The Winner's Crime (9 page)

winter Rebellion. She’d written letters, then burned them.

She’d sent an invitation to the court. It was ignored. He

was in the city now, Jess had said. He’d fallen in with a

wild crowd. Then Jess had gone tight- lipped and wouldn’t

say any more— and Kestrel, who had loved Ronan as much

as she could, and missed him, didn’t dare ask.

Slowly, Kestrel said to Jess, “I’ve told you before. The

emperor made the off er of marriage to his son. I couldn’t

refuse.”

“Could you not? Everyone knows the story of how you

brought the wrath of the imperial army to Herran. You

could have asked the emperor for anything.”

Kestrel was silent.

“It’s because you do not
want
to refuse,” Jess said. “You

never do anything you don’t want to do.”

“It’s a po liti cal marriage. For the good of the empire.”

“What makes you think that
you
are the best thing

for it?”

Kestrel had never seen such resentment in Jess’s eyes.

Quietly, Kestrel said, “Ronan wants nothing to do with me

now anyway.”

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“True.” Jess seemed to regret her hard words, then to

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regret her regret. Her voice stayed stony. “I am glad that he

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won’t be here to night. How could the emperor invite
Her-

rani
to the ball?”

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“Just one. One Herrani.”

’S

“It’s disgusting.”

“They’re not slaves anymore, Jess. They’re in de pen dent

members of the empire.”

THE WINNER

“So we reward murder with freedom? Those rebels

killed Valorians. They killed our
friends
. I hate the em-

peror for his edict.”

Dangerous words. “Jess—”

“He doesn’t know. He didn’t see the slaves’ savagery.

I did.
You
did. That so- called governor kept you as some

kind of toy—”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

Jess scowled at the fl oor. Her voice came low: “You

never do.”

Kestrel stood next to Verex outside the closed ballroom

doors, listening to the swell of the emperor’s voice. Kestrel

couldn’t distinguish the words, but heard the sure rhythm.

The emperor was a skilled public speaker.

Verex’s head was lowered, hands stuff ed in his pockets.

He was dressed in formal military style: all black, with

gold piping that echoed the glittering horizontal line drawn

above Kestrel’s brows. His belted, jeweled dagger matched

hers. The emperor had fi nally given Kestrel the dagger he’d

promised, and it was indeed fi ne— set with diamonds and

exquisitely sharp. It was too heavy. It dragged at her hip.

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She wished the emperor would stop talking. Her

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stomach dipped and rose with the sound of his voice. Her

SKI

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nails curled into her palms.

Verex scuff ed his boot.

She ignored him. She touched a glass petal on her neck-

lace. It felt frail.

MARIE RUTK

The emperor’s voice stopped. The doors fl ung open.

It was like a hallucination: the crowd in a splash of col-

ors, the heat, the applause, the fanfare.

Then the crash of sound faded, because the emperor

was speaking again, and then he must have stopped speak-

ing, because Kestrel heard the breathless silence that came

just before Verex kissed her.

His lips were dry. Polite.

She had known it was coming, it was all planned, and

she had done her best to be as far away from herself as pos-

sible when it happened. But her mind couldn’t stay asleep

forever. It told her to stay put, don’t shrivel away, this is not

so bad, the kiss is a thing, an empty thing, a scrap of blank

paper. Yet Kestrel was awake, and she knew the taste of her

own lies.

“I’m sorry,” Verex said quietly when he pulled away.

And then they were dancing before everybody.

The kiss had numbed her. Verex’s words didn’t register

at fi rst. When they did, they seemed like her own words,

like she’d been saying them to her old self, the one who had

given up Arin.
I’m sorry,
she told herself.
Forgive me,
she’d

said. Kestrel had thought she’d known what her choices

had cost her, but when the prince had kissed her she sharply

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understood that she was going to pay for this for the rest of

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her life.

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“Kestrel?”

“Sorry,” Kestrel repeated as they spun across the ball-

CRIME

room fl oor. The prince’s feet had no natural talent, but he

’S

was grimly capable, the way someone might be if his danc-

ing master came to lessons armed with a switch.

“I’ve been unforgivable,” Verex said. “Is that why you

THE WINNER

look so miserable?”

Kestrel studied the piping on his jacket.

Verex said, “Maybe there’s one fi nal reason you are de-

termined to marry me.”

The violinists’ bows sank down across the strings.

“My father is holding something over you,” Verex said.

Kestrel glanced up, then away again. Verex drew their

clasped hands to his chest. The crowd murmured and

sighed.

He shrugged. “It’s how my father is. But what does

he—?”

“Verex, am I so bad a choice for a wife?”

He smiled a little. The dance was ending. “Not so bad.”

“Let’s agree, then, to make the best of things,” Kestrel

said.

Verex bowed, and before Kestrel could decide whether

this was his
yes
or simply meant to mark the dance’s end,

he passed her hand to a senator’s. Then there was another

dance, and another senator, and she was whirled into the

exchequer’s arms.

After that, faces and titles no longer held much mean-

ing.

Finally, she stepped deliberately wrong so that some-

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one trod on her toes. She soothed her partner’s horrifi ed

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apologies, but begged for a rest and made certain she

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limped a little as she went to sit in the corner of gamers.

Kestrel chose a gilt chair set apart from the others, but

it wouldn’t be long before someone pulled a chair near, and

she would have to talk and smile even though the muscles

MARIE RUTK

in her cheeks felt as if someone had pinched them.

She needn’t have worried. All eyes were focused on the

crown prince, who sat across a Borderlands table, facing a

highly ranked lieutenant of the city guard.

The game was careening toward a humiliating end for

the prince. The lieutenant had already captured many of

Verex’s key game pieces, lining up the green fi gures in a

row. Verex’s general was isolated from his troops and fl anked

by the lieutenant’s. The marble pieces tapped out their

paths, knocked each other down.

Verex’s eyes lifted to meet hers across the room. He set

a tentative fi nger on his green infantry.

It was just a game. What did it matter if Verex made

the wrong move, and lost?

Yet Kestrel thought of Arin, who hadn’t answered the

emperor’s summons, and wondered what he would lose be-

cause of it.

She thought of the possibility of peace with Verex.

She held the prince’s gaze and shook her head— the

slightest of gestures, a mere tip of her chin.

He lifted his hand from the infantry and settled it on

the cavalry.

Kestrel used two fi ngertips to brush invisible lint from

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her dress, fl icking her hand forward, away from her body.

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Verex moved the cavalry two paces forward.

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So it went, the smugness draining from the lieutenant’s

face as Verex’s army made signifi cant advances and crucial

CRIME

kills. Verex looked to his father, who had appeared on the

’S

edges of the crowd. When the prince’s asking eyes turned

again to Kestrel and she saw how hope made them luminous,

she couldn’t look away. She off ered her silent suggestions. He

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took them.

The green general toppled the red one.

The crowd roared for their prince. The emperor folded

his arms and rocked on the balls of his feet, his expression

amused, pinned to his son’s.

But not disapproving.

Kestrel heard Verex decline to play another game. Now

that the spectacle was over, the crowd’s attention would

soon turn to her. There was a Borderlands game at another

nearby table between a senator’s daughter and Risha, the

eastern princess who had been kidnapped as a small child

and raised in the imperial palace as a pampered hostage.

Kestrel had expected that Risha would be a good Border-

lands player, but from everything Kestrel had seen, the prin-

cess possessed (or cultivated) a decided mediocrity at the

game. There was no excitement to be had at
that
table. A bit

farther over was a match between the Herrani minister—

Tensen, she remembered his name— and a very minor Val-

orian baron who had probably condescended to play with

Tensen only for the plea sure of beating him before a crowd.

Many were watching, widening mirthful eyes when Tensen

forgot how a gaming piece moved, or seemed to doze off

between his turns. That farce might hold people’s interest,

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but not for long.

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And then they would come for her.

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Kestrel’s throat closed when she thought of faking joy

at her engagement. Yet she would have to do it. She would

have to dance all night long and into the gray hours of

morning, until the last reveler had left the ballroom and

MARIE RUTK

her shoes were worn out and her heart was in shreds.

Kestrel stood. The emperor wasn’t watching her, at

least not for now. His eyes were on his son. She threaded

through the crowd, telling each person who stopped her

that she had promised a dance to someone else. The ball-

room was thick with people. Faces clustered around her

like children’s puppets on sticks.

Somehow she dodged them, and slipped down a hall-

way where the air was cooler. No one lingered here. There

was nothing to see, nothing to do. This area was used only

in fi ne weather when the balconies lining the hallway were

open to the palace gardens below. Each balcony was now

curtained off from the hallway, and Kestrel knew that the

glass shutters attached to each balustrade had been drawn

and fastened for the winter. Despite every attempt to ward

off the cold, it seeped beneath the velvet curtains. It lapped

over Kestrel’s slippered feet.

With a quick glance behind to make certain that no

one was near and no one saw her, she dove through a cur-

tain and pulled it shut behind her.

The balcony was a box, its glass walls like black ice:

sheer slices of the night outside. Light from the hallway

lined the seam of the curtain and glowed at its hem, but

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Kestrel could barely see her own hands.

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She touched a glass pane. These windows would be

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open on the night of her wedding. The trees below would

be in bloom, the air fragrant with cere blossoms.

CRIME

She would choke on it. Kestrel knew she would hate

’S

the scent of cere fl owers all her life, as she ruled the empire,

as she bore her husband’s children. As she aged and the

ghosts of her choices haunted her.

THE WINNER

There was a sudden sound. The slide of wooden cur-

tain rings on the rod. Light brightened behind Kestrel.

Someone was coming through the velvet.

He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel’s

balcony— close, closer still as she turned and the curtain

swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against the

frame. He held the sweep of it high, at the level of his gray

eyes, which were silver in the shadows.

He was here. He had come.

Arin.

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8

KESTREL HAD FORGOTTEN. SHE HAD THOUGHT