The Winner's Kiss (46 page)

“You cheated?” he muttered. “How could you cheat and still lose?”

Arin swung at the general, who cut the blow wide, deflecting it easily, holding it in a semi-bind that forced Arin's sword low. Arin's guard was open. The general was quick, his parry swift. The man's steel was so sharp that Arin didn't feel, at first, when it cut him.

The
emperor licked his dry lips. He turned over the two marked tiles in the boneyard. A wolf. A snake. “These are good tiles. Why would you mark tiles and not take them for yourself?” He swallowed. The knot of cartilage in his throat bobbed.

Kestrel saw him begin to understand.

His body began to understand, too.

He lunged for her.

The sword nicked the side of Arin's neck just below the ear. It would have taken off his head if he hadn't recoiled in time.

Arin had been looking at the general's face without really seeing it. He saw it now. He saw that the man knew exactly who he was, and that he longed for Arin's death almost as much as Arin longed for his.

The emperor knocked over the wine. He seized up against the table, hand clamped around Kestrel's dagger.

She stepped back from the table as he shuddered against it. She felt a relief so deep that it didn't even feel like relief. It plunged straight into exhaustion.

“I lied,” Kestrel told him.

The emperor tried to push himself upright. She thought he might be trying to do something with the dagger, but his arm had gone rigid. It thumped into the spilled red wine.

“I lied when I said I hadn't come to murder you.”

His eyes were wide, stark.

“It never mattered whether I won or lost the game,”
Kestrel
said. “Only how long the poison would take to kill you. It comes from a tiny eastern worm. In its purest form, the poison is clear. It dries to a shine. I painted it onto four Bite and Sting tiles. You touched them.”

Foam dribbled from his locked mouth.

His breath rasped. It became glottal, the sound of bubbles popping.

Then it ended.

Arin struck back.

As they fought, viciously silent words thudded in his blood:
Mother, father, sister. Kestrel.

Arin didn't care that the blows his sword hammered against the man's metal body were useless, that there was no art to this, that nothing would pierce the armor, that a few smashed buckles where the general's armor joined was no victory. He could see too little of the man's flesh, couldn't reach it, and he desperately wanted to make him bleed. If he couldn't carve into the general, Arin would bludgeon him. He'd beat until something broke.

The buckles,
death said.

Arin shifted the path of his sword in midswipe and curved it down toward the elbow of the general's sword arm, aiming right for where the broken buckles of the general's arm guard flapped loose.

Arin sheered the man's arm off at the elbow.

Blood pumped onto Arin. If the general made a sound, Arin didn't hear it. He was warm and wet.

The general fell. He lay blinking up at the sun, at Arin,
his
eyes glazed, mouth moving as if speaking, but Arin heard nothing.

For a moment, Arin faltered.

But there was nothing of her in this man, this enemy at his feet. Arin drew back his sword—more power than necessary for the death blow. He wanted to pour himself into this act.

Vengeance: wine-dark, thick. It flooded Arin's lungs.

Those light brown eyes, on him.

There was that.

That one thing that Kestrel shared with her father.

Arin heard himself speak. His voice sounded far away, as if some part of him had left this road and was as high as the sun, looking down on the half that he had left on earth.

He said, “Kestrel asked me to do this.”

For she had.

Arin was a boy, a slave, a grown man, free. He was all of this at once . . . and something else, too. He realized it only now, as he plunged his sword down toward the general's throat.

He hadn't been blessed by the god of death.

Arin
was
the god.

Chapter 40

But he stopped.

Regret wasn't the right word for what he felt later. Disbelief, maybe. Sometimes, even years after the war, he'd tear out of sleep, sweating, still trapped in the nightmare where he had butchered the father of the woman he loved.

But you didn't,
she would tell him.

You didn't.

Tell me. Say it again. Tell me what you did.

Trembling, he would.

His brain had been a glass ball. Nothing in it but echoes. His mother's scent. Father's voice. How Anireh's gaze had held him from across the room, and her eyes said,
Survive.
They said,
Love,
and
I'm sorry
. They said,
Little brother
.

And then silence. It became silent in Arin's head as he stood on the road. He stopped hearing voices. He thought about how it had seemed strange that Risha would plot the emperor's death, yet refuse to kill him herself. Arin understood now. He knew how it was to have no family: like living in a house with no roof. Even if Kestrel were here, and
begged
him—
Let your sword fall, do it, please, now
—Arin wasn't sure that he could make her an orphan.

And he wasn't sure that she
would
beg that if she were gazing down as he did on the graying face of her dying father, the man's eyes sky-bright as he tried to speak, his remaining hand fumbling against his chest, just above his heart.

A throbbing radiance burned inside Arin; he hadn't realized the pitch revenge could reach, how murder could come this close to desire.

He felt his eyes sting, because he knew what he was going to do.

He didn't want to be here. He wondered why we can't remember when our mothers carried us inside them: the dark and steady heart, how it was the whole of the world, and no one harmed us, and we harmed no one.

Arin thought that if he didn't kill this man his memory of his mother would fade. It already had, over time. Someday she would be as far away as a star.

But he couldn't do it.

He had to do it.

Tell me what you did
.

Arin dropped his sword, dropped to his knees, yanked the woven baldric from the fallen man's shoulder, and used it to make a tourniquet to save the person he hated most.

After the battle, and after Roshar had accepted the Valorians' surrender, when Arin was sick with worry because Kestrel hadn't yet returned from Sythiah, he went to the healers' tent.

The
general was asleep, his cauterized arm swathed in bandages, his armor removed. A drug had been forced down him. It had been a violent scene. Even now, asleep, the man was under guard and bound in chains at the ankles, his remaining hand strapped tight to his side.

Arin tugged at his hair until his scalp hurt. If Kestrel wasn't back by noon he was going to ride to Sythiah. His brain was crawling in his skull, his stomach was a shriveled lump.

He hated seeing the general. He hated seeing even Verex (whom he halfway liked) limping around the camp, teeming with worry—for Risha, but also for Kestrel, which made Arin feel absurdly possessive, as if Verex were trying to rob him by feeling in any way similar to Arin. Arin became insufferable, he knew it, but he was constantly having to wrestle down the knowledge that if something had happened to Kestrel his heart would turn to salt.

He didn't know what to do with his hands as he looked down at the sleeping general. Arin thrust them into his pockets before they went for the throat. He reminded himself why he had come.

He ripped open the man's jacket. Arin reached for the inside breast pocket, located exactly where the man had tried to touch his chest as he had lain bleeding on the road.

Arin's fingers met paper. He pulled it out, its texture suede-soft from having been handled so much. It had been unfolded and folded many times.

It was sheet music. At first, Arin didn't understand what he looked at. Kestrel's handwriting. Herrani script. Musical notation in crisp black. His own name leaped off the page.

Dear
Arin.

Then he recognized the music as the sonata Kestrel had been studying when he'd entered her music room at the imperial palace in late spring. It had been the last time he'd seen her before the tundra. He had thought it would be the last time he would ever see her.

Arin hastened from the tent. He couldn't read the letter here.

But he didn't know if he could read it anywhere, if any place would be private enough, because being alone meant he'd still be with himself, and he hated to remember how he'd left Kestrel that day, and what had befallen her after.

He was desperate to read it.

He couldn't bear to read it.

He resented that her father had kept it.

He wondered what it meant that her father had kept it.

Arin was only vaguely aware of having stumbled through the noisy camp and into the woods. The thought of reading the letter felt like a violation, like he'd be reading a letter meant for someone else.

Yet it had been addressed to him.

Dear Arin.

Arin read.

“Are you all right?”

Arin glanced up at Roshar, then returned his attention to the horse. He ran a hand down the inside of its front left leg and picked up the hoof, cupping its front. With his free hand, he cleaned the hoof with a pick, brushed it off, and
used
a knife to probe the outer edges of the hoof, looking for the source of the problem. Steam rose from a nearby bucket of hot, salted water. It was near noon.

“Arin.”

“Just thinking.” Kestrel's written words still radiated through him, making him feel larger inside than he had been before, as if he'd swallowed the sun and it somehow fit, and blazed and ached and left him dazzled: half-blind but still seeing things more clearly than before.

“Well, stop it,” Roshar said. “You've been looking either dour or dreamy and neither really suits the victorious leader of his free people.”

Arin snorted. The horse, feeling his knife touch a sore spot, tried to pull her hoof away. He held it fast, supporting it from below with his knee.

“You could at least make a rousing speech,” Roshar said.

“Can't. I'm riding to Sythiah.”

Roshar made a strangled sound.

“Not on this horse,” Arin said. “She's lame.”

“What are you
doing
?”

“She was limping. It hurt to look at her. An abscess, I think. She must have stepped on something sharp.”

“Arin, you're not a damn farrier. Someone else can do this.”

“
Tssah,
” Arin hissed in sympathy when he found the abscess. The horse tried again to tug away, but he punctured the sealed wound, which instantly dribbled black pus. He worked on opening the abscess, then pressed the rest of the pus out. “Bring that bucket closer, will you?”

“Oh, certainly. I live to please.”

Arin
lowered the hoof into the bucket's hot water. The horse, already in pain, stamped, splashing the water as she reared her head, but Arin grabbed the halter and brought her head down, soothing her as he watched the foot to make sure it stayed in the bucket.

“Arin, why are you so transparent? Whenever you worry, you start fixing things. Draining nasty gunk from a hoof is the least of it. I don't know what's worse, watching you do that or knowing how hard it will always be for you to keep yourself to
yourself
.”

Arin stroked the horse's neck. She stamped again, but began to calm.

“We won,” Roshar said, “and Kestrel is fine. We've discussed this. That poison is highly toxic.”

“But she's not back.”

“She
will
be. You need to seize your political moment. If you don't, someone else will.”

Arin squinted at him. “You call me ‘transparent' as if that's a bad thing, but I don't need to make a speech for my people to see what I am.”

Roshar shut his mouth. He looked ready to say something else, then didn't, because Kestrel and Risha rode into camp.

Chapter 41

The army moved at a slow pace toward the city, some on foot, and many wounded. Kestrel stayed away from the wagons that carried them. “I can't see him,” she told Arin when the army paused to rest. But part of her wanted to use this time to see her father.

“You don't have to,” Arin said. In the silence that followed, as they walked away from the wagons, fragments of every thing he had told her gained shape and terribly vivid color: her father's severed arm, Arin's lost vengeance, the letter that she hadn't even recognized when Arin gave it to her.

It was a moment before Kestrel realized that a jittery energy had come over Arin. He was biting his lower lip and his hands were making stunted gestures as if he were trying to speak but couldn't. Finally, he said, “You asked for his death. I didn't do it. Should I have? Did I do the wrong thing?”