Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
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
god, who ruled love.
My soul is yours,
he had said.
You
know that it is
. His expression had been so open, so true.
Frightened, even, of what he was saying. And she had
been frightened, too, by how he had spoken what she felt.
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It frightened her still.
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The coin. Kestrel forced her attention again to the coin.
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There was nothing honest about the god of money. She
recalled that now. This god was two- faced, like this piece
of gold. Sometimes male, sometimes female.
He rules buy-
ing and selling,
Enai had said,
which means she rules negotia-
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tion. And hidden things. You can’t see both sides of one coin at
once, can you, child? The god of money always keeps a secret.
The god of money was also the god of spies.
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5
ARIN REMEMBERED.
It had been easy at fi rst, the promise to be Cheat’s spy.
“I trust you most,” the leader of the rebellion had mur-
mured in Arin’s ear after his sale to the general’s daughter.
“You are my second- in- command, lad, and between you
and me we will have the Valorians on their knees.”
Everything had slid and locked into place along well-
oiled grooves.
Except . . .
Except.
The general’s daughter had taken an interest in Arin. It
was a gods- given opportunity, yet even in those early days
as her slave, Arin had had the misgiving— uncomfortable,
low, electric, like sparks rubbed off clothes in winter— that
her interest would lead to his undoing.
And Arin was Arin: he pushed his luck, as he always
did.
His habit was worse with her. He said things he
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shouldn’t. He broke rules, and she watched him do it, and
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said little of the breaking.
It was, he decided, because she didn’t care what he did.
Then came an impulse whose danger he should have
seen—
would
have seen, if he had been able to admit to
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himself what it was that made him want to shake her awake
even though her eyes were open.
Why should she care what a slave did?
Arin would
make
her care.
Arin remembered.
How he couldn’t sleep at night in the slaves’ quarters
for the music that needled its way through the dark, across
the general’s grounds from the villa, where the girl played
and played and didn’t care that he was tired, because she
didn’t know that he was tired, because she gave no thought
to him at all.
He was whipped barebacked by her Valorian steward
for some slight off ense. The next day she had ordered him to
escort her to a tea party. Pride had kept him from wincing as
he moved. The fi ery stripes on his back split and bled. She
wouldn’t see, he would not let her see, he would not give
her the satisfaction.
Nonetheless, he searched for a sign that she’d even
heard of the fl ogging. His gaze raked her face, fi nding noth-
ing there but a discomfort to be so scrutinized.
She didn’t know. He was certain he would have been
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able to tell. Guilt was an emotion she was bad at hiding.
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Across the distance, where she was sitting on a bro-
cade divan, teacup and saucer in hand, she dropped his
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gaze, turned to a lord, and laughed at something he had
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said.
Her innocence was maddening.
She should know. She should know what her steward
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had done. She should know it to be her fault whether she’d
given the order or not— and whether she knew or not. In-
nocent? Her? Never.
He pulled the high collar of his shirt higher to hide a
lash that had snaked up his neck.
He did not want her to know.
He did not want her to see.
But:
Look at me,
he found himself thinking furiously at her.
Look at me
.
She lifted her eyes, and did.
The memories were strange, they were a network of lashes,
laid one on top of the other, burning traces that might have
resembled a pattern if it wasn’t clear that they had been left
by a wild hand with no restraint. The lashes were lit with
feeling.
He was stinging, stinging.
“Arin,” Tensen said during their meeting with the Her-
rani trea sur er, who was even grimmer than usual, “where is
your head? You’ve heard nothing I’ve said.”
“Say it again.”
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“The emperor has had a new coin minted to celebrate
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the engagement.”
Arin didn’t want to hear about the engagement.
“I think that you should see it,” Tensen said.
Arin took the coin, and didn’t see what ever it was that
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Tensen thought he should see.
Tensen told him the story of Jadis.
Arin dropped the coin.
He remembered.
He remembered changing.
He saw Kestrel give a fl ower to a baby everyone else ig-
nored. He watched her lose cheerfully at cards to an old Val-
orian woman whom society giggled about, not even bothering
to hush their words, for she was too senile, they said, to
understand.
Arin had stood behind Kestrel during that card game.
He’d seen her high hand.
He saw her honesty with him. She off ered it like a cup
of clear water that he drank deep.
Her tears, glinting in the dark.
Her fi erce creature of a mind: sleek and sharp- clawed
and utterly unwilling to be caught.
Arin saw Kestrel step between him and punishment as
if it meant nothing, instead of everything.
“Arin?” Tensen called through the memories.
Arin remembered the sunken days after he’d seen her
last, after she’d handed him her emperor’s decree of Her-
rani freedom and told him about her engagement. “Congrat-
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ulate me,” she’d said. He hadn’t believed it. He had begged.
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She had’nt listened. “Oh, Arin,” Sarsine said to him during
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the time when he wouldn’t leave the rooms Kestrel had
lived in. “What did you expect?”
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Grief. It had all come to this.
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“Arin,” Tensen said to him again, and Arin could no
longer ignore him. “For the last time, are you going to the
capital or not?”
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6
OFFICIALS AND ARISTOCRATS BEGAN TO
arrive in the capital in preparation for the ball. Every day
more sets of fi ne horses were brought into the imperial
stables, limping from the bitter ride down winter roads.
Although Kestrel had pointed out the diffi
culties of bad
travel conditions for their guests, the emperor apparently
thought this was unimportant. He had invited them; they
must come. Fires were laid to warm palace guest suites
that would be lived in for quite some time: after the ball,
there would be parties and events right up until the wed-
ding.
One afternoon, Kestrel took a carriage down through
the city to the harbor, a maid shivering beside her. There
was no reason why this girl couldn’t be the one in Verex’s
employ, but Kestrel heaped furs on their laps and encour-
aged the maid to nudge her toes closer to the hot brick on
the carriage fl oor.
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Their progress through the city was slow. The roads
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were steep and narrow, made less for the con ve nience of
society and more for the purpose of slowing an enemy’s
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progress up the slopes to the palace.
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No new ships had arrived. Kestrel shouldn’t have ex-
pected to see one Herrani- made anyway. It was green storm
season. No sane person would sail between the Herran
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peninsula and the capital.
The harbor wind chapped Kestrel’s lips.
“What are we doing here?” said the maid through chat-
tering teeth.
Kestrel could hardly say that she was looking for a boat
that had brought Arin. Time was running out for him to
make the longer but safer trek through the mountain pass,
which had been cleared after the treaty with Herran had
been signed. The ball loomed at the end of the week. Most
guests had already arrived. But not him.
“Nothing,” Kestrel said. “I wanted the view.” The girl
blinked: her only sign of annoyance to have been dragged
down to the harbor. But Kestrel wasn’t allowed to travel
without an escort. She had hundreds of engagement gifts—
a pen made from the ivory of a horned whale, ruby dice
from a colonial lord who had heard of Kestrel’s love of
games, even a clever collapsible tiara for traveling . . . The
list of pretty presents was long, but Kestrel would have
gladly traded them all for one hour of privacy outside the
palace.
“Let’s go,” she said, and didn’t return to the harbor.
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She dined with senators. Over the rim of her wineglass,
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Kestrel watched the Senate leader, who looked oddly tan
for winter, murmur something to the emperor.
What were you doing,
she remembered the captain ask-
ing Thrynne in the prison,
eavesdropping outside the doors
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of a private meeting between the emperor and the Senate
leader?
It suddenly seemed that Kestrel’s cup wasn’t fi lled with
wine but blood.
The emperor glanced up and caught Kestrel staring at
him and the Senate leader. He lifted one brow.
Kestrel glanced away. She drank her wine to the bottom.
Her father sent his apologies. He couldn’t come to the ball.
He was mired in fi ghting near the border with the eastern
plains.
I’m sorry,
General Trajan wrote,
but I have my or-
ders.
Kestrel stopped rereading the scant black lines of writ-
ing. Instead, she stared at all the blank space left on that
one sheet of paper. The white of it hurt her eyes. She let the
letter fall.
She’d never even considered it a possibility that her fa-
ther would come— not until the moment that she had held
his letter in her hands and ripped it open.
That blinding hope. That drop into disappointment.
She should have known better.
She remembered the letter’s last word:
orders
. Kestrel
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wondered how far her father’s obedience to the emperor
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would go. What would the general have done in Thrynne’s
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prison cell? Would his knife have cut as easily as the cap-
tain’s, or worse, or not at all?
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But when she thought of her father and imagined him
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in the captain’s role, Thrynne wasn’t there in the prison in
her mind. She was the one in chains.
What were you doing,
the general asked,
bargaining with the emperor for a slave’s
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life?
Kestrel shook her head, and no longer saw the prison or
her father. She was looking out a window in one of her
rooms high above the palace’s inner ward, facing the barbi-
can, where visitors would enter.
She palmed away the window’s frost. The barbican’s
gate was shut.
Come away from the window,
she heard her father order.