Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
his ear. “Yes,” she murmured. “But not yet.”
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41
HE KISSED HER. HER MOUTH PARTED BENEATH
his. Her hands were on him, and it was curious, it felt alien.
He relaxed— shouldn’t he relax? She seemed to think he
should.
He remembered his hunger. Not for this. But she gave,
and he took, and gave back, even while knowing what he
really wanted instead. He didn’t want to want it, and the
thought of Kestrel, of that monstrous want— so stupid, so
wrong
— made him stop. He pulled away. He gritted his
teeth once, hard, in a held breath, bright fury at himself.
“Arin?” said the queen.
He kissed her again, more deeply. This time, he lost
himself in it a little. It fi lled him. It pulled him away from
himself. That was good. He was tired with the way he had
been. He forgot it all.
Except . . . he remembered other kisses, other times. It
was impossible not to.
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This was the truth: in his mind, Kestrel touched his
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scarred face. This was her mouth moving against his. This
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was the truth: what he imagined was a lie. The truth and
the lie held him tight.
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It made him think. The queen leaned into him, brush-
’S
ing his bruised shoulder, and he winced. He recalled his
own soot- covered face after fi ring the weapon. What had
Arin thought earlier? That he looked like he’d been in a fi re.
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Something in his mind began to burn. Arin saw again
that pair of gloves in the fl ames. He remembered telling
Roshar to burn the plains.
You’re lucky the general didn’t do
that to begin with
.
Wait, wait. Why hadn’t he?
Because Kestrel had off ered him a diff erent plan. The
poisoned horses.
I can explain,
she’d said to Arin. He’d re-
fused to listen.
I had no choice,
she’d said.
My father would
have—
Tentatively, with a dread that hissed into him along its
quick fuse, Arin imagined the disaster that didn’t happen
and the one that did. He imagined fi re and the plains-
people burning . . . or dead horses and an exodus south.
The kiss went cold on his lips. Arin was numb with
understanding. He broke away from the queen.
Arin imagined Kestrel. He saw her considering a choice:
fi re and annihilation, or poison and survival. He knew
what he’d choose. He began to wonder if Kestrel had made
the very same choice.
He grew pale. He felt the blood leave him. His warring
heartbeat was loud in his ears.
The queen was staring. He’d pulled away from her; he
remembered doing that as if it were a lifetime ago. Arin
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couldn’t be sure if she’d touched him again after that. She
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wasn’t touching him now. She eyed him warily. He saw
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himself as she must: hunched, seeming suddenly ill. Or as if
he’d been assaulted. Cuff ed across the head, or knocked
back like when the explosion in the kitchen yard had kicked
the breath out of him. “Arin,” she said, “what’s wrong?”
MARIE RUTK
Arin’s shoulder ached, his throat ached.
He
had been
wrong, he had been kissing a lie. It would have sweetened,
he would have kept doing it. He would have kept pretend-
ing the queen was Kestrel. But who
was
Kestrel? He’d been
so sure, once. And then she’d appeared outside his besieged
city walls with the emperor’s treaty in her hand and an en-
gagement mark on her brow, and his certainty became a
wretched, crippled thing. He’d been a fool, he had told
himself as he stood in the snow outside his city, back to the
wall, cold to the bone. He’d been a fool of the worst kind:
the one who can’t see things for what they really are.
Arin raised a sudden fl at hand, palm out, as if stopping
someone. He remembered again how the siege had ended.
But this time, he changed the way he saw it. This time, in
his memory, he ignored that mark on Kestrel’s brow. He
saw only what she held in her hand: the treaty. It had saved
his life and spared his country. In his memory, Kestrel of-
fered him the folded, creamy paper. He took it, he opened
it. In his mind, he now saw a meaning in that treaty, and
the way she had given it to him, that he hadn’t before. Sud-
den understanding made Arin’s hand fall, and clench.
“I need to leave,” Arin told the queen. “I need to leave
right now.”
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42
KESTREL LOOKED LIKE SHE’D BEEN DIPPED IN
blood.
In the end, she hadn’t actually given any orders for her
wedding dress to be altered. The water engineer had al-
ready changed her bet, and although Kestrel wasn’t sure if
the emperor knew this, or what the consequences might
be, she dreaded the malicious attention it would attract if
she did anything more to upset the emperor’s plans. He
expected her to wear red, so the dress was red after all, in
stiff , glossy crimson folds of rich samite. It was heavy.
Structured in the bodice— it hurt when Kestrel breathed
too deeply— with full skirts whose pintucked shadows cre-
ated even deeper shades of red, almost black. The train was
bustled now, but when Kestrel entered the great hall it would
pour in a river behind her.
The new dressmaker’s hands fl uttered over Kestrel. “Is it
too tight? Or . . . perhaps you’d like more embellishment?
Crystals sewn onto the hem?”
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“No.” It was the last fi tting before the wedding— barely
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O
more than a week away. What Kestrel really wanted was
for the dress to be burned.
“Oh, but you haven’t even seen it with the gold yet.”
The dressmaker gathered handfuls of golden sugarspun
MARIE RUTK
wire and began to weave it through Kestrel’s braids and
around her neck, trailing it in chilly patterns over her bare
shoulders. The pain in Kestrel’s lungs grew worse. Her eyes
burned.
“Isn’t that better? Isn’t it?” the dressmaker’s voice was
high. “You are so beautiful!”
Kestrel suddenly heard the suppressed panic in the
girl’s voice. Kestrel saw her refl ection. She wasn’t beautiful.
Her face was pinched and white, eyes shocked and wide.
She looked ill. Kestrel pressed hands to damp eyes, pressed
hard, and looked again. Kestrel didn’t know what the dress-
maker saw in her expression, but she realized that what ever
it was, the girl read it as her own doom. She was a late- hour
replacement for Deliah: a simple seamstress elevated to
the role of imperial dressmaker. The girl was afraid. Why
wouldn’t she be afraid of Kestrel’s dissatisfaction? The last
imperial dressmaker was dead.
Kestrel turned from the mirror to face the brown-
haired girl. Kestrel stepped down from the block, careful of
the hem, and gently rested a hand on the girl’s arm.
The new dressmaker quieted. “Do you like it?” she whis-
pered.
“It’s perfect,” Kestrel said.
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Her father was healed. He would leave the morning after
the wedding to resume command of the eastern campaign.
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He would have left already if it weren’t for the emperor’s
’S
orders. Kestrel sometimes thought that the general would
have stayed no matter what for her birthday recital and the
wedding, but she tended to believe this only when not in
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his company. The moment he stood before her, his eyes
increasingly restless, she knew that she’d been deluding
herself.
He invited her for a walk. The wind was loud and brisk
enough to make Kestrel’s ears ache.
It seemed at fi rst that Kestrel and her father wouldn’t
speak. Then he said, “I don’t know what to give you for the
wedding.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I wish”— he squinted at a wheeling falcon high above
the Spring Garden—“I wish I’d held back something of
your mother’s that I could give to you. I’d say that I’d been
saving it for this.” On the day she’d come of age, Kestrel
had inherited all of her mother’s possessions. He had
wanted none of them.
A few months ago, Kestrel would have found another
way—
light, negligent, maybe witty—
to repeat that it
didn’t matter. But now she felt keenly the damage of how
they never really said what they meant to each other. Yes,
they came close. They had understandings, such as the
one that regularly brought the general to the secret space
behind the music room’s screen— if not into the music room
itself— to hear Kestrel play. This was a kind of honesty, she
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supposed, but it wasn’t
plain
, it wasn’t true, and she couldn’t
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help the hurt that came with the thought that she was just
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like him. She, too, couldn’t say what she meant. She wanted
to. She tried. The words struggled inside her.
Kestrel said, “Would you give me something if I asked
for it?”
MARIE RUTK
Carefully, he said, “That would depend.”
“Stay. Don’t go to the east.”
“Kestrel . . .”
“Stay one more week, then,” she pleaded. “Or a day.
Stay one more day after the wedding.”
He kept looking at the sky, but the hunting bird was
gone.
“Please.”
He fi nally turned to her. “Very well,” he said. “One
more day.”
Events for the court continued. There was the spring tour-
nament. There were masques, dances, feasts. More than
once, Kestrel caught Tensen’s gaze from across a room. She
averted her eyes. She knew that he wanted to speak with
her. He would press her for more information. He would
urge her to take more risks, all for a very uncertain gain.
But she’d made her decision. She would marry. She would
rule. This was how she would change things. Her attempts
at skullduggery seemed almost silly now: the games of a
child who doesn’t want to grow up. Worse— in her starkest
moments, when Kestrel was most honest with herself, and
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honesty showed itself like a skeleton, bones clean and jut-
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ting, she knew that her eff orts to be Tensen’s spy had been
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a way to prove herself to Arin . . . even as she insisted that
he never know.
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It made no sense. Its senselessness was painful. How
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had Kestrel become someone who didn’t make sense?
Two days before her birthday recital, which was two
days before the wedding, Verex stopped the emperor on the
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palace grounds after a horse race where one of the imperial
mounts had taken the prize. The prince had approached
his father precisely at the moment when the emperor had
his back to Kestrel. The emperor didn’t see how close she
was.
“Should we be concerned that the Herrani governor
hasn’t returned for the wedding?” Verex asked. His gaze
fl ickered over his father’s shoulder to light on Kestrel.
The emperor laughed.
“There’s only one representative from that territory,”
Verex said. “It will look a little strange. Maybe the gover-
nor ought to be here.” His eyes asked Kestrel’s wish. She
shook her head.
“Oh, the Herrani.” The emperor chuckled again. “No
one cares about the Herrani. Honestly, I had forgotten all
about them.”
When Arin arrived in the capital’s harbor, he reined him-
self in. During the sea journey, he’d let himself pace the
ship’s deck, or curse faint winds. The waves didn’t make him
sick, not this time. He was too intent on the movements of
his thoughts. Arin was incandescent, nervy, sleepless, and
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possibly mad.
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