The Winner's Crime (89 page)

it. Kestrel smiled, and waited for the stick to be brought

back.

“Sneaky,” Arin teased her.

Kestrel shrugged a little helplessly at her imagination.

She’d come to accept the way her mind would conjure up

Arin. She’d come to need it.

She’d left the physician in his garden to walk the lawn

alone with her dog. The day had grown warm. Kestrel sat

on the lawn. The green scent fi lled her senses. She seemed

to even taste it.

The puppy settled beside her. Kestrel took off her tight

shoes. The grass prickled through her stockinged feet. The

palace was too large to appear distant. Still, Kestrel felt far

from it, at least for now.

“Not far enough.” Arin spoke as if he could read her

mind.

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She faced her pretend Arin. His scar was healed. His

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gray eyes were startlingly clear. “You’re not real,” she re-

minded him.

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“I
feel
real.” He brushed one fi nger across her lower lip.

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It suddenly seemed that there were no clouds in the sky,

and that she sat in full sunshine. “
You
feel real,” he said.

The puppy yawned, her jaws closing with a snap.

THE WINNER

The sound brought Kestrel to herself. She felt a little em-

barrassed. Her pulse was high. But she couldn’t stop pre-

tending.

Kestrel reached beneath her skirts to pull down a knee-

high stocking.

Arin made a sound.

“I want to feel the grass beneath my feet,” Kestrel told

him.

“Someone’s going to see you.”

“I don’t care.”

“But that someone is
me
, and you should have a care,

Kestrel, for my poor heart.” He reached under the hem of

her dress to catch her hand in the act of pulling down the

second stocking. “You’re treating me quite badly,” he said,

and slid the stocking free, his palm skimming along the

path of her calf. He looked at her. His hand wrapped

around her bare ankle. Kestrel became shy . . . though she

had known full well what she was doing.

Arin grinned. With his free hand, he plucked a blade of

grass. He tickled it against the sole of her foot. She laughed,

jerking away.

He let her go. He settled down beside her, lying on his

stomach on the grass, propped up by his elbows. Kestrel lay

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on her back. She heard birdsong: high and long, with a trill

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at the end. She gazed up at the sky. It was blue enough for

summer.

“Perfect,” she said.

“Almost.”

MARIE RUTK

She turned to look at him, and he was already looking

at her. “I’m going to miss you when I wake up,” she whis-

pered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep

under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He

was a dream.

“Don’t wake up,” he said.

The air smelled like new leaves. “You said you trusted

me.”

“I did.” He added, “I do.”

“You
are
a dream.”

He smiled.

“I lied to you,” Kestrel said. “I kept secrets. I thought it

was for the best. But it was because
I
didn’t trust
you.
”

Arin shifted onto his side. He caressed her cheek lightly

with the back of his hand. That trailing sensation felt like

the last note of the bird’s song. “No,” he agreed, his voice

gentle. “You didn’t.”

Kestrel woke. The puppy was draped across her feet,

sleeping. Her stockings lay in a small heap beside her. The

sun had climbed in the sky. Her cheek was fl ushed, the

skin tight: a little sunburned.

The puppy twitched, still lost in sleep. Kestrel envied

her. She rested her head again on the grass.

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She closed her eyes, and tried to fi nd her way back into

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her dream.

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CRIME

Later, in the Butcher’s Row, Kestrel told Tensen to fi nd out

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if the water engineer changed her bet on the wedding dress.

If she did, then it meant that Elinor and the physician were

working together.

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Kestrel plucked at her work scarf. She tugged it low.

Her disguise felt very thin. “There’s something else . . .”

The weather remained warm, but she shivered. “I was

wrong to make you promise not to tell Arin about me.”

Tensen raised his white brows.

“I want him to know,” she said.

“I’m not sure that’s wise.”

“Of course,” she said hastily, “a letter sent to Herran

would be too risky. But maybe you know of a way . . .” She

heard the pleading in her voice, and stopped.

Tensen’s expression shifted. It showed a fl ash of

something— what, Kestrel couldn’t quite tell, it had come

and gone too quickly— and then settled into sympathy.

“Oh, Kestrel,” Tensen said. “I would tell him, but he’s not

in Herran. I don’t know where he is.”

“You’re his spymaster. How can you
not know
?”

“No one does.” Tensen spread his hands. His gold ring

caught the light. “If you don’t believe me, you can certainly

ask around. But”—

his voice grew concerned—“given

your . . . history with Arin, I’m not sure such inquiries

would be safe. They could come to the attention of the

emperor. Or your father.”

Kestrel felt horribly trapped and robbed, though she

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she had already given up. She struggled not to show this.

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Already, that dream on the grass had faded in her memory.

It was as if she’d worn it out by thinking too much about

it. But in the moment, it had felt so real. Kestrel couldn’t

quite believe that it hadn’t been.

MARIE RUTK

She looked numbly at Tensen’s ring. He hadn’t worn it

in a while. She supposed that it had been lost, and found

again. Sometimes things happened that way. But some-

times, Kestrel knew, what’s lost stays lost forever.

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38

KESTREL

WASN’T SURE HOW, BUT GENERAL

Trajan had learned about the deserter: the well- bred son

who had left his post in a brigade fi ghting in the east.

“And he’s here.” Her father’s voice was fl at. “Living in a

palace suite.”

“I haven’t decided what to do with him.” The emperor

reached for his fork and knife and suggested that they

begin the third course. He caught Kestrel’s eye. She began

to eat.

Her father did not. “What is there to decide?”

“Trajan, he’s just a boy. No older than Verex.” The em-

peror smiled fondly at his son, who looked down at his

plate.

“He betrayed you. He betrayed me. He betrayed
him-

self
. Where is his honor now?”

“I imagine it’s with his parents’ lucrative mills in the

southern isles. Maybe it’s been ground along with their fi ne

grain and baked into delicious bread.”

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“The law on desertion is clear.”

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The emperor drank his wine. “To be honest, I was sav-

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ing him for you. Go see him if you like.”

“I will,” her father said, “and then I’ll return to the

east.”

“You can’t even walk the length of the Spring Garden

MARIE RUTK

without catching your breath. Would
you
follow such a

commander into battle?”

Her father’s eyes squinted as if narrowed against a sud-

den glare of light. Kestrel brought her fork clattering down

on her plate. Anger boiled up her throat. She opened her

mouth to speak, but her father’s eyes cut to her, and it was the

same as when he’d stood in the palace courtyard, his blood

on his horse, and she had moved to help him.

“All in good time, old friend,” the emperor said gently.

His voice had an almost smoky sound, a quality that might

have been love if love were like cured meat: hung, dried,

and stored to be eaten a little at a time in hard conditions.

Verex pushed his food around his plate. Kestrel’s father

didn’t move.

“I’m sorry,” the emperor told him. “I’m not ready to

lose you yet.”

The general wanted her to come with him. “One day you’ll

rule the empire,” he said. “You need to know what to do.”

This was what he did.

He went to the young soldier’s palace suite. He watched

the young man, not much older than Kestrel, grow pale.

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The general brought Kestrel into the sitting room with

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him, then drew the soldier to the side, one fi rm hand on

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the shoulder. The general murmured in his ear. The boy

sank in on himself, and turned his face so that Kestrel

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couldn’t see.

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The general’s voice took the tone of a question. The

boy inhaled a shuddering breath. Kestrel’s father said some-

thing that sounded soothing. Safe. She’d heard him like

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that before, when she was small.

“Forgive me,” the soldier said in a strangled whisper.

“I will,” the general said. “After.”

Then he told Kestrel that it was time to go.

The deserter used his dagger. An honor suicide.

For a few days, the gossip was on every courtier’s lips.

Then news came from the east. The barbarians had burned

the plains, said the report. The empire’s latest prize was

black, barren, smoking.

The names came later. A much longer list of casualties

than usual.

One name was passed around the court like a pearl. It

was said slowly, in appreciation of its luster, its smooth

weight, the way it rolled into the well of a palm and warmed.

When Kestrel heard it, she realized that she had been

expecting this since the day Ronan had snatched the re-

cruitment list from her. The discovery of that expectation

cracked some brittle thing inside her. She had known. She

had known this would happen. And yet it was now clear

that she hadn’t
believed
that she did, that she had shunted

thoughts of it away into a part of her mind where things

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How could she have hidden from that knowledge?

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How could she have known that Ronan would die, and

yet not know it?

It had been so clear.

In her rooms, alone, Kestrel covered her mouth. The

MARIE RUTK

pearl of Ronan’s name lodged in her throat. She swallowed.

It hurt.

She had dreams that shamed her in the morning,

dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet

spoke in Arin’s voice.
I made this for you,
he said.
Do you

like it?

The powder was so fi ne that she inhaled its sweetness,

but always woke before she could taste.

Kestrel wrote to Jess. She was afraid to visit.

The next day, Kestrel’s maid brought her a letter. Kes-

trel’s heart leaped to see Jess’s handwriting on the outside,

and that familiar wax seal. Instantly, she blamed herself for

that surge of relieved hope. It was wrong for her to feel this

way when Ronan was dead.

But she hadn’t thought Jess would answer her. And this

letter— Kestrel weighed it in her hand before she broke the

seal— was just as thick as the one she had sent Jess. Surely

Jess wouldn’t write so much if she wanted nothing to do

with Kestrel.

Kestrel opened it. She felt again that strange mixture of

knowing and not knowing, of shock and resignation.

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She unfolded the envelope. Hadn’t she seen this com-

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ing? Hadn’t it been obvious?

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The envelope contained the letter Kestrel had sent to

Jess: unopened, unread.

CRIME

’S

Kestrel hadn’t played the piano since discovering the music