The Winner's Kiss (5 page)

“Come with me,” Kestrel said to them, though this offer was foolish enough to border on suicidal. How would she get them to the gate without being noticed? She couldn't save the entire camp. How would they survive on the tundra, and not be caught? But . . . “Come with me,” she said again. She moved back down the hallway, toward the exit. She beckoned them after her. They stood still. When Kestrel took a woman's hand, it was snatched back.

Finally, Kestrel picked up the cell door key that had fallen to the ground and pressed it into a prisoner's hand. The fingers stayed loose. The key dropped.

Frustration surged through Kestrel—and relief, and shame at her relief. She wanted to apologize. Yet she wanted most of all to live, and she knew—the knowledge was sudden, lancing, sharp—that if she didn't leave
now
, she would die here.

Kestrel clutched the gate key. “I'll leave the gate open,” she promised.

No one replied.

She turned and ran.

It wasn't dark enough. She cursed the greenish sky. Someone was going to spy her shadow, creeping along the outside wall of her prison block.

But no one did. The windows of the guards' barracks burned brightly. She heard laughter. She saw one lone guard by the gate. The young man was leaning lazily against the bars.

Still crouched in the shadow of the prison barracks, Kestrel shifted the heavy key in her palm, its jagged teeth pointing out.

The guard at the gate shifted. She thought she saw him close his eyes as he sighed and settled into a more comfortable position.

Swiftly, her tattered shoes silent over the ground, Kestrel sped toward him. She swung her fist with the key at his head.

He lay in a heap at her feet, his temple bleeding. Kestrel fumbled with the key, her breath loud, gasping. It wasn't until she moved to set the key into the gate that she thought of the possibility that it was the wrong key, that she had been tricked, or Verex had, or the senator.

Horror spiked through her. But the key went in smoothly and it turned, making no more sound than a knife in butter.

A giddy rush. Her heart soaring in her chest. Her ribs spread wide with relief. A laughing breath.

She pushed the gate open. She slipped out onto the tundra, stealthy at first, then running as fast as a deer.

She was free.

Her foot plunged into a puddle. The ground was soggy, the vegetation short and shrubby. Little cover. Nowhere to hide. She was too exposed. Her breath rasped. Her heart faltered. Her legs were hot and thick and slow.

Then: horses.

A sob of fear burst past her lips. She heard them behind her. Fanned out wide. Galloping. A hunt.

A shout. She'd been seen.

Little rabbit, little fox.

Run.

She fled. She couldn't really see where she was going, couldn't look back. Gasps tore at her throat. She stumbled, nearly fell, forced herself forward. She heard the horses stop and that was worse, because the guards must be dismounting now, they were close, and she didn't want to know this. It could not be over.

But someone caught her from behind. Pitched her down. She screamed against the wet earth.

She was dragged back inside the prison gate. She refused to walk. They pulled her through the mud and then finally carried her.

As on her first day in the camp, she was brought before the silver-braided woman. A thin purple welt cut across the woman's throat. Kestrel should have killed her. She should have locked all the women prisoners in their cells. Her escape
had
been too quickly discovered. She hadn't had enough of a head start. Yet another mistake.

“I told you that if you behaved, no one would hurt you,” the woman said. She unhooked the whip from her belt.

“No.” Kestrel shrank. “Please. I won't do it again.”

“I know you won't.” The woman shook the looped whip. It snapped out loose at her thigh.

“That makes no sense.” Kestrel's voice got threaded and high. “I won't be able to work if you do that.”

“Not at first. But afterward I think you'll work much better.”

“No. Please. Why punish me if I won't remember it? I won't, I'll be just like the other prisoners, I'll forget it, I'll forget every thing.”

“You'll remember long enough.”

Kestrel twisted wildly, but hands were already opening the back of her dress, she was being turned around, pushed up against the gate, tied to the bars. The wind whispered across her bare back.

I have been whipped before,
she heard the memory of Arin's voice.
Did you think I couldn't bear the punishment for being caught?

Kestrel strained against her bonds, terrified.

“Princess,” said the guard behind her.

Kestrel's muscles went tight. Her shoulders hunched. She couldn't breathe.

“Every new prisoner shines with a little light,” the guard said. “Your light happens to shine brighter. It's best for everyone if it goes out.”

Kestrel pressed her forehead against the bars. She stared
at
the tundra. Her breath was coming again now. Hard and fast.

There was a sharp, whistling sound like a bird taking off.

The whip came down. It carved into her. Something wet ran down her ribs.

She wasn't brave. She could hear herself as it continued. She wasn't anything she recognized.

It used to be that Kestrel would treasure the memory of Arin singing to her. She'd worry that she'd somehow forget it. The sliding low notes. The sweet intervals, or the way he'd sustain a long line, and how she loved the sound of him taking a breath as much as she did the way he could hold a musical phrase aloft until it ended exactly where it should.

But after the guards untied her from the gate, when her back was on fire and she couldn't walk and her bones were a trembling liquid, she looked at the cup in the woman's hand. Kestrel reached for it. She begged to drink.

The cup was set to her lips. She caught the silvery scent of the nighttime drug. The thought of becoming just like the other prisoners no longer seemed so bad.

It would be a blessing to forget.

After all, what was there to remember?

Someone she never could have had. Friends dead or gone. A father who did not love her.

The cup tipped. Water ran over her tongue, cool and delicious. She forgot the pain, forgot where she was, forgot who she'd been, forgot that she had ever been afraid of forgetting.

Chapter 3

Arin added the captured Valorian vessels to his fleet.

Some of the Dacran sailors who had been sent to scour the aqueducts found the source of the poison that had been flowing into the city's water supply. It was a large vat lodged in a mountain tunnel that connected the water's path to arcades that came down the mountainside in a series of tiered arches. The vat was cleverly designed; it leaked a thick, brownish liquid in a dose measured by internal weights and counterweights.

When Arin saw it, brought forth from one of the old mountain trenches that had been used ten years ago by Herrani slaves to construct the tunnel, he had wanted to pitch the vat off the cliff and watch it shatter on the rocks below. Instead, he helped carry it carefully down the mountain and stored it in the city's arsenal to be used against the Valorians in case of a siege.

Every one in the city drank rainwater collected in barrels or brought in from the countryside. They all went a little
thirsty
until Arin, having waited a few days for the aqueduct to flush itself clean, drank some of its water and felt no different than he had before.

“Do you really think it could work?” Sarsine asked. Arin's cousin lay in her bed in his family home, still pallid. Her movements were slow and she slept most of the day, but her eyes had grown brighter in the past few days.

“It
does
work.” Arin described the different parts of the miniature cannon he had designed in the Dacran castle forge. “It's what made the eastern queen agree to ally with us,” he added, though with an uncomfortable sense that this perhaps had not been the whole explanation for the queen's decision. “This weapon might give us the edge we need against the empire, but we must make more. Sarsine, I need you.” He brushed lank hair from her forehead and looked into the face that reminded him of his father, for whom she'd been named—an unfashionable, solid-sounding name she'd hated as a girl. He cupped her cheek. “I can't do this alone.”

She reached for his hand and held it. She no longer looked so weak. Sarsine smiled. “You're
not
alone,” she told him.

Eastern reinforcements came by ship roughly a week after the sea battle, and Arin was hugely relieved to see the new sloops drop anchor in his harbor. The Valorian counterattack would come soon—possibly somewhere along the western coast, he suspected.

One
of the new arrivals in the harbor created quite a commotion. A cage was lowered from the largest sloop into a launch and rowed slowly to the piers. As the launch approached, Arin saw that the Dacrans at the oars were stiff and silent, edged as far away as possible from the cage. One figure, though, leaned against the bars, crooning to the pacing animal inside. Arin immediately recognized the young man. He felt a surge of gladness. He hadn't expected Roshar to come.

The eastern prince looked up to see Arin standing on the pier. A grin split his face. Arin used to think that Roshar had a skull's face; the nose and ears had been cut off. But Roshar looked so ferociously alive, his black eyes shining and lined with green paint, his teeth white and even, that although Arin remembered what he'd thought when he'd had his first shocking glimpse of Roshar's mutilations, that memory felt distant now.

Roshar, ignoring the startled cries of his crewman, leaped from the launch onto the pier. The launch rocked in the water. The small tiger growled.

Arms folded across his chest, Arin walked to the end of the pier. “Did you have to bring the tiger?”

“I kept him hungry during the journey here, just for you,” Roshar said. “Go give him a nice snuggle, won't you? He's come all this way to see you. The least you could do is give him one of your arms to eat. Too much? What about a hand? At least some fingers. Arin, where's your hospitality?”

Arin, laughing, embraced his friend.

He
choked on his first lungful of smoke. “This is vile.”

“I told you you'd like it.” Roshar bit the stem of his pipe, lighting the tobacco. He shook the match out. For a few moments, he smoked in silent contentment. Both the silence and the contentment were, in Arin's experience, rare for the prince. “Try it again,” Roshar said, “or I'll think you're rude.”

Arin, ignoring him, went to open a window. Sweet warm air washed into his father's study.

“Arin,” Roshar complained. “Shut the window. I'm cold. Why is your country so damned
cold
?”

“It's summer.” The first day of the season, which Valorians celebrated as Firstsummer, had already passed.