Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
she cherished. She pressed her thumb once against the ruby
set into the dagger’s hilt and carved with her seal: the talons
of a bird of prey. She pressed hard enough for it to hurt.
Then she gave her weapon to the emperor.
He placed it in the drawer that had held the coin and
pushed it shut. He regarded Kestrel, his own dagger gleaming
at his hip. He touched the golden line on her brow that
marked her as an engaged woman. “I have your loyalty to
the empire, don’t I?”
“Of course.” She tried to ignore the weightlessness of
her scabbard.
“Good. And what’s past is past, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
The emperor seemed satisfi ed. “There will be no hint
of any sympathy you might have toward Herran— or its
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governor. If you have any, rub it out. If you don’t, you won’t
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like the consequences. Do you understand?”
She did. Kestrel saw now that the emperor hadn’t in-
tended her visit to the prison to be a mere test or lesson. It
had been a warning of what came to those who crossed
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him.
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4
KESTREL CARRIED THE JADIS COIN WITH HER
everywhere. It was in her pocket on the day she surprised
the prince in her music room.
She was drawn up short by the sight of Prince Verex
sitting at a table set with the pieces of an eastern game. He
glanced at her, then down at the marble pieces. A blush
seeped into his cheeks. He toyed with a miniature can-
non.
“Borderlands is a game meant to be played by two op-
ponents,” Kestrel said. “Are you waiting for me?”
“No.” He dropped the gaming piece and shoved his
hands under his arms. “Why would I be?”
“Well, this is my room.”
Within her fi rst days in the palace, the emperor had
given Kestrel a new piano and had had it installed here in
the imperial wing, saying that this room’s acoustics were
excellent. This wasn’t true. The room echoed too much. It
sounded larger than it really was. Its stone walls were bare,
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the furniture stiff . Shelves were sparsely decorated with
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objects that had nothing to do with music: astrolabes,
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gaming sets, a clay soldier, collapsed telescopes.
“Your room,” Verex repeated. “I suppose everything in
the palace is here for your taking. My father is giving you
the empire. You might as well have my old playroom, too.”
MARIE RUTK
His shrug was tight- shouldered.
Kestrel’s gaze fell again on the clay soldier. She saw its
chipped paint, its place of prestige in the center of a shelf.
The room was a cold, uninviting place for any child. She
recalled that Verex, too, had lost his mother at an early
age.
Kestrel went to sit across from him. “Your father
didn’t
give
me this room”, she said. “He probably hoped
we would share this space and spend more time with each
other.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“But here we are together.”
“You’re not supposed to be here. I paid one of your
ladies- in- waiting. She told me you planned to spend the
afternoon in the library.”
“One of my servants reports to
you
?”
“It seems that the general’s daughter, despite her repu-
tation for being so very clever, thinks she’s immune to all
the petty espionage a court is capable of. Not really that
smart, is she?”
“Certainly smarter than someone who decides to reveal
that he has her maid in his employ. Why don’t you tell me
which maid, Verex, and make your mistake complete?”
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For a moment, she thought he’d overturn the table and
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send the Borderlands pieces fl ying. She realized then what
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he’d been doing as he sat alone in front of the Borderlands
set, a game that was the rage at court. The pieces were or-
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ga nized in a beginner’s pattern. Verex had been practicing.
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It seemed that the hurt lines of his expression spoke in
the clearest of words.
“You hate me,” Kestrel said.
THE WINNER
He sagged in his chair. His messy, fair hair fell for-
ward, and he rubbed his eyes like someone woken too early.
“No, I really don’t. I hate
this
.” He waved a hand around
the room. “I hate that you’re using me to get the crown. I
hate that my father thinks it’s a brilliant idea.”
Kestrel touched a piece from the Borderlands game. It
was a scout. “You could tell him that you don’t wish to
marry me.”
“Oh, I have.”
“Maybe neither of us has much choice in the matter.”
She saw his swift curiosity and regretted her words. She
moved the Borderlands scout closer to the general. “I like
this game. It makes me think that the eastern empire ap-
preciates a good story as well as a battle.”
He gave her a look that noted a sharp change in sub-
ject, but said only, “Borderlands is a game, not a book.”
“Borderlands could be
like
a book, if one had constantly
shifting possibilities for diff erent endings, and for the way
characters can veer off course into the unexpected. Bor-
derlands is tricky, too. It tempts a player into thinking she
knows the story of her opponent. Take the story of the in-
experienced player. The beginner who doesn’t see traps
being set.” Verex’s expression had grown softer, so Kestrel
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arranged the Borderlands pieces into an opening gambit
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and moved them into diff erent patterns of play for two op-
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ponents, explaining how a perceived beginner might win a
game by deliberately falling for a trap in order to set one of
his own. When the green general fi nally toppled the red,
Kestrel said, “We could practice together.”
MARIE RUTK
Verex’s large eyes were suddenly too shiny. “By ‘practice,’
you mean ‘teach.’ ”
“Friends play games together all the time without think-
ing of it as practicing or teaching or winning or losing.”
“Friends.”
“I don’t have many.” She had one. She missed Jess ter-
ribly. Jess had gone to the southern isles with her family for
her health. In the past, Jess would have gone to a charming
little house her family owned by the sea on the warm south-
ern tip of Herran, but the Midwinter Edict ordered Valo-
rian colonists to surrender all property in Herran. The
colonists were compensated by the emperor, and Jess’s par-
ents had purchased a new house in the islands. But Kestrel
read the homesickness in Jess’s letters. Kestrel wrote back.
They wrote often, but letters weren’t enough.
Verex nudged the fallen red general with his green one,
listening to the rocking tap of marble on marble. “Maybe we
could be friends, if you could explain why
you
don’t tell my
father that you don’t wish to marry me.”
But Kestrel couldn’t explain.
“You don’t want
me
,” Verex said.
She couldn’t lie.
“You claimed that you don’t have a choice,” he said.
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“What did you mean?”
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“Nothing. Truly, I want to marry you.”
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His anger returned. “Then let’s list the reasons.” He
ticked them off on his fi ngers. “You seek the empire, and a
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husband you can manipulate as easily as these game pieces.”
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“No,” she said, but why wouldn’t Verex believe his por-
trait of her: power- hungry, unfeeling? It was what Arin be-
lieved.
THE WINNER
“You want a good laugh. So that at our engagement
ball you can watch me lose at Borderlands while every
single aristocrat and governor of the territories laughs with
you.”
“A ball? All the governors? Are you sure? No one’s told
me about this.”
“My father tells you
everything
.”
“He didn’t. I swear, I knew nothing of a ball.”
“So he plays games with you, too. My father is two-
faced, Kestrel. If you think he adores you, you’d better
think again.”
Kestrel threw up her hands. “You’re impossible. You
can’t blame me for his favor
and
claim that I’m no more than
an amusing toy to him.” She stood and went toward the
door, for she saw that the brief peace between them had dis-
integrated, and her mind was reeling. An engagement ball.
With all the governors. Arin was coming. Arin would be
here.
“I wonder why my father didn’t tell you,” Verex said.
“Could it be so that in catching you off guard, he could
observe exactly what lies between you and the new gover-
nor of Herran?”
Kestrel stopped, turned. “There is
nothing
between us.”
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“I’ve seen the Jadis coin. I’ve heard the rumors. Before
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the rebellion, he was your favorite slave. You fought a duel
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for him.”
She almost reached out to a bookshelf to steady herself.
It felt as if she might fall.
“I know why you’re marrying me, Kestrel. It’s so that
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everyone will forget that after the rebellion, no one put
you
in a prison, not like every other Valorian in Herran’s city.
You were special, weren’t you? Because you were
his
. Every-
one knows what you were.”
Her vertigo vanished. She snatched the clay soldier off
the shelf.
She saw instantly from Verex’s expression that she held
something he cherished. She would smash it, she would
smash it against the fl oor. She would break Verex like his
father had broken him.
Like she had broken her own heart. Kestrel felt the
pieces of her heart suddenly, as if love had been an object,
something as frail as a bird’s egg, its shell an impossible
cloudy pink. She saw the shock of its bloody yolk. She felt
the shards of shell pricking her throat and lungs.
Kestrel set the soldier back on the shelf. She made cer-
tain her voice was clear when she spoke her last words be-
fore leaving the room. “If you won’t be my friend, you’ll
regret being my enemy.”
Kestrel retreated to her suite and sent her maids away. She
didn’t trust any of them now. She sat by a tiny window that
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gave a feeble light. When she took the Jadis coin from her
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pocket, it looked dull on her palm.
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This is the year of money,
she remembered. She had in-
deed planned on going to the library earlier today, as her
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maid had informed Verex. She’d hoped to research the
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Herrani gods, then thought better of it. The library pos-
sessed a paltry collection of books; it was mostly a glamor-
ous room where courtiers sometimes met for a quiet tea, or
THE WINNER
where a military offi
cer might consult one of the thousands
of maps. The library would have suited Kestrel well if she
had wanted to fi nd a map or to socialize . . . or if she’d
wanted members of the court to see her researching Her-
rani books.
She had turned away from the thick library doors.
Now she huddled in her velvet chair, trying to concen-
trate on the actual words of her conversation with Verex
instead of on their emotional undertow. She fl ipped the
coin, fl ipped it again. Emperor. Jadis. Emperor. Jadis.
He’s
two- faced,
Verex had said of his father. Kestrel thought
about that phrase as she considered each side of the coin.
Two- faced
: the word dangled a hook into the dark well of
her memory. It snagged on something.
The Herrani believed that a god ruled not just one
thing, but a whole domain of associated ideas, actions, ob-
jects. The god of stars was the god of stars, yes, but also of
accidents, beauty, and disasters. The god of souls . . . Kes-
trel’s throat closed as she remembered Arin invoking that