Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
studied Kestrel with a slanting gaze. “Very neat of you, Lady
Kestrel. You solve all my worries. You hand me the unrav-
aged plains for the low price of poison. How nice that you
minimize our enemy’s civilian casualties at the same time.”
Kestrel said nothing.
He sipped his chocolate. “Have you ever witnessed your
father in battle? You should. I’d like to see
you
fi ght under
a black fl ag, just once. I’d like to see you truly at war.”
Kestrel couldn’t quite return the emperor’s stare. She
lifted her eyes and noticed the prince and Risha leave their
gaming table. They disappeared into the hedge maze. Kes-
trel understood now why Verex seemed so happy. She won-
dered if the whole court knew about him and the princess.
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She suspected it must.
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“Oh,” the emperor drawled, “the Herrani wish to speak
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with you, Kestrel. They’ve made a formal request.”
His words seemed to linger in the air longer than pos-
sible. Kestrel had the odd impression of the emperor play-
ing a piano, and striking a dissonant chord that caught the
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fascination of everyone listening.
“Hardly surprising,” she said coolly. “The Herrani are
bound to want to speak with me from time to time. I was
named their emissary.”
“Yes, we should correct that. You’re too busy for such a
dull job. They’ll be notifi ed that you have given up the
position. There’s no need for you to meet with either of the
Herrani representatives again.”
When Kestrel returned to her suite, the bed was empty and
made. Jess’s trunk was gone.
But Jess had promised. Her visit was supposed to last
longer than this. They’d barely seen each other, and for
Jess to
leave
, to leave now, so soon . . .
Kestrel tugged on a silken bellpull. When her ladies- in-
waiting arrived in her sitting room, she asked, “Where’s my
letter?”
The maids looked quizzical.
“From my friend,” Kestrel said. “For me. It’s not like
her to leave. Not without saying something.”
There was a silence. Then one of the maids off ered,
“The lady had her trunk sent to her townhome in the city.”
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“But
why
?”
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A silence made clear that no one knew why. Kestrel
pressed her lips shut.
CRIME
“It’s late,” a maid said. “Shouldn’t you change into a
’S
new dress for the afternoon? What will you wear?”
Kestrel waved a hand in a gesture very much like one
she’d often seen the emperor make. She hadn’t meant to do
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that. It upset her. “I don’t care,” she said curtly. “You choose.”
Her ladies- in- waiting bustled into action, putting away
her furs and parading gowns. While the maids tutted over
some fabrics and fi ngered others approvingly, Kestrel won-
dered what Jess would have chosen. She shoved that thought
away.
But this was like discarding a Bite and Sting tile only to
draw a series of worse ones. Because there was Arin, in the
velvet balcony of her mind, and there was the Winter Gar-
den, cold with his absence, and there were the pink and red
berries and her awful advice to the emperor.
Kestrel knew what would happen after the eastern
horses died.
She imagined the yellow- green waves of grass. The
ticking zizz of grasshoppers. Horse carcasses rotting in the
sun.
The plainspeople would starve. Their children would
grow hollow. They would cry for horse milk. The plains-
people would move south on foot to their queen’s city in
the delta. Many would fall in their tracks. Some would not
get up.
This would happen. It would happen because of Kes-
7
trel. She had done this.
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But
wasn’t this better? Hadn’t the alternative been
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worse?
The alternative almost didn’t matter. It didn’t keep
Kestrel from feeling a sick horror at what she’d done.
One of the maids shrieked.
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The maid had opened another wardrobe. Masker
moths were fl ying out. They beat against the lamps and
spun up in panicked, gray spirals. Their dusty wings began
to wink orange and rose as they blended into the tap-
estries.
“They’ve ruined the clothes!” A maid slapped moths
out of the air. One hit the carpet and lay still. Its wings
went red, tipped with white to match the carpet’s design ex-
actly. Masker moths had the property of camoufl age even
in death.
Kestrel stooped and picked it up. The furred, lifeless
legs clung to her. The red wings changed to match her skin.
The maids hunted the moths ferociously. Masker moths
were a common house hold pest in the capital, and this
wasn’t the fi rst time they’d eaten into a wardrobe of expen-
sive clothes. Judging by the number of moths, the larvae
must have been fattening themselves on Kestrel’s silks for
at least a week. The maids killed every last moth, crushing
them against the walls. Masker moths left behind smears
of no discernible color. Damaged wings lost their camou-
fl age.
“Go, all of you,” Kestrel told her maids. “Fetch servants
to clean out the wardrobe.”
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None of the ladies- in- waiting thought to question why
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they
all
must go. No one asked why Kestrel couldn’t simply
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summon servants with the pull of a bell. They glared with
satisfaction at the carnage of dusty wings, and left.
CRIME
When she was alone, Kestrel opened the wardrobe
’S
wider and found a pelisse crawling with moth maggots.
Using her dagger, she cut a swath of fabric where the larvae
squirmed most thickly. She brought it to her dressing table,
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which was stacked with bottles of perfumes and oils and
jars of cream. She took a pot of bath salts and dumped its en-
tire contents out a window, then dropped the cloth and its
larvae into the pot and stoppered it, but loosely, so that air
would fl ow. To be sure, she hatched a cross into the cork’s
center with her dagger’s point. Kestrel set the pot at the back
of her dressing table and arranged the bottles to hide it.
She sat back in her dressing chair, thinking about the
creatures feeding on the cloth in the pot. They were fat al-
ready. They’d become moths soon.
And when they did, she had a plan for them.
Kestrel went to her study, and wrote a letter to the Her-
rani minister of agriculture.
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11
KESTREL SET HER CUP ON ITS SAUCER. “I DIDN’T
ask to see
you
,” she said.
“Too bad.” Arin claimed the chair across from her table
in the library in a manner unbearably familiar to her. It
was as if the chair had always been his.
He slouched in his seat, tipped his head back, and
looked at her from beneath lowered lids. The morning
light fi red his profi le. “Worried, Lady Kestrel?” He spoke
in Valorian, his accent roughening his voice. He always pro-
nounced his
r
’s too low in his throat, so that when he spoke
in her tongue everything came across as a soft growl. “Dread-
ing what I’ll say . . . or do?” He smiled a grim little smile.
“No need. I’ll be the perfect gentleman.” He tugged at his
cuff s. It was only then that Kestrel noticed that they came
too short on his arms and showed his wrists.
It pained her to see his self- consciousness, the way it
had suddenly revealed itself. In this light, his gray eyes were
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too clear. His posture had been confi dent. His words had
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had an edge. But his eyes were uncertain. Arin fi dgeted
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again with his cuff s as if there was something wrong with
them— with him.
No,
she would have said.
You’re perfect,
CRIME
she wanted to say. She imagined it: how she would reach
’S
out to touch Arin’s bare wrist.
That could lead nowhere good.
She was ner vous, she was cold. Her stomach was a
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fl urry of snow.
She dropped her hands to her lap.
“No one’s here anyway,” Arin said, “and the librarians
are in the stacks. You’re safe enough.”
It
was
too early for courtiers to be in the library. Kestrel
had counted on this, and on the fact that if anyone did
turn up and saw her with the Herrani minister of agricul-
ture, such a meeting would excite little interest.
One with Arin, however, was an entirely diff erent story.
It was frustrating: his uncanny ability to unsettle her
plans— and her very sense of self. She said, “Pressing where
you’re not invited seems to be a habit with you.”
“And yours is to put people in their place. But people
aren’t gaming pieces. You can’t arrange them to suit your-
self.”
A librarian coughed.
“Lower your voice,” Kestrel hissed at Arin. “Stop being
so—”
“Incon ve nient?”
“Frankly, yes.”
His smile came: quick, true, surprised by itself. Then
changing, and slow. “I could be worse.”
“I am sure.”
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“I could tell you how.”
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“Arin, how is it for you here, in the capital?”
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He held her gaze. “I would rather talk about what we
were talking about.”
She arranged her fi ngers along the studs that pinned
green leather to the tabletop. She felt each cool, small, hard
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nail. The silence inside her was like those nails. What it
held down was something sheer: a feeling like fragile silk,
billowing up at the sound of his voice.
If she and Arin were to talk about what they had been
talking about, that silk could tear free. It would fl oat up. It
would catch the light, and cast a colored shadow.
What color would it be, Kestrel wondered, the silk of
what she felt?
What would it be like to let it go, let it canopy above
her?
“It wasn’t a false question,” she said quietly. “I think the
capital must be strange for you.”
Arin studied her, thoughtful now. “Is it that way for
you?”
“It shouldn’t be.”
“You were raised in Herran. This isn’t your home.”
“It’s my country.”
Arin’s face closed along lines she knew well. He
shrugged, the movement small and short. He helped him-
self to tea.
Hesitant, Kestrel asked, “Are they good to you here?”
A rising ribbon of steam curled around his face. He
drank from the cup and lowered it, the gesture as fl uid as
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that of any courtier. But his hand was a laborer’s hand, and
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the porcelain cup, painted with fl owers and dipped in gold,
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looked out of place. Arin frowned at the cup. “Sometimes
I think it was easier to be ignored. Here, no one ignores
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me. Even if they ignore me they
don’t
, not really. The way
’S
they
don’t
look feels like they’re staring. When I was a
slave in Herran, no one ever looked at me. No one looks at
a slave.” Arin set the cup on its saucer with an abrupt
click
.
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“Kestrel, when did I do it? I keep asking myself when I did
the thing that was beyond your understanding. Was there
one thing that made too many for you to forgive me? The
lies—”
“I would have lied, too.”
“The Herrani rebellion. I plotted for months. I plotted
against
you
.”
“I understand why.”
“Your friends, then. Your people. The poison. Benix’s
death. Jess’s sickness. It was my fault. You blame me.”
Kestrel shook her head— not to deny his words, but be-
cause it wasn’t as simple as he’d said. “Sometimes I imagine
that I’m you. I imagine your life. What we did to it. And I