Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
“I’m breaking it now.”
“Do you so easily break your oaths?”
“Wouldn’t you, for your people?”
“I’m not translating that,” the skull- faced man told
him. “It’s insulting. You’re a little self- destructive, aren’t
you?”
Impatient, the queen interrupted. She told Arin to ex-
plain his possession of the Valorian dagger.
“It’s a reminder,” he said.
“Of ?”
“What I despise.”
The queen considered this. Her face was leaner than
Risha’s, but much like her younger sister’s. It was easy,
looking at the queen, to feel again his admiration for Risha,
the way it had grown from the fi rst moment Tensen had
revealed her to be his Moth. Arin said to the queen, “I
know that your country has suff ered. I know that my own
is too small to stand alone against the empire. If I had a
choice, the empire or the east, I’d choose you. Let Herran
be your ally.”
She cocked her head. “What exactly would we do with
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“Let us fi ght for you.”
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“In exchange for our protection of your little penin-
sula, no doubt. As you have pointed out, Herran
is
small.
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Your soldiers would hardly swell our ranks. Do you
want
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your people to be our cannon fodder? Even if you did, how
would that work? We do not even speak the same lan-
guage.”
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“We’ll learn yours.”
The queen raised a skeptical brow.
“I’ll prove it to you,” Arin said.
“I would like to see you try.”
“Good,”
Arin said, using the one Dacran word he knew,
the one that the skull- faced man had said to him on the
pier.
The queen’s surprise was clear. But she didn’t smile,
and what she said next made Arin wonder if he hadn’t just
somehow deeply off ended her.
“Let us turn,” she said, “to the subject of your punish-
ment.”
For bearing an enemy’s weapon, Arin was forbidden to
carry any at all.
For entering Dacran territory, Arin was not allowed to
leave it.
For his crimes against Roshar, the queen’s brother, the
injured party was given permission to exact his choice of
punishment.
“I’ll have you killed later,” Roshar told Arin after bring-
ing him to the room where he would stay. “I need time to
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decide the very best method.”
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Arin looked at him. The mutilations made it hard to
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see any resemblance to Risha or the queen. Roshar must
have caught the quality of Arin’s gaze. The way it exam-
ined. Roshar sneered. “Or maybe I’ll fi nd a punishment
better than death.”
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Arin glanced away.
Roshar began unpacking Arin’s things— with the ex-
ception of the dagger— from the satchel onto a table. Food,
water, clothes. “What’s this?” Roshar held up the packet
that contained spools of thread.
“Sewing kit.”
Roshar tossed it on the table. Then he stared down at
all of Arin’s things as if they could add up to the answer to
a hard question. “You’ve come a long way.”
“Yes.”
“All the way from the imperial capital.” Quietly, Ro-
shar said, “Is my little sister well?”
“Yes. She—”
“I don’t want to talk about her. I just wanted to know
how she is.”
“Did you discuss her with the queen when we fi rst en-
tered that room?”
Roshar looked at Arin as if he were insane. “Of course
not.”
“Then what took so long to tell the queen?”
“Your crimes. In loving detail.”
“No,” Arin said, “it sounded like a story.”
Roshar prodded a fl ask of water. “Clearly you didn’t
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know
anything
about our country, if you bothered to bring
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this
.”
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“Why won’t you tell me what you said?”
Roshar kept poking at the fl ask, making it rock against
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the table. Slowly, he said, “Maybe I did tell a story. Maybe
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it was about two slaves in a faraway land, and how one
helped the other.”
“But I didn’t.” Arin remembered it again. He tasted the
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dirt in his mouth, felt the gravel under his cheek. He heard
the cries. He felt his shame.
“You saved me,” Roshar said.
Arin was confused. At fi rst he thought this was sarcasm.
But there had been something open in Roshar’s voice, like
yearning. Was Roshar reinventing what had really hap-
pened? Maybe he was imagining a version of the world
where the Valorian’s knife had never cut his face. A fi ction.
A story with a happy ending.
“I’m sorry,” Arin said carefully. “I tried. But I couldn’t
do anything.”
“You did. You saved the thing in me that decided I
would run away again.”
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29
“I WANT YOU TO DO SOMETHING FOR ME,”
Kestrel’s father said.
Firstspring had come and gone. Kestrel had missed
most of the celebrations to be with her father in his rooms,
as she was every day. The only event she’d attended was the
one at the orphanage, where the children had looked dubi-
ously at the bright kites she off ered. “They’re not the right
color,” a little girl had said. “I want a black one.” After-
ward, Verex had gone through the leftovers. “May I keep
this?” He lifted a pink and green kite. “It’s my favorite,” he
said. Kestrel had smiled.
Now she looked warily at her father as he lay in his bed.
She waited to see what he would ask.
“I want you to go to the battling clubs in the city,” he
said, “and recruit people to the military.”
Kestrel edged her chair away from the bed. The wooden
squeak was loud. She toyed with a bit of embroidery on her
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sleeve and imagined that her disappointment was a thread
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that could be tied into knots and stitched down tight.
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During all the hours she had sat by her father, this was the
fi rst time he’d asked her for anything. What had she hoped
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he would ask?
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Perhaps to be brought a glass of water. Or to be told
what had happened to the dagger he’d given her. He
couldn’t have missed its replacement. The emperor’s gaudy
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blade was right there in full view, strapped to Kestrel’s
waist.
It seemed impossible to tell her father certain things
unless he asked for them.
But some words came easy, because they were angry
and had been said many times before. “I want nothing to
do with the military.”
“Kestrel.”
“Look at what it’s done to you.”
“I will heal.”
“And the next time? You are going to keep fi ghting
until the day you’re killed, and I have to set an empty plate
at the table for my father’s ghost.”
“We don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Then you’ll leave me with nothing at all.”
“We need more soldiers,” he said. “The army is stretched
too thin.”
“Then stop trying to take new territory.”
“That isn’t what the emperor wants.”
“What do
you
want?”
“That,” he told her, “is a foolish question.”
Was it because he had known her all her life that he
knew exactly which words would hurt most? But no, it
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couldn’t be time that gave someone that power. Arin had
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it, too.
I don’t know you anymore,
he’d said.
And I don’t
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want to.
If she went to the battling clubs and signed more sol-
diers into the army, did that mean that their deaths would
be her fault? Would the blood of the people they killed be
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on her hands? And the grief and anger of those who were
left behind— was that her doing, too? She remembered
how the war orphans had wanted black kites.
“Recruit them yourself,” she told her father.
He was silent as she strode to the door. It was that si-
lence that ultimately stopped her. Though Kestrel’s back
was to him, she still saw him as he lay wounded on the
bed. Pale and drawn. Tired in a way she’d never seen.
If she recruited more Valorians . . . it might help her
him when he returned to the fi eld. More soldiers could
mean that he’d be kept safe for another year. Maybe two.
Kestrel sighed. Her back still to him, she said, “I don’t
know why you think that
I
could persuade anyone to sign
up.”
“The people love you.”
“They love
you
. I’m just your daughter.”
“You escaped from Herran. You alerted us to the rebel-
lion. And by now everyone must know how I won the eastern
plains.”
“I wish you’d claimed that idea for your own.”
“I would never do that.”
Kestrel turned, set her shoulders back against the door,
and crossed her arms. She thought of Tensen’s latest request
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for information. “Do you know the chief water engineer?”
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“Elinor?” From his bed, the general looked at Kestrel
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with eyes narrowed in pain. This conversation had exhausted
him. His breath was uneven. If he’d been anyone else, he
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would have already asked for medicine. “I know her a little.”
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“From your campaigns in the east?” With the excep-
tion of the plains, the lands there were watery, especially
farther south, though Valorian soldiers had never reached
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the queen’s city in the delta.
“Yes, and in Herran. Why?”
“She has a townhome here. I thought that maybe . . .
after I go to the battling clubs, you’d like for me to pay her
a call. I could ask her to join the regiment when it returns
east. You might need someone to build bridges, or dams—”
“Yes.” If he’d had more energy, the general would have
looked amused. “I do. But she’s the emperor’s now. He
doesn’t like to share. Don’t waste your time visiting her.”
Kestrel paused, then said, “I’m going to the battling
clubs under one condition.”
“Ah.” His head leaned back into the damp pillow. “A
bargain. What must I do now?”
“Drink your medicine.”
The battling clubs
were not-
very-
secret societies. There
were four in the city, and they each served young aristo-
crats with luxurious headquarters designed for private par-
ties, sultry moments in hidden rooms— and, of course,
fi ghting.
Each club came equipped with an impressive variety of
weaponry. There were keyed rooms for combatants who
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Everybody knew the few club rules. Clean up your own
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blood. Money up front for gambling. Members only. Even
Lady Kestrel would have had problems at the door if she
hadn’t shown her father’s signet ring.
The clubs unsettled her. It didn’t matter how much
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dark wainscoting lined the walls, or that the furnishings
were backed by southern isle silk. The rooms still smelled
like wine and sweat and blood. It made her think of fi ght-
ing Irex in Herran. His boot cracking against her knee. She
remembered Cheat’s weight fl attening her against the fl oor.
Kestrel’s mouth was chalky.
She asked for water. She was served. Then she went
about her business.
After three clubs, she had collected about twenty
names. It wasn’t much. Several Valorians who signed were
wild- eyed and laughing. Some were fl attered. Others—
especially those closest to twenty years old— were resigned,
because the empire would soon make them choose between
marriage and the military anyway. If a citizen wouldn’t
make babies to boost the imperial population, she would
have to make war.
In one club, two young women signed up together.
They insisted on writing their names on the same line.