The Winner's Kiss (13 page)

Arin's stomach seized. His lungs blazed. He flung open a window.

He stared into the garden, remembering this view. He'd watched flowers dip and float in a breeze while Kestrel played a melody written for the flute. His mother used to sing along to it, in the evenings, for guests.

He wondered if this was what it meant to have been born in the year of the god of death: to see every thing defiled.

But the air cleared his head. He made his way to the kitchens. There he started yet another fire, this time to boil water. He found a harsh-smelling block of lye. Rags. Buckets. Orange-scented wood oil. Vinegar for the windows and walls. Arin began to clean the house from top to bottom.

As he wrung out a cloth, he felt his god sneer.
Cleaning? Ah, Arin. This is not why I made you. This is not our agreement.

Arin had no sense of having agreed to anything, only of having been claimed, and liking it.

He couldn't dishonor his god. But he also couldn't dishonor himself. He pushed the voice from his head and kept at his task.

When he returned to the forge, the fire was long dead. He restarted it and stoked the flames. Then he set his father's sword into the fire, heated it to the point of flexibility, and held it against the anvil. He chopped the blade. His mind was quiet
as
he trimmed it down and something new formed beneath his hands. Folded steel, layer upon layer. Forge-welded. Shorter, thinner. Strong and sprung. He reformed the hilt. Shaped and ground the blade. He did all that he could to make Kestrel's dagger his finest work.

Chapter 12

She swam out of the murk.

She was sore—shoulders and ribs and stomach especially. But the spasms that had racked her body were gone. Every thing was impossibly soft. The feather bed. Her thin shift. Clean skin. The tender give of the pillow beneath her cheek. She blinked, heard the short sweep of her eyelashes against the pillow's fabric. Her hair lay loose, smooth. It had been disgusting when she'd arrived here. She remembered Sarsine working oiled fingers through it. “Cut it off,” Kestrel had said. She'd felt disjointed and eerie as the words left her dry lips, like she wasn't really speaking but echoing something she'd already said.

“Oh no,” Sarsine had replied. “Not this time.”

Cut it off
. Yes. There had been another time. Then, there'd been a tangle of myriad little braids beneath her fingers, and she'd hated the feel of them . . . because of the ghost of an unexpected plea sure . . . yet what kind of pleasure, and why it had vanished, her mind refused to say.

You
might regret cutting your hair, a society lady like you,
Sarsine had said in this other, earlier time.

Please. I can't bear it.

Sarsine unsnarled the dense clumps left by the prison camp. The movement of fingers in Kestrel's hair made her dizzy. She'd gagged, and was sick all over again.

Now, puzzling through this, Kestrel touched a ribbon of hair on the pillow. She'd lost track of its color in the prison.

Familiar. Dark blonde. A little reddish. It had been a more fiery hue when she was little.
Warrior red,
her father had said, tweaking a braid. She suspected that he'd been disappointed to see it darken over time.

She sat up—too swiftly. Her sight dimmed. She got light-headed.

“Ah,” said a voice.

Her vision cleared. Sarsine stretched up from a chair (dove-gray wood, upholstery the color of matte pearl. This, too: familiar) and padded to a small table that held a covered tureen. Sarsine ladled steaming broth into a cup and brought it to her. “Hungry?”

Kestrel's stomach growled. “Yes,” she said, marveling at such a simple thing as normal hunger. She drank, and felt immediately exhausted. The cup hung limp in her hands. “How long?” she managed to say.

“Since you've been here? Two days.”

The windows were curtained and glowed with daylight.

“You've been fitful,” Sarsine said, “and very ill. But I think”—the woman touched Kestrel's cheek—“that we've turned a corner.”

This
woman was good, Kestrel thought. All brisk confidence. Firm, matter-of-fact, with an undercurrent of care. A crease of worry about the eyes. Genuine, maybe.

“You need some solid sleep,” Sarsine said. “Can you try?”

Kestrel liked this, too: how Sarsine knew that something that should be easy wasn't easy. It was true that wake and sleep in the past days (two, she reminded herself) had been broken and shuffled. She glanced up into Sarsine's eyes. Then stared. She saw clearly now what she hadn't noticed before. Her heart thumped.

They were the exact same color. Gray, like fine rain. Heavy black lashes. His eyes.

Her mouth, too. Not quite the same shape. But the cut of the lower lip, the corner lifted in the smallest of smiles . . .

“Well?” Sarsine said gently, taking the empty cup, which had become heavier than stone.

Kestrel reached for Sarsine's free hand and gripped it. She steadied under the unwavering gray gaze.
Not right,
part of her insisted. Not right to seek him in this woman's face. To seek him at all. But Kestrel did, she couldn't help doing it, and when sleep opened beneath her she wasn't afraid to fall into it.

It was night when she woke again. The lamp burned low. A large shadow lurked in the chair. Long, trousered legs stretched out, boots still tightly laced. His dark head crooked awkwardly against the carved trim of the chair's back.

Clean,
asleep. Hard lines softer now. Face shaven. That scar.

He was
too
clean. Close enough that she could smell him. He smelled strange: vinegar and orange and . . . lye?

His eyes cracked open. Hazy for the length of one drawn breath. Then alert in the lamplight. He watched her watch him. He didn't move.

Her rabbit heart beat fast. She flickered between distrust and trust and an emotion less easy to name.

“Go back to sleep,” he murmured.

She closed her eyes. Her rabbit heart slowed, curled up in its warren, and seemed to become fully itself: warm fur, soft belly. A thrum of breath in the dark.

When she woke again, the curtains were wide open. Midday. Yellow light. The pearl-colored chair was empty.

An unpleasant bolt shot through her. She didn't know what it meant, exactly, but it made her feel small.

She pushed herself up. A mirror stood on a nearby dressing table. Kestrel slipped from the bed: hollow, unsteady. The dressing table and its chair weren't so nearby after all. The distance between her and them yawned wide. When she reached the chair, she dropped down into it.

The girl in the reflection looked so shocked that Kestrel's first instinct was to touch her. To reassure. Fingertips met. The mirror was cool.

“Planning on breaking it?” said a voice.

Kestrel's hand fell, and her gaze jerked away to find Sarsine
standing
behind her in the open doorway. Kestrel hadn't been alone after all. The woman's expression had the thoughtful cast of someone who'd been watching for a while. She carried a bundle of fabric in her arms.

“That's not me,” Kestrel said.

Sarsine draped the fabric (a dress) over the back of the pearl-gray chair. She came close and rested a hand on Kestrel's shoulder—warmly, yet at a careful distance from the raised marks she could prob ably see on Kestrel's back through her shift.

Kestrel glanced again at the too-thin girl with the sunken eyes. Cracked lips. The knobs of her clavicle.

“Here,” Sarsine said, and gathered Kestrel's hair. She wove a quick, practical braid.

“He did that,” Kestrel said suddenly. He had braided her hair, before.
That
(that?) was the unnamed, lost plea sure she had tried to remember. He had taken his time. A sensual slowness. The brush of his thumb against the nape of her neck. Mesmerizing. Then later, the next morning: all those little braids transformed into miserable knots.

“What?” Sarsine tied the braid with a ribbon.

“Nothing.”

Sarsine met her eyes in the mirror, but said only, “Come, let's get you dressed.”

“To do what?”

“To look more like yourself.” Sarsine pulled her to her feet.

The dress was too loose. But it fit well in the shoulders and was the perfect length. The fabric. That pattern of sprigged flowers. “This is mine.”

“Yes.”

“
But this isn't my home.”

Sarsine's fingers paused in their buttoning. “No.”

“Then what am I doing here? Where did you get this?”

Sarsine fastened the last button. “How much do you remember?”

“I don't know.” She was frustrated. “How am I supposed to know
how much
? For that, I'd have to know what I've forgotten. You tell me.”

“Better if you asked someone else.”

Kestrel knew whom she meant. There it was again: his fingers sliding through her hair. It was true, what she'd suspected on the tundra was true. A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise.

“No,” Kestrel told Sarsine. “I trust
you
.”

Sarsine knelt to put slippers on her feet. “Why?”

“You don't want anything from me.”

“Who says I don't? A maid might seek any number of things from her mistress.”

“You're not my maid.”

Sarsine glanced up.

“Why are you doing this?” Kestrel asked. “Why are you kind to me?”

Sarsine dropped her hands to her skirted lap. She worried a thumb over the opposite palm. Then she got to her feet and helped Kestrel to a full-length floor mirror. Kestrel, fully tired now, and confused by a number of conflicting things, let herself be led.

“There,” Sarsine said, once Kestrel stood before the reflection. “You look almost like a proper Valorian lady. That's what you are. When I first saw you, I hated you.”

Kestrel
stared at herself. She didn't see what was worth hating. She didn't see much of anything. Just a shadow of a girl in a nice dress. She whispered, “Am I despicable?”

Sarsine's smile was sad. “No.”

There was a silence that Kestrel didn't want to break, because it seemed, for that moment, that there was a downy safety in not deserving hatred. Maybe she didn't need to be anything else. Maybe it was all a person needed to be.

Sarsine said, “Almost eleven years ago, your people conquered this country. They enslaved us. You were rich, Kestrel. You had every thing you could want. You were happy.”

Kestrel's brow furrowed. She recognized some of what Sarsine had said, saw it far off, hazy in the distance. But . . .

It was
want
, she realized. And
happy
.

“I don't know every detail,” Sarsine said. “What I do know is that last summer, you bought Arin in the market.”

“So it's true.”

“You won him at an auction and brought him to your house. But the auctioneer, a man called Cheat—”

Kestrel felt an ugly pang.

“—
wanted
you to win. Arin did, too. Your father is the highest-ranking general in the Valorian army. Arin was a spy for the Herrani rebellion. He was crucial. Nothing could have been done without him. Or you. You gave him useful information, though you didn't mean to. You wouldn't have done it if you'd understood what Arin was after and what he'd do with what you told him. Valorians were attacked all over the city, taken by surprise, killed. Your friends, too.”

Tears on dead skin. A girl in a green dress. Poisoned purple lips. Kestrel swallowed.

“
After the rebellion,” Sarsine said, “you were brought here.”

Kestrel's voice came out strangled: “A prisoner.”

Sarsine pursed her mouth, but didn't deny it. “You escaped. I'm not sure how. The next thing we knew, the Valorian army was here and we were under siege. But you came and presented Arin with a treaty.”

Heavy paper beneath her thumb. Snow floating onto her cheeks. White paper, white snow, white heart.

“It offered us our independence as a self-governed territory under the emperor's rule. It seemed too good to be true. It was. Several months later, people in this city began to fall ill. I did, too. We were being slowly poisoned by tainted water from the aqueducts. The emperor wanted to kill us without risking any of his soldiers' lives. We know this—and stopped it—because of you. You were passing information to Tensen, Arin's spymaster in the capital. Arin didn't know who Tensen's source was. Tensen refused to name her, and instead called her by a code name: the Moth.

“You were caught. A Herrani groom in the mountains brought news that a woman in a prison wagon bound for the tundra had given him a moth and asked him to give it to Arin. Arin went for you. Here you are.”

Kestrel's teeth were set, her shoulders stiff. She didn't remember most of what Sarsine had said, wasn't sure what to make of the few vague images that pulsed in her mind. She fought fatigue. “That's crazy.”

“Implausible, I know.”

“A story.” Kestrel groped for the way to say it. “Like something out of books. Why would I do such things?”

It
was you,
she'd told him on the tundra.
You're the reason I was in that prison.

Yes.

Flatly, Kestrel said, “I sound very stupid.”

“You sound like the person who saved my life.” Sarsine touched three fingers to the back of Kestrel's hand.

Kestrel remembered what that gesture meant. The knowledge opened inside her. The gesture was Herrani. It meant gratitude, or apology, or both.

She plucked at the loose dress. Her thoughts whirled. Her eyelids were heavy, lowering. She tried to imagine her former self. Enemy. Prisoner. Friend? Daughter. Spy. Prisoner again. “What am I now?”

Sarsine held both of Kestrel's hands. “What ever you want to be.”