The Winner's Kiss (2 page)

No, not a boy. A man made in my image . . . one who knows he can't afford to be seen as weak.

The hawk launched into the sky.

You're mine, Arin. You know what you must do.

Arin cut the Valorian's throat.

It was when Arin was sailing home into his city's bay, his hair hard with dried blood, his clothes stiff with it, that the story slipped inside him. It lay on his tongue and melted like a bitter candy.

This is the story Arin told.

Once there was a boy who knew how to cower. One
night,
the gods could see him locked alone inside his rooms, shaking, near vomiting with fear. He heard what was happening elsewhere in the house. Screams. Things breaking. Harsh orders, the actual words muffled yet still clearly understood by the boy, who retched in his corner.

His mother was somewhere beyond that locked door. His father. His sister. He should go to them. He said so to his pointed knees, tucked up beneath his nightshirt as he huddled on the floor. He whispered the words, voice warbling out of control.
Go to them
.
They need you.
But he couldn't move. He stayed where he was.

The door thumped. It shuddered on its hinges.

With a splintering crack, the door gave way. A foreign soldier pushed inside. The soldier's skin and hair were fair, his eyes dark. He grabbed the boy by his bony wrist.

The boy tugged madly back, but it was ridiculous, he knew how pathetic his effort was. He squawked and flailed. The soldier laughed. He shook the boy. Not very hard, more as if trying to wake the child up.
Come along nicely,
the soldier said in a language that the boy had studied yet never expected to use.
And you won't get hurt.

Not getting hurt was very important. The mere promise of it made the child go limp with ugly relief. He followed the soldier.

He was led to the atrium. Every one was there, the servants, too. His parents didn't see him arrive. He was so quiet. Later, he couldn't say how things would have been different if it hadn't been his sister, standing at the far side of the room, who noticed him first. He wasn't sure how he could have
changed
what happened after. All he knew was that at the most important moment, he had done nothing.

He'd heard there were women in the Valorian army, but the soldiers in his house that night were men. Soldiers stood on either side of his sister. She was tall, imperious. Her loose hair fell around her shoulders like a black cape. As Anireh's gaze fell upon him and her gray eyes flashed, the boy realized that he'd never before believed that she loved him. Now he knew she did.

She said something low to the Valorians. The boy heard the tone of it, musical in its mockery.

What did you say?
a soldier demanded.

She said it again. The soldier seized her, and the boy understood with a sick horror that this was his fault. It was, somehow, all his fault.

They were taking his sister away. Soldiers were taking her toward a cloakroom used in winter when his family had evening guests. He'd hidden in there before. It was close and dark and airless.

This was the point in the story when Arin wished he could reach through time and put his hands over the boy's small ears. He wanted to deafen the sounds.
Close your eyes,
he wanted to tell that child. The echo of an old panic fluttered in Arin's chest. It was crucial that he imagine how he would stop the boy from witnessing what happened next.

Why did Arin do this to himself? It made him ache, this effort to try to change his memory of that night. It was compulsive. Sometimes he thought it hurt more than the actual truth. Yet even now, more than ten years after the Valorian
invasion,
Arin couldn't help thinking with desperate fervor about what he should have done differently.

What if he'd called out?

Or begged the soldiers to let his sister go?

What if he'd run to his parents, who were still unaware of his presence in the room, and stopped his father from snatching a Valorian dagger from its sheath?

Or his mother. Surely he could have saved his mother. It wasn't her nature to fight. She wouldn't have done it if she'd known he was there. He'd stared as she lunged at the soldier holding his sister. Soldiers cut his father down. The cloakroom door shut behind Anireh. A dagger sliced his mother's throat. There was a bright plume of blood.

Arin's ears were roaring. His eyes were dry rocks.

After the soldiers had yanked him shrieking off his mother's body, he was led with the servants into the city. The royal palace burned on its hill. He saw the corpses of the royal family hanging in the market, including the prince that Anireh was supposed to marry. It was possible that his sister was still alive, wasn't it? But two days later Arin would see her body in the street.

Even though it didn't seem like anything worse could happen, Arin swallowed his sobs, was silent in his terror. He did as he was told.
Come along nicely,
the soldier had said.

He saw an armored man stalking among his troops. Later, Arin would learn that the general had been young at the time of the invasion. But that night the man had seemed ancient, enormous: a flesh-and-metal monster.

Arin imagined how, if he could, he would kneel before the boy he had been. He'd cradle himself to his chest, let
the
child bury his wet face against his shoulder.
Shh,
Arin would tell him.
You will be lonely, but you' ll become strong. One day, you will have your revenge.

What had happened with Kestrel was not the worst thing. It did not compare.

Arin thought about this as his ship, with the rest of his victorious fleet, dropped anchor in Herran's moonlit bay. He ran a thumb along the scar that cut down through his left brow and into the hollow of his cheek. Rubbed at the line of raised flesh. A recent habit.

No, it didn't hurt anymore to think about Kestrel. He'd been a fool, but he'd had to forgive himself for worse. Sister, father, mother. As for Kestrel . . . Arin had some clarity on who he was: the sort of person who trusted too blindly, who put his heart where it didn't belong.

She might even be married to the Valorian prince by now. She was playing her games at court. No doubt winning. Maybe her father would write to her from the front and ask for more of the same excellent military advice she had given him when she'd condemned hundreds of people in the eastern plains to starvation.

Arin used to clutch his head in disgusted wonder at how fascinated he'd once been by the daughter of the Valorian general. He used to sting at her rejection. Now, though, the thought of Kestrel gave him a cold relief. Ice on a bruise.

Gratitude. Because she meant nothing to him. Wasn't that a gods-given gift, to remember her and feel nothing?
Or
if he felt something, it was really no more than the way it was to touch his scar and marvel at its long ridge, the nerve-dead skin. Arin knew that some things hurt forever, but Kestrel wasn't one of them. She was a wound that had finally healed clean.

Chapter 2

She had no one to blame but herself.

As the wagon trundled north, Kestrel stared at the changing landscape through the barred window. She watched mountains give way to flat lands with patches of dull, reddish grass. Long-legged white birds picked their way through shallow pools. Once, she saw a fox with a white chick dangling from its teeth and Kestrel's empty stomach clenched with longing. She would have gladly eaten that baby bird. She would have eaten the fox. Sometimes she wished she could eat herself. She'd swallow everything—her soiled blue dress, the shackles on her wrists, her puffy face. If she could eat herself up, there'd be no trace left of her or the mistakes she had made.

Awkwardly, she lifted her bound hands and knuckled her dry eyes. She thought that maybe she was too dehydrated to cry. Her throat hurt. She couldn't remember when the guards driving the wagon had last given her water.

They were deep into the tundra now. It was late spring—or no, Firstsummer must have already come. The tundra,
frozen
for most of the year, had come alive. There were clouds of mosquitoes. They bit every bare inch of Kestrel's skin.

It was easier to think about mosquitoes. Easier to look at the low, sloping volcanoes on the horizon. Their tops had blown off long ago. The wagon angled toward them.

Easier, too, to see lakes of astonishingly bright green-blue water.

Harder to know that their color was due to sulfide in the water, which meant they were nearing the sulfur mines.

Harder to know that her father had sent her here. Hard, horrible, the way he had looked at her, disowned her, accused her of treason. She'd been guilty. She had done every thing that he believed of her, and now she had no father.

Grief swelled in her throat. She tried to swallow it down. She had a list of things to do—what were they? Study the sky. Pretend you're one of those birds. Lean your forehead against the wagon's wall and breathe. Don't remember.

But she never could forget for long. Inevitably, she remembered her last night in the imperial palace. She remembered her letter confessing every thing to Arin.
I am the Moth. I am your country's spy,
she'd written.
I have wanted to tell you this for so long.
She'd scrawled the emperor's secret plans. It didn't matter that this was treason. It didn't matter that she was supposed to marry the emperor's son on First-summer's day, or that her father was the emperor's most trusted friend. Kestrel ignored that she'd been born Valorian. She'd written what she felt.
I love you. I miss you. I would do anything for you.

But
Arin had never read those words. Her father had. And her world came apart at the seams.

Once there was a girl who was too sure of herself. Not everyone would call her beautiful, but they admitted that she had a certain grace that intimidated more often than it charmed. She was not, society agreed, someone you wanted to cross.
She keeps her heart in a porcelain box,
people whispered, and they were right.

She didn't like to open the box. The sight of her heart was unsettling. It always looked both smaller and bigger than she expected. It thumped against the white porcelain. A fleshy red knot.

Sometimes, though, she'd put her palm on the box's lid, and then the steady pulse was a welcome music.

One night, someone else heard its melody. A boy, hungry and far from home. He was—if you must know—a thief. He crept up the walls of the girl's palace. He wriggled strong fingers into a window's slim opening. He pulled it open wide enough to fit himself and pushed inside.

While the lady slept—yes, he saw her in bed, and looked quickly away—he stole the box without realizing what the box held. He knew only that he wanted it. His nature was full of want, he was always longing after something, and the longings he understood were so painful that he did not care to examine the ones that he didn't understand.

Any member of the lady's society could have told him that his theft was a bad idea. They'd seen what happened
to
her enemies. One way or another, she always gave them their due.

But he wouldn't have listened to their advice. He took his prize and left.

It was almost like magic, her skill. Her father (
a god,
people whispered, but his daughter, who loved him, knew him to be wholly mortal) had taught her well. When a gust of wind from the gaping window woke her, she caught the thief's scent. He'd left it on the casement, on her dressing table, even on one of her bed curtains, drawn ever so slightly aside.

She hunted him.

She saw his path up the palace wall, the broken twigs of fox-ivy he'd used to clamber up, then down. In some places the ivy branches were as thick as her wrist. She saw where it had held his weight, and where it hadn't and he'd almost fallen. She went outside and tracked his footprints back to his lair.

You could say that the thief knew the moment she crossed his threshold what he held in his tightening fist. You could say that he should have known well before then. The heart shuddered in its cool white box. It hammered inside his hand. It occurred to him that the porcelain—milky, silken, so fine that it made him angry—might very well shatter. He'd end up with a handful of bloody shards. Yet he didn't relinquish what he held. You could imagine how he felt when she stood in his broken doorway, set her feet on his earthen floor, lit up the room like a terrible flame. You could. But this isn't his story.

The
lady saw the thief.

She saw how little he had.

She saw his iron-colored eyes. Sooty lashes, black brows, darker than his dark hair. A grim mouth.

Now, if the lady had been honest, she would have admitted that earlier that evening as she'd lain in bed, she'd woken for the length of three heartbeats (she had counted them as they rang loud in her quiet room). She'd seen his hand on her white-covered heart. She had closed her eyes again. The sleep that had reclaimed her had been sweet.

But honesty requires courage. As she cornered the thief in his lair, she found that she wasn't so sure of herself. She was sure of only one thing. It made her fall back a little. She lifted her chin.

Her heart had an unsteady rhythm they both could hear when she told the thief that he might keep what he had stolen.

Kestrel woke. She'd fallen asleep. The floor of the moving wagon creaked beneath her cheek. She hid her face in her hands. She was glad that her dream had ended where it did. She wouldn't have wanted to see the rest, the part where the girl's father discovered that she'd given her heart to a lowly thief, and wished her dead, and cast her out.

The wagon stopped. Its door rattled. Someone set a key into its lock. It grated. Door hinges squealed and hands reached
inside.
The two guards hauled her out, their grips firm and wary, as if she might fight them.