Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
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34
KESTREL STAYED CLOSE TO HER FATHER. HE
could walk well enough but tired easily, so she challenged
him to Borderlands games played in his suite, though most
of the court spent whole days out of doors in the blue
weather, opening parasols against the sun. There had never
been such a spring, the courtiers exclaimed. The Firstsum-
mer wedding was sure to be glorious.
When Kestrel played Borderlands with her father in his
suite, they usually moved their pieces in silence. But one
day, not long after she had seen Jess, her father shifted his
infantry forward in reckless fashion.
“Why are you exposing your soldiers?” Kestrel asked.
His brows lifted. “Are you criticizing my line of play?”
“You should use your cannon.”
He had the beginnings of a smile. “Have I foiled some
strategy of yours?”
“I could decimate your front lines. I could do it right
now.”
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“Well, if you must.”
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Kestrel was growing angry. She made no move.
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Her father said, “Are we arguing?”
“No.”
“What are we arguing about?”
Kestrel thought of Ronan, fi ghting in the east. She
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thought about how she’d crushed the necklace Jess had
given her because it had been expendable. It was the kind
of choice her father had raised her to be able to make. She
thought about how when they were little girls, she and Jess
had walked hand in hand, Jess’s palm fresh against hers.
Kestrel thought about Arin, in Herran’s city, and what he
must think of her now. And fi nally, Kestrel thought about
herself as if she were two people, and one self stood behind
the screen in the music room, watching her other self, and
judging.
“You are sacrifi cing them,” she told her father.
“It’s just a game.”
Kestrel said nothing.
“You worry about my methods,” said the general. “You
think I don’t know how to go to war.”
“You’re wasting lives.”
“I protect my soldiers as best as I can. And I
do
use can-
non. The Valorian army is well- gunned. We have signifi cant
stores of black powder. Our arsenal outstrips anything an
enemy can off er. I rarely even need cannon.”
She imagined Ronan at the very front of an army. “So
you let our people fi ght hand to hand instead.”
“That’s what we do. It’s who we are. If we can’t take
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what we want with our own hands, we don’t deserve to win
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it.”
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Kestrel leaned away from the gaming table. She sat
back in her chair.
CRIME
He said, “Would you rather I line up my cannon barrel
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to barrel and raze the eastern forces?”
No, of course not. That wasn’t what she’d meant.
“You accuse me of wasting lives. I could, Kestrel. I
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could waste them in the thousands, the tens of thousands.
I don’t. I try to minimize enemy casualties.”
“Only so that you can enslave people afterward.”
His mouth thinned. “I think we should fi nish our
game.”
He won.
Verex stopped her in the hallway. “I’ve been looking for
you.”
“Maybe you bribed the wrong lady-
in-
waiting. You
should choose one who keeps a closer eye on my where-
abouts.”
He laughed. “Or maybe
you
should bribe one of my
valets, so that we’d be even. Then again”— he shrugged
good- naturedly—“my whereabouts aren’t very interesting.”
He tugged her hand. “Come. I have something to show
you. Give you, actually.”
“A gift?”
“A wedding present.”
The word
wedding
stopped her heart. “It’s too early for
that.”
“It’s never too early for presents.”
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“I don’t have anything for you.”
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“Oh, just come. You’ll like it, I promise.”
SKI
O
It was a good- size puppy. A black, squirming creature
with folded ears and a tail that had been docked for hunt-
ing. It was chewing the leg of one of the ornate chairs in
Verex’s sitting room. It had left a yellow puddle on the
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wooden fl oor.
“The runt,” Verex said proudly. “She survived.”
Kestrel bent low, her organza skirts rustling. She of-
fered a hand to the animal, who snuffl
ed it, then pushed
beneath so that Kestrel could properly scratch behind her
ears. Her stubby tail beat back and forth. Delightedly, the
puppy nipped Kestrel’s wrist.
Kestrel felt suddenly quiet and warm, as if she had just
come inside from a long walk on a day chillier than anyone
had predicted.
She straightened. She went to Verex and kissed his cheek.
“Oh,” he said, and awkwardly patted her shoulder.
“Well.” He smiled.
They played with the puppy, whom Kestrel didn’t yet
want to name. They tossed velvet cushions for the dog to
catch. She savaged them. Feathers fl urried over the fl oor.
This moment was simple, smooth, like a pebble lifted
from a riverbed. Kestrel could have asked Verex about the
screen in the music room. She could have talked about that
Borderlands game with her father, or how her oldest friend
was no longer her friend. But Kestrel didn’t want to. Noth-
ing should spoil this moment. She played tug- of- war with
the dog until the animal dropped her cushion, which no
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puppy collapsed in a black heap and fell asleep.
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Kestrel wondered what Jess would name her, then
shoved that thought from her mind.
CRIME
But . . .
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Something had been troubling her. Something about
that day in Jess’s parlor that she should be able to fi gure
out. A mystery that Kestrel thought could have a clear an-
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swer when so much else seemed bewildering, like how she
understood Jess’s anger— and didn’t.
“You know a lot about healing,” she said to Verex.
“Not really.” He sat on the fl oor by the sleeping puppy,
who had huddled on Kestrel’s feet. “I studied it a bit. I told
you: my father didn’t like it. I didn’t get far.”
“But you know some things.”
He shrugged. “I suppose.”
“Is there a brownish medicine one might take with
water?”
“
Diluted
with water?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean. The medicine leaves a residue
at the bottom of the glass.”
He pursed his lips. “That could be a few diff erent
things. You should ask the palace physician. He’s devel-
oped many medicines made in concentrated form to be di-
luted later with water. He’s excellent at calculating dilution.
He trained as a water engineer.” When he saw Kestrel’s sur-
prise, Verex said, “Yes, he even served in the military with
the palace water engineer. But that was long ago. He had a
gift as a medic on the battlefi eld and changed professions.”
Verex ran a hand down the back of the puppy, who sighed
heavily. “Don’t you wish it were that easy? To change who
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you are?”
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For a moment, Kestrel didn’t quite hear his question.
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Her mind was sparking with the connection between the
palace physician and its chief water engineer, who had been
bribed for some unknown thing.
She’d promised Tensen she would discover what that
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thing was.
She’d promised herself to live by her own ideas of honor.
She would help Tensen. Because it was right. Because it
mattered.
How can the inconsequence of your life not shame you?
Kestrel’s memory was so full of Arin’s voice that she
didn’t realize that Verex was peering at her. What had he
asked?
If she wished to change herself.
“No,” she lied. Then she decided that what she’d said was
the truth. “No,” she said again, “I don’t.”
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35
“THIS CAME FOR YOU,” THE DACRAN QUEEN
said in her language, handing Arin a parcel. “A Herrani
ship brought it to the temple island.”
He tucked the package under his arm. It couldn’t be
simply a package. It was news. Arin hid his eagerness.
And he hid his surprise. At the queen, delivering some-
thing to him. At her standing in his room, which was only
one room, not a suite. The bed— much higher than Arin
was used to, and narrower— was in a corner, neatly made.
The light was soft and gray. It haloed a geometric star of
small, triangular windows clustered into a radiant pattern.
The queen’s black eyes, lined with streaks of blue paint that
swirled greenly down to her brown cheekbones, seemed to
glow. She was tall; her gaze was almost level with his.
“Open it,” she said.
Arin rubbed a palm against his scarred cheek.
“Do you understand me?” she said. “You seem to.
You’ve learned my language quickly.”
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“So could Herrani soldiers. We could fi ght together.”
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“And yet you cannot obey even a simple command.”
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Arin opened the package. It was a shirt edged with
intricately woven trim in colors he knew well. He shouldn’t
have stared and begun to decode the knots and colors be-
neath the queen’s gaze, but he did. The Moth—
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“That cloth is too heavy for our weather,” said the
queen.
“I’ll send it back.” Arin would cut away the woven trim
and sew on a message of his own for Tensen.
He draped the shirt casually across the back of a chair,
reading in the threads that the imperial water engineer was
living beyond her apparent means, and was unfriendly to
Herran. The Moth believed that the engineer
had
made a
bargain with the emperor. There was no proof, but—
It began to rain. Arin heard water rushing through the
castle pipes. The queen had been silent, watching him. He
forced himself to turn away from the shirt.
Maybe it was because his mind was full of the Moth,
and the way the gray thread that represented her wove
throughout the entire trim. Arin looked at the queen and
saw Risha instead. The queen had those straight brows, the
same shape of the mouth, and the same— he began to sus-
pect it, the idea grew— generosity.
“I am sending my brother outside the city,” she said.
“You will go with him.” She paused, then added, “You are
good for him. He is restless.”
“Was he with your sister when she was captured by the
empire?”
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The queen’s face closed.
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Arin said, “I think he blames himself.”
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“He blames me.”
“I don’t understand.”
CRIME
The queen went to the kaleidoscopic windows and
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watched the rainfall. She pretended his words had meant
something else. “It can’t be easy to learn another language
so quickly. Do you have a gift for it?”
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He wasn’t sure. Even now, he didn’t recognize every
word she used. His mind darted meaning into the blank
moments and made sense of what he didn’t know, crafted
whole sentences from understood parts. It felt like a
game . . .
As this last thought occurred to him, he saw its danger.
He felt the kick in his gut that told his mind to stop, and
he snatched at that half thought about words and meaning
and games. He tried to drag the thought back. It spun
away. It began to think for itself, about Bite and Sting, and
about how he could beat someone without knowing each
tile in play. Yes, he had won, even when playing against
Kestrel made it feel like all the tiles were blind on both