The Winner's Kiss (37 page)

His god was amused.
If she doesn't believe in me, how can I believe in her?

The general had landed. Arin could see him. He saw Kestrel see him. Several columns of Valorians pushed up from the shore onto the beach.

Roshar ordered his vanguard forward.

Death bit the nape of Arin's neck, where a cat bites her kitten.
Maybe,
death murmured,
I' ll show her the same kind of mercy I' ll show you.

Arin's heart thumped. His blood rushed. He put a free hand to his stinging skin and drew it away, expecting blood.

Nothing.

A push of damp wind at his back. The trembling of the horse beneath him. A cannon boomed. The animal screamed, reared again. It plunged forward, through the lines of the vanguard, right into the oncoming Valorians.

She couldn't see Arin. She couldn't see him, and it felt as if she couldn't see anything at all.

The cannons held their breath. Vanguard crashed into
vanguard.
She saw the collision happen a few ranks ahead. The spurt of blood. Hideous masks of fear and hatred. An arm shorn from the shoulder. Bodies shoved from horses, crumpled into the sand beneath hooves. And the cruelty of what she couldn't see.

Where
was
he?

Javelin hadn't moved. He was stone, which made her realize that she was, too. One hand clutched a sword as if she could squeeze the hilt into nonexistence. A sword. Her, with a sword. She had no skill for it.

Terror snaked through her, slipping and winding.

The Valorians hadn't yet broken through the front lines. Artillery couldn't be used, for fear of hitting one's own. There were a few brief moments before an enemy reached her.

And maybe ahead, somewhere, was what she realized she feared most of all. Arin's emptied eyes. His blood spilling, spent.

She kneed Javelin forward and rode up through the ranks.

He was nearly thrown from his horse. A Valorian slammed into him. Arin caught a blow to his armored chest, sucked in a sharp breath. Felt the bruise, maybe a fracture. No blood, he thought. For the smallest of moments it was hard to focus, hard even to know what his hands were doing or what he saw and whom he fought. He asked his god a formless question. If he could have put it into words, he would have asked if the god's mercy was to have let him live for so long. Twenty years is better than nine. Or was the god's mercy to die
this
way, and not a different, worse way? Or
simply
to come home, to the haven of the gods. Mother, father, sister. A wash of loneliness, of longing, of
yes
. Yes, maybe that was it, maybe that was what the god had meant. Mercy. A promise: that the final moment before this world became the next one would be as sweet as love.

But he could not think this, or understand it. He simply felt it, this question that was many questions condensed into an iron bead, the head of a pin, a tiny hard point of dread and hope and relief.

His
horse
. His damned horse. The animal kept straining its will against Arin's. This horse was going to get him killed. Arin tried to feel worried.

His sword opened someone's belly. He wasn't sure how. His blade shouldn't have gotten past Valorian armor. But entrails probed out of a gash. A slow, wet unfolding.

Arin ended it.

To come home,
mused his god, who had been able to take the iron bead of Arin's heart and make it a feather, and could separate each barb from the other, all along down the quill. The god ran a finger down the unnaturally fanned vane.
Is that what you think I meant by mercy? Is that what you want?

Well, Arin.

Well.

Kestrel didn't understand why no one attacked her. Then she did, and felt stupid and grateful. Her armor. Her Valorian looks. Roshar's forces knew her, knew her horse. But to the Valorians, she seemed to be one of their own. Oddly posi
tioned,
if they thought about it, but no one thought. They gurgled from cut throats. They drove swords so far into bodies that their fists vanished inside someone else's flesh.

She moved Javelin among them—Valorian, Dacran, Herrani.
Little ghost
. Yes. She didn't exist. Even when someone's blood sprayed her cheek, it didn't feel real. No one touched her.

Until she saw Roshar hack a sword from someone's grip, smash his shield into the Valorian's nose, and slice in at the neck. The prince kneed his horse out of the path of the body's fall. He wheeled his horse and saw Kestrel. “Where's Arin?” he shouted.

Kestrel's voice didn't work. “I don't know,” she finally said, the whisper hoarse. Roshar wouldn't have been able to hear even if he weren't several feet away.

But a nearby Valorian heard. He'd seen the look between her and the prince, had heard them speak the Dacran tongue. A cavalry officer. He shouldered his horse into hers. Reached. Grabbed her throat.

“A scout?” His dark eyes were narrow, his teeth bared. “In the vanguard? Name your regiment.”

She gasped.

“Traitor.” He knocked the sword from her limp hand.

“Kestrel!” Roshar.

Too far away.

She strained to breathe. She didn't break his gaze. Whispering something she knew he couldn't hear, she watched the Valorian lean forward, loosen his grip just slightly. Kestrel reached for her dagger and drove it into his armpit.

He
grunted, let go. She jerked her dagger free and pierced his throat.

His weight sagged against her. He was gasping in her ear, the sound sticky and wet, blood gushing onto her as she tried to keep her seat, tried to push the armored officer away. But his horse balked. The Valorian gripped her, his brown eyes staring, vengeful, fading. With the last of his strength, he dragged her down with him. He pulled her from her horse.

Arin's horse was bad, but it'd be much worse to be without one. He cut a space around him. The frontier between army and army was dissolving. Kestrel must be several ranks behind him. The Valorians would soon reach her.
Stay close,
he'd said. His anxiety rose, making him vicious. Some part of him stared at what his hands and body did, but the larger part of him grew yet larger, and took satisfaction. There was plea sure and murder along with worry at his plea sure. Running through all of it: a sheer stream of fear.
Stay close
.

He turned his horse back.

And if he couldn't find her?

Farther back. Still farther.

The Valorians had already eaten their way into the rank where she and Javelin had been.

His lungs squeezed shut.
Where?
he demanded.

The general?
his god coyly answered.
Allow me to point you the way
. . .

Arin's nerves screamed.

Open your eyes,
death said.

Look, my love, and see.

Arin
did. He saw, not far away, Javelin standing amid the boil of war. His rider was gone.

Kestrel's cheek was in the sand. Her mouth was full of it. She coughed and spat, her back and shoulders sinking into the beach, and pushed at the dead body heaped onto her. She tried to lever it off. Her arms gave out. She saw the misting sky. Her horse, close. She pushed again at the officer. His armor made him heavier. She was soaked with his blood. She felt it still pumping, heard the chaos around her. Panic stitched down her spine.

She shoved. The body didn't budge. She tried harder, felt the weight press her chest. Finally, she screamed.

Something slammed into Arin. He kept his seat, wheeled to see his attacker, saw the Valorian's grin—and then, too late, the serrated steel along the length of the man's boot. Arin noticed it right before the Valorian used his foot like a knife and slashed the exposed ribs of Arin's horse.

The animal's cry pierced Arin's ears. He was pitched to the ground.

In war,
her father sometimes said,
you might live, you might die. But if you panic, death is the only outcome.

She hated him for his coolness. His rules.

But.

The body crushed her.

But
. . . the sand.

She tried to see if she could turn onto her belly. Wriggling, she shifted beneath the body. As she strained to turn, she waited for someone to notice her, and attack. She waited for hooves to crush her skull. But Javelin stood solidly, right where he'd been the moment she'd fallen. Cavalry maneuvered around the harmless horse. No one was looking at the ground.

Worming into the sand, she flipped onto her front and began to dig, sweeping the sand away from her as if swimming. She dug her elbows into the trough she'd made and pulled.

She slipped free.

Arin scrambled to his feet. Dodged—just in time—the kick of the serrated boot to his head. With both hands (where was his sword?), he seized the Valorian's ankle and hauled the man off his horse.

Kestrel's shaking hands sifted through the sand for her dagger. Her dagger. She must find it. She could not lose it.

When she found the ridge of it beneath a veil of red sand, tears pricked her eyes. She seized its hilt.

Javelin was steady, waiting for her. She wanted to lean against him and press her face into his hide. She wanted to become a horse so that she could thank him in a way he would understand.

She
went to mount him—then saw, over the rise of her saddle, Arin.

From the beach, Arin snatched a sword—his? didn't matter—and was already swiping it down through the air toward the fallen Valorian's neck when the man surged to his feet, struck Arin's blade aside with his own, and drove its point toward Arin.

Arin countered, heard the skittering of steel against steel, and felt the vibration, the pressure. He felt the pressure give. The man's blade sank for an instant.

But it was a trick. In that moment of seeming weakness, the Valorian's other hand went for his dagger, which he stabbed into a gap where Arin's armor joined.

Kestrel was stumbling forward on the sand, her legs too sluggish; she couldn't move fast enough. The Valorian's back was to her. She could see Arin's face, the crease between his brows, the inward quality of his expression. And then something shifting: a flare, a recognition.

The Valorian stabbed. Arin cried out.

The dagger bit into his ribs. Pain laced up his side. He struck back, sword dancing harmlessly down the Valorian's armor, doing no more damage than to cut the laces of the man's right boot.

“
You're mine,” said the Valorian.

Which was what death always said. Arin, surprised to hear the god's words come from a human mouth, faltered. He felt strange. He thought,
Ah
. He thought,
Grateful.
He welcomed the god's warning, realized that he'd always wanted to know before it happened. He wouldn't want to blink too suddenly out of this life.

But he loved this life. He loved the girl in it.

His heart punched hard, rebelled.

Too late. The base of the Valorian's blade was coming at his head, angled for his neck.

Arin tried to duck. The hilt slammed into his temple.

Darkness bled across his vision. He couldn't feel his legs. He tried to hear his god, but he heard only silence, and then he heard nothing at all.

Chapter 33

She saw Arin go down. She skidded in the sand as she ran, her ears roaring. Her mind closed over. A shaking dread.

A few paces away. Her dagger was tight in her hand. The Valorian's back was an armored wall. The man raised his sword again. He didn't hear her come at him.

But where,
where
? She had a dagger, but there was nowhere to stab—not the back of the neck, which she couldn't reach, not the torso or even the legs. He was armored from shoulders to boots.
A dagger wants flesh,
her father would say.
Find it.

A great pressure in her chest. Desperation as she came up behind. She didn't know what to do, couldn't think, and then it was as if someone else noticed the looseness at the top of one of the man's boots and dropped her to her knees in the sand. She seized the boot's top, yanked it back, and slashed the ropy tendon at the ankle.

He screamed. She seemed to feel him feel the excruciating pain of the cut tendon curling up into his calf. His collapse.
The
pumping agony. How a girl climbed onto him—feral, foxlike. But: a girl? But: her hair, her skin, her eyes, her armor. Not the enemy. The enemy?

Then the dagger found his throat and he knew exactly what she was.

Her hand, her arm: bright red. She couldn't let go of the dagger. She made herself sheathe it. She needed her hands, she needed Arin.

The sprawl of him. She was weeping, crouched in the sand, empty fingers wild when she reached him, searched him, found the dagger in his side, his blackened brow, purple cheek, split skin. She touched his face and felt his head loll. A pulse? Or just her own pulse? Her body vibrated with it, she couldn't keep her fingers steady against the hollow under his jaw.

She made herself look again at the dagger in his side, and unbuckled the armor to see better.

Only the tip of the dagger had entered the flesh. It was stuck between the ribs. Her sudden hope was savage.

She didn't want to pull the dagger out—she had nothing to stanch a flow of blood—and returned her attention to Arin's head. This time, when her fingers went for his pulse, she found it and knew it to be his. Her tears flowed fresh.

The wound in his side was minor. Yet a blow to the head can do anything, can kill, paralyze, take away his senses, his mind. It could make him sleep forever.

“Arin, wake up.”

Once the words came, they didn't stop.

“We have to move. We can't stay here.”

“Please.”

“
Please wake up.”

“I love you. Don't leave me. Wake up.”

“Listen to me. Arin?”