The Winner's Kiss (3 page)

They had reason to worry. Once, Kestrel had knocked one of the men unconscious by striking his temple with the manacles on her wrists. The second guard caught her before she could run. The last time they'd opened her door, she'd flung the contents of the waste bucket in their faces and pushed past them. She'd sprinted, blind in the sudden daylight. She was weak. Her bad knee gave out and she hit the dirt. After that, the guards stopped opening the door at all, which meant no food or water.

If they had decided to take her outside now, it was because they had arrived at their destination. For once, Kestrel didn't struggle. Her dream had numbed her. She needed to see the place where her father had condemned her to live.

The work camp was enclosed by a black iron fence the height of three men. Dead volcanoes loomed behind the two blocky stone buildings. The tundra stretched to the east and west: tattered blankets of yellow moss and red grass. It was chilly. The air was thin. Every thing smelled rotten.

This far north, twilight had a greenish cast. A line of prisoners filed into the camp through an open narrow gate. Their backs were to Kestrel, but she caught a glimpse of one woman's face in the pale green light. The expression frightened Kestrel. It was utterly blank. Although Kestrel had been following her guards quietly, those empty, glassy eyes made her dig in her heels. The guards' hands tightened. “Keep
moving,”
one of them said, but the prisoner's eyes—all of the prisoners' eyes—were shiny mirrors, and Kestrel, although she'd known her destination in the north and had known that she, too, was a prisoner, only now fully realized that she was going to transform into one of these empty-faced people.

“Don't be difficult,” said a guard.

She went boneless. She sagged in their grip. Then, as they bent and swore and tried to drag her upright, she abruptly straightened and rammed her head back into one man's face, threw the other off balance.

It was the least successful of her escape attempts. Stupid, to try anything just outside a camp that held scores of Valorian prison guards. But even as several of them swarmed out to help subdue her, she couldn't think how she could have done anything else.

Nobody hurt her. This was very Valorian. Kestrel was here to work for the empire. Damaged bodies don't work well.

After she'd been dragged inside the camp, she was shoved across the muddy yard and right up to a woman who looked Kestrel over with amused, almost friendly scorn. “Pretty princess,” she said, “what did
you
do to end up here?”

Though now dirty and disheveled, Kestrel's hair had been braided with aristocratic flair the day she'd been caught. She remembered slipping into the soft blue dress and seeing the spill of it across her lap when she'd sat at the piano on her last night in the imperial palace—when was this? Nearly a week must have passed, she thought. Had it been that long
a
time since she'd written that reckless, wretched letter? That
short
a time? How had she fallen so far so fast?

Kestrel plunged again into that icy well of fear. She was drowning in it. She couldn't even react when the woman drew the dagger from her hip.

“Hold still,” the woman said. With a few rapid slashes, she cut Kestrel's skirts straight down between the legs. From her belt, the woman unhooked a loop of thin rope that hung next to a coiled whip. She cut the rope into several short lengths that she used to tie the slashed fabric to Kestrel's legs, fashioning something like trousers. “Can't have you tripping over yourself in the mines, can we?”

Kestrel touched a knot at her thigh. Her breath evened. She felt a little better.

“Hungry, princess?”

“Yes.”

Kestrel snatched what was offered. The food vanished down her throat before she even registered what it was. She gulped the water.

“Easy,” said the woman. “You'll get sick.”

Kestrel didn't listen. Her manacles jangled as she tipped the canteen to drain the last drop.

“I don't think you need these.” The woman unlocked the manacles. The weight dropped from Kestrel's wrists. Each wrist, now bare, bore a raised welt. Her hands felt disturbingly light, like they might float away. They didn't look like they belonged to her. Grimy. Nails jagged. A nasty, infected graze over two knuckles. Had she really once played music with those hands?

Her
skin prickled. Her stomach cramped—she
had
eaten and drunk too quickly. Kestrel tucked her hands under crossed arms and hugged them to her.

“You'll be fine,” the woman said soothingly. “I hear that you've been somewhat of a troublemaker, but I'm sure you'll settle down in no time. We're fair here. Do as you're told and you'll be treated well enough.”

“Why . . .” Kestrel's tongue felt thick. “Why did you call me princess? Do you know who I am?”

The woman clucked. “Child, I don't care who you are. Soon enough, neither will you.”

Kestrel's scalp was crawling. She had the odd and yet vivid idea that tiny beetles were marching in her veins. She looked down at her hand, half expecting to see moving bumps beneath the skin. She swallowed. She wasn't frightened anymore. She was . . . what was she? Her thoughts streamed by in a blur: a magician's trick with colored rags, a long line of them pulled out of the mouth, hand over hand . . .

“What did you put in the food?” she managed to say. “The water?”

“Something to help.”

“You drugged me.” Kestrel's pulse was so fast she couldn't feel each heartbeat. They blurred into a solid vibration. The prison yard seemed to shrink. She stared at the woman and tried to focus on her features—the broad mouth, the silvered braids, a slight tilt to the eyes, the two vertical wrinkles between her brows. But the woman's smile was far away. Her features grew vague, unfinished. They pulled and drifted
apart
until Kestrel became convinced that if she reached out, her fingers would go right through the woman, whose smile broadened.

“There,” the woman said. “Much better.”

Kestrel didn't know how she'd gotten inside the cell. She was consumed by an urge to move. Before she realized it, she was pacing the short space, hands opening and closing. She couldn't stop. Her pulse thrummed in her ears: loud and high and soaring.

The drug wore off. She was spent. She sort of remembered that she'd paced for what might have been hours, but now that she was aware of the size of her cell—her wardrobes in the imperial palace had been larger—the memory didn't seem possible. But her feet ached, and she saw that she'd worn down the thin soles of her elegant shoes.

Her heart felt like lead. She was cold. She sat in a heap on the dirt floor, looking at bright mold on the stone walls: a host of tiny green starfish. She touched the knots on the ropes that tied the cut-up dress to her legs. The gesture made her feel more like herself.

Most of the escape attempts on the road north to the tundra had prob ably been doomed to fail. Still, Kestrel couldn't help hoping that her first effort might ultimately be the best. As desperate, perhaps, as the others, but maybe more likely to work. On her first morning in the wagon, the guards had stopped to water the horses. Kestrel had heard
the
voice of a Herrani. She'd whispered to him, pushing a dead masker moth through the bars of her window. She could still feel the moth between her fingertips, its furred wings. Part of her hadn't wanted to let it go. Part of her thought that if she kept the moth, she might somehow reverse her mistakes. She would have said different things to Arin as he stood in her music room. It had been only the day before. She'd sat at the piano, smoothing hands over her blue skirts, feeding him lies.

Kestrel held the papery moth. Then she dropped it into the Herrani's waiting hand.
Give this to your governor,
she said.
Tell Arin that I—

She hadn't managed more. The guards had seen her reaching out to the Herrani through the bars. They'd let the Herrani go after a rough search seemed to prove that Kestrel had not, in fact, given him anything. Had the moth dropped to the ground? Had it simply been too camouflaged for the guards to notice it? Kestrel hadn't quite been able to see through the window.

But if that Herrani man went to Arin and reported what had happened, wouldn't Arin be able to understand what she'd done and where she'd been exiled? She listed the pieces of the story in her mind. A moth: the symbol of Arin's anonymous spy. A prison wagon headed north. Even if that Herrani man along the road didn't know who Kestrel was, he'd still be able to describe her to Arin, wouldn't he? At the very least he could report that a Valorian woman had given him a moth. Arin would figure things out. He was quick, cunning.

And blind.

I
would do anything for you,
she'd written in the letter her father had found. But that part, despite feeling true when she'd scrawled it on the page, had been a lie. Kestrel had refused Arin. She hadn't been honest with him, not even when he'd begged. She'd pretended she was empty and careless and cruel.

He'd believed it. She couldn't believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.

She squashed her sneaking hope that Arin might discover what had happened and come to her rescue. That was a terrible plan. It wasn't a plan at all. She could do better than that.

All the food was drugged. The water, too. On her first morning in the camp, Kestrel ate in the yard with the other prisoners, who were slack-faced and didn't speak, even though she'd tried to talk with them. As she filed out of the camp with them in an orderly line, Kestrel felt the drug hit her heart. Her blood roared.

They entered the mining area at the base of the volcanoes. Kestrel couldn't remember having walked the path to arrive here. She also didn't care that she didn't remember. This distant awareness of not caring brought a bump of plea sure.

It was a relief to work. The urge to move, to
do
, rode high. Someone—a guard?—gave her a double basket. She eagerly began to fill it, prying crumbly yellow blocks of sulfur from the ground. She saw tunnels that led below a volcano. The prisoners who went there carried pickaxes. Kestrel was made to work out in the open. She gathered—the real
ization
was plucked like a stone from the rushing river of the drug—that she was too new to be trusted with an ax.

All the guards carried looped whips attached to their belts, but Kestrel didn't see them being used. The guards—they could not be Valoria's best and brightest, if commissioned to serve in the worst corner of the empire—were content to keep a lazy eye on the prisoners, who obeyed directions easily. The guards talked among themselves, complaining about the smell.

The boiled egg odor was very strong here. She noticed this without being bothered by it or by the sweat that stained her dress even as she shivered hard (was it very cold, or was this just the nature of the drug?). She loaded each of the two baskets attached by a flexible pole that she heaved up onto her shoulders. The weight felt good; it was so
good
to dig and lift and carry and dump and do it all over again.

At some point she staggered under the baskets. She was given water. Her marvelous strength returned.

By twilight, she was hollowed out. Her good sense returned. She refused the food served when the prisoners had filed through the black iron gate and into the yard.

“This food is different,” said the silver-braided guard from yesterday, whom Kestrel understood to be in charge of the female prisoners. “Last night I gave you a taste of how nice it'd be to work, but from now on you'll get a dose of something different at night.”

“I don't want it.”

“Princess, no one cares what you want.”

“
I can work without it.”

“No,” the woman said gently, “you can't.”

Kestrel backed away from the long table with its bowls of soup.

“Eat, or I'll force it down you.”

The guard had told the truth. The food contained a different drug, one with a metallic scent like silver. It made everything slow and dark as Kestrel was led into her prison block and to her cell.

“Why doesn't the empire drug all its slaves?” Kestrel mumbled before she was locked up.

The woman laughed, the sound murky, underwater. “You'd be surprised how many tasks require a mind.”

Kestrel felt foggy.

“New prisoners are my favorites. We haven't had one like you in a long time. New ones are always entertaining, at least while they last.”

Kestrel thought she heard the key turn. She dropped into sleep.

She tried to eat and drink as little as she could get away with. She remembered the guard's words . . . until, in fact, she no longer remembered them and avoided full meals simply out of the awareness that the drugged food changed her and she didn't like it. She'd tip her bowl of soup out onto the muddy prison yard when no one was looking. She crumbled bread and let it fall from her hands.

Still,
she was hungry. She was thirsty. Sometimes, she ignored her nagging worry and filled her belly.

I would do anything for you
. The words echoed in her mind. Often, she couldn't quite sort out who'd said them. She thought she might have said them to her father.

Then she'd feel suddenly ill, nauseated with an emotion she would have recognized as shame if she'd had a clearer head. No, she hadn't said that to her father. She had betrayed him. Or had
he
betrayed
her
?

It was confusing. She was certain only of the sense of betrayal, thick and hot in her chest.

Kestrel had moments of clarity before the morning drug shot her up, or before the twilight drug dragged her down. In those moments, when she could smell the sulfur on her and feel its dust in her eyelashes, saw the yellow stuff beneath her fingernails and powdering her skin like pollen, she'd envision those words, written in ink on paper.
I would do anything for you
. She knew exactly who had written them and why. She became aware that she had been pretending to herself when she'd believed her words had been untrue, or that any of the limits she'd set between her and Arin mattered, because in the end she was here and he was free. She
had
done every thing she could. And he didn't even know.