The Winner's Crime (17 page)

her moths and treasonous promises to Tensen?

She thought about what her father would say if he

knew.

She thought about the prison and Thrynne’s skinned

fi ngers.

But maybe the emperor planned a punishment fi t for a

child, like barring Kestrel from the piano.

Maybe he would humiliate her at court.

Maybe the stolen letters
were
enough.

Kestrel’s bruise faded. The scab fl aked away.

Uneasy, Kestrel fi nally decided that the emperor

wouldn’t risk doing anything extreme to General Trajan’s

daughter.

She dined with the emperor every day. He was slyly

kind, even solicitous. He acted as if nothing had happened.

Kestrel stopped tensing herself for a blow that didn’t

come.

Maybe it never would.

To Arin, the imperial palace was a big box of architectural

tricks. It didn’t matter, though, how many dead- ended hall-

ways there were. He didn’t care about the dizzying array of

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chambers for leisure. He ignored the way that tight, wind-

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ing staircases could split into several directions.

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In the end, the palace was really just a building, and in

every building servants were housed in the same place: the

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worst.

’S

So when Arin went looking for Kestrel’s dressmaker,

she wasn’t hard to fi nd. He took staircases down. He went

into the dark. He followed musty air. Insuff erable heat.

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The kitchen’s fi res. Sweat and fried onion smells.

The Herrani servants were helpful. Too helpful. Their

eyes were shining. They would have shared anything with

him. Their faces fell to be asked so little as the whereabouts

of a dressmaker. Even the slaves from various conquered

territories, whose languages Arin didn’t speak, and who

worked in tense and arcane hierarchies with the newly

freed Herrani, watched Arin with expressions approach-

ing awe.

Arin’s failure felt hot within him. It was a kind of poi-

son, steeping steadily. The Herrani servants asked to be

told the story of how Arin had brought a mountain down

on Valorian troops. How had he saved Minister Tensen

during that assault on a country estate? Was it from a cross-

bow quarrel, or a thrown dagger?

The stories were worthless. Everything Arin had done,

from the Firstwinter Rebellion to his last stand against the

Valorian general, had changed nothing. His people still be-

longed to the empire.

“Deliah,” Arin reminded the Herrani gathered in the

largest kitchen. “Where is she?”

Her workshop was in a nicer section of the palace, on

the ground fl oor in a room with enough light to make the

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bolts of fabric glow. When Arin entered, Deliah was sewing,

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her lap heaped with rich, wine- dark cloth. Her mouth was

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full of straight pins. She removed them slowly, one by one,

when Arin asked his question.

“I want to know who’s been bribing you,” he said.

“That’s not what I thought you’d ask.”

MARIE RUTK

“I’ve been to the city.” Arin hated being in the palace.

He felt better in the city, though he didn’t like that either,

and never shook the feeling of being in enemy territory. He

prowled it, and kept to the alleys. “There’s a tavern—”

“I know the one you mean. It’s the only place that

serves Herrani.”

“They serve everyone— especially bet- makers and book-

keepers. If
I
were to bet on something, it’d be on the fact

that you must have every courtier in the palace hounding

you for a tip on what your lady will wear to her wedding.

The payout could be huge.”

Deliah had been stabbing pins into the small cushion

strapped to her wrist. Now she stopped and ran a fi nger

over the stiff silver grass of clustered pins. “I don’t tell any-

one anything about the wedding dress. I don’t take bribes.

Not even from you.”

“I’m not saying that you do. That’s not what I want.

Just tell me who’s been asking.”

“If you want a list, it’ll be long.”

“So tell me who
isn’t
asking.”

She was still wary. “Why?”

“Because that’s the person who already knows.”

Deliah touched the pins again. “The Senate leader,” she

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said. “Most of the courtiers ask in person, even the important

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ones. They don’t want to risk that somebody else might

learn what they think I’ll tell. But I’ve never seen the Senate

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leader. Even his daughter, Maris, wants to fi nd out. Her

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bribe was the promise that I could work for her.” Deliah gave

a short laugh. “I dress the imperial family. The emperor

would never let me go.” Her eyes challenged Arin, daring

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him to promise that something would change, that he could

make it change for her.

His hot feeling of shame cooled into a black lump: a

hard, burnt thing.

He moved to leave.

“Something happened to her,” Deliah said suddenly.

He stopped. “What do you mean?”

“Before you came—

weeks before you came—

Lady

Kestrel’s maids brought me a dress. It was white and gold.

And fi lthy. The hem had been dragged through something,

I’m not sure what. It was on the seat of the dress, too. The

knees. There was vomit on one sleeve. Some seams had

split.”

Arin’s mouth went dry.

“The maids wanted to know if I could salvage it,” De-

liah said. “Impossible. It was ruined. I tore that dress into

rags.”

Arin made himself speak. “When?”

“I told you when.”

“Was Kestrel with someone the day she wore that dress?”

Deliah spread her hands helplessly. “I have no idea
ex-

actly
when she wore it, or the company she might have

kept. You’d have to ask her ladies- in- waiting, and I don’t

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recommend that. At least one of them is in the pocket of

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the prince, and only the gods know how many report to

the emperor.”

“You must know something more.”

“I’ve told you everything.”

MARIE RUTK

“You see her. When you fi t her to a dress . . . you see

her skin. Was there . . . damage? He had a gut-wrenching

memory of Kestrel’s face after Cheat had attacked her.”

Bruises. Scars. Anything. Anything around that time. Any-

thing since.”

“No,” said Deliah, which was a deep relief to him until

she added, “not that I could see. I haven’t fi tted her in the

past week, though.”

“Watch her.”

“I can’t do that. I can’t keep reporting to you. The em-

peror . . .”

“
I
am Herran’s governor.”

She gave him a pitying look. “We both know how

much that’s worth.”

He covered his eyes. He shook his head. “At least let me

know if there’s been anything else . . . strange.”

She shrugged. “The usual. Orders for a new day dress.

Minor repairs. Complaints about pests getting into the

wardrobes and eating the fabric. That sort of thing.” De-

liah still had that look on her face, and Arin wanted to

defend himself, to say that the only reason she should re-

port on Kestrel’s doings was that the general’s daughter

was obviously up to something, that the ruined dress was

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evidence of what he couldn’t see and
must
see, because

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Kestrel had a knack for working her fi ngers through

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schemes, and sometimes she pulled the strings, and some-

times she tugged at the edges until she uncovered some-

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thing she shouldn’t.

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Arin wanted to insist that if a secret concerned Kestrel,

it concerned the emperor, and that concerned Herran. This

was why he asked for Deliah’s help. It was for his country.

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Only for that.

It was not out of worry for Kestrel.

Not out of love.

Not because the description of that dress made Arin try

to imagine every possible thing that had been done to Kes-

trel while she wore it, or everything she might have tried to

do.

In the end, none of this was easy for him to say. He was

silent as he made to leave Deliah’s workshop.

“She cares for you,” Deliah said suddenly. “I know that

she does.”

It was so blatantly untrue that it almost seemed like a

cruel joke.

Arin laughed.

Arin’s mind had gone dark, which was perhaps why he

didn’t notice that the hallway had, too. All the lamps but

one had burned down. The last sputtered in its oil.

He hadn’t been paying attention to where he was going.

He’d intended to return to his rooms, but this hall was no-

where near that wing. He found himself in a disused part of

the palace hung with frayed tapestries that— as far as he

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could tell in the dim light— glorifi ed Valorian conquests

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from a century before, when Herran was at its height and

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Valoria was a speck of a country with unwashed warriors

who liked the sight of blood so much they’d cut their own

fl esh to get it.

The tapestries were crude. It might have amused him,

MARIE RUTK

if he were in the mood to be amused, how bad Valorians

were at beauty. They stole it. They forced it. They had

never been able to bring beauty to life.

Yet this made him think of Kestrel’s hands springing

from piano keys, and coming down again, and running

wild, and this made him think of the ruined dress, and this

made him stride farther into the shadowed hall as if he

could escape his own thoughts, and that brought him smack

against a blank wall.

He swore. He looked up at the scrolled woodwork of

the ceiling and tried to be very careful not to insult the god

of the lost. Instead, he focused on the woodwork carvings

of his dead end, and noticed an odd, rigid line cutting

through the swirling pattern. Narrowing his eyes in the

light of the dying lamp, he caught a gleam in the ceiling.

Metal. There was a metal strip running horizontally across

the ceiling— no, not
across
, not exactly. It was set
into
the

ceiling.

Arin was so distracted by wondering what that thing

was that he didn’t see a shadow slip toward him and then

behind.

He heard a metallic cranking sound. That line burst

into full being— an iron gate hurtling down from its slit in

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the ceiling.

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It hit the stone fl oor. It trapped Arin into the dead end.

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And even though he was already turning, adrenaline punch-

ing through his veins and singing high in his brain, he

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didn’t quite see the shadow behind him become a man. He

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didn’t see a face.

There was a rush of air. Arin was shoved back against

the grate, and then he didn’t see anything at all.

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14

ARIN LAY ON STONE. HIS NECK CROOKED

painfully against something hard and cold. It took sev-

eral blurry seconds before he thought
gate
, and then
am-

bush
.

He didn’t move. He didn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t

have been knocked out for long, because hands were pat-

ting him down for weapons. Arin wore no dagger at his

hip. That was too Valorian. But his knife was pulled from

one boot. His attacker came down on him, kneeling on his

chest. Heavy. The air squeezed out of him.

Arin’s head throbbed. It took everything he had not to

be sick.

The weight on his chest shifted. “Let’s make you

pretty,” the man said, and set the tip of a blade against

Arin’s lips.

Arin’s fi st cocked up and slammed into bone. He

shoved the man off him. He was awake now, he was on his