The Winner's Kiss (12 page)

Arin followed them up the stairs to the east wing, where Sarsine opened the door to the suite where Kestrel had once stayed. When they entered, Arin searched Kestrel's face for some sign of recognition. She kept her gaze averted from his in a way that showed that she knew she was being scrutinized, and why.

Sarsine settled Kestrel onto the nearest soft chair and knelt before her, removing the battered shoes that were barely recognizable as having once been a lady's slippers.

Her expression flickering, Kestrel studied Sarsine's dark, bent head. Kestrel's voice, which she'd used less and less in the past few days, was hoarse. “Are you my maid?”

His cousin flinched. He saw Kestrel realize that she'd said something wrong. Sarsine looked to him. He leaned and whispered in her ear.

Sarsine set the shoes down in a neat pair. “Yes,” she finally said. “I will be for now, if you like.” She rose and began to peel the coat off Kestrel.

Something that Arin had tried to wind tightly inside him during the days on the tundra began to unwind. He wasn't
sure
what was going to happen when it came undone. He would have said—if he could have said anything at all—that what he felt was like the desolate trembling that seized Kestrel's body at night.

Sarsine caught his eye. Lifted her brows. She had paused in the removal of Kestrel's clothes. Her message was clear.

He nodded. He should leave, of course he should, yet he couldn't make himself move.

“Arin.” Sarsine was stern now.

He turned, but hadn't gotten far when he heard Sarsine's sucked breath. He glanced back.

His eyes went wide. He was next to them before he was aware of having taken a step. His hand snatched the loose cloth of Kestrel's shirt at the shoulder. He saw it: the red welt that slashed down her shoulder blade. She jerked away from his grasp. The cloth tore. Not much. Enough.

“Arin!” Sarsine.

He saw more, he saw how the lashes looked like his own, how they had sliced her skin and went out of his sight under the cloth. He knew it was all over her back. “I asked you.” His voice was wretched. “I asked you if you were hurt.”

“I'm not. It's healed.”

“But you were.”

“I didn't remember.”

He didn't believe her. “How could this happen to you? How could you not tell me?” He had pulled her to her feet. He was holding her by the upper arms. There was no flesh there. His thumbs met bone. He was not himself. This was
not
his world. There was no version of his world where this could be real.

“You're frightening her,” Sarsine said.

Not fear. Kestrel's face was a blazing challenge: chin lifted, shoulders tight, shirt loose at the neck. One of the lashes had curled up over her collar bone. She tugged free.

His throat was tight. “You should have told me.”

“I don't have to tell you anything.”

“Kestrel, you . . . did something for me. For this country. Don't you remember? Can't you try? Or let me tell you, please—”

Her flat palm cracked across his face.

It sucked the air out of him. His cheek burned. She'd caught him across the mouth, too. Her eyes were liquid and golden and lost and angry. He was too ashamed of himself to speak.

Gently, Sarsine said, “I know you want to help.”

“Of course I do,” he whispered.

“Then you need to leave.”

It wasn't until he was alone in the hallway, sagged against the wall, that he touched where she had hit him. His fingers came away wet. He stared at the tears. They shone on his fingertips like blood.

Chapter 11

“Will she die?”

Sarsine shut the door to Kestrel's suite behind her with more force than necessary. Hands planted on her hips, she stared down at Arin where he sat in the hallway, back to the wall opposite Kestrel's door. His joints were stiff. He didn't know how long he'd been sitting there.

“Gods, Arin. Pull yourself together. No, she won't die.”

“The lashes. There could be an infection. A fever.”

“There isn't.”

“It happened to me.”

“She's not you.”

“She can't keep anything down. It's gotten worse.”

“She was drugged twice a day, every day for about a month. Some of what she's going through is because her body wants the drugs it can't have.”

He caught the plural form. “More than one kind?” Though he'd already suspected this from his own experience with the exhilarating power of the drug he'd been given
in
the mines, and the way Kestrel longed for something to make her sleep. Had begged for it, sometimes.

“Yes.”

“She told you this.” Hurt pinched his heart. He looked away from his cousin so that she wouldn't see how it felt that Kestrel had so easily told her what he'd been forced to guess. He was in the tent again, on the tundra, listening to the wind buckle the canvas. The chill oozing up from the ground, Kestrel in his arms, his pulse wild, the awful shudder of her limbs, the curve of her neck in the dim green dark. The relief to hear, finally, her breath slow and quiet. The way his own breath stayed uneven for a long time after that.

He said, “How did you get her to fall asleep?”

“She's not asleep.”

“What?”

“She's calm enough for now.”

“You left her alone,
awake
?” He remembered how she'd stood in a small boat high over black water on the night of the Firstwinter Rebellion, ready to jump. He heard her asking for Roshar's numbing ring. “You can't. Go back. Sarsine, you can't leave her alone.”

His cousin's hands slid down from her hips. Her stance loosened, her expression growing soft and tired. “Kestrel's too strong to do what you're thinking.”

“Look at her.” Arin spoke as if Kestrel were in the hallway with them.
Look at what I've done,
he almost said, then bit back the words. Sarsine would only say that none of this was his fault.

He knew the truth.

Sarsine sat on the floor across from him, knees drawn
up
under neath her muslin skirts. “I
have
looked at her. I've bathed and dressed her and put her to bed, and she's malnourished and sick, but she's
alive
. She's fought hard to live. If you don't think she's strong, you're mistaken.”

“I'll stay with her.”

Sarsine slowly shook her head. “She doesn't want you.”

“I don't care.”

“She won't hurt herself.”

“You don't know that.”

“Arin, I'll care for her, of course, but we can't be with her every moment of the day.”

“I damned well can.”

“She would hate it. She doesn't even know who she is anymore. How can she find out if she's never alone with herself?”

Arin tunneled his fingers through his dirty hair and pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes until they flashed white under the lids. “I know who she is.” Proud girl. Hard, noble heart. And a liar, a liar. “I should have known.” Every moment with her in the capital rushed through him, freezing his veins. He'd swallowed her lies. The way she'd mocked him. Set him aside, made him insignificant. It had been easy to believe. It had made sense.

He cursed himself. He saw the opportunities he'd had, over many months before her arrest, to seize the truth of things. But none of what he'd seen or suspected in the capital had made sense. It had been senseless, so apparently wrong, the way he'd seen her eyes slim with longing when he'd found her by a canal. The waters had swelled below. She'd worn a maid's dress. Senseless: that she would
gamble
her safety to help someone else's people. Senseless: that she'd smuggle information to Arin's spymaster. A traitor to her country. The Valorian punishment for treason was death.

And Arin had accused her of selfishness. In the capital, he'd thought words like
power hungry
, and
shallow
, and
cruel
. He'd said as much to her face. He'd blamed her for the deaths of the eastern plainspeople.

Her stricken expression, clear in the rushlights of that filthy tavern. The white line of her mouth.

He had ignored it. Misread it.

He'd missed every thing that had mattered.

Sarsine grabbed his wrists and tugged the hands from his eyes. He looked at her, but didn't see her. He saw Kestrel's wasted face. He saw himself as a child, the night of the invasion, soldiers in his home, how he had done nothing.

Later,
he'd told Sarsine when the messenger had come to see him.

No, I won't,
he'd promised Roshar when the prince had listed reasons not to rescue the nameless spy from the tundra's prison.

“I was wrong,” Arin said. “I should have—”

“Your
should haves
are gone. They belong to the god of the lost. What I want to know is what you are going to do
now
.”

He had long avoided the general's estate.

Sarsine's words ringing through his head, Arin rode Javelin through the unlocked gate.

A
yellow-throated thrush called from a low bough. The uncut grass of the meadow reached up to the horse's hocks. Arin walked Javelin through the green hiss of it, away from the villa, which he wasn't yet ready to see, and up a hill, through a grove daubed with small, ripening oranges. They'd be hard and dry if he plucked and peeled them. Not ready yet. But their scent made him want them now.

He made a clicking sound with his teeth and tongue, nudged the horse with his heels. Javelin flicked an ear and picked up the pace, gusting a short breath through his nostrils, pleased to go more quickly.

Arin kept clear of the larger outbuildings. The thatched cottage that had belonged to Kestrel's nurse, just west of the overgrown garden. The empty stables. The empty slaves' quarters. The windowless barnlike shape of it, the paint white and flaking in the sun. Arin kept Javelin on his determined path, but turned a little in the saddle for a backward glance at the last building, his sword shifting against his hip as he did so.

He reached the forge and swung off the saddle, dropped his boots to the ground. He loosened the stallion's girth and let him go. The grass was high and good. A horse's heaven.

Arin's boots were loud on the flagstones. There were smithies in the city he could have used, but this one—perversely—felt like his. Things were as Arin had left them last winter. Inside, tools hung where they should. The anvil had a skin of dust. The hearth was long dead. The coal scuttle full.

He built a fire in the forge, worked the bellows, and watched flames snap to life. When it was going strong, he
left
the fire to burn. He'd be back. The fire would have to burn a while for what he wanted. In the meantime—he forced himself to think it—he should go see the house.

The general's villa—Kestrel's—had stood empty since Arin had killed Cheat last winter. As the leader of the Herrani rebellion, Cheat had claimed the house as his and lived there because it was the best, and because it was the general's. Maybe even because it was Kestrel's. Arin didn't know when Cheat's malevolent fascination with her had begun. Arin swallowed hard to remember it.

His hand was tight on the sword's hilt. He looked at his clenched knuckles, looked again at his father's sword, pulling out an inch of it to see the gleam of finely tempered steel in the sun. Then he dropped it back home into the scabbard and he went inside the house.

Past the portico, the entry way's fountain was silent and scummed over. Bugs walked the water's green surface. Painted gods stared down at Arin from the walls. Other creatures, too: fawns, a leaping stag, birds. He caught a glimpse of one frescoed bird arrested in midflight and remembered seeing it for the first time over Kestrel's shoulder, on the day that she'd bought him.

Inside, the house was mostly bare. He'd thought it would be, but had never thought that it would look like
this
.

After Arin had signed the imperial treaty that seemed to promise Herran freedom, the Valorian colonists surrendered their homes in this territory. Ships came to empty the houses of Valorian possessions. There were disputes over whose was what. Arin had waded in, brokered the negotia
tions,
but had ignored Kestrel's house. The Herrani family who'd owned it was long dead. When a Valorian ship entered the harbor to empty the general's villa, Arin pretended that the ship and house didn't exist. He'd assumed that every thing had been taken. He was almost right.

He hadn't been here since the Firstwinter Rebellion. He hadn't wanted to be drawn to Kestrel's rooms, or to see the kitchens where his people had been forced to work, or to find the place where the steward accused him of touching something he shouldn't have. A flogging had followed, set far back on the grounds so that no one in the house would be bothered by unpleasant sounds. Arin hadn't wanted to remember the music room ringing with Kestrel's playing, or to see the library where he'd once shut himself inside with her. He'd wanted nothing of this place at all. Even when he'd come with men and a cart and draft horses to bring the piano to his house, Arin hadn't gone inside. He'd waited outside, rigging a system of pulleys he used to help haul the instrument up and onto the cart after it had been wheeled out the wide doors of the music room.

So he wasn't prepared for the filth he saw and smelled.

Cheat had been vengeful. The corners reeked of piss. There were stains on the walls, the windows. Several panes were shattered.

Arin's feet carried him swiftly to the music room. Things were odd there: leaves of sheet music scattered on the floor, some of it burned, but only a little, as if Cheat had started and then had had a better idea, prob ably the same idea that had kept him from ruining the piano. Maybe Cheat hadn't
been
sure whether to force Kestrel to do what he wanted, or bribe her . . .