Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
hoarse. “Was it . . . the kiss? In my kitchen. Was
that
the
unforgivable thing?”
“Arin.”
“I shouldn’t have.”
“Arin.”
“I’m sorry, Kestrel. I’m sorry. Tell me what I can say.”
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It wasn’t the misery that gave her pause. It was his voice.
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It was what lay beneath his voice: that underground river
SKI
O
of song that was always there, that he tried to dam and
block and bury. It had been his secret. When she had
bought him, she’d felt the strain of this secret even then.
Arin was a singer. Yet he had disowned it, he hid it. His
MARIE RUTK
secret had seemed so vital, so fi ercely kept, that Kestrel had
never forced its fact to the surface, and hadn’t thought to
question whether Arin hid anything else.
He was waiting for her to speak. A library clock chimed.
The sound woke her from her memory. A new thought
made her skin prickle with fear.
Even if Arin didn’t know her secrets, he sensed them. It
was as if he could hear them rustling in her dark heart.
Kestrel had decided she would never tell him. Yet a mere
moment ago she’d spoken too openly, like someone who
hoped he would guess exactly what her secrets were.
She met his anxious eyes. She thought of the nails in
the table and the force it had taken to drive them in. She
thought about temptation, and the smart thing, and how
in the seventeen years before she’d met Arin, she’d always
known which to choose. “I forgive you.” Kestrel made her
tone off handedly kind, even bored. “There, do you feel
better? My choice to marry the prince isn’t about blaming
you. It’s not about you at all. I simply want something
else.”
He stared.
“Really, Arin. I have the chance to rule half the known
world one day. That isn’t too diffi
cult to understand.”
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He turned to look out the window. The light was stron-
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ger now. It bleached his face.
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“Since we are being so honest,” she said, “I’d like for
you to tell me why you’re here instead of Tensen. Did he
CRIME
send you?”
’S
“He never read your note,” Arin said to the window. “I
saw your seal. I opened the letter.”
“I suppose I should scold you for it.” She lifted one
THE WINNER
shoulder in an elegant shrug. “Though I might as well tell
you as him.”
Arin looked at her then. “Tell me what?”
“That I am no longer the imperial ambassador to Her-
ran.”
“But you agreed. It was part of the treaty the emperor
signed. That I signed. It’s
law
.”
“The law is written by the sword. The emperor holds
the sword, not you, and if he says that I am not to be bur-
dened by a tiresome post, who are we to disagree? Come,
let’s not quarrel. The tea is nice, isn’t it? A little too steeped,
though. I might not fi nish my cup.”
Arin’s expression was turning dangerous. “So we’re to
talk about
tea
?”
“Would you prefer chocolate?”
“And when I see you next, shall I compliment your daz-
zling shoes and doeskin gloves? Because what else will you
have to discuss? Doesn’t the life of an empress- to- be bore
you?” Arin had switched to speaking in his own language,
but she’d never heard him sound like this before. His voice
was mincing and sharp. It was a mockery of the way court-
iers talked. “Maybe we can discuss the latest crimes of your
beloved empire over tea. I can admire the cunning little
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shapes of hardened sugar and pass you a tiny sweet swan on
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a spoon. You can set it to swim in your cup while you pre-
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O
tend that the massacres in the east aren’t happening. And
maybe I will note how the people of the southern isles are
still slaves, and the tribes of the northern tundra were wiped
out long ago. You will say that the southern slaves have it
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better under the empire than when they were free. Look at
all that clean water piped down from the mountains through
the imperial aqueducts, you’ll say. Isn’t that lovely? As for the
northern tribes, there were never very many of them any-
way.”
His voice tightened. The mockery was gone. “And I
might tell you that Herran is thinned to the point of star-
vation. We are poor, Kestrel. We eat through a meager sup-
ply of grain and wait for the hearthnut harvest, and for
news of how much your emperor will seize of it. What if I
ask if you know how much? You’ll probably say that you
remember how your Herrani nurse used to bake hearthnut
bread for you. Maybe you’ve even been to the southern tip
of Herran’s peninsula where the hearthnut trees grow, and
remember how the sun there is hot year- round. You’ll say
all this in a cozy tone as if we share something, when what
we share is what your people steal from mine.
“I will say
tell me
. Tell me how much we’ll have to live
by after the emperor’s tithe. You’ll say you don’t know. You
have no intention of knowing.”
Kestrel had risen from her seat.
“Then I will be silent,” Arin said, “and you will stir
your tea. You will drink and I will drink. There. Is that
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how it will be?”
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Kestrel was light- headed. “Go away,” she whispered,
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though she was the one standing. Arin didn’t move from
the table. He stared up at her, jawline tight, and she didn’t
CRIME
understand how it could still be there in his face: that hard
’S
expectation, that angry faith.
Don’t fail me,
his eyes said.
Don’t fail yourself.
She quit the table.
THE WINNER
“You’re better than this,” he called after her. A librarian
stepped from the stacks to shush him. Kestrel walked away.
He said, “How can the inconsequence of your life not
shame you?”
He said, “How do you not feel empty?”
I do,
she thought as she pushed through the library
doors and let them thud behind her.
I do.
Kestrel was shaking when she sat down in front of her
dressing table. Curse Tensen. Curse him for not collecting
his own letters, or for sleeping in late while Arin had riffl
ed
through them. She’d been discreet in what she had written—
this was the imperial court, and the only secrets put down
on paper were
meant
to become gossip— but what if she
hadn’t been?
She’d better reconsider her plan. Tensen couldn’t be
trusted to keep Arin in check. She was a fool even to con-
sider becoming the minister of agriculture’s new spy. What
kind of spymaster allows his letters to be read?
Then again, what kind of would- be spy stamps a letter
with her own seal? What a stupid mistake.
Kestrel looked at the bottles on her dressing table and
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imagined how it would sound if she sent the whole lot of
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them crashing to the stone fl oor. A great, glorious smash.
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O
But a moment passed, then another, and she calmed, reach-
ing carefully for a pot set back behind the others.
Kestrel seemed to see the pot in her hand as if it were
far away.
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You’re better than this,
Arin had said.
Her fi ngers tightened around the pot. She brought it
close. She smiled a hard smile, one as thin as the glass be-
neath her nails.
The masker moth larvae had cocooned. There were
bulging, pellet- like cases all over the silk.
Kestrel returned the pot to its place. She would wait for
the moths to hatch. It wouldn’t take long. Then she would
make her move.
She pled a minor illness: a cold caught from sitting too
long in the Winter Garden after the ball. Verex didn’t visit,
but sent a kind note along with a vial of medicine.
The emperor sent no word.
Kestrel wrote to Jess: a teasing letter fi lled with merry
turns of phrase that chided Jess for abandoning her in her
hour of need. There were too many parties, too many bor-
ing people. Jess had left her defenseless.
I need my friend,
Kestrel wrote. Then she saw the anxi-
ety in her spiky cursive. Kestrel felt the nibbling fear that
she
had
been abandoned, that she had unknowingly of-
fended Jess.
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I saw him,
Jess had said. She had seen Arin at the ball.
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But then she’d clung to Kestrel’s hand in the dark. Jess
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wouldn’t have done that, surely, had she guessed what Arin
and Kestrel had been doing while the dancers danced?
CRIME
Maybe the sight of Arin had frightened Jess. Kestrel
’S
couldn’t blame her. Jess had witnessed things Kestrel hadn’t
the night of the Firstwinter Rebellion. And Jess knew they
were Arin’s doing.
THE WINNER
Kestrel blacked out her last line of writing.
I miss you, little sister,
she wrote instead.
Jess’s reply was slow in coming. It was short. Jess was
tired, the letter explained, her health worse than thought.
By the time you receive this, we will have left for the south
again,
Jess wrote. The entire family would go. Jess was
sorry.
It was an explanation of sorts. But Kestrel found herself
rereading the letter in her empty receiving room, searching
for signs of love as if it could be captured in a double- dotted
i
, or in the decorative slash through the last word of Jess’s
last sentence. The paper in Kestrel’s hand felt thin.
Uneasy, Kestrel crumbled the letter’s wax seal between
her fi ngers. She tried not to think about how she hadn’t
even been able to see Jess one more time. She tried not to
think about how the empty room felt suddenly emptier.
Kestrel kept to parts of her suite that were unquestionably
private: her bedchamber and dressing room. And one day,
even though she couldn’t have possibly heard the fl utter of
such small wings, Kestrel lifted her head, came quickly to
the dressing table, and cleared a path through the bottles
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to see masker moths hatching in their pot. Some were
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struggling out of cocoons. Others clung to the glass, their
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O
wings clear, or they clustered upside down on the bottom
of the cork and turned a stippled light brown.
Kestrel lit a candle. When the moths had all hatched
and the candle had burned down, Kestrel poured molten
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wax over the stopper of the moths’ pot. She sealed it thor-
oughly, so that no air would leak into the pot.
It took a day for the moths to die. Afterward, Kestrel
announced to her maids that she felt much better.
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12
THERE WAS A RECEPTION IN THE PALACE
gallery. Everyone was invited to admire the emperor’s col-
lection of stolen art. Kestrel’s father had once told her that
the military had a standing order to spare art during the
sack of a city. “He didn’t like that I razed the Herrani pal-
ace when we invaded.” The general had shrugged. “But it
had been the right military move.”
Her father had never feared the emperor, so Kestrel told
herself that neither should she. This was why, in full view
of a crush of guests milling about the statues and paint-
ings, Kestrel made her way toward Tensen.
A few amused eyebrows were raised—
Can’t seem to
keep away from the Herrani, can she?
Kestrel practically
heard— but the emperor’s back was to her for now, and she
would need only a few moments. She slipped a hand into
her dress pocket.
Tensen stood before a landscape stolen from the south-
ern isles. Arin wasn’t with him. He was late. Perhaps he