The Winner's Curse

7

The general was a busy man, but not so busy that he wouldn’t find out if Kestrel flouted his wishes. Since the day of the auction, Kestrel felt watched. She was careful to attend her training sessions with Rax, the captain of her father’s guard.

Not that Rax would mind if she didn’t turn up in the practice room adjoining the guards’ barracks. When she had been a child and ferocious in her need to prove herself, Rax had been, in his own way, kind. He did little more than observe that she had no natural talent for fighting. He smiled at her efforts and saw to it that she was adequate at all weapons a soldier needed to wield.

But as years passed, so did his patience. She became careless. She would drop her guard in fencing. Her eyes wouldn’t stop dreaming, even when he shouted. She let arrows go wide, head tilted as if listening to something he couldn’t hear.

Kestrel remembered his mounting suspicion. The warnings he had given her to stop trying to protect her hands. She held her practice sword too gingerly, shrank back if it seemed possible Rax’s attack could endanger her fingers, and took body blows that would have killed her had his sword been steel and not wood.

One day when she was fifteen, he wrenched her shield away and smashed the flat of his sword against her exposed fingers. She dropped to her knees. She felt her face go white with pain and fear, and knew she shouldn’t have wept, shouldn’t have cradled her fingers to her, shouldn’t have hunched her body to hide her hands from further assault. She should not have confirmed what Rax already knew.

He went to the general and told him that if he wanted a musician, he could buy one at the market.

Kestrel’s father forbade her to play. But one of her few true military skills was going without sleep. In this, she rivaled the general. So when the swelling in her left hand had gone down and Enai had unwound the stiff wrapping that had held her fingers rigid, Kestrel began to play at night.

She was caught.

She remembered running after her father, pulling on his arms, his elbow, his clothes as he strode to the barracks in the middle of the night for a mace. He ignored her begging.

He would have easily destroyed the piano. It was too big, and she too small, for her to stand in the mace’s way. If she had blocked the keys, he would have broken the case. He would have crushed its hammers, snapped its strings.

“I hate you,” she had told him, “and my mother would, too.”

It wasn’t her wretched voice, Kestrel later thought. It wasn’t the tears. He had seen grown men and women weep over worse. That wasn’t what made him drop the mace. But even now, Kestrel didn’t know whether he had spared the instrument for love of her or love of the dead.

“What’s it to be today?” Rax drawled from his bench at the other end of the practice room. He ran a hand over his grizzled head, then over his face as if he could wipe away the obvious boredom.

Kestrel meant to answer him but found herself looking at the paintings along the walls, though she knew them well. They showed girls and boys leaping over the backs of bulls. The paintings were Valorian, just as this particular building was Valorian-built. Blond, reddish, even chestnut hair streamed in banners behind the painted youths as they vaulted over the bulls’ horns, planted palms on the beasts’ backs, and flipped over the hindquarters. This was a rite of passage, and before it had been banned by the same law that forbade dueling, it was something all Valorians had had to do when they turned fourteen. Kestrel had done it. She remembered that day well. Her father had been proud of her. He had offered any birthday gift she desired.

Kestrel wondered if the slave—if Arin—had seen the paintings, and what he might think of them.

Rax sighed. “You don’t need to practice standing and staring. You’re good at that already.”

“Needles.” She pushed thoughts of the slave from her mind. “Let’s work on Needles.”

“What a surprise.” He didn’t say that they had done that yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Needles was the one technique he could reasonably bear to see her try to hone.

Rax hefted a broadsword as she strapped the small knives to her calves, waist, and forearms. Each blunted practice blade could fit easily in her palm. Needles were the only weapons that let her forget they were weapons.

Rax lazily blocked the first one that spun from her fingers across the room. His blade knocked hers out of the air. But she had more. And when it came to close hand-to-hand fighting, as Rax always made sure it did, she might actually be able to beat him.

She didn’t. Kestrel limped across the grass to Enai’s house.

On her fourteenth birthday, Kestrel had asked her father for the woman’s freedom. By law slaves belonged to the head of a household. Enai was Kestrel’s nurse, but she was the general’s property.

He had not been pleased at the request. Yet he had promised Kestrel anything.

And although Kestrel was now grateful Enai had chosen to remain at the villa, that she would be there today when Kestrel knocked on her door, sweaty and disheartened, she remembered how her happiness had dissolved when she had told Enai about her birthday gift, and the Herrani had stared at her.

“Free?” Enai had touched her own wrist, where the brand would be.

“Yes. Aren’t you … glad? I thought you would want this.”

Enai’s hands fell to her lap. “Where would I go?”

Kestrel saw, then, what Enai did: the difficulties of an old Herrani woman alone—however free—in her occupied country. Where would she sleep? How would she earn enough to eat, and who would employ her when Herrani couldn’t employ anyone and Valorians had slaves?

Kestrel used some of the inheritance settled on her after her mother’s death to have the cottage built.

Today, Enai scowled when she opened the door. “Where have you been? I must be nothing to you, that you should ignore me for so long.”

“I’m sorry.”

Enai softened, tucking a scraggly lock of Kestrel’s hair back into place. “You certainly are a sorry sight. Come inside, child.”

A small cooking fire chittered on the hearth. Kestrel sank into a chair before it, and when Enai asked if she was hungry and was told no, the Herrani gave Kestrel a searching look. “What’s wrong? Surely by now you’re used to being beaten by Rax.”

“There is something I am afraid to tell you.”

Enai waved this away as nonsense. “Haven’t I always kept your secrets?”

“It’s not a secret. Practically everyone knows.” What she said next sounded small for something that felt so big. “I went to the market with Jess more than a week ago. I went to an auction.”

Enai’s expression grew wary.

“Oh, Enai,” Kestrel said. “I’ve made a mistake.”