The Winner's Curse

12

Arin had bathed. He was wearing house clothes, and when Kestrel saw him standing in the doorway his shoulders were relaxed. Without being invited, he strode into the room, pulled out the other chair at the small table where Kestrel waited, and sat. He arranged his arms in a position of negligent ease and leaned into the brocaded chair as if he owned it. He seemed, Kestrel thought, at home.

But then, he had also seemed so in the forge. Kestrel looked away from him, stacking the Bite and Sting tiles on the table. It occurred to her that it was a talent for Arin to be comfortable in such different environments. She wondered how she would fare in his world.

He said, “This is not a sitting room.”

“Oh?” Kestrel mixed the tiles. “And here I thought we were sitting.”

His mouth curved slightly. “This is a writing room. Or, rather”—he pulled his six tiles—“it was.”

Kestrel drew her Bite and Sting hand. She decided to show no sign of curiosity. She would not allow herself to be distracted. She arranged her tiles facedown.

“Wait,” he said. “What are the stakes?”

She had given this careful consideration. She took a small wooden box from her skirt pocket and set it on the table. Arin picked up the box and shook it, listening to the thin, sliding rattle of its contents. “Matches.” He tossed the box back onto the table. “Hardly high stakes.”

But what were appropriate stakes for a slave who had nothing to gamble? This question had troubled Kestrel ever since she had proposed the game. She shrugged and said, “Perhaps I am afraid to lose.” She split the matches between them.

“Hmm,” he said, and they each put in their ante.

Arin positioned his tiles so that he could see their engravings without revealing them to Kestrel. His eyes flicked to them briefly, then lifted to examine the luxury of his surroundings. This annoyed her—both because she could glean nothing from his expression and because he was acting the gentleman by averting his gaze, offering her a moment to study her tiles without fear of giving away something to him. As if she needed such an advantage.

“How do you know?” she said.

“How do I know what?”

“That this was a writing room. I have never heard of such a thing.” She began to position her own tiles. It was only when she saw their designs that she wondered whether Arin had really been polite in looking away, or if he had been deliberately provoking her.

She concentrated on her draw, relieved to see that she had a good set. A tiger (the highest tile); a wolf, a mouse, a fox (not a bad trio, except the mouse); and a pair of scorpions. She liked the Sting tiles. They were often underestimated.

Kestrel realized that Arin had been waiting to answer her question. He was watching her.

“I know,” he said, “because of this room’s position in your suite, the cream color of the walls, and the paintings of swans. This was where a Herrani lady would pen her letters or write journal entries. It’s a private room. I shouldn’t be allowed inside.”

“Well,” said Kestrel, uncomfortable, “it is no longer what it was.”

He played his first tile: a wolf. That meant one less chance for her to add a wolf to her hand. She set down her fox.

“But how do you even know to recognize the room?” Kestrel pressed. “Were you a house slave before?”

His finger twitched against a tile’s blind side. Kestrel hadn’t meant to upset him, but saw that she had.

“All Herrani aristocratic houses had writing rooms,” he said. “It’s common knowledge. Any slave could tell you what I just did. Lirah could, if you asked her.”

Kestrel hadn’t quite realized that he knew Lirah—or at least, well enough to drop her name casually into the conversation. Though of course he did. She remembered how quick Lirah was to tell her of Arin’s whereabouts earlier. The girl had spoken as if the answer had already been trembling on the surface of her mind, like a dragonfly on water, long before Kestrel had asked.

Kestrel and Arin played in silence, discarding tiles, drawing new ones, playing others, speaking only to bet.

Then Arin’s hands paused. “You survived the plague.”

“Oh.” Kestrel hadn’t noticed that her loose, slashed sleeves had slipped back to reveal the skin of her inner arms. She touched the short scar above her left elbow. “Yes. Many Valorians caught the plague during the colonization of Herran.”

“Most Valorians weren’t healed by a Herrani.” He stared at the scar.

Kestrel drew the sleeves over her skin. She picked up a match and turned it around in her fingers. “I was seven at the time. I don’t remember much.”

“I’m sure you nevertheless know what happened.”

She hesitated. “You won’t like it.”

“It doesn’t matter what I like.”

She set down the match. “My family had just arrived. My father didn’t fall ill. I suppose he had a natural immunity. He has always seemed … invulnerable.”

Arin’s face tightened.

“But my mother and I were very sick. I remember sleeping next to her. Her skin was hot. The slaves were told to separate us, so that her fever wouldn’t drive mine and mine hers, but I always woke up in her bed. My father noticed that no Herrani seemed very affected by the plague—and if they caught it, they didn’t die. He found a Herrani physician.” She should have left it at that. Yet Arin’s gray gaze was unwavering, and she felt that to say no more would be a lie he would easily see. “My father told the doctor to heal us or be killed.”

“So the doctor did.” Arin sounded disgusted. “For fear of his life.”

“That’s not why.” Kestrel looked down at her tiles. “I don’t know why. Because I was a child?” Kestrel shook her head. “He cut my arm to bleed the disease. I suppose that’s what all Herrani doctors did, if you recognize the scar. He stopped the blood. He stitched the wound. Then he turned the knife on himself.”

Something flickered in Arin’s eyes. Kestrel wondered if he was trying, as she often did when she looked in the mirror, to see her as a child, to see whatever it was in her that the doctor had decided to save. “And your mother?” he said.

“My father tried to cut her in the same way the doctor had cut me. I remember that. There was a lot of blood. She died.”

In the silence, Kestrel heard a falling leaf scratch the glass of the window, opened out toward the dimming sky. It was warm, but summer was almost over.

“Play your tiles,” Arin said roughly.

Kestrel turned them over, taking no joy in the fact that she had surely won. She had four scorpions.

Arin flipped his. The sound of ivory clacking against the wooden table was unnaturally loud.

Four vipers.

“I win,” he said, and swept the matches into his hand.

Kestrel stared at the tiles, feeling a numbness creep along her limbs. “Well,” she said. She cleared her throat. “Well played.”

He gave her a humorless smile. “I did warn you.”

“Yes. You did.”

He stood. “I think I’ll take my leave while I have the advantage.”

“Until next time.” Kestrel realized she had offered him her hand. He looked at it, then took it in his own. She felt the numbness ebb, only to be replaced by a different kind of surprise.

He dropped her hand. “I have things to do.”

“Like what?” She tried for a lighthearted tone.

He answered in kind. “Like contemplate what I am going to do with my sudden windfall of matches.” He widened his eyes in pretend glee, and Kestrel smiled.

“I’ll walk you out,” she said.

“Do you think I will lose my way? Or steal something as I go?”

She felt her expression turn haughty. “I am leaving the villa anyway,” she said, though she had had no such plans until the words left her mouth.

They walked in silence through the house until they had reached the ground floor. Kestrel saw his stride pause, almost imperceptibly, as they passed the closed doors that hid her piano.

She stopped. “What is your interest in that room?”

The look he gave her was cutting. “I have no interest in the music room.”

Her eyes narrowed as she watched him walk away.