Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
“It’s a runt,” Verex said. “Its mother won’t nurse it.” He
showed her how to nudge the milk rag into the puppy’s
mouth.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
The prince fi ddled with a bit of straw. “Oh, I fi gured it
out. It’s not hard to guess what my father holds over you.”
He caught her startled look. “Not when you know him like
I do. He’d have this hound’s neck snapped even if its dam
nursed it after all. He doesn’t like weaklings. But he loves
to discover a weakness. And now your governor is gone.”
She kept her blurred eyes on the puppy. “That’s not
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what I meant. That’s not what I wanted to say.”
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“But it’s the truth. You love him. That’s your weakness.
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One way or another, it’s why you agreed to marry me.”
Kestrel smoothed a thumb over the soft fl ip of one tiny
ear. She looked at the puppy, blind and asleep even while
sucking at the milk.
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Verex said, “No one likes to be used.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to use you.”
“Honestly, I
expect
to be used. This is the court. I never
thought . . . well, I’m my father’s son, aren’t I? Of course
my marriage would be arranged. Of course I woudn’t get
to choose. I know that I’ve been angry. I know that I
am
,
and that it eats at me, but . . . I would have understood,
Kestrel, about the engagement. I understand you now. You
could have told me
why
.”
“Do you think that
why
really matters?”
“Don’t you?”
“Verex, I’ve done something horrible.” The puppy’s ribs
rose and fell as Kestrel told Verex about her plan to poison
the horses of the eastern plains, and why she’d suggested it.
He was silent. One hand twitched in the straw. Kestrel
thought he meant to take the puppy away from her, but he
didn’t.
She said, “I’ve heard that you don’t agree with the war
in the east.”
“My father says I’m soft. He’s right.”
“You must blame me all the more.”
“For being hard?” He brushed his fair hair out of his
eyes so that he could see her better. “Is that what you think
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you are?”
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“If I hadn’t suggested poison, maybe the plains wouldn’t
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have been burned after all. Maybe our army would have
done nothing.”
CRIME
He gave a cynical laugh.
’S
She said, “If I’d never talked with your father, at least
what ever
did
happen wouldn’t have been my fault.”
“I’m not sure that not knowing is the same thing as in-
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nocence.” He leaned back into the rustling, smelly straw. “I
think that you did the best that you could. Risha will think
so, too, when I tell her.”
“No. Don’t tell her. Please.”
“I tell her everything,” he said simply.
Kestrel’s gaze fell again to the puppy. She wondered
what it would be like to be able to tell someone everything.
She stroked the soft creature. “Will it live?”
“I hope so.”
A quick, hot liquid streamed through Kestrel’s fi ngers.
She yelped. The puppy’s urine trickled down her sleeve.
Verex widened his already large eyes. “
That
was lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“That’s not all puppies do, you know. It could have
been worse.”
Kestrel smiled. “That’s true,” she said. “You’re right.”
Her smile grew, and became a laugh.
Her maids were horrifi ed. They ran a bath and practically
stripped the clothes from her. But Kestrel nursed that fl oat-
ing feeling of forgiveness Verex had given her. It buoyed
her in the warm bath.
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She asked to be alone.
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The bath cooled. Her hair, water- dark, lay fl at and sleek
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over her breasts like armor.
Arin had changed her. It was time to admit that.
Kestrel stood in the bath. The water sheeted from her.
She wrapped herself, oddly and unreasonably shy with her
MARIE RUTK
own nakedness.
What kind of change had Arin wrought?
She thought back to last summer, and how it had felt as
if he were thumbing her eyes wide open to see her world.
She thought about the puppy, velvety blind, and her wish
never to have heard any plan for the eastern plains, so that
she wouldn’t bear any responsibility for what had been
done.
Kestrel thought that she needed to open her eyes wider.
She looked.
There was the plush robe around her, for the prince’s
bride must have comfort. She saw stained glass set in the
bathing room windows, for a Valorian must have beauty.
Gold rings glimmered wetly on Kestrel’s wrinkled fi ngers.
The general’s wars had won luxury for his daughter.
And there were the rules. They hung invisible in the
humid air. But who had decided them? Who had decided
that a Valorian honors her word? Who had convinced her
father that the empire must continue to eat other countries
whole, and that slaves were Valoria’s due right of conquest?
Her father held his honor so fi rmly, like a solid thing,
something that couldn’t twist free. It occurred to Kestrel
that she had wondered before what her father’s honor was
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like, and Arin’s, but she didn’t know the shape of her
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own.
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There was dishonor, she decided, in accepting someone
else’s idea of honor without question.
CRIME
Kestrel bent to touch the faucet and pipe of the bath.
’S
There was running water in Herrani houses, for fountains,
mostly, but the imperial palace was veined with an inge-
nious system of pipes that pumped in warm water from
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thermal sources in the mountain, heated it further with a
furnace, and swept it up to the highest fl oors. This system
had been invented by the chief water engineer, the one who
had designed the canals.
On the day after Arin had left, Tensen had asked Kes-
trel to investigate something. “The chief water engineer
has done the emperor a favor,” he’d said. “Could you fi nd
out what it was?”
Kestrel lifted her hand from the still warm bath pipe
that led to the fl oor and vanished into it. She went to the
window, and stood in the light of its brilliant stain. Her
hands glowed blue and deep pink. She unlatched and
swung open the window. Everything went clear. The air
was raw. Kestrel could scent it on the wind: that thing that
was going to blow her forward in time, to warmth, fl owers
blooming, trees in pollen and then spread green.
Spring.
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23
ON THE SIXTH DAY AT SEA, ARIN STOPPED
being seasick. That night, there
were no clouds. Stars
frosted the sky. The ship was becalmed.
Arin was on deck, turning Kestrel’s dagger in his hands.
In the end, he’d decided to take it with him. It was his
now, by his own blood. Or so he told himself.
He sheathed it. He tipped his head back and gazed at
the wide band of stars that arched over him in a glittery
smear.
Sarsine had seemed so tired when Arin had seen her on
his way from the capital. He’d worried over her wan face
and shadowed eyes.
She’d snorted. “It’s the food.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“There’s too little of it.” She’d sighed then, and said
that all of Herran was tired.
“That will change,” he told her. He explained how to
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save the hearthnut harvest. Sarsine had touched the back
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of his hand in gratitude. Then she’d looked at him hard.
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Her eyes were bright. She said, “Look at what they did to
you.”
CRIME
“It’s nothing.”
’S
But she wept over his changed face, which made him
feel worse about it. Arin let her. He didn’t know what else
to do.
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Later, Sarsine said, “Now tell me what you haven’t told
me.”
So he had told her about Kestrel. Arin recalled it now
as he shifted to look out over the black mirror of the sea.
Sarsine had been quiet. They’d been in the library of his
family home, not the salon. Kestrel’s piano was in the salon.
Though out of sight, the instrument had loomed in his mind:
large, shining. Intrusive. He wanted to rid himself of it.
Sarsine said, “This doesn’t sound like her.”
Arin shot her a cold glance.
“You know her better than I do,” Sarsine admitted.
He shook his head. “I’ve been lying to myself.”
It seemed that he’d been confused for a long time, that
the last clear thing he’d done was to declare that the em-
peror’s treaty was a trick. Arin knew that his army would
have lost that day. The Valorians had already breached the
city walls. But the fi ght would have been vicious. The Her-
rani would have fought to the death. They would have
killed as many as they could. The treaty ended up being a
bloodless victory for the emperor: a way to drain Herran’s
resources without losing another Valorian soldier.
It could be a trick,
Kestrel had said,
but you will choose it.
It had been snowing then. Snow had caught in her eye-
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lashes. He used to wonder what would have happened if
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he had reached to brush it away. He used to imagine the
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snowfl akes melting beneath his fi ngertip. It shamed him to
remember this.
Arin hadn’t fallen asleep on the deck of his strangely
still ship, yet, it felt as if he’d been dreaming. As if dreams
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and memories and lies were all the same thing.
He startled at the sound of a fi sh breaking the water.
He had no idea how long he had been standing there. The
stars had moved in the sky.
Chilled, tired, Arin went below.
He left winter behind him. The wind had picked up. It
luff ed the sails. It fi lled their canvas bellies. The Herrani
captain, who had been somewhat of a legend before the
war, was pleased. The ship sped over the waves.
The sun became melted butter. Arin stripped away his
father’s hot, threadbare jacket. He didn’t want to wear it
again.
The sea sheered into green: marvelously clear. Arin saw
whole worlds in the water below. Fish broke away and came
together and rearranged themselves like pieces of a colored
puzzle.
Once, a creature leaped out of the water. Its dorsal fi n
was scalloped and pink. It made a strange, whistling cry,
then dived under again.
Arin’s wound fi nally healed. He tugged out the stitches
himself.
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He was truly in eastern waters now. The wind and sea and
sun made it easier not to think.
CRIME
Though not always. There was a shining hot day when
’S
the sun was high over Arin’s head and he saw what he
thought was the shadow of the ship in the water. Then the
large shadow shifted and slid in a way that made no sense.
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Arin stared, realizing that the shadow was in fact an enor-
mous sea creature swimming far below the ship. He hadn’t
understood what he’d seen.
He heard Tensen’s words again:
You’re seeing what you
want to see
.
Arin thought of Kestrel, and wondered if some wounds
ever heal. His heart thumped in his ears. He was stunned
all over again by his anger.
But what does Tensen want you to see?
whispered a voice
inside him. The very thought was an insult to Tensen, who
had warned Arin from the fi rst about his obsession with
Kestrel.
Arin could now appreciate—
in a gritty, unpleasant
way— that Kestrel had been honest with him. For a long
time, she’d tried to make things clear. She’d sent troops to
attack Arin’s forces after she’d fl ed Herran. She’d told him