The Winner's Crime (88 page)

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Then Roshar was there, and they worked together until

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Arin slid out from under the body.

He lay gasping in the mud. Roshar sat heavily beside

him. The prince’s forearm was shredded, held gingerly at

an angle. Blood ran from the elbow.

MARIE RUTK

Arin closed his eyes. He saw the tiger’s eyes. He opened

his. He saw a labyrinth of reeds, the slick of mud beneath

his cheek.

Roshar inhaled. For one bizarre moment, Arin thought

that the sound he heard next had come from the prince.

A scratchy cry. A mewl.

No. Arin knew what that was. He screwed his eyes

shut. He wouldn’t look.

“A cub,” Roshar said.

And then Arin had to see. A little tiger clambered

through the bent reeds. Its forelegs sank into mud. It

looked at its slumped mother and cried piteously.

Arin was stricken. He tasted mud in his mouth.

He saw, in his memory, a boy. Begging and weeping.

Pulling at his mother’s dead hand. Tugging her long,

bloody black hair. Arin’s hands had been small then. But

they’d had a terrible strength. They’d clung hard. Then his

mother’s murderer had dragged him away.

Arin breathed through the memory. He choked on air

as if it were knotted rope. He wiped mud from his face.

Spat it out.

“Now, what to do with
you
,” said Roshar, looking at

the cub. It fl oundered in the mud. It sank in past its

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haunches.

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“Leave it alone.”

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Roshar ignored Arin. He slogged through the boggy

reeds until he reached the cub. With his good arm, Roshar

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lifted the tiger free.

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“Brother, you are mad,” said the queen.

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“He loves me,” Roshar protested. The cub was sleeping,

huddled against Roshar’s leg.

“And when it has grown, and is large enough to eat a

man?”

“Then I’ll make Arin take care of him.”

Arin had had enough. He moved to leave Roshar’s

suite.

“Wait,” said the queen.

Arin was sore. His raked shoulders were padded with

gauze, and he was tired, achingly tired from the journey

back, from the shock of the plainspeople when he and Ro-

shar had stumbled to the camp with a tiger cub, from how

easily they had agreed to move camp once they saw the

danger of tigers breeding nearby. How they’d fed Arin

when he hadn’t wanted to eat. And then there had been

Roshar’s fascination with the tiger’s carcass, the way the

prince had inspected the slack jaws to pronounce that the

broken teeth were an old injury, and thank the goddess for

that, he’d said, or they would have had no chance at all. “I

would have lost my arm at the very least,” Roshar had said.

As it was, his arm was a bloody mess. It had been cleaned,

stitched, and dressed in the camp. “Looks like you’ll have

to get me and the cub home all by yourself,” Roshar had

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said cheerfully. So Arin had paddled downstream while

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Roshar slept, having numbed his arm with a lighter dose of

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the same drug he’d once used to knock out Arin. The

drugged ring was a cunning thing. He’d pricked himself

with it, then eyed Arin’s torn shirt and raked shoulders.

“Sorry,” he’d said. “None for you. You’ve got to row.”

MARIE RUTK

Arin swore at him.

Roshar smiled. “Watch your mouth,” he’d said, and

closed his eyes.

Arin’s shoulders had burned and bled as he paddled. The

cub unhappily paced the canoe the entire way to the queen’s

city. The boat wobbled as the animal moved, and moved

again, and found its uncertain footing, and cried.

“Wait,” the queen said again to Arin. She left Roshar’s

side, crossed the room, and off ered something. It gleamed on

her uplifted palm: Kestrel’s dagger. “Thank you,” said the

queen. She tried to give it to him.

“I don’t want it.”

The hand that held the dagger faltered.

Arin said, “You know what I want.”

The queen shook her head. “No alliance.”

Arin remembered the suff ocating fear as he lay trapped

beneath the tiger’s paws. The fear had squeezed his gut. It

had robbed his breath. It was the
familiarity
of that fear,

not just the fear itself, that had done it. This was how he

had felt for months, for
years
: pinned down by the empire.

In his mind, Arin shrank the dagger on the queen’s

palm. He made it the size of a needle. Easy to ignore. Easy

to lose.

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He saw again how Roshar had tossed Risha’s tiny weap-

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ons into the castle doll house.

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He saw an eastern crossbow, so small compared to a

Valorian one.

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The tiger cub, its little teeth bared.

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His own country, helpless before the empire’s massive

army, their engineers, their black fl ags, their black rows of

cannon, their seemingly limitless supply of black powder.

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Arin saw, suddenly, an idea.

It took shape inside him. It was small. Compact, hard,

mobile. It grew behind his eyes until he blinked, and saw

again what was actually there before him in Roshar’s suite.

Not a memory, or a fear, or an idea. Just a dagger on the

queen’s palm.

How much damage, really, could one dagger do?

“Get that thing away from me,” Arin told the queen. “I

want a forge, and I want to be left alone.”

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37

KESTREL’S FATHER INSPECTED THE PUPPY. HE

gripped the scruff of its neck and held it stock- still. He lifted

the surprisingly big paws. He held the muzzle and peeled

back the pink-and-black lips to see the teeth.

“That’s a good dog,” he said fi nally. “You’ll have to

train her.”

No, Kestrel decided. She didn’t.

Kestrel had a gift. It lay in a small box tucked into her skirt

pocket. It tapped against her thigh as she walked through

an arcarde and into the Spring Garden. The wind was

warm and soft. It made the puppy beside her sniff the air.

The dog caught the scent of something and bolted for the

trees. Kestrel didn’t call her back.

The palace physician was known to tend to his own

plot of medicinal herbs. Kestrel found him there by a shrub

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with a peppery scent.

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He straightened at the sight of her. Immediately con-

cerned, he asked if her father had worsened.

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“He’s well,” she said, “though I
am
here because of him.”

’S

She off ered the small box. “Thank you. You saved his life.”

He was pleased. There was a slight fl ush to his lined

cheeks, and his hands, dusted with earth, accepted the box

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carefully. Then he became awkward, fumbling with the box

in his haste to clean his hands on a handkerchief, which he

didn’t have. Kestrel gave him hers.

He smiled apologetically. “I’m not used to appearing

presentable to society.” He opened the box and caught his

breath. Inside lay a golden pin: a fl owering tree, the sign of

the physicians’ order. It bore jeweled fruit. “This is too

much.”

“For my father’s life? It is not enough.”

His eyes grew moist. Kestrel felt a little guilty, as if

she’d sat down to play Bite and Sting with someone who

had no head for the game.

Yet there might be a connection between the physician

and the water engineer. She’d promised Tensen to discover

what the water engineer had done for the emperor. And then

there was that long table set with empty plates in her mind.

The eastern plains. The slaves who cleaned the imperial

palace. Arin’s stitched face.

“Will you show me your garden?” Kestrel asked.

They walked the green rows.

“I’m worried about a friend of mine.” Kestrel described

Jess’s vial of dark liquid. “Is it safe?”

“I think I know who this friend of yours is. A colonial

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girl from Herran? No need to worry. I gave her the medi-

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cine myself. It’s just something to calm the nerves.”

Kestrel was relieved. “So it
is
safe.”

“Well, in the right dosage.” Quickly, he added, “But

she would never have access to enough to do her harm.

MARIE RUTK

Even city apothecaries aren’t allowed to sell it. I oversee the

making of that medicine in the palace, and I give out very

small supplies.”

“Is it addictive?”

“No. The body doesn’t crave it. But the mind might.

Your friend might come to rely upon it to sleep. If used for

too long, it could be dangerous.”

“
How
dangerous?”

His expression spoke the answer. “But that would take

months of use.”

Kestrel’s voice rose. “Why would you give my friend a

medicine that could kill her?”

“My lady.” His voice was respectful but fi rm. “Every

medicine has its risks. We use a medicine because its ben-

efi t outweighs potential harm. Your friend needs peace and

sleep. Not forever. Just long enough for her to feel that

peace is possible. She’s weak. I worry that if she doesn’t

rest, she could fall prey to a serious illness.” When he saw

Kestrel’s uncertainty, he said, “When you saw her, did your

friend tremble? Did her hands shake?”

“No.”

“Then there’s no need to worry. Trembling is a sign of

overdosage— not that this would even be possible in the

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case of your friend. I gave her very little.”

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The puppy bayed in the distance. “Don’t give her any

more.” Kestrel twisted her fi ngers together. “Please don’t.”

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“I wouldn’t.” The physician was aff ronted. “There’s no

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need to even ask that. I would never risk a Valorian’s well-

being.”

Kestrel tried not to worry. With years of practice at

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pretending that what really mattered was nothing, she asked

the physician about his garden. They discussed his herbs

and the earth and the weather.

In war,
her father said,
the best feint is the one that you

mean
. If you want to distract your enemy and make him miss

a key move, your ruses must be real.

This was Kestrel’s line of play:

She truly wanted to thank the physician.

She truly wanted to know about Jess’s health.

The truth of things, she was coming to understand, has

a weight that people sense. She’d given these truths to the

physician for him to hold so that while his mind was heavy

with them, she could make a move that wouldn’t seem like

a move at all.

“I’m amazed at how well your garden is doing,” she

said. “The weather is so fi ckle. Warm one day, chilly the

next. I hardly know what to wear anymore.”

“You always dress exquisitely.”

“I do, don’t I? But it’s hard to settle on the right choice.

Why, I’ve even changed the plans for my wedding dress.”

He paused midstride. He started to say something, but

she carefully missed it. She was helped in ignoring him by

the puppy, who came bounding toward Kestrel. It carried a

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stick in its teeth. The puppy laid it at Kestrel’s feet and

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barked.

“But . . . but it’s too late to change your wedding dress,”

said the physician. “A new one would never be ready in

time. Lady Kestrel, you must reconsider . . .”

MARIE RUTK

She ignored him as he continued to talk. The puppy

looked at her expectantly, wagging its short tail, wuffl

ing

with excitement. Kestrel stooped to pick up the slobbery

stick. She threw. The stick soared into the blue sky, whip-

ping over itself. The dog raced across the lawn to fetch