The Winner's Curse

37

She had been right. The Herrani quickly took Arin as their leader, either because they had always admired him or because they had liked Cheat’s flair for savagery and assumed that if Arin had killed him he must have been the better monster.

He was certainly the better strategist. Whole swaths of the peninsula began to fall under Herrani control as squadrons were sent to capture farmlands. Food and water were stockpiled, enough for a year of siege—or so Kestrel overheard from guards at the entrances of the house.

“How can you possibly hope to succeed against a siege?” Kestrel asked Arin during one of the rare times he was home and not leading an assault in the countryside. They sat at the dining room table, where Kestrel wasn’t allowed a knife for the meal.

At night, Kestrel treasured the memory of Arin’s song. But by day, she could not ignore basic facts. The missing knife. How any easy way out of Arin’s home was guarded, even ground-floor windows. Guards eyed her warily as she passed. Kestrel possessed two keys that did little more than prove that she remained under a privileged form of house arrest.

Was she to earn her freedom one key at a time?

And when her father returned with the imperial army—as he inevitably would—what then? Kestrel tried to imagine turning traitor and counseling the Herrani through the coming war. She couldn’t. It didn’t matter that Arin’s cause was just, or that Kestrel now allowed herself to see that. She couldn’t fight her own father.

“We can withstand a siege for some time,” Arin said. “The city walls are strong. They’re Valorian-built.”

“Which means that we will know how to bring them down.”

Arin swirled his glass, watching the water’s clear spin. “Care to bet? I have matches. I hear they make very fine stakes.” There was the quirk of a smile.

“We aren’t playing at Bite and Sting.”

“But if we were, and I kept raising the stakes higher to the point where you couldn’t bear to lose, what would you do? Maybe you’d give up the game. Herran’s only hope of winning against the empire is to become too painful to retake. To mire the Valorians in an unending siege when they’d rather be fighting the east. To force them to conquer the countryside again, piece by piece, spending money and lives. Someday, the empire will decide we’re not worth the fight.”

Kestrel shook her head. “Herran will always be worth it.”

Arin looked at her, his hands resting on the table. He, too, had no knife. Kestrel knew that this was to make it less obvious that she wasn’t to be trusted with one. Instead, it became more.

“You’re missing a button,” he said abruptly.

“What?”

He reached across the table and touched the cloth at her wrist, on the spot of an open seam. His fingertip brushed the frayed thread.

Kestrel forgot that she had been troubled. She had been thinking about knives, she remembered, and now they were talking about buttons, but what one had to do with the other, she couldn’t say.

“Why don’t you mend it?” he said.

She recovered herself. “That is a silly question.”

“Kestrel, do you not know how to sew a button?”

She refused to answer.

“Wait here,” he said.

Arin returned with a sewing kit and button. He threaded a needle, bit it between his teeth, and took her wrist with both hands.

Her blood turned to wine.

“This is how you do it,” he said.

He took the needle from his mouth and pierced it through the cloth.

“This is how you build a fire.”

“This is how you make tea.”

Small lessons, sprinkled here and there, between days. Through them, Kestrel sensed the silent history of how Arin had come to know what he did. She thought about it during the long stretches of time when she didn’t see him.

Days passed after Arin had sewn the button tight to her sleeve. Then an empty week went by after he’d struck fire to kindling in the library fireplace, then even longer since he’d placed a hot cup of perfectly steeped tea in her hands. He was gone. He was fighting, Sarsine had said. She would not say where.

With her newfound—if limited—freedom, Kestrel often wandered through the wings where people worked. Some doors were barred to her. The kitchens were. They hadn’t been before, on that horrible day with Cheat by the fountain, but they were now that everyone knew that Kestrel could roam the house. The kitchens had too many knives. Too many fires.

But there were fires lit regularly in the library and in her suite, and Kestrel had learned how to make one anywhere. Why not set fire to the house and hope to escape in the confusion?

One day, she studied the fringe on her sitting room curtains and clutched kindling hard enough to get splinters. Then her grip loosened. A fire was too dangerous. It could kill her. She told herself that this was why she returned the small sticks of wood to the hearth, and dropped them back into the kindling box. It wasn’t because she couldn’t bear the thought of destroying Arin’s family home. It wasn’t because a fire might also kill the Herrani who lived here.

If she escaped and sent the imperial army to the city, wasn’t that the same as bringing death to every Herrani in this house? To Arin?

She was angry, then, at his foolishness for teaching her such an obviously dangerous skill as building a fire. She was angry at what the idea of his death did to her.

Kestrel slammed shut the lid on the kindling box, and on the sudden grief of her thoughts. She left her rooms.

She roamed the wing of servants’ quarters: a corridor of small rooms set close together, with chalk-white, identical doors, at the back of the house. Today Herrani were emptying them out. Framed canvases went by. Kestrel watched a woman shift a large, iridescent oil lamp in her arms to rest on her hip like a child.

Like every other colonial family, Irex’s had turned the servants’ quarters into storage and had had an outbuilding constructed to house their slaves. Privacy was a luxury slaves didn’t deserve, or so most Valorians had thought … to their undoing, since forcing their slaves to sleep and eat together in one collective space had helped them plot against their conquerors. It amazed Kestrel, how people set their own traps.

She remembered that kiss in the carriage on Firstwinter night. How her whole being had begged for it.

She had baited her own trap, too.

Kestrel moved on. She took the stairs down to the work-rooms. The lower level was warmed throughout by the kitchens’ constant fires. She passed the still room. The laundry, with its sails of hung sheets. She saw people busy in the scullery, where tubs were filled with pots and steaming water, and bare, copper-lined sinks waited for the washing of porcelain dining sets.

She walked past the scullery, then paused to feel a chill breeze curl around her ankles. A draft. Which meant that somewhere nearby, a door had been left open to the outside.

Was this Kestrel’s chance to leave?

Could she take it?

Would she?

She followed the current of cold air. It led her to a dry pantry, whose door was ajar. Grain sacks were stacked inside.

But this was not the source of the draft. Kestrel continued down the empty hallway. At its end, a pale blade of light cut across the floor. Cold flowed in.

The door to the kitchen yard was open. A few snowflakes swirled into the hallway and vanished.

Maybe now. Maybe now was the moment when she would flee.

Kestrel took another step. Her heartbeat trembled in her throat.

Then the door sang wide on its hinges, light flooded the hallway, and Arin walked in.

She bit back a gasp. He, too, was surprised to see her. He straightened suddenly under the weight of the grain sack over his shoulder. Quick as thought, his eyes went to the open door. He set down the sack and locked the door behind him.

“You’re back,” she said.

“I’m leaving again.”

“To steal more grain from a captured country estate?”

His smile was perfectly mischievous. “Rebels must eat.”

“And I suppose you use my horse in these battles and thefts of yours.”

“He’s happy to support a good cause.”

Kestrel huffed and would have turned to wend her way back through the workrooms, but he said, “Would you like to see him? Javelin?”

She stood still.

“He misses you,” said Arin.

She said yes. After Arin had stacked his final load of grain in the pantry and given her his coat, they walked out into the kitchen yard and crossed its slate flagstones to reach the grounds and the stables.

It was warm inside the stables. It smelled like hay, leather, grassy manure, and somehow sunshine, as if it had been stored here for the winter. Irex’s horses were sleek beauties. High-spirited. Several of them stamped in their stalls as Kestrel and Arin entered, and another tossed its head. But Kestrel had eyes for only one horse.

She went straight to his stall. He towered over her, but lowered his head to push against her shoulder, breathe gustily over her uplifted hands, and lip the ends of her hair. Kestrel’s throat tightened.

She had been lonely. She thought that loneliness shouldn’t hurt so much—not when there was everything else. But here was a friend. Running a hand down Javelin’s velvet nose reminded her of how few she had.

Arin had been hanging back, but now he came near. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I need to ready him to ride. Daylight’s fading. I have to leave.”

“Of course you do,” she said, and was horrified to hear the choked sound of her voice. She felt Arin looking at her. She felt the question in his gaze, the way he saw her near tears, and this hurt, too, more than the loneliness, because it made her know that her loneliness had been for him, that it had sent her wandering through the house, looking for yet another little lesson.

“I could stay,” he said. “I could leave tomorrow.”

“No. I want you to go now.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, but what about what I want?”

The softness in his voice made her lift her gaze. She would have answered him—how, she wasn’t sure—if Javelin’s attention hadn’t turned to him. The stallion began nuzzling Arin as if he were the horse’s favorite person in the world. Kestrel felt a pang of jealousy. Then she saw something that sent thoughts of jealousy and loneliness and want right out of her head, and just made her mad. Javelin was nibbling a certain part of Arin, whuffling around a pocket exactly the right size to hold a—

“Winter apple,” Kestrel said. “Arin, you have been bribing my horse!”

“Me? No.”

“You have! No wonder he likes you so much.”

“Are you sure it’s not because of my good looks and pleasing manners?” This was said lightly—not quite sarcastically, yet in a voice that nevertheless told Kestrel that he doubted he possessed either of these things.

But he was pleasing. He pleased her. And she could never forget his beauty. She had learned it all too well.

She blushed. “It’s not fair,” she said.

He took in her rising color. His mouth curved. And although Kestrel wasn’t sure that he could interpret what effect he was having on her simply by standing there and saying the word pleasing, she knew that he always knew when he had an advantage.

He pressed it. “Doesn’t your father’s theory of war include winning over the other side by offering sweets? No? An oversight, I think. I wonder … might I bribe you?”

Kestrel’s fingers clenched. It probably looked like anger. It wasn’t. It was the instinctive gesture of someone dangerously tempted.

“Open your hands, Little Fists,” said Arin. “Open your eyes. I haven’t stolen his love for you. Look.” It was true that in the course of their conversation, Javelin had turned away from Arin, disappointed by the empty pocket. The horse nosed Kestrel’s shoulder. “See?” Arin said. “He knows the difference between an easy mark and his mistress.”

Arin was an easy mark. He had offered to bring her to the stables, and here was the result: from where Kestrel stood, she could see the open tack room, how it was organized, and everything she would need to saddle Javelin quickly. Speed would matter when she escaped. And she would, she must, it was just a matter of getting out of the house at the right time, the right way. Javelin would be the fastest means to reach the harbor and a boat.

When Arin and Kestrel left the stables, the snow had stopped and everything was crystalline. Kestrel wasn’t sure if it had grown colder or only seemed that way. She shivered inside Arin’s coat. It smelled like him. Like dark, summer earth. She would be glad to give the coat back. To see him slip it on in preparation for whatever mission would carry him away from here. He clouded her head.

She inhaled the cold air and willed herself to be like that breath … a relentless, icy purity.

What would Kestrel’s father think, to know how she wavered, how close she came sometimes to wanting to remain a favored prisoner? He would disown her. No child of his would choose surrender.

She went, under guard, to see Jess.

The girl’s face was gray, but she could sit up and eat on her own. “Have you heard anything about my parents?” Jess asked.

Kestrel shook her head. A few Valorians—civilians, socialites—had returned unexpectedly early from their stay in the capital for the winter season. They had been stopped in the mountain pass and imprisoned. Jess’s parents hadn’t been among them.

“And Ronan?”

“I’m not allowed to see him,” Kestrel said.

“You’re allowed to see me.”

Kestrel remembered Arin’s one-word note. Carefully, she said, “I think that Arin doesn’t consider you to be a threat.”

“I wish I were,” Jess muttered, and fell silent. Her face seemed to sink in on itself. It was unbelievable to Kestrel that Jess—Jess—could look so withered.

“Have you been sleeping?” Kestrel asked.

“Too many nightmares.”

Kestrel had them, too. They began with Cheat’s hand on the back of her neck and ended with her gasping awake in the dark, reminding herself that the man was dead. She dreamed about Irex’s baby, dark eyes fixed on her, and sometimes he would speak like an adult. He accused her of making him an orphan. It was her fault, he said, for having been blind to Arin. You cannot trust him, the baby said.

“Forget your dreams,” Kestrel told Jess, even though she couldn’t follow her own advice. “I have something to cheer you up.” She handed her friend a folded pile of dresses. Once, her clothes would have been too tight for Jess. Now they would hang on her. Kestrel thought about that. She thought about Ronan, in prison, and Benix and Captain Wensan and that dark-eyed baby.

“How do you have these?” Jess ran a hand over silk. “Never mind. I know. Arin.” Her mouth twisted as if drinking the poison again. “Kestrel, tell me it isn’t true what they say, that you are truly his, that you are on their side.”

“It isn’t.”

With a glance to make certain no one overheard, Jess leaned forward and whispered, “Promise that you will make them pay.”

It was what Kestrel had hoped Jess would say. It was why she had come. She looked into the eyes of her friend, who had come so close to death.

“I will,” Kestrel said.

Yet when she returned to the house, Sarsine had a smile on her face. “Go into the salon,” she said.

Her piano. Its surface gleamed like wet ink. An emotion flooded through Kestrel, but she didn’t want to name it. It wasn’t right that she should feel it, simply because Arin had given back to her something that he had more or less taken.

Kestrel shouldn’t play. She shouldn’t sit on that familiar velvet bench or think about how transporting a piano across the city was no mean feat. It meant people. Pulleys. Horses straining to haul a cart. She shouldn’t wonder how Arin had found the time and begged his people’s goodwill to bring her piano here.

She shouldn’t touch the cool keys, or feel that delicious tension between silence and sound.

She remembered that Arin had refused to sing for who knows how long.

Kestrel didn’t have that particular kind of strength.

She sat and played.

In the end, it wasn’t hard to guess which rooms had been Arin’s before the war. They were silent and dusty. Any children’s furniture had been removed, and the suite was fairly ordinary, its windows hung with deeply purple curtains. It looked as if for the past ten years it had served as a guest suite for the lesser sort of visitors. Its only unusual qualities were that its outer door was made of a different, lighter wood than those in the rest of the house … and that the sitting room had instruments mounted on the walls.

Decoration. Perhaps Irex’s family had found the child-size instruments quaint. A wooden flute was tilted at an angle over the mantelpiece. On the far wall was a row of small violins, growing larger until the last, which was half the size of an adult violin.

Kestrel came often. One day, when she knew from Sarsine that Arin had returned home but she had not yet seen him, she went to the suite. She touched one of his violins, reaching furtively to pluck the highest string of the largest instrument. The sound was sour. The violin was ruined—no doubt all of them were. That is what happens when an instrument is left strung and uncased for ten years.

A floorboard creaked somewhere in one of the outer chambers.

Arin. He entered the room, and she realized that she had expected him. Why else had she come here so frequently, almost every day, if she hadn’t hoped that someone would notice and tell him to find her there? But even though she admitted to wanting to be here with him in his old rooms, she hadn’t imagined it would be like this.

With her caught touching his things.

Her gaze dropped. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind.” He lifted the violin off its nails and set it in her hands. It was light, but Kestrel’s arms lowered as if the violin’s hollowness were terribly heavy.

She cleared her throat. “Do you still play?”

He shook his head. “I’ve mostly forgotten how. I wasn’t good at it anyway. I loved to sing. Before the war, I worried that gift would leave me, the way it often does with boys. We grow, we change, our voices break. It doesn’t matter how well you sing when you’re nine years old, you know. Not when you’re a boy. When the change comes you just have to hope for the best … that your voice settles into something you can love again. My voice broke two years after the invasion. Gods, how I squeaked. And when my voice finally settled, it seemed like a cruel joke. It was too good. I hardly knew what to do with it. I felt so grateful to have this gift … and so angry, for it to mean so little. And now…” He shrugged, a self-deprecating gesture. “Well, I know I’m rusty.”

“No,” Kestrel said. “You’re not. Your voice is beautiful.”

The silence after that was soft.

Her fingers curled around the violin. She wanted to ask Arin a question yet couldn’t bear to do it, couldn’t say that she didn’t understand what had happened to him the night of the invasion. It didn’t make sense. The death of his family was what her father would call a “waste of resources.” The Valorian force had had no pity for the Herrani military, but it had tried to minimize civilian casualties. You can’t make a dead body work.

“What is it, Kestrel?”

She shook her head. She set the violin back on the wall.

“Ask me.”

She remembered standing outside the governor’s palace and refusing to hear his story, and was ashamed once more.

“You can ask me anything,” he said.

Each question seemed the wrong one. Finally, she said, “How did you survive the invasion?”

He didn’t speak at first. Then he said, “My parents and sister fought. I didn’t.”

Words were useless, pitifully useless—criminal, even, in how they could not account for Arin’s grief, and could not excuse how her people had lived on the ruin of his. Yet again Kestrel said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

It felt as if it was.

Arin led the way out of his old suite. When they came to the last room, the greeting room, he paused before the outermost door. It was the slightest of hesitations, no longer than if the second hand of a clock stayed a beat longer on its mark than it should. But in that fraction of time, Kestrel understood that the last door was not paler than the others because it had been made from a different wood.

It was newer.

Kestrel took Arin’s battered hand in hers, the rough heat of it, the fingernails still ringed with carbon from the smith’s coal fire. His skin was raw-looking: scrubbed clean and scrubbed often. But the black grime was too ingrained.

She twined her fingers with his. Kestrel and Arin walked together through the passageway and the ghost of its old door, which her people had smashed through ten years before.

After that, Kestrel sought him out. She used the excuse of those lessons he had given her. She said that she wanted more. She acquired a number of menial skills, like how to blacken boots.

Arin was easy to find. Although raids on the countryside continued, he increasingly relied on lieutenants to lead the sorties. He spent more time at home.

“I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,” Sarsine said.

“He’s giving officers under his command the chance to prove their worth,” Kestrel said. “He’s showing his trust in them and letting them build their confidence. It’s sound military strategy.”

Sarsine gave her a hard look.

“He’s delegating,” Kestrel said.

“He’s shirking. And for what, I’m sure you know.”

This struck a bright match of pleasure within Kestrel.

Like a match, it burned out quickly. She recalled her promise to Jess to make the Herrani pay.

But she did not want to think about that.

It occurred to her that she had never thanked Arin for bringing her piano here. She found him in the library and meant to say what she had come to say, yet when she saw him studying a map near the fire, lit by an upward shower of sparks as one log fell on another, she remembered her promise precisely because of how she longed to forget it.

She blurted something that had nothing to do with anything. “Do you know how to make honeyed half-moons?”

“Do I…?” He lowered the map. “Kestrel, I hate to disappoint you, but I was never a cook.”

“You know how to make tea.”

He laughed. “You do realize that boiling water is within the capabilities of anybody?”

“Oh.” Kestrel moved to leave, feeling foolish. What had possessed her to ask such a ridiculous question anyway?

“I mean, yes,” Arin said. “Yes, I know how to make half-moons.”

“Really?”

“Ah … no. But we can try.”

They went into the kitchens. A glance from Arin cleared the room, and then it was only the two of them, dumping flour onto the wooden worktable, Arin palming a jar of honey out of a cabinet.

Kestrel cracked an egg into a bowl and knew why she had asked for this.

So that she could pretend that there had been no war, there were no sides, and that this was her life.

The half-moons came out as hard as rocks.

“Hmm.” Arin inspected one. “I could use these as weapons.”

She laughed before she could tell herself it wasn’t funny.

“Actually, they’re about the size of your weapon of choice,” he said. “Which reminds me that you’ve never said how you dueled at Needles against the city’s finest fighter and won.”

It would be a mistake to tell him. It would defy the simplest rule of warfare: to hide one’s strengths and weaknesses for as long as possible. Yet Kestrel told Arin the story of how she had beaten Irex.

Arin covered his face with one floured hand and peeked at her between his fingers. “You are terrifying. Gods help me if I cross you, Kestrel.”

“You already have,” she pointed out.

“But am I your enemy?” Arin crossed the space between them. Softly, he repeated, “Am I?”

She didn’t answer. She concentrated on the feel of the table’s edge pressing into the small of her back. The table was simple and real, joined wood and nails and right corners. No wobble. No give.

“You’re not mine,” Arin said.

And kissed her.

Kestrel’s lips parted. This was real, yet not simple at all. He smelled of woodsmoke and sugar. Sweet beneath the burn. He tasted like the honey he’d licked off his fingers minutes before. Her heartbeat skidded, and it was she who leaned greedily into the kiss, she who slid one knee between his legs. Then his breath went ragged and the kiss grew dark and deep. He lifted her up onto the table so that her face was level with his, and as they kissed it seemed that words were hiding in the air around them, that they were invisible creatures that feathered against her and Arin, then nudged, and buzzed, and tugged.

Speak, they said.

Speak, the kiss answered.

Love was on the tip of Kestrel’s tongue. But she couldn’t say that. How could she ever say that, after everything between them, after fifty keystones paid into the auctioneer’s hand, after hours of Kestrel secretly wondering what it would sound like if Arin sang while she played, after wrists bound together and the crack of her knee under a boot and Arin confessing in the carriage on Firstwinter night.

It had felt like a confession. But it wasn’t. He had said nothing of the plot. Even if he had, it still would have been too late, with everything to his advantage.

Kestrel remembered again her promise to Jess.

If she didn’t leave this house now, she would betray herself. She would give herself to someone whose Firstwinter kiss had led her to believe she was all that he wanted, when he had hoped to flip the world so that he was at its top and she was at its bottom.

Kestrel pulled away.

Arin was apologizing. He was asking what he had done wrong. His face was flushed, mouth swollen. He was saying something about how maybe it was too soon, but that they could have a life here. Together.

“My soul is yours,” he said. “You know that it is.”

She lifted a hand, as much to block his face from her sight as to stop those words.

She walked out of the kitchen.

It took all of her pride not to run.

She went to her rooms, yanked on her black dueling clothes and boots, and reeled in her makeshift knife out of the ivy. She bound the strip of cloth that held it around her waist. She went into the garden and waited for nightfall.

Kestrel had always thought that the rooftop garden was her best chance for escape. Yet she couldn’t see how to take it.

She swept her gaze over the four stone walls. Again, she saw nothing. Kestrel stared hard at the door, but what good could that do her? The door led to Arin’s suite, and Arin—

No. Kestrel was thinking that no, she would not go through that door, she could not, when it suddenly struck her that she had her answer.

It was little use considering the door as a way to pass through the wall. The door was a means to get up it.

Kestrel set her right hand on the doorknob and her left toes on the lower hinge. Her left hand braced against the stony line of the doorjamb, and she pushed herself up onto that hinge, balancing on such a small thing, just a strip and nub of metal. Then right foot up to meet her hand on the doorknob. She shifted her weight and stood to grasp the top hinge before she dug her fingers into the crack where the top of the door met stone.

Kestrel climbed up the door and onto the top of the wall that separated her garden from Arin’s. She balanced along it until she reached the roof.

Then she was moving down its slope, running to reach the ground.