The Winner's Kiss (25 page)

It struck Arin that Roshar could have pressed Kestrel for information before, back in the city, and if he hadn't, it wasn't likely out of deference to her ill health and recovery, or because he'd assumed there was nothing to be gained from digging around in Kestrel's uncertain memory. It was because Roshar wouldn't have trusted what she had to say . . . then. If he trusted her word now it was only because she'd
been
damaged by their enemy. Which made her—Arin saw the idea take shape in Roshar's eyes—a motivated asset to their cause.

“I don't like what you're thinking,” Arin said.

“She could be useful.”

“You will not
use her
.”

“The general's daughter? We'd be fools not to. You talk about her as if she's made of spun glass. Know what I see? Steel.”

“You won't make her part of this war. I'm taking her back to the city.”

“No,” Kestrel said from behind them. “You're not.”

Arin turned.

The sight of her. It wasn't just that she looked lost in his too-large shirt, or how her eyes were tired holes. It was the set of her jaw. The way she lifted her chin. He'd seen this before. All the ships that shattered against the rock of her determination. How she'd break herself, too, if she must, to get what she wanted.

Lock this slave up
. Her words, uttered the day she'd fought a duel for his sake, still hurt. What had followed: the clench of helplessness. Being outnumbered by her father's private guard. The first blow. The way she hadn't looked back as she'd let the door shut behind her. Humiliation. A sort of appalled admiration. Indebtedness. Later: her, injured and limping across the villa's lawn.

It had changed him. Exposed something running inside him like a vein of soft gold. A slow attraction. Growing, despite himself, into care . . . and more.

That incident last autumn when she'd tricked him, had
him
locked in a cell while she rode to the duel, loomed in his mind as a little story that told the larger one of how she'd been broken, and he'd been kept safe, and how his safety and her brokenness had broken him.

Now she stared him down. His gaze traced the fall of a single, newly plaited braid over her shoulder, its color obscure in the twilight. He recalled the fold of the dead Valorian girl's body over his blade. His sister being dragged to the cloakroom.

“You can't stay,” he told her.

“It's not your choice.”

“It's not safe.”

“That doesn't matter.”

“I won't allow it.”

“You don't command this army.”

Roshar smiled.

“No,” said Arin. “Don't.”

“What do you propose, my lady?”

“My prince, I wish to enlist. I swear to serve, and rout your enemy, and wash my blade with his blood.”

“How savagely Valorian of you. Is this the traditional military oath? I like it. I accept.”

She nodded slightly and cast Arin an unreadable look—tinged, perhaps, with something like regret, though it was hard to know exactly what had affected her. Maybe it was his expression, or maybe a memory floating invisibly in the darkening summer air, seen only by her.

She left them.

“If you send her into battle,” Arin told Roshar, “ she'll fall in the first wave.”

“
Why, because she's half your size? I'll wager she's had more training than the average foot soldier.”

“She has no talent for it and little experience.”

“She wants this, Arin. I don't blame her for wanting it, and quite frankly I think her help could be crucial.”

“Her
advice
. Let her advise, then. Enlist her, rank her, if you must. But keep her out of combat.”

“All right,” Roshar said. “For you.”

Arin turned to leave. His head was brimming, his heart sore.

Roshar touched his shoulder, surprisingly gentle. “I know you want her to be safe forever, but it's just not that kind of world.”

Arin begged a pair of Herrani officers to share a tent. He shouldered the spare one, loosely bundled. He found a woman about Kestrel's height and bartered a little boot knife for a set of decent clothes. He rummaged through supply wagons and stared dully at the extra suits of armor: all far too large. Swords: too heavy. He considered a gun among the many rows of them, hidden in a false bottom below bales of horse feed. Unsure, he left the guns where they lay. Finally, he snagged an eastern crossbow. Even if Roshar kept his word and tried to keep Kestrel from any real military action, there was always the possibility of a surprise attack.

He brought every thing to Kestrel. It was full night. Light from a nearby fire flickered in her face. He tried not to look at her. He crouched and began to set the tent's frame. He drove a stake into the earth. Drier now.

There
was a pause after he hammered the first stake in. He straightened.

“I thought . . .” Kestrel's voice trailed into the dark. She didn't say what she thought. She touched his wrist, light as a moth.

Arin flinched. He didn't mean to. He wanted to undo it, yet flitting through his mind was a nightmarish sequence of images: a masker moth, the signed treaty in Kestrel's wintry hand, the Valorian girl he had killed at sea. His mother's bloody black hair.

Kestrel drew back. He seemed to feel her echo his hurt. “I can do that.” She took the stone from his hand. “My father taught me how to pitch a tent. I remember.”

What else do you remember?
Arin wanted to ask, and was repulsed by himself. He knew how much what she
did
remember wounded her. He hadn't thought it'd be possible to hate the general more, yet there it was: a hot jet of hatred. He said, “I won't spare your father.”

The shadows were too deep between them. He couldn't read her face. She said, “I don't want you to.”

Chapter 21

They continued south. Arin kept his distance from her. Once or twice, she rode Javelin alongside his horse. It went badly. He didn't know how to fix himself. He couldn't accept this.

The first time she drew her horse up to him, he burst out, “For gods' sake, you don't even have armor.”

“I know you're worried,” she said quietly.

“Your father wanted you to enlist. You fought him. Your music. You loved it more. You told me once that you didn't want to go to war because you didn't want to kill.”

“This is important to me.”

“You wouldn't have done this before.”

“I know. I've changed.”

He heard the truth of this in a way he never had. She'd said this many times, even insisted on it: the woman he'd known was gone. He heard again his promise to her in his tent. He felt the absence of hers.

Yet it was wrong to feel hurt in the face of her larger grief, and the wrongness of it made him feel small. He looked at
the
sun in her hair, the ease of her seat in the saddle. Beyond her: a file of cavalry, an eastern pennant snapping blue and green. Fear choked him. It was hard to hear what she said next. A promise to be careful, to take no risks. It was so impossible and absurd to make any promise like that in war that he couldn't even reply.

Eventually, she fell silent.

The next time, also on the road, he noticed her weaving Javelin through the ranks to approach him. He twitched his horse left and found a reason to be somewhere else. At night, he waited until she had pitched her tent. He made sure not to set his nearby.

She continued to glow at the edge of his vision. When camp broke at dawn, he'd catch sight of her bright hair, notice her talking effortlessly with the Herrani, or trying to learn Dacran from the easterners. He watched the soldiers' wariness dissolve. They began to smile at her arrival, to like her despite themselves and her appearance: the very image of a Valorian warrior girl.

She kept close company with Roshar. Arin saw from afar the way the prince teased her. Heard her laugh. It squeezed a fist inside him. At dusk, the pair of them played cards. Roshar bled the air with a string of eastern curses when he lost.

On an evening when they were about ten leagues from Errilith, Arin came to Roshar's tent, which was large enough
to
accommodate a small table, a set of canvas-backed chairs, and a collapsible bed woven in the style and colors of the nomadic plainspeople. The ticking had feathers, not straw, and the table offered roasted fowl, hulled red berries, and a bowl of eastern rice rendered a shocking orange by a spice Arin had tasted before, and found tangy, sweet, and a little bitter. There was a gourd of wine and two pewter cups. Two plates.

“And lo,” Roshar said from where he lounged in his teak chair with its swoop of green cloth. “The rains opened, and the stranger was a stranger no more.”

Arin looked at him.

“Poetry,” Roshar explained, “though it doesn't scan so well in your tongue.”

“You're expecting someone.”

“Maybe. You'll do for now. Sit with me.”

“Kestrel?”

“Pardon me?”

“Are you expecting Kestrel.” The question came out flat.

Roshar coughed. “Nooo,” he drawled, but Arin didn't like the humor in his voice. He sat anyway and watched Roshar prepare a plate for him, which wasn't at all expected of an eastern prince and his guest, but Roshar sometimes liked to play the prince and sometimes didn't. “Kestrel has raised the issue of Valorian scouts. We can't expect to be wholly unnoticed, tramping along the main southern road.”

“There's been no attack.” Which was what Arin thought would ensue if the Valorians became aware of their movements.

“She wagers that the general has noticed the concentra
tion
of our forces at Lerralen. Whether he knows of this contingent is unclear, but he might be refraining from attacking us because he doesn't want to position forces north of Errilith when his supply lines run south of it. Or maybe he thinks we'll choose to defend the wrong estate and he can seize his prize unchallenged. Why confront us now and pay the price in blood if we'll waste our energies elsewhere while he takes what he wants? Of course, Errilith could be the wrong estate.”

“If Kestrel says that's the one, she's right.”

“I agree.” Roshar drank his wine.

Arin tried to eat.

“Have you ever bested her at cards? Borderlands? Anything? She
murders
me,” Roshar complained.

“You spend a good deal of time with her.”

Roshar's cup paused in midair. “Arin.”

Swift jealousy. A caged resentment.

“I'm not—shall we say—
interested
in Kestrel.” The prince's expression changed slightly, and in the pause that followed, a slow thought occurred to Arin, one that offered an entirely new explanation for why Roshar's soldiers had done nothing when Arin had pushed him into the shadowed trees. “Women don't interest me that way,” Roshar said.

It seemed to Arin that he had understood this for a long time without actually realizing that he did. He caught Roshar's expression, which on another man Arin might have called tentative, but on the prince looked closer to soft curiosity. His black eyes were quiet. Arin felt things shift between them into more intricate patterns than before. “I know,” Arin told him.

“
Oh
do
you?” A wicked grin. “Would you like to know for sure?”

Arin flushed. “Roshar . . .” He floundered for what to say.

The prince laughed at him. He filled Arin's cup. “Drink fast, little Herrani. As you astutely observed, I have someone else coming to night, and while your company is almost always welcome, his is company I will best enjoy alone.”

Kestrel waited outside Arin's tent. It was a muzzy sort of night, too warm for a fire. The camp was a dark terrain. He didn't see her clearly, just the shape of her.

“I brought you something.” She held out her hand and dropped a round object into his.

He knew it instantly. He ran fingers over its firm, lightly pebbled surface. “An orange.”

“I found a tree not far from camp and took as many as I could carry. Most I gave away. This one, I thought we could share.”

He jumped the orange from one hand to the other, marveling at it.

She said, “I didn't know whether you like them.”

“I do.”

“Did you tell this to me once? Did I forget?”

“I never told you. Actually . . .” He rolled it in the well of one palm. “I love them.”

He could have sworn that she smiled in the dark. “Then what are you waiting for?”

He
dug his thumb in and peeled it open. Its perfume sprayed the air. He halved it and gave Kestrel her share.

They sat on the grass outside his tent. They'd camped in a meadow not far from the road. He touched the grass, sleek beneath his fingers. He ate. The fruit was vibrant on his tongue. It had been years. “Thank you.”

He thought he saw her mouth curve, and he was washed by a breathless nervousness. He spat a seed into his palm and wondered what little kernel lay in the folds of this moment. Then he told himself to stop thinking. An orange. A rare enough plea sure. Just eat.

After a moment, he asked, “How are you?”

“Better. Before . . . it was like I was trying to navigate a new country where there was no such thing as the ground. At least now I know where I stand.” He heard the sound of her brushing her hands clean, and then the sound of things unsaid, of words weighed and found wanting. Sorrow, radiating from her. The low throb of it.

Gently, he asked, “Are you truly better?”

He heard her breath catch.

“You don't have to be better.”

The silence expanded.

He said, “I wouldn't be.”

Her voice was a mere thread. “How would you be?”

He thought of the wrongness of loss, how as a child he'd step right into it, and fall, and then would blame himself not only for every thing he hadn't done when the soldiers had invaded his home, but also for his fathomless grief. He should see the gaping holes in his life. Avoid them. Step carefully,
Arin,
why can't you step carefully? Mother, father, sister. What could you say about someone who walked daily into his grief and lived at the bottom of its hole and didn't even want to come out?