Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
would allow. They were drawing closer.
“Did a senator corner you?” Verex asked. “They’ll do
that. They’ll try to worm their way into your good graces
for a chance to infl uence my father. Well, Kestrel? Where
were
you? And what . . .” He frowned, peering closely at
her. “Your mark has faded.”
“Oh,” she said. “I have a headache.” As the courtiers
watched, she rubbed at her forehead, smudging the mark.
She hoped the gesture seemed casual, absentminded, as if
she had been doing it all eve ning.
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Arin rambled around the palace suite he was to share with
Tensen. It was not small or large, neither luxurious nor
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spare. Arin had thought that the palace steward would as-
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sign the Herrani contingent an insulting set of rooms, but
this suite seemed chosen to send the message that the Her-
rani didn’t matter one way or the other.
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He shrugged off his shirt. It was early in the eve ning,
not yet midnight. The ball was still whirling on its giddy
axis. Tensen hadn’t returned.
Arin could smell Kestrel’s perfume on him. It exhaled
faintly from his shirt, mingled with the scent of the sea.
Folding the fabric— or not really folding it, more smooth-
ing it out over the back of a dressing room chair, as if the
cloth were a living thing that needed soothing— Arin found
a hole in the seam where the shoulder met the body. He
worked a fi nger through the rip and swore.
Well, it was an old shirt. He had worn his fi nest clothes.
He’d torn them out of the trunk upon his arrival in the
palace and fl ung them on, fumbling with the cuff s, know-
ing he was late for the ball. Maybe the hole had happened
then, in his haste.
It would have happened sooner or later. All of his best
garments were ten years old. They had been his father’s.
They fi t Arin badly. Even after alterations, it seemed
that there wasn’t enough room anywhere. His father had
been an elegant man, his proportions artistic. If he stood
here now next to Arin, a stranger would never guess they
were related.
Arin pressed a hand to his face. He felt the bones that
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made him look so diff erent. There was the prickle of a
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beard.
How ridiculous he must have looked next to those pol-
ished courtiers, with his ill- fi tting clothes and unshaven face.
How rough, how thuggish.
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How wrong.
Arin fl icked open a straight razor, fi lled the washbasin,
and lathered soap. He tried to shave without looking too
closely at his face in the washbasin mirror.
A nick pinkened the lather with blood.
He kept at it, more attentive this time, until he had fi n-
ished, wiped off the lather, and poured water over his bowed
head. He looked up again, dripping. His face was clear.
Sometimes Arin could see the boy he had been before
the war. When he did, he usually felt a tenderness for that
child as if he were wholly other than Arin, not part of him-
self at all. That boy didn’t blame Arin, exactly, for existing
when he did not, but when Arin caught a glimpse of the
child, usually lingering about the eyes, Arin always looked
away. He would feel a small sharpness, like the nick of the
razor.
Arin’s face was wet, his hair black with water. He shiv-
ered, suddenly aware of the winter. He searched for some-
thing to wear, and pulled on a nightshirt and robe.
Arin felt again his ner vous ness as he’d stood outside
the balcony curtain. The curtain had swung after Kestrel
had closed it behind her, and he’d gingerly touched its
sway. He remembered that hunted expression she had
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thrown over her shoulder before disappearing behind the
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And then there, in the dark, with her . . . it made Arin’s
throat tighten as if he were thirsty.
Prove it,
he’d told her,
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words thick with desire, full of a traitorous kind of confi -
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dence, one that came and then abandoned him and then
returned and left in such rapid tides that he couldn’t keep
his footing.
Prove that you want him
. Kestrel had pushed
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him away.
He could have sworn that he had sensed in her the
same wish that was in him. It had been on her skin like a
scent. Hadn’t it? But then Arin remembered how she’d es-
caped his house in Herran. He saw her again on the har-
bor: her hand on a weapon, that fl ash in her eyes. It had
wrecked him.
He
had done this, he had made this, had lied
to her, tricked her, killed her people, killed what ever it was
that had made Kestrel open up to him on Firstwinter
night . . . before she knew his treachery.
Of course she had chosen someone else.
There was a knock at the dressing room door.
“Arin?” Tensen called. “Can I come in?”
No,
Arin wanted to say, and had he still been in front of
the mirror and could have seen his face he
would
have said
it, because his refl ection would have shown something vul-
nerable and uncertain, and he would have despised it. He
wouldn’t have let anyone see him then.
Tensen knocked again.
Arin’s wet hair was cold. A chilly rivulet crept down his
neck. Arin dried himself off , rubbing a towel at his short
hair as he kept his back to the mirror. He went to open the
door.
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Tensen scrutinized Arin, which made the younger man’s
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jaw go tight. But Tensen gave him an easy smile, pulled up
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the dressing room chair, and sat gustily down. “That,” he
said, “was exhausting. And profi table.”
“What have you learned?” Arin asked.
Tensen told him about Thrynne.
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“Gods,” Arin said.
“No, Arin. I won’t have that look on your face. Thrynne
knew what he risked when he came to the capital. He did
it for Herran.”
“I asked him to.”
“We all make our choices. What would you choose:
Herran’s sake, or yours?”
Arin’s answer was quick. “Herran’s.”
Tensen said nothing for a moment, only gazed up at
him with the pensiveness of someone considering a ques-
tion not so easily answered. Arin didn’t like that expression,
he bristled at it, but before he could speak, Tensen said,
“What would you have
me
choose?”
“I can’t tell you what to choose for yourself.”
“No, what would you have me choose for
you
? Say that
you were in Thrynne’s position— imprisoned, worse— and
my intervention could help you but hurt our country.
What should I do?”
“Leave me there.”
“Yes,” Tensen said slowly. “That’s what I thought you’d
say.”
Arin threaded fi ngers through his damp hair and
tugged until his scalp hurt. “Are you sure of this news?”
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“My source is good.”
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“Who?”
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Tensen waved a hand. “No one important.”
“But who?”
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“I promised not to tell. Don’t make an old man break
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his promises.”
Arin frowned, but said only, “This isn’t the year of
money. And what
did
Thrynne overhear the emperor and
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Senate leader say?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll fi nd out.”
“Caution, Arin. I myself might have a way.”
“Oh?”
Tensen smiled. “A new recruit.” He refused to say any-
thing more. He found a comfortable position in his chair
and changed the subject in a way that spun Arin’s head.
“Well, I think they make a charming couple.”
“What?”
“The prince and Lady Kestrel.”
Arin had known whom Tensen had meant.
“Their kiss was sweet,” said the spymaster. “One would
assume their marriage was just a po liti cal alliance—
I
cer-
tainly did, until I saw them kiss.”
Arin stared.
“You must have missed it,” Tensen said. “It was at the
beginning of the ball. But of course you were late.”
“Yes,” Arin said fi nally. “I was.”
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10
KESTREL CREPT INTO BED AT DAWN, FOOTSORE
from dancing. She hung her unbuckled dagger from its
hook on the bedpost. She shivered, more from fatigue than
cold, as she got beneath the blankets next to Jess. The other
girl lay sleeping, curled on her side.
“Jess,” Kestrel whispered. “I broke your necklace.”
Jess gropingly stretched out her hand and caught Kes-
trel’s. “I’ll make you another one,” she murmured. Eyes
still shut, she frowned. “I saw him at the ball.”
“Who?” But Kestrel knew who, and Jess slipped back
into sleep.
An elite group of courtiers and visiting dignitaries were in-
vited to join Kestrel for hot chocolate in the Winter Gar-
den the morning following the ball. White and gray furs
muffl
ed the ladies, while the men favored sable, except for
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the occasional rakish youth who sported the rusty striped
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fur of an eastern tiger. Braziers burned throughout the gar-
den’s open patio, which was bounded at the southern end
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by an evergreen hedge maze.
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Kestrel had arrived late, and alone. Despite the meager
rest, she’d woken up a few hours after dawn because her
body knew that she needed to. Jess still slept. Kestrel daw-
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dled in her preparations, changing her dress twice, hoping
that Jess might stir. But she didn’t, and Kestrel was reluctant
to wake her. Finally, she left the suite.
Although the footmen in the Winter Garden should
have announced Kestrel’s presence upon her arrival, she
bribed them not to. She pulled her white furs more closely
about her face and walked alone through a pathway of trees
with sprays of pink and red berries. They were poisonous—
yet beautiful, sprinkled like bright musical notation against
the black bars of branches. Through the trees, Kestrel
watched the party and listened.
Many complained about their dancing blisters. “I’ll
plunge my bare feet right into the snow, to numb them!”
cried a colonial lady from the southern isles.
“Oh no,” smiled a naughty young man. “Let me warm
them instead.”
The entire scene looked pretty and fun . . . and fake.
Who knew if that fl irty young man even liked the lady— or
if he liked ladies at all. Kestrel wasn’t the only person at
court who planned to marry someone she didn’t want.
Kestrel could see the emperor seated in the patio’s center
next to the largest brazier, surrounded by senators. At the
far end of the patio, near the hedge maze, Verex hunched
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over a Borderlands table. His back was to Kestrel. The east-
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ern princess sat across from him, her expression gentle as
she executed a merciless move.
The Herrani hadn’t been invited to this exclusive event.
Kestrel needn’t worry about meeting Arin’s gaze . . . or not
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meeting his gaze.
Then again, he might come anyway. It would be like
him to turn up uninvited.
Wouldn’t it?
Kestrel found that she had come close to a tree. Her
hands were on its bark. It was silver; smooth and papery in
places, rough in others. She had been running fi ngers over
the bark’s striations and knots the way she’d seen blind
people come to understand an object. When she thought
of this, she realized that she was trying to understand
whether she wanted to see Arin here in the Winter Garden
or not. And that was a fool’s question. It was pure, punish-
ing foolishness, the mere consideration of either possibility,
when she had already decided that neither should matter.