The Winner's Kiss (24 page)

“The leaves of the trees are cupped for it.”

“You can't see that in this dark.”

“I see it in my mind.” The smoke from his pipe lingered. He folded his arms across his chest. His body looked close to sleep. “Arin.”

Arin, who was sitting with his forearms propped on bent knees, fingers loose, felt nowhere near sleep. “Yes?”

“How do I look in the dark?”

Startled, Arin glanced at him. The question had had no edges. It wasn't sleek, either. Its soft, uncertain shape suggested that Roshar truly wanted to know. In the fired red shadows, his limbs looked lax and his mutilated face met Arin's squarely. The heavy feeling that Arin carried—that specific sadness, nestled just below his collar bone, like a pendant—lessened. He said, “Like my friend.”

Roshar didn't smile. When he spoke, his voice matched his expression, which was rare for him. Rarer still: his tone. Quiet and true. “You do, too.”

Alone in his tent, Arin must have fallen asleep at some point. He woke expecting Kestrel to be beside him. Her presence
seemed
clear and real, as real as when she'd stood before him in his rooms. That thin shift. The sear of her hot skin.
I want to remember you
.

Go back to sleep, he told himself. You can't hold her to any promise.

He curled onto his side. There was a clap of thunder. The sky opened. Rain pattered the canvas, and grew loud.

It didn't let up. Water streamed down the horses as they walked. After noon looked no different from morning, which hadn't looked a lot different from night. Every thing was a muddled gray. Arin was soaked to the skin. Rain ran off his nose.

Progress was slow. Arin fell back to the middle lines and stopped to help shoulder a wagon wheel out of a slick rut between split paving stones. He'd just mounted his horse again when he realized that a halt must have been called. Every one stayed where they were.

He rode up through the ranks to Roshar. “What is it?” he asked the prince.

“A parting of ways.” Roshar nodded at the road ahead, and he pulled a waxed map from a tube in his saddlebags. Arin took a roughly woven blanket from his and sidled his horse along Roshar's, reaching the blanket over him and the prince as a shield to keep the worst of the rain off the map.

The road would soon fork. West lay Lerralen.

“I'm going to listen to your advice,” Roshar said. “We split. Most to the west. Some south. Lay your bet, Arin. It's your country. Where will the action be?”

Arin
studied the map, worrying his lower lip between his teeth.

Mmm,
said death.
Those estates look nice.

A few unwalled villages stood near them. The estates were far enough south that it'd be easy for the general to run his supplies from Ithrya onto the mainland.

“One of these,” Arin said, rain dripping from his mouth. It felt like he was spitting. “If the general gains a foothold there he can strengthen his position, take almost every thing he needs from the estates, except black powder. He could creep up, spread out, form flanks to the east and west. Scoop us up. Push to the city.”

Roshar rolled and stowed the map. Arin lowered the blanket, which was soaked. He'd have a wet night.

Roshar looked up into the rain, blinking. “Almost feels like home.” He squinted at Arin. “Do you want to go with Xash to Lerralen?”

Arin shook his head.

“That's what I thought.”

The army divided. Arin rode south with Roshar.

Near dusk the rain stopped, but it had been falling so long that Arin seemed to still see it dribbling across his vision.

The diminished army set up camp for the night, swearing at the mud, the mood miserable. Arin's tent had stayed mostly dry in its tarp. A change of clothes, too, buried at the bottom of a saddlebag. Every thing else was damp. He unbuckled his leather armor, which shed water and smelled like a soggy cow. Shrugged off his tunic. Had nothing to
hang
it with. He draped it to dry on a low-hanging branch of a nearby tree, then sighed when a breeze showered droplets down from high leaves.

Every one wanted a fire, but the wood in the forest along the road was wet. Nothing would burn. Arin resigned himself to the damp. He pitched his tent, peeled a broad strip of thick bark off a tree (the unexposed side was dry), and sat on it rather than the mud outside his tent while he used his one dry shirt to wipe rain off anything metal so that it wouldn't rust: his sword, dagger, shield, armor buckles, the horse tack.

It felt nothing like summer. Arin was chilled, the skin along his back unpleasantly tight. A lock of wet hair flopped down along his cheek. He shuddered, brushed it away, and kept polishing with the shirt, rubbing at the bit and buckles on the bridle and girth. He warmed a little from the activity.

“Well, well, look at you.” Roshar stood in front of him, hands on his hips, armor unbuckled but still on. “So industrious. Cold, too, I bet.”

Arin ignored him.

“While you're at it,” Roshar said, “want to dry my things, too?”

Arin paused, looked up, and made a gesture he'd learned in the east.

Roshar laughed. He squished his way toward his tent. Arin heard him call for one of his underlings. Then Arin stopped paying attention.

After a while, though, a prickle crept up his neck. At first Arin thought it was the cold. But he wasn't finished with
his
task, and so didn't pull the mostly dry shirt over his head, which was what he longed to do. He kept at what he was doing.

Slowly, he became aware of a surprised quiet stealing over the camp. The sodden thuds of a lone horse's hooves, approaching. Then someone—a Dacran—said, “Stay where you are!” Arin heard the crank of a crossbow.

He looked up just as the rider stopped.

There—high up on her stallion, hair plastered to her head, expression bleak—was Kestrel.

Chapter 20

He went to her, yanking his clammy tunic off the tree as he passed, shrugging into it.

Her hands clenched the reins, body stiff. She'd been riding for a long time. She had a stunned look that reminded him badly of the tundra. Every thing about her was rigid and wrong.

He took her by the waist and lifted her down. Vivid with confusion and worry, he said, “What are you doing here?”

“I'm sorry. I didn't keep my promise to you.”

“That doesn't matter.”

“I gave you my word. A Valorian honors her word.” She swayed slightly.

He flipped open Javelin's saddlebag. No food. No clothes. Not a match, not a bit of tinder. Not even a canteen. Just a burned-out lamp. “Kestrel, you're scaring me.”

“I'm sorry.”

He got her to his tent, ignoring the curious stares, and was grateful—without quite knowing why—that Roshar was nowhere to be seen. Arin grabbed his dry shirt from
where
he'd let it fall to the ground and dug his clean trousers out of a saddlebag. His canteen. Some hardtack, gone sticky with the damp. “Here.” He pressed it all into her hands. “Change. Eat. I'll be outside.”

She nodded. He was shakily relieved to get a response that seemed, small as it was, normal. Then she dis appeared into his tent and he became anxious again.

Moments passed. There was a rustle from inside the tent. It subsided. He asked if she was all right. No answer. Finally, he was too concerned not to come inside.

She was sitting, staring into her lap, holding the unopened canteen. She'd changed into his shirt, then appeared to have reached the limit of what she could do. She still wore her wet trousers, the riding boots, her dagger. The hardtack lay to the side, untouched.

He knelt and took her freezing hands. “Please tell me what's wrong.”

She opened her mouth but choked on the words. She looked brittle. He began to feel the way she looked. He tried a different question. “How did you know where we'd be?”

“I guessed.”

Arin stared.

“I thought—maybe Lerralen—but my father, he . . . I know what he's like. So I thought—” She halted. He didn't like the way her voice collapsed when she mentioned the general. “The Errilith estate. Livestock, meadows, trees. Water. It'd make sense. To him. I worried. Maybe you wouldn't think of Errilith. Or you would and ignore it. But I hoped.”

He felt a flash of wild fear. To wander vaguely south . . . unsupplied, alone, practically unarmed . . . on a gamble. A
guess
. It shook him. “You don't even have a map.” He tried to say nothing else. He worried that she'd see the extremity of what he felt and recoil from it.

“I've seen the right maps, before. I remembered. I—” Her face contorted.

“You don't have to say.”

“Let me. I want to. I went to the villa. My house. After I left your suite. I didn't mean to stay there so long. I'm sorry.”

“You've nothing to apologize for.”

“Yes. I was so
sure
. On the tundra, I blamed you. The blame: rotten inside me. But when I went home, I remembered. The prison wasn't your fault. It was mine. It was his.”

Arin went cold. His suspicion took its final shape. “Your father.”

“Yes.”

“Your father betrayed you.”

“I wrote a letter to you when I was in the capital. So
stupid
, to put it all in writing. Every thing I'd done. The information I passed to Tensen. The way I worked against the empire. What I felt. My father read it. He gave it to the emperor.” She was weeping. “And I know, I
know
that it hurt him, that I broke something, that he felt it break. Maybe I wasn't
me
anymore, to him. Do you understand? Not his daughter. Not anyone he knew. Just a lying stranger. But how could he? Why couldn't he love me most? Or enough. Why couldn't he love me enough to choose me over his rules?”

Arin pulled her onto his lap. He held her shaking form, tucked his face into the crook of her cold neck as she sobbed
against
him. He murmured that he loved her more than he could say. He promised that he would always choose her first.

She was exhausted, and she fell asleep quickly. Arin sat beside her for a few long moments after. Murder rose in his heart.

The general was out of reach, for now. But someone closer by would do.

He left the tent and didn't have to go far. Roshar was waiting for him. “I hear we have an unexpected guest,” said the prince.

Arin clamped a hand down on his shoulder and drove him into the trees.

Roshar—oddly enough—made no sound until enough distance had been put between them and the army. When they wouldn't be overheard, he said cautiously, “Arin, why are you . . . manhandling me?”

“You knew.”

“Specificity, please.”

“On the morning we left, you knew that her horse wasn't in the stables. That's why you saddled a horse and brought it to me: so that I wouldn't notice that she was gone. You are a liar.”

“That's not a lie.”

Silence.

“Arin, you are
crushing
me. Fine, yes, all right. I might have
gently deceived
you, in the name of your greater happiness. Is that really a lie? Or if it is, isn't it a very, very small one?” He showed with his fingertip and thumb just how small.

“
You don't know what makes me happy.”

“I know that you're not. I know that you've no sense of reason where she's concerned. Maybe I
did
observe that Javelin wasn't in his stall that morning. Maybe I knew how things would unfold: how you'd notice, and go tearing off after her, wherever she was, and my sister would learn of it. What would my soldiers think if I waited for you? Or if we marched south without you? It'd all fall apart. So yes, I lied. I'd do it again. My only other option was to watch you throw every thing away for the sake of someone who doesn't even love you.”

Arin released him. He felt brutally gutted.

“You wanted the truth,” said the prince.

Arin thought of Cheat, Tensen, Kestrel. He wondered if some part of him was drawn to lies. What was it that made him so easy to deceive?

“Oh, Arin. Don't look like that. I apologize.”

He stared at his friend, who was still his friend. It struck him that Roshar had gone quietly into the trees because if he had protested, his army would have cut Arin down.

Arin apologized as well, then said, “It's not you who angers me.”

“Oh no?”

“You're just a close target.”

“How flattering.”

“Kestrel was caught by her father. He had proof that she was spying for Herran and exposed her to the emperor.”

Roshar considered this, his expression guarded. “A new memory?”

“Yes.”

“
What else does she remember about the general?”

“I'm not sure.”

“You should ask.”

“No.”

“This isn't prying, Arin. This is gathering information potentially relevant to our current operation. I'm happy to talk with her if you won't.”

“Leave her alone.”

“You underestimate my charm. Granted, she once pulled that dagger on me, but we've put that behind us. She likes me. I am very likable.”

Arin didn't want to tell him about her raw eyes, or the stripped, thin quality of her voice. The way she'd wept, the utter abandonment. Her face: so alone, no matter what he said to her.

“She's in no shape to talk to you,” he said flatly. “She rode for two days and a night with no food or water except maybe what she gathered along the road—
if
she bothered to do that. She didn't even know for sure that she'd find us. She guessed where we'd go and pushed herself to catch up.”

The prince lifted his brows. “Impressive.”

His tone made Arin wary. “What do you mean by that?”

“She's got a knack for survival.”