The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  Awkwardly, she lifted her bound hands and knuckled her dry eyes. She thought that maybe she was too dehydrated to cry. Her throat hurt. She couldn’t remember when the guards driving the wagon had last given her water.

  They were deep into the tundra now. It was late spring—or no, Firstsummer must have already come. The tundra, frozen for most of the year, had come alive. There were clouds of mosquitoes. They bit every bare inch of Kestrel’s skin.

  It was easier to think about mosquitoes. Easier to look at the low, sloping volcanoes on the horizon. Their tops had blown off long ago. The wagon angled toward them.

  Easier, too, to see lakes of astonishingly bright green-blue water.

  Harder to know that their color was due to sulfide in the water, which meant they were nearing the sulfur mines.

  Harder to know that her father had sent her here. Hard, horrible, the way he had looked at her, disowned her, accused her of treason. She’d been guilty. She had done every thing that he believed of her, and now she had no father.

  Grief swelled in her throat. She tried to swallow it down. She had a list of things to do—what were they? Study the sky. Pretend you’re one of those birds. Lean your forehead against the wagon’s wall and breathe. Don’t remember.

  But she never could forget for long. Inevitably, she remembered her last night in the imperial palace. She remembered her letter confessing every thing to Arin. I am the Moth. I am your country’s spy, she’d written. I have wanted to tell you this for so long. She’d scrawled the emperor’s secret plans. It didn’t matter that this was treason. It didn’t matter that she was supposed to marry the emperor’s son on First-summer’s day, or that her father was the emperor’s most trusted friend. Kestrel ignored that she’d been born Valorian. She’d written what she felt. I love you. I miss you. I would do anything for you.

  But Arin had never read those words. Her father had. And her world came apart at the seams.

  Once there was a girl who was too sure of herself. Not everyone would call her beautiful, but they admitted that she had a certain grace that intimidated more often than it charmed. She was not, society agreed, someone you wanted to cross. She keeps her heart in a porcelain box, people whispered, and they were right.

  She didn’t like to open the box. The sight of her heart was unsettling. It always looked both smaller and bigger than she expected. It thumped against the white porcelain. A fleshy red knot.

  Sometimes, though, she’d put her palm on the box’s lid, and then the steady pulse was a welcome music.

  One night, someone else heard its melody. A boy, hungry and far from home. He was—if you must know—a thief. He crept up the walls of the girl’s palace. He wriggled strong fingers into a window’s slim opening. He pulled it open wide enough to fit himself and pushed inside.

  While the lady slept—yes, he saw her in bed, and looked quickly away—he stole the box without realizing what the box held. He knew only that he wanted it. His nature was full of want, he was always longing after something, and the longings he understood were so painful that he did not care to examine the ones that he didn’t understand.

  Any member of the lady’s society could have told him that his theft was a bad idea. They’d seen what happened to her enemies. One way or another, she always gave them their due.

  But he wouldn’t have listened to their advice. He took his prize and left.

  It was almost like magic, her skill. Her father (a god, people whispered, but his daughter, who loved him, knew him to be wholly mortal) had taught her well. When a gust of wind from the gaping window woke her, she caught the thief’s scent. He’d left it on the casement, on her dressing table, even on one of her bed curtains, drawn ever so slightly aside.

  She hunted him.

  She saw his path up the palace wall, the broken twigs of fox-ivy he’d used to clamber up, then down. In some places the ivy branches were as thick as her wrist. She saw where it had held his weight, and where it hadn’t and he’d almost fallen. She went outside and tracked his footprints back to his lair.

  You could say that the thief knew the moment she crossed his threshold what he held in his tightening fist. You could say that he should have known well before then. The heart shuddered in its cool white box. It hammered inside his hand. It occurred to him that the porcelain—milky, silken, so fine that it made him angry—might very well shatter. He’d end up with a handful of bloody shards. Yet he didn’t relinquish what he held. You could imagine how he felt when she stood in his broken doorway, set her feet on his earthen floor, lit up the room like a terrible flame. You could. But this isn’t his story.

  The lady saw the thief.

  She saw how little he had.

  She saw his iron-colored eyes. Sooty lashes, black brows, darker than his dark hair. A grim mouth.

  Now, if the lady had been honest, she would have admitted that earlier that evening as she’d lain in bed, she’d woken for the length of three heartbeats (she had counted them as they rang loud in her quiet room). She’d seen his hand on her white-covered heart. She had closed her eyes again. The sleep that had reclaimed her had been sweet.

  But honesty requires courage. As she cornered the thief in his lair, she found that she wasn’t so sure of herself. She was sure of only one thing. It made her fall back a little. She lifted her chin.

  Her heart had an unsteady rhythm they both could hear when she told the thief that he might keep what he had stolen.

  Kestrel woke. She’d fallen asleep. The floor of the moving wagon creaked beneath her cheek. She hid her face in her hands. She was glad that her dream had ended where it did. She wouldn’t have wanted to see the rest, the part where the girl’s father discovered that she’d given her heart to a lowly thief, and wished her dead, and cast her out.

  The wagon stopped. Its door rattled. Someone set a key into its lock. It grated. Door hinges squealed and hands reached inside. The two guards hauled her out, their grips firm and wary, as if she might fight them.

  They had reason to worry. Once, Kestrel had knocked one of the men unconscious by striking his temple with the manacles on her wrists. The second guard caught her before she could run. The last time they’d opened her door, she’d flung the contents of the waste bucket in their faces and pushed past them. She’d sprinted, blind in the sudden daylight. She was weak. Her bad knee gave out and she hit the dirt. After that, the guards stopped opening the door at all, which meant no food or water.

  If they had decided to take her outside now, it was because they had arrived at their destination. For once, Kestrel didn’t struggle. Her dream had numbed her. She needed to see the place where her father had condemned her to live.

  The work camp was enclosed by a black iron fence the height of three men. Dead volcanoes loomed behind the two blocky stone buildings. The tundra stretched to the east and west: tattered blankets of yellow moss and red grass. It was chilly. The air was thin. Every thing smelled rotten.

  This far north, twilight had a greenish cast. A line of prisoners filed into the camp through an open narrow gate. Their backs were to Kestrel, but she caught a glimpse of one woman’s face in the pale green light. The expression frightened Kestrel. It was utterly blank. Although Kestrel had been following her guards quietly, those empty, glassy eyes made her dig in her heels. The guards’ hands tightened. “Keep moving,” one of them said, but the prisoner’s eyes—all of the prisoners’ eyes—were shiny mirrors, and Kestrel, although she’d known her destination in the north and had known that she, too, was a prisoner, only now fully realized that she was going to transform into one of these empty-faced people.

  “Don’t be difficult,” said a guard.

  She went boneless. She sagged in their grip. Then, as they bent and swore and tried to drag her upright, she abruptly straightened and rammed her head back into one man’s face, threw the other off balance.

  It was the least successful of her escape attempts. Stupid, to try anything just outside a camp that held scores of Valorian priso
n guards. But even as several of them swarmed out to help subdue her, she couldn’t think how she could have done anything else.

  Nobody hurt her. This was very Valorian. Kestrel was here to work for the empire. Damaged bodies don’t work well.

  After she’d been dragged inside the camp, she was shoved across the muddy yard and right up to a woman who looked Kestrel over with amused, almost friendly scorn. “Pretty princess,” she said, “what did you do to end up here?”

  Though now dirty and disheveled, Kestrel’s hair had been braided with aristocratic flair the day she’d been caught. She remembered slipping into the soft blue dress and seeing the spill of it across her lap when she’d sat at the piano on her last night in the imperial palace—when was this? Nearly a week must have passed, she thought. Had it been that long a time since she’d written that reckless, wretched letter? That short a time? How had she fallen so far so fast?

  Kestrel plunged again into that icy well of fear. She was drowning in it. She couldn’t even react when the woman drew the dagger from her hip.

  “Hold still,” the woman said. With a few rapid slashes, she cut Kestrel’s skirts straight down between the legs. From her belt, the woman unhooked a loop of thin rope that hung next to a coiled whip. She cut the rope into several short lengths that she used to tie the slashed fabric to Kestrel’s legs, fashioning something like trousers. “Can’t have you tripping over yourself in the mines, can we?”

  Kestrel touched a knot at her thigh. Her breath evened. She felt a little better.

  “Hungry, princess?”

  “Yes.”

  Kestrel snatched what was offered. The food vanished down her throat before she even registered what it was. She gulped the water.

  “Easy,” said the woman. “You’ll get sick.”

  Kestrel didn’t listen. Her manacles jangled as she tipped the canteen to drain the last drop.

  “I don’t think you need these.” The woman unlocked the manacles. The weight dropped from Kestrel’s wrists. Each wrist, now bare, bore a raised welt. Her hands felt disturbingly light, like they might float away. They didn’t look like they belonged to her. Grimy. Nails jagged. A nasty, infected graze over two knuckles. Had she really once played music with those hands?

  Her skin prickled. Her stomach cramped—she had eaten and drunk too quickly. Kestrel tucked her hands under crossed arms and hugged them to her.

  “You’ll be fine,” the woman said soothingly. “I hear that you’ve been somewhat of a troublemaker, but I’m sure you’ll settle down in no time. We’re fair here. Do as you’re told and you’ll be treated well enough.”

  “Why . . .” Kestrel’s tongue felt thick. “Why did you call me princess? Do you know who I am?”

  The woman clucked. “Child, I don’t care who you are. Soon enough, neither will you.”

  Kestrel’s scalp was crawling. She had the odd and yet vivid idea that tiny beetles were marching in her veins. She looked down at her hand, half expecting to see moving bumps beneath the skin. She swallowed. She wasn’t frightened anymore. She was . . . what was she? Her thoughts streamed by in a blur: a magician’s trick with colored rags, a long line of them pulled out of the mouth, hand over hand . . .

  “What did you put in the food?” she managed to say. “The water?”

  “Something to help.”

  “You drugged me.” Kestrel’s pulse was so fast she couldn’t feel each heartbeat. They blurred into a solid vibration. The prison yard seemed to shrink. She stared at the woman and tried to focus on her features—the broad mouth, the silvered braids, a slight tilt to the eyes, the two vertical wrinkles between her brows. But the woman’s smile was far away. Her features grew vague, unfinished. They pulled and drifted apart until Kestrel became convinced that if she reached out, her fingers would go right through the woman, whose smile broadened.

  “There,” the woman said. “Much better.”

  Kestrel didn’t know how she’d gotten inside the cell. She was consumed by an urge to move. Before she realized it, she was pacing the short space, hands opening and closing. She couldn’t stop. Her pulse thrummed in her ears: loud and high and soaring.

  The drug wore off. She was spent. She sort of remembered that she’d paced for what might have been hours, but now that she was aware of the size of her cell—her wardrobes in the imperial palace had been larger—the memory didn’t seem possible. But her feet ached, and she saw that she’d worn down the thin soles of her elegant shoes.

  Her heart felt like lead. She was cold. She sat in a heap on the dirt floor, looking at bright mold on the stone walls: a host of tiny green starfish. She touched the knots on the ropes that tied the cut-up dress to her legs. The gesture made her feel more like herself.

  Most of the escape attempts on the road north to the tundra had prob ably been doomed to fail. Still, Kestrel couldn’t help hoping that her first effort might ultimately be the best. As desperate, perhaps, as the others, but maybe more likely to work. On her first morning in the wagon, the guards had stopped to water the horses. Kestrel had heard the voice of a Herrani. She’d whispered to him, pushing a dead masker moth through the bars of her window. She could still feel the moth between her fingertips, its furred wings. Part of her hadn’t wanted to let it go. Part of her thought that if she kept the moth, she might somehow reverse her mistakes. She would have said different things to Arin as he stood in her music room. It had been only the day before. She’d sat at the piano, smoothing hands over her blue skirts, feeding him lies.

  Kestrel held the papery moth. Then she dropped it into the Herrani’s waiting hand. Give this to your governor, she said. Tell Arin that I—

  She hadn’t managed more. The guards had seen her reaching out to the Herrani through the bars. They’d let the Herrani go after a rough search seemed to prove that Kestrel had not, in fact, given him anything. Had the moth dropped to the ground? Had it simply been too camouflaged for the guards to notice it? Kestrel hadn’t quite been able to see through the window.

  But if that Herrani man went to Arin and reported what had happened, wouldn’t Arin be able to understand what she’d done and where she’d been exiled? She listed the pieces of the story in her mind. A moth: the symbol of Arin’s anonymous spy. A prison wagon headed north. Even if that Herrani man along the road didn’t know who Kestrel was, he’d still be able to describe her to Arin, wouldn’t he? At the very least he could report that a Valorian woman had given him a moth. Arin would figure things out. He was quick, cunning.

  And blind.

  I would do anything for you, she’d written in the letter her father had found. But that part, despite feeling true when she’d scrawled it on the page, had been a lie. Kestrel had refused Arin. She hadn’t been honest with him, not even when he’d begged. She’d pretended she was empty and careless and cruel.

  He’d believed it. She couldn’t believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.

  She squashed her sneaking hope that Arin might discover what had happened and come to her rescue. That was a terrible plan. It wasn’t a plan at all. She could do better than that.

  All the food was drugged. The water, too. On her first morning in the camp, Kestrel ate in the yard with the other prisoners, who were slack-faced and didn’t speak, even though she’d tried to talk with them. As she filed out of the camp with them in an orderly line, Kestrel felt the drug hit her heart. Her blood roared.

  They entered the mining area at the base of the volcanoes. Kestrel couldn’t remember having walked the path to arrive here. She also didn’t care that she didn’t remember. This distant awareness of not caring brought a bump of plea sure.

  It was a relief to work. The urge to move, to do, rode high. Someone—a guard?—gave her a double basket. She eagerly began to fill it, prying crumbly yellow blocks of sulfur from the ground. She saw tunnels that led below a volcano. The prisoners who went there carried pickaxes. Kestrel was made to work out in the open. She gathered—the realization was plucked like a sto
ne from the rushing river of the drug—that she was too new to be trusted with an ax.

  All the guards carried looped whips attached to their belts, but Kestrel didn’t see them being used. The guards—they could not be Valoria’s best and brightest, if commissioned to serve in the worst corner of the empire—were content to keep a lazy eye on the prisoners, who obeyed directions easily. The guards talked among themselves, complaining about the smell.

  The boiled egg odor was very strong here. She noticed this without being bothered by it or by the sweat that stained her dress even as she shivered hard (was it very cold, or was this just the nature of the drug?). She loaded each of the two baskets attached by a flexible pole that she heaved up onto her shoulders. The weight felt good; it was so good to dig and lift and carry and dump and do it all over again.

  At some point she staggered under the baskets. She was given water. Her marvelous strength returned.

  By twilight, she was hollowed out. Her good sense returned. She refused the food served when the prisoners had filed through the black iron gate and into the yard.

  “This food is different,” said the silver-braided guard from yesterday, whom Kestrel understood to be in charge of the female prisoners. “Last night I gave you a taste of how nice it’d be to work, but from now on you’ll get a dose of something different at night.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Princess, no one cares what you want.”

  “I can work without it.”

  “No,” the woman said gently, “you can’t.”

  Kestrel backed away from the long table with its bowls of soup.

  “Eat, or I’ll force it down you.”

  The guard had told the truth. The food contained a different drug, one with a metallic scent like silver. It made everything slow and dark as Kestrel was led into her prison block and to her cell.

  “Why doesn’t the empire drug all its slaves?” Kestrel mumbled before she was locked up.