The Winner's Curse

3

Kestrel didn’t know what to say.

Her father, fresh from a bath after a hot day of training soldiers, watered his wine. The third course was served: small hens stuffed with spiced raisins and crushed almonds. It tasted dry to her.

“Did you practice?” he asked.

“No.”

His large hands paused in their movements.

“I will,” she said. “Later.” She drank from her cup, then ran a thumb over its surface. The glass was smoky green and finely blown. It had come with the house. “How are the new recruits?”

“Wet behind the ears, but not a bad lot.” He shrugged. “We need them.”

Kestrel nodded. The Valorians had always faced barbarian invasions on the fringes of their territories, and as the empire had grown in the past five years, attacks became more frequent. They didn’t threaten the Herran peninsula, but General Trajan often trained battalions that would be sent to the empire’s outer reaches.

He prodded a glazed carrot with his fork. Kestrel looked at the silver utensil, its tines shining sharply in the candlelight. It was a Herrani invention, one that had been absorbed into her culture so long ago it was easy to forget Valorians had ever eaten with their fingers.

“I thought you were going to the market this afternoon with Jess,” he said. “Why didn’t she join us for dinner?”

“She didn’t accompany me home.”

He set down his fork. “Then who did?”

“Father, I spent fifty keystones today.”

He waved a hand to indicate that the sum was irrelevant. His voice was deceptively calm: “If you walked through the city alone, again—”

“I didn’t.” She told him who had come home with her, and why.

The general rubbed his brow and squeezed his eyes shut. “That was your escort?”

“I don’t need an escort.”

“You certainly wouldn’t, if you enlisted.”

And there they were, pressing the sore spot of an old argument. “I will never be a soldier,” she said.

“You’ve made that clear.”

“If a woman can fight and die for the empire, why can’t a woman walk alone?”

“That’s the point. A woman soldier has proved her strength, and so doesn’t need protection.”

“Neither do I.”

The general flattened his hands against the table. When a girl came to clear away the plates, he barked at her to leave.

“You honestly don’t believe that Jess could offer me any protection,” Kestrel said.

“Women who are not soldiers don’t walk alone. It’s custom.”

“Our customs are absurd. Valorians take pride in being able to survive on little food if we must, but an evening meal is an insult if it’s not at least seven courses. I can fight well enough, but if I’m not a soldier it’s as if years of training don’t exist.”

Her father gave her a level look. “Your military strength has never been in combat.”

Which was another way of saying that she was a poor fighter.

More gently, he said, “You’re a strategist.”

Kestrel shrugged.

Her father said, “Who suggested I draw the Dacran barbarians into the mountains when they attacked the empire’s eastern border?”

All she had done then was point out the obvious. The barbarians’ overreliance on cavalry had been clear. So, too, had been the fact that the dry eastern mountains would starve horses of water. If anyone was a strategist, it was her father. He was strategizing that very moment, using flattery to get what he wanted.

“Imagine how the empire would benefit if you truly worked with me,” he said, “and used that talent to secure its territories, instead of pulling apart the logic of customs that order our society.”

“Our customs are lies.” Kestrel’s fingers clenched the fragile stem of her glass.

Her father’s gaze fell to her tight hand. He reached for it. Quietly, firmly, he said, “These are not my rules. They are the empire’s. Fight for it, and have your independence. Don’t, and accept your constraints. Either way, you live by our laws.” He raised one finger. “And you don’t complain.”

Then she wouldn’t say anything at all, Kestrel decided. She snatched her hand away and stood. She remembered how the slave had used his silence as a weapon. He had been haggled over, pushed, led, peered at. He would be cleaned, shorn, dressed. Yet he had refused to give up everything.

Kestrel knew strength when she encountered it.

So did her father. His light brown eyes narrowed at her.

She left the dining hall. She stalked down the northern wing of the villa until she reached a set of double doors. She threw them open and felt her way through the dark interior for a small silver box and an oil lamp. Her fingers were familiar with this ritual. It was no trouble to light the lamp blind. She could play blind, too, but didn’t want to risk missing a note. Not tonight, not when today she had done little but fumble and err.

She skirted the piano in the center of the room, skimming a palm across its flat, polished surface. The instrument was one of the few things her family had brought from the capital. It had been her mother’s.

Kestrel opened several glass doors that led into the garden. She breathed in the night, letting its air pool inside her lungs.

But she smelled jasmine. She imagined its tiny flower blooming in the dark, each petal stiff and pointed and perfect. She thought again of the slave, and didn’t know why.

She looked at her traitor of a hand, the one that had lifted to catch the eye of the auctioneer.

Kestrel shook her head. She wouldn’t think about the slave anymore.

She sat in front of the instrument’s row of black and white keys, nearly a hundred of them.

This wasn’t the kind of practice her father had had in mind. He had meant her daily sessions with the captain of his guard. Well, she didn’t want to train at Needles, or anything else her father thought she should learn.

Her fingers rested on the keys. She pressed slightly, not quite hard enough for the hammers inside to strike the loom of metallic cords.

She took a deep breath and began to play.