Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
new his belief was. How fragile. Yes, it could break. With
just the right amount of pressure in the right place, it would
crack like a mirror. Kestrel saw something in Arin that
she’d never seen in him before, something unbearably
young. She saw, for a moment, the boy Arin must have
been. Right around the eyes. A softness. A yearning. There,
in the lines of his sensitive mouth. There, to show her how
to strike hardest.
“This isn’t one of your Herrani tales with gods and vil-
lains and heroes and great sacrifi ces,” she said. “I loved those
stories when I was little. I’m sure you did, too. They’re bet-
ter than real life, where a person makes decisions in her best
interests. Reality isn’t very poetic, I know.” She shrugged.
“Neither is the sort of arrogance that encourages someone
to think that so much revolves around him.”
Arin looked away. He stared at the piano, its strung
insides exposed under the propped- open lid.
She walked around him in a slow circle, sizing him
up. “I wonder what you believe could compel me to go to
such epic lengths for your sake. Is it your charm? Your
breeding?”
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His eyes cut to her. She paused, letting her gaze trace
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his scar. He tensed. She made her mouth curl. “Not your
SKI
O
looks, surely.”
His jaw tightened.
Thorns pricked her throat, she ached with self- disgust.
Yet she forced her smile to grow. “I don’t mean to be cruel.
MARIE RUTK
But these ideas of yours are so
unbelievable.
And frankly, a
little desperate. Like a fantasy. Hasn’t it occurred to you
that you’re just seeing what you want to see?”
“No.”
But she’d seen him waver. “You must realize that you’ve
been telling yourself a story. Arin, we’re too old for stories.”
His voice came low. “Are we?”
“
I
am. Stop being a child. It’s time you grew up.”
“Yes.” The word was slow. His tone was unexpectedly
fi lled with something Kestrel recognized as wonder at the
same moment that the recognition cramped her stomach.
She knew that sound. It was the voice of someone for
whom a cloud of confusion has been lifted. It was clarity,
and the strength that returns with it.
“You’re right,” Arin said. When he faced her again she
saw no shadow of that boy. It was as if she’d dreamed him.
“I misunderstood,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”
Formally, even clinically, Arin touched three fi ngers to
the back of Kestrel’s hand. Then he left, and closed the
door behind him.
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44
THE DOOR’S THUD ECHOED LOUD. A TOXIC
fear ate at Kestrel. Even as doubt grew, and hinted that her
strategy was the wrong one, or that no strategy could mend
what she’d just done, Kestrel clung to the most important
rule her father had taught her:
Deal with danger before it
deals with you
.
“Father?” Kestrel called. Her voice rose higher. “Fa-
ther?”
There was no answer. Had he been too shocked by
what he had heard . . . suspicious? Was he refusing already
to speak with her?
She rushed to the door and fumbled it open. The hall-
way was empty. Arin had vanished. An overturned bucket
had spilled its foaming water. It was soaking Kestrel’s
shoes. She stood in the puddle for a moment, her feet wet
and cold. Then she felt wildly along the corridor’s carvings
until she found the wooden button in the center of a blown
fl ower. The panel slid aside, and light from the hallway il-
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luminated the hidden room. It was empty.
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What did this mean? Kestrel wondered whether her
SKI
O
father could have left sometime after his watch had struck
the hour, but before Arin had arrived. Had everything
she’d said to Arin been for nothing?
She pressed fi ngertips to her temples. Her mind teemed
MARIE RUTK
with possibilities, her pulse soared, and she wasn’t thinking
so much as scrambling from one thought to the next.
Kestrel returned to the music room and picked up the
fallen pen. She wrote Arin a letter. She wrote it on the sheet
music, running words right over the notes. The ink fl owed
and smeared as Kestrel told Arin the truth, from the treaty
to her engagement, from the Moth to her love, from the
eastern horses to the poison that was killing his people. She
wrote feelingly, fi ercely, the nib of the pen sometimes punc-
turing the page.
The words came easily. In a bare minute, the letter was
done.
It burned in her skirt pocket like a hot coal. Kestrel went to
her father’s suite— he wasn’t there, his valet didn’t know
where he was— and then fi nally to her own, where two
maids were so perfectly normal that their ordinariness
was dizzying to Kestrel. She made an excuse and ducked
into her dressing room. Alone, she tucked a masker moth
into her sleeve. The buttoned fastening at the wrist kept
the moth safely inside, and she wished fervently that she
had done this earlier. If only she’d had a moth in the music
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room. She could have slipped it to Arin. A sign. She would
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have been subtle— a sleight of hand was all it would have
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taken, an absentminded rub of her wrists, and then the re-
veal.
CRIME
Kestrel had a three- tiered plan of what to do when she
’S
found Arin. If she found him alone, and trusted their pri-
vacy, she would speak. Yet . . . would he listen? She remem-
bered that clarity in his voice as he had fi nally and fully
THE WINNER
given up on her, the coolness of his touch . . . a lightness.
That light, cool quality had been relief. She knew that. If
she tried to speak with him again, he might very well just
walk away.
Please, read this letter,
she’d say, and place it in his
hands. If all else failed, or they weren’t alone: the moth.
There was a tap at the dressing room door.
Kestrel opened it to see one of the maids: a very young
girl. Quiet, softly plain. “My lady,” the maid said, “forgive
me, but you seem upset.”
“I’m fi ne.” But Kestrel’s voice was strained.
“Should I send for the prince?”
So this was the maid in Verex’s employ. Kestrel realized
that regardless of why the arrangement had begun, at some
point Verex had asked the maid to watch over her, and to
tell him if Kestrel needed help.
How like Verex. How like her friend.
It gave her courage. “No,” she told the maid. “Truly,
I’m fi ne. Everything will be fi ne.”
At fi rst, Kestrel felt better. She left the imperial wing be-
hind her, clinging to her plan as if it were a guiding hand.
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But as she took a tightly wound marble staircase down,
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careful not to rush, careful to smile at a passing courtier
SKI
O
and to ignore imperial guards stationed at the landings of
each fl oor, that guiding hand grew cold. When she reached
the wing that held suites for the lesser sort of guests, that
hand felt like a fi stful of bones. If she let go, they would
MARIE RUTK
scatter and roll.
Kestrel stole a glance behind her. No one seemed to be
following her.
She turned down one last hall. The day’s last light
seeped in from a lone window. It cast the hallway into lurid
orange.
Kestrel stood before the door. Could it really have been
this easy? But then, the hidden room behind the screen
had been empty. And the general was her
father
. He had
taught her how to ride. He loved her. She knew it. Wasn’t it a
betrayal of him to fear that he had reported the conversation
in the music room . . . if, indeed, he’d even witnessed it?
You have been betraying him all along,
whispered a voice
inside her.
You are betraying him now.
Yet she knocked at Tensen’s door. With a jittery grati-
tude, she heard someone stirring inside. Footsteps neared.
The handle clicked. The door widened, and so did Tensen’s
eyes when he saw who stood before him.
She didn’t wait for him to speak. She slipped inside.
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45
“YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE,” TENSEN SAID.
Kestrel ignored him. She threaded through the small
suite, ignoring the very existence of privacy as Tensen trailed
after her, protesting. She even entered his dressing room.
She rounded on Tensen. “Where’s Arin?”
“I told you,” Tensen said warily, “no one knows where
he is, and I assure you that I haven’t hidden him in the
wardrobe.”
“Well, he’s closer than you’d think, and he hasn’t been
in Herran’s city, or he would be dying.” She explained what
she knew about the poison fl owing through Herran’s aque-
ducts. The news made Tensen grow still. Stony. Telling the
news had the opposite eff ect on her, because beneath her
own words she heard the murmurs of everything Arin had
said to her in the music room, and what she’d said back.
Tensen caught her wild hands. “Kestrel, be calm. Lower
your voice.”
Had she been shouting? Her breath felt shallow, as if
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she’d been running. “Where can I fi nd him?”
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“I need for you to calm down.”
SKI
O
She pulled away. “The city’s water supply is tainted. I
have to tell him.”
“It can’t be you.” His small green eyes were worried.
“There are places in the palace you can’t go without raising
MARIE RUTK
suspicion. Arin might even have left already. Your emper-
or’s punishment for treason is death. Do you
want
to be
caught?”
“It must be me,” she insisted. “I have to explain . . .
other things.”
“Ah.” Tensen covered his mouth and rubbed at his
cheek. “He risked a great deal meeting with you alone.
Would you have him risk that again?”
“No, but . . .” She felt desperate. The pieces of her were
coming apart, jumbling out of order. She took the letter from
her pocket. She could no longer believe that Arin might
accept it. Not from her. Not after the things that she had
said. “Find him. Give this to him. It explains.”
He took the folded page gingerly. The black and white of
the sonata’s score looked up at them. “What does it explain?”
“Everything.”
“Kestrel, what exactly do you hope giving him this will
do?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. I—”
“You’re not yourself. You’re not thinking clearly.”
“I don’t want to think clearly! I am
tired
of thinking
clearly. Arin should know about me. He should have al-
ways known.”
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“It was better for him that he didn’t. You believed that.
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I did, too.”
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“We were
wrong
.”
“So after he learns the truth, you’ll end your engage-
CRIME
ment.”
’S
“No.”
“You’ll run away with Arin to live in a dying country
for a few short days before the hammer of another invasion
THE WINNER
falls.”
“No.”
“Why not?” Tensen said. “You love him.”
Helplessly, she said, “I love my father, too.”
Tensen looked down at the letter. He turned it over in
his hands.
“If you don’t give that to Arin,” Kestrel said, “I will.”
Tensen grimaced. Then he opened his jacket and placed
the letter in an internal breast pocket. He refastened the
jacket and patted his chest once, just above the heart. Kes-
trel heard the faint crackle of paper.
“You’ll do it?” she said.
“I promise.”
Kestrel’s father was waiting in her suite. He must have sent
the maids away. He was alone, sitting in a chair in the out-
ermost receiving room. During daylight hours, the chair
had a view of the barbican through which the general had