The Winner's Crime (91 page)

Did
Kestrel know? She thought of when she sat to play

Bite and Sting. When Kestrel turned the tiles, and fl ipped

the blank sides onto their backs, and showed their faces

and tallied their value, did she know? Sometimes the game

went too quickly for Kestrel to understand exactly what

she was doing. All she knew was that in the fi nal play she

would win.

Kestrel looked at Deliah. She wasn’t certain of winning

anymore, or even of what she could possibly hope to win.

She didn’t know what winning would mean.

Smoothly, she told Deliah, “Of course I do.”

There was a hunt in the mountain forest behind the pal-

ace. The hounds bayed. A few courtiers brought slaves to

load their crossbows for them, which would have appalled

Kestrel’s father, had he seen it. He’d chosen to stay behind.

Verex came, but refused to hunt. The emperor smiled

widely. “There’s my milk- blooded boy,” he said.

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“Walk with me, Verex,” said Kestrel. “I’ve no interest in

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hunting either.”

They took the trail ahead of the emperor. Kestrel’s

puppy bounded alongside her.

“What a sweet dog,” Kestrel heard Maris say.

MARIE RUTK

The emperor’s cheerful voice fl oated clear. “Do you like

her?”

Verex stiff ened beside Kestrel.

“She’s yours,” the emperor told Maris.

Kestrel turned. “No. She’s mine.”

“What do you care if Maris has her?” There was that

smile again. “You haven’t even named her.”

“Let her go,” Verex whispered in Kestrel’s ear. “Re-

member.” He didn’t say what she should remember, but

Kestrel did anyway: Arin’s stitched face.

The dog nudged her damp nose against Kestrel’s trou-

sered leg.

“Her name,” Kestrel told the emperor, “is
Mine
.”

He shrugged and looked careless. Maris, with a court-

ier’s instinct, had caught the scent of danger and waited to

see what would happen next. When nothing did, and noth-

ing more was said, she moved to catch up with her friends.

Later that afternoon, the emperor shot a fox. “For my

daughter.” Blood marbled its reddish ruff . Its little black

feet looked like dried paintbrushes. The emperor declared

that its fur would be made into a stole for Kestrel.

When the court headed down to the castle and Verex

was walking alongside Risha, the emperor fell in step with

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Kestrel.

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He wasn’t smiling anymore, but the smile was in his

hardened voice, trapped there: an insect in amber. “Don’t

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be more trouble than you’re worth,” he said.

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“Give the dog away,” Kestrel told Verex. She had held the

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prince back on the palace lawn, its grass soft and fi ne, the

green brightly pale. The other courtiers had gone ahead.

“Find her a home far from the court. Find the right per-

son.”

“
You
are the right person.”

Kestrel’s eyes stung. The puppy sat and happily chewed

her paws.

Verex said, “This is my fault.”

Kestrel said no. She said that she could no longer look

at this dog, this warm and perfect gift, without seeing it

hurt. It was diff erent to give something up than to see it

taken away. The diff erence, Kestrel said, was choice. A lim-

ited freedom, but better than none. Or so she had thought

when Arin had given her two keys to his guarded house.

She had thought the same when she’d off ered him his

country, nailed and bound and screwed tight with certain

conditions. Better than nothing. She’d thought this before,

and thought it again, but she didn’t believe it anymore.

Now she knew that to give something up
was
to have it

taken away.

Kestrel said all this silently to herself. The words felt so

loud inside her head that she almost forgot that she hadn’t

actually spoken them. But then she looked again at Verex

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and saw him waiting, worried, and remembered what he’d

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said last. She shook her head:
no.

Quietly, Verex said, “My father needs for you to love

him best. He needs for you to love what he loves. There’s

no room for anything else.”

MARIE RUTK

“I know.”

“I’m not sure you do. Kestrel, your dressmaker is dead.”

The news dropped hard. It sank and hit bottom. Kes-

trel saw Deliah, the woman’s gray eyes lined with heavy

lashes— Arin’s eyes— as she lifted the ivory hem of the

dress. The fabric went sheer, then solid as it settled. The

skirt had swelled like a lung, then sighed.

Fear came over Kestrel in a nasty, shimmering breath-

lessness.

“She was seen meeting with the Herrani minister of

agriculture,” Verex said. “Later, the captain of the guard

came for her. She killed herself with her own shears.”

Kestrel remembered Thrynne’s bloody fi ngers in the

guttering prison light.

“The meeting with the minister wasn’t why the captain

was sent,” Verex said. “That was an excuse. The real reason

happened the day your governor left. The reason was the

stitches on his face. Neat seams. Kestrel, don’t you remem-

ber how perfect they were? My father saw. That dressmak-

er’s loyalty to Arin was clear on his face.”

The puppy was licking Kestrel’s palm. Warm wet skin,

cooling. Breath gently huff ed into Kestrel’s hand. The sky

was a feather blanket of clouds, save for one blue hole in

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the fabric. A blue cloud in a white sky.

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The hole grew wider, bluer. It pulled itself open. It si-

lently stretched, like Kestrel’s guilt, like the moment when

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she’d seen Arin’s sewn cheek, like her father’s gaze, drawn

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to the moth on the painting’s frame. Kestrel saw satin

blue, the color of Jess’s dress. Powdered-sugar clouds, Kes-

trel thought. In her memory, Ronan handed her a cake.

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She tasted it. It ate into her tongue like poison.

Verex said, “You need to watch yourself. If you play

against my father, you’ll lose. This kind of game isn’t about

intelligence, Kestrel. It’s about experience. And you’re con-

fl icted, and so . . .
hurt
that . . .” He shook his head. “Please,

just don’t do anything reckless.”

“For how long?”

“You know.”

Kestrel rested her wet palm on the big puppy’s black

skull.
Mine
, she thought. Then she lifted her hand away

and told Verex to take the dog by the collar.

How long? Until the emperor was dead.

“Kestrel . . . one day, we could change things.”

She looked up from the dog and at Verex, at his long,

thin frame, the hunched shoulders, the shock of pale hair,

the large, liquid eyes.

She wondered what would happen if she took his free

hand. She wondered if he would imagine that Risha, not

she, held his hand, and if this was how Kestrel’s marriage

to him would always be. She saw herself and Verex holding

each other. She felt, almost, the kindness of it . . . and she

felt, surely, its cruelty. Its claim on them. Its crime as they

each pretended the other was someone else.

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“I will never keep you from Risha,” she said.

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“I wouldn’t do this to her,” he said. “If—”

There was no need to fi nish. They both knew what the

emperor was capable of doing to the princess if Verex de-

fi ed him.

MARIE RUTK

“We could remake the world,” Verex said. “Would it be

so bad, to rule the empire together?”

It had been a question Kestrel hadn’t allowed herself to

ask. Now she did. The question kept asking itself, an echo

with no answer.

“We can do this,” Verex said, “if we wait. If we’re care-

ful. Kestrel, can you be careful?”

In her mind, Kestrel played the tiles.

The emperor.

The water engineer.

The physician.

A favor.

Herran.

Valoria.

She noted the new engravings. She arranged them in

diff erent orders. She sought a pattern and came up empty.

She mixed the tiles again. But the emperor made it hard to

think. She fl ipped his tile so she wouldn’t have to look at

him.

Its other side, however, wasn’t blank. It showed her fa-

ther’s face.

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What game was this?

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What did Kestrel think she was doing?

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Hadn’t she lost enough? Hadn’t she done enough? She

remembered Verex’s advice.

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The riddle of the engineer and physician wasn’t hers to

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solve. She needed to stop.

Yes, stop playing, Kestrel, she told herself. Clear the

bets, clear the table. Walk away from the game.

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Now.

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40

FIRST, ARIN MADE THE MOLDS. ONE, THE SIZE

and shape of a child’s marble. The other, long and thin and

cylindrical. He made two of each kind from fi red clay and

set the twinned halves aside. He heated lead in the forge’s

fi re until the metal oozed red.

Arin had been a blacksmith, but blacksmiths rarely

work with molds. His clay molds cracked. Hot lead spilled.

There was nothing to do but let everything cool into a mis-

begotten heap and shove it to the side.

It was maddening. And surprising, how Arin realized

that he needed those hours in the forge, how work he was

once forced to do was now
his
. He loved that feeling of

making something. He smoothed fresh clay, curving it,

hollowing it out with a mea sured tool. He watched new

molds bake in the forge’s fi re.

When they broke again, he almost didn’t mind. He

would make more. One day, they would be right.

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Arin had told the queen and her brother not to enter the

forge. Roshar did anyway, his arm still heavily ban daged,

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the little tiger padding behind him.

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“I think”— Roshar surveyed the disarray—“that you

should have taken that dagger and been happy with it.”

Arin handed him a list. “Supplies.”

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“My, how the lowly have risen. I’m not your messenger

boy.” He read the list. “What do you want
that
for? What

are you making?”

“Your queen’s
something more
.”

Roshar laughed. “She asked you for ‘something more’?

I doubt that this”— he fl ourished the list at Arin’s latest

disaster—“was what she had in mind.”

The tiger nipped Arin’s ankle. He gently nudged its

face away. “Roshar, why are you here?”

“I’ve named the cub. I named him after you.”

“Roshar.”

“When Arin grows up, you’ll be sentenced to death by

tiger in the Dacran arena. Arin will eat you alive.”

Arin looked at Roshar’s feral grin, and at the soft,

mazed face of the tiger. The fi re caught its eyes.

Roshar said, “I came to tell you that we burned the

plains yesterday.”

Arin glanced up. The green paint that lined Roshar’s

eyes made them look narrower, bright. Roshar’s smile

changed. It dug in deep. “Casualties?” Arin asked.

“Many.”

“Good.”

“Not quite good enough for you, I’m afraid. You gave

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sound advice, I admit, but that won’t buy your alliance. I

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don’t see how
this
will either.” Roshar looked contemptu-

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ously at the items littering the forge’s worktable.

Arin was tempted to explain his idea. “Do you remem-

ber the weapons in Risha’s doll house?”

Roshar’s expression closed. “Do you remember that

MARIE RUTK

seal on your pretty dagger? That knife is a lady’s weapon.