Read The Winner's Crime Online
Authors: Marie Rutkoski
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father burned them. Kestrel, I know you think that you’ve
hidden your heart where no one can see it.” Verex’s dark
CRIME
eyes held hers. “But you need to hide it better.”
’S
An arrow fl ew high above its target, its feathers whis-
tling.
“Verex, what has my maid told you?”
THE WINNER
“Not much . . . so far.” He must have seen the worry
she was trying to hide. His expression softened. “Let’s keep
it that way, shall we?”
Kestrel mustered a bright, tense smile.
Verex sighed. “Come on,” he said. “I want to see Risha
shoot.”
Kestrel let him lead her to the archers. She was glad
that she’d made no promise to enter the archery contest.
Her fi ngers would tremble on the bowstring.
Risha notched an arrow. She had a fi ne, strong line.
Kestrel focused on watching the eastern girl. If she watched
Risha with the same intensity that Verex did, she might be
able to forget, if only for a moment, Verex’s warning.
Risha let the arrow go. It soared lazily and hit the tar-
get’s edge. All of her arrows in the target were badly placed.
Kestrel would have thought from the way Risha held her
bow that she would have been able to do better. Then
again, the day was full of sneaky little breezes.
Risha aimed again.
“. . . born fi rst?” Kestrel heard someone saying. “A baby
prince or princess?”
Verex went still beside her. Kestrel spotted the gossip-
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ing courtiers. She realized they were looking right at her
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and Verex. Their words came clear on the wind. It shouldn’t
SKI
O
have taken so long for Kestrel to understand what they
meant. When she did, her cheeks burned.
Risha let the arrow fl y.
It drove deep into the target’s very center.
MARIE RUTK
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32
LEARNING THE EASTERN LANGUAGE MADE
Arin feel like he was remembering something he didn’t
know he knew. Dacran was very similar to Herrani. It had
some of the same patterns, and though the vocabulary was
diff erent, the words didn’t sound completely alien, either.
Arin learned quickly.
If the eastern language felt familiar, much in this new
country was strange. Dacran cuisine focused far more on
color than taste. Clothes were plain but cosmetics were
not, and men as well as women used them. Roshar in par-
tic u lar liked to line his eyes with vivid, dramatic fl air, as if
to show that he knew this drew attention to his mutila-
tions, and he didn’t care.
Arin was allowed to roam the castle and city. “Everyone
knows who you are,” Roshar had said with a shrug. “If you
wander too far away, the city militia will happily shoot you.”
“What exactly is ‘too far’?”
Roshar told him to fi gure it out for himself.
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The queen, meanwhile, kept her distance.
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At fi rst, Arin stayed inside the castle, thinking that the
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structure was a shell that housed not only the queen, but
her internal self. If he knew its hallways and alcoves and
chambers, he might be able to guess at what would per-
suade her to an alliance with Herran.
MARIE RUTK
But the dizzying mix of transparent and opaque walls
gave him no clues. He wandered. Sometimes he heard dis-
tant music played in other rooms. There was an instru-
ment like the Herrani violin, except with a fl atter bridge,
and here the strings were tuned more sharply and played
with a percussive quality: lots of plucked notes and aggres-
sive bow strokes.
Arin rarely saw the queen. When he did, she ignored
him in an icy way that never failed to remind him that
he had no weapon. His parents had thought that openly
carry ing a blade was the height of barbarism. Now, though,
Arin felt strange without Kestrel’s dagger at his hip. Its lack
made him uncomfortable . . . and even more uncomfort-
able about what that discomfort might mean.
The easterners were always well armed. They favored
small weapons. Their crossbows were smaller than Arin
had ever seen. From Roshar, he learned that they weren’t as
powerful as a western crossbow, but more accurate and
easier to load quickly.
The eastern love for the miniature was everywhere
within the castle. Paintings no larger than a handspan
adorned the walls. Basins collecting rainwater that fun-
neled down from the roofs were decorated with tiny mosa-
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ics of dragonfl ies. Shelves in rooms meant for smoking held
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clocks the size of watches, and porcelain eggs that, when
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opened, showed coiled snakes made from jointed green
glass. Some eggs hatched tiny tigers that gnashed their me-
CRIME
chanical teeth.
’S
Once, Arin strayed far into the recesses of the castle
and found a model of the castle on a pedestal. Inside, suites
had details that made Arin wish for a magnifying lens.
THE WINNER
With a fi ngernail, he turned a faucet in a bathing room.
Water fi lled the teacup- size bathtub. It all made Arin feel
too large: thuggish and fumbling.
“I was told that you were here,” said a voice behind
him. It was Roshar.
Arin turned off the bathtub’s water.
“That was my sister’s.” Roshar’s tone made clear which
sister he meant. He stared at a suite of rooms that looked fi t
for a little princess. A chest sat at the foot of a canopied
bed. Arin moved to open it. He expected Roshar to snarl
an objection, but Roshar simply looked at him, black eyes
curious and narrow, like the eyes of the snakes in the por-
celain eggs. With one fi nger, Arin reached inside the chest.
He snatched his hand back. Blood speckled his fi nger.
It felt as if he’d been bitten by a host of tiny fangs.
Roshar took the chest from the small room. He tipped
its contents onto his palm, which he held out for Arin to see.
Miniature weapons. Swords the size of matchsticks.
Daggers like sharp, steel fi lings. Roshar squeezed his hand
around them, then fl ung the bloody little weapons into
Risha’s doll house suite.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
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“A beheading would be spectacular,” Roshar said as Arin
SKI
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steered up the canal. It was a clear day. “Don’t you think?
You’re too heavy for a good hanging. Your neck would
break the moment you dropped.”
“Beheading’s quick, too.”
MARIE RUTK
“Not if the ax is dull.”
It was a typical conversation between Arin and Roshar,
who had very helpfully taught Arin his country’s words for
various deaths by execution and reminded Arin on a daily
basis that his life was in the prince’s hands. Usually, this
kind of talk cheered Roshar, who lay settled into his end of
the canoe, his arms crossed over his chest. One leg draped
over the side of the boat. His eyes were on the blue sky. But
the lazy posture looked like a lie today. Roshar’s body was
set with hard lines.
Then his gaze lowered and cast out over the city. Some-
thing caught his attention. It changed his face. It stole all
the pretending from it, and left nothing but the same naked
anger that had made him clench a fi st around Risha’s toy
weapons.
Arin saw what he saw.
A woman wandered near the edge of the canal. She
wore the tapered trousers of the plainspeople. Nestled in
her arms was a cloth bundle of blue, the color worn by Da-
cran children. She held the bundle like a baby. But it had
no face. It had no hands. It was nothing more than a rag
wrapped around itself. She touched it tenderly.
Arin stopped rowing. The water swirled away from his
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Sometimes, Arin almost understood what Kestrel had
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done. Even now, as he felt the drift of the boat and didn’t
fi ght its pull, Arin remembered the yearning in Kestrel’s
CRIME
face whenever she’d mentioned her father. Like a home-
’S
sickness. Arin had wanted to shake it out of her. Especially
during those early months when she had owned him. He
had wanted to force her to see her father for what he was.
THE WINNER
He had wanted her to acknowledge what
she
was, how she
was wrong, how she shouldn’t long for her father’s love. It was
soaked in blood. Didn’t she see that? How could she
not
?
Once, he’d hated her for it.
Then it had somehow touched him. He knew it him-
self. He, too, wanted what he shouldn’t. He, too, felt how
the heart chooses its own home and refuses reason.
Not
here,
he’d tried to say.
Not this. Not mine. Never.
But he had
felt the same sickness.
In retrospect, Kestrel’s role in the taking of the eastern
plains was predictable. Sometimes he damned her for cur-
rying favor with the emperor, or blamed her for playing war
like a game just because she could. Yet he thought he knew
the truth of her reasons. She’d done it for her father.
It almost made sense. At least, it did when he was near
sleep and his mind was quiet, and it was harder to help
what entered it. Right before sleep, he came close to under-
standing.
But he was awake now. He was staring as the glassy-
eyed woman cradled her cloth baby. He saw her caress the
blue folds. He saw the end of understanding.
Arin wished that Kestrel could see what he saw. He
wished that he could make her pay for what she had done.
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33
SPRING PINCHED THE WORLD OPEN. TIGHT
buds split along their seams and spilled out their colors.
Kestrel stayed indoors. It didn’t help. Thoughts, too,
have their seasons, and she couldn’t stop what worked its way
up through the underground of her mind. And what were
her thoughts? What did she gather in secret, in guilt? What
did she hold, and lift to the light to see better, and what did
she drop as quickly as she could, as if it were hot to the touch?
That last kind of thought grew like fl owers with fi re for
petals. They blackened the grass around them. They burned
from root to stamen. Kestrel avoided them.
Except when she didn’t. Sometimes, she went to them
fi rst. Sometimes, she lied to herself along the way.
She thought about the piano she had left behind in
Herran. And it was allowed for her to think about that,
because why wouldn’t she miss the instrument she’d grown
up playing, and had been her mother’s? There was nothing
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ing sound, that it was probably the fi ner instrument, but
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that it made her long for the one she’d played almost all her
life. She could practically feel the cool keys.
CRIME
Her piano was in Arin’s house. She knew the house well.
’S
It had been her prison. It had become— almost—her home.
But then she thought that this was not true. She didn’t
know Arin’s house all that well, and her insistence on this
THE WINNER
truth made it clear that she had told herself that earlier lie
only so that she could correct herself. Because wasn’t there
a part of Arin’s home that she had never seen?
This was her correction:
This was the burning fl ower:
Kestrel had never been in Arin’s rooms. Yes, she’d vis-
ited his childhood suite. She’d been there once with him.
But that wasn’t where he had slept during her time there.
That wasn’t where he passed his private hours, where he
bathed and dressed and read and looked out windows. No,
she’d never seen those views.