villa, where the girl played

and played and didn’t care that he was tired, because she

didn’t know that he was tired, because she gave no thought

to him at all.

He was whipped barebacked by her Valorian steward

for some slight off ense. The next day she had ordered him to

escort her to a tea party. Pride had kept him from wincing as

he moved. The fi ery stripes on his back split and bled. She

wouldn’t see, he would not let her see, he would not give

her the satisfaction.

Nonetheless, he searched for a sign that she’d even

heard of the fl ogging. His gaze raked her face, fi nding noth-

ing there but a discomfort to be so scrutinized.

She didn’t know. He was certain he would have been

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able to tell. Guilt was an emotion she was bad at hiding.

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Across the distance, where she was sitting on a bro-

cade divan, teacup and saucer in hand, she dropped his

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gaze, turned to a lord, and laughed at something he had

’S

said.

Her innocence was maddening.

She should know. She should know what her steward

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had done. She should know it to be her fault whether she’d

given the order or not— and whether she knew or not. In-

nocent? Her? Never.

He pulled the high collar of his shirt higher to hide a

lash that had snaked up his neck.

He did not want her to know.

He did not want her to see.

But:

Look at me,
he found himself thinking furiously at her.

Look at me
.

She lifted her eyes, and did.

The memories were strange, they were a network of lashes,

laid one on top of the other, burning traces that might have

resembled a pattern if it wasn’t clear that they had been left

by a wild hand with no restraint. The lashes were lit with

feeling.

He was stinging, stinging.

“Arin,” Tensen said during their meeting with the Her-

rani trea sur er, who was even grimmer than usual, “where is

your head? You’ve heard nothing I’ve said.”

“Say it again.”

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“The emperor has had a new coin minted to celebrate

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the engagement.”

Arin didn’t want to hear about the engagement.

“I think that you should see it,” Tensen said.

Arin took the coin, and didn’t see what ever it was that

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Tensen thought he should see.

Tensen told him the story of Jadis.

Arin dropped the coin.

He remembered.

He remembered changing.

He saw Kestrel give a fl ower to a baby everyone else ig-

nored. He watched her lose cheerfully at cards to an old Val-

orian woman whom society giggled about, not even bothering

to hush their words, for she was too senile, they said, to

understand.

Arin had stood behind Kestrel during that card game.

He’d seen her high hand.

He saw her honesty with him. She off ered it like a cup

of clear water that he drank deep.

Her tears, glinting in the dark.

Her fi erce creature of a mind: sleek and sharp- clawed

and utterly unwilling to be caught.

Arin saw Kestrel step between him and punishment as

if it meant nothing, instead of everything.

“Arin?” Tensen called through the memories.

Arin remembered the sunken days after he’d seen her

last, after she’d handed him her emperor’s decree of Her-

rani freedom and told him about her engagement. “Congrat-

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ulate me,” she’d said. He hadn’t believed it. He had begged.

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She had’nt listened. “Oh, Arin,” Sarsine said to him during

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the time when he wouldn’t leave the rooms Kestrel had

lived in. “What did you expect?”

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Grief. It had all come to this.

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“Arin,” Tensen said to him again, and Arin could no

longer ignore him. “For the last time, are you going to the

capital or not?”

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6

OFFICIALS AND ARISTOCRATS BEGAN TO

arrive in the capital in preparation for the ball. Every day

more sets of fi ne horses were brought into the imperial

stables, limping from the bitter ride down winter roads.

Although Kestrel had pointed out the diffi

culties of bad

travel conditions for their guests, the emperor apparently

thought this was unimportant. He had invited them; they

must come. Fires were laid to warm palace guest suites

that would be lived in for quite some time: after the ball,

there would be parties and events right up until the wed-

ding.

One afternoon, Kestrel took a carriage down through

the city to the harbor, a maid shivering beside her. There

was no reason why this girl couldn’t be the one in Verex’s

employ, but Kestrel heaped furs on their laps and encour-

aged the maid to nudge her toes closer to the hot brick on

the carriage fl oor.

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Their progress through the city was slow. The roads

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were steep and narrow, made less for the con ve nience of

society and more for the purpose of slowing an enemy’s

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progress up the slopes to the palace.

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No new ships had arrived. Kestrel shouldn’t have ex-

pected to see one Herrani- made anyway. It was green storm

season. No sane person would sail between the Herran

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peninsula and the capital.

The harbor wind chapped Kestrel’s lips.

“What are we doing here?” said the maid through chat-

tering teeth.

Kestrel could hardly say that she was looking for a boat

that had brought Arin. Time was running out for him to

make the longer but safer trek through the mountain pass,

which had been cleared after the treaty with Herran had

been signed. The ball loomed at the end of the week. Most

guests had already arrived. But not him.

“Nothing,” Kestrel said. “I wanted the view.” The girl

blinked: her only sign of annoyance to have been dragged

down to the harbor. But Kestrel wasn’t allowed to travel

without an escort. She had hundreds of engagement gifts—

a pen made from the ivory of a horned whale, ruby dice

from a colonial lord who had heard of Kestrel’s love of

games, even a clever collapsible tiara for traveling . . . The

list of pretty presents was long, but Kestrel would have

gladly traded them all for one hour of privacy outside the

palace.

“Let’s go,” she said, and didn’t return to the harbor.

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She dined with senators. Over the rim of her wineglass,

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Kestrel watched the Senate leader, who looked oddly tan

for winter, murmur something to the emperor.

What were you doing,
she remembered the captain ask-

ing Thrynne in the prison,
eavesdropping outside the doors

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of a private meeting between the emperor and the Senate

leader?

It suddenly seemed that Kestrel’s cup wasn’t fi lled with

wine but blood.

The emperor glanced up and caught Kestrel staring at

him and the Senate leader. He lifted one brow.

Kestrel glanced away. She drank her wine to the bottom.

Her father sent his apologies. He couldn’t come to the ball.

He was mired in fi ghting near the border with the eastern

plains.
I’m sorry,
General Trajan wrote,
but I have my or-

ders.

Kestrel stopped rereading the scant black lines of writ-

ing. Instead, she stared at all the blank space left on that

one sheet of paper. The white of it hurt her eyes. She let the

letter fall.

She’d never even considered it a possibility that her fa-

ther would come— not until the moment that she had held

his letter in her hands and ripped it open.

That blinding hope. That drop into disappointment.

She should have known better.

She remembered the letter’s last word:
orders
. Kestrel

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wondered how far her father’s obedience to the emperor

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would go. What would the general have done in Thrynne’s

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prison cell? Would his knife have cut as easily as the cap-

tain’s, or worse, or not at all?

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But when she thought of her father and imagined him

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in the captain’s role, Thrynne wasn’t there in the prison in

her mind. She was the one in chains.
What were you doing,

the general asked,
bargaining with the emperor for a slave’s

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life?

Kestrel shook her head, and no longer saw the prison or

her father. She was looking out a window in one of her

rooms high above the palace’s inner ward, facing the barbi-

can, where visitors would enter.

She palmed away the window’s frost. The barbican’s

gate was shut.

Come away from the window,
she heard her father order.

She stayed where she was. The glass fogged.

‘
No’ doesn’t exist, Kestrel. Only ‘yes.’

The view had clouded over.

She left the window. There was nothing to see anyway.

The days wore on.

There was a per for mance for the court. A Herrani