The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  The woman laughed, the sound murky, underwater. “You’d be surprised how many tasks require a mind.”

  Kestrel felt foggy.

  “New prisoners are my favorites. We haven’t had one like you in a long time. New ones are always entertaining, at least while they last.”

  Kestrel thought she heard the key turn. She dropped into sleep.

  She tried to eat and drink as little as she could get away with. She remembered the guard’s words . . . until, in fact, she no longer remembered them and avoided full meals simply out of the awareness that the drugged food changed her and she didn’t like it. She’d tip her bowl of soup out onto the muddy prison yard when no one was looking. She crumbled bread and let it fall from her hands.

  Still, she was hungry. She was thirsty. Sometimes, she ignored her nagging worry and filled her belly.

  I would do anything for you. The words echoed in her mind. Often, she couldn’t quite sort out who’d said them. She thought she might have said them to her father.

  Then she’d feel suddenly ill, nauseated with an emotion she would have recognized as shame if she’d had a clearer head. No, she hadn’t said that to her father. She had betrayed him. Or had he betrayed her?

  It was confusing. She was certain only of the sense of betrayal, thick and hot in her chest.

  Kestrel had moments of clarity before the morning drug shot her up, or before the twilight drug dragged her down. In those moments, when she could smell the sulfur on her and feel its dust in her eyelashes, saw the yellow stuff beneath her fingernails and powdering her skin like pollen, she’d envision those words, written in ink on paper. I would do anything for you. She knew exactly who had written them and why. She became aware that she had been pretending to herself when she’d believed her words had been untrue, or that any of the limits she’d set between her and Arin mattered, because in the end she was here and he was free. She had done every thing she could. And he didn’t even know.

  The guards still didn’t trust Kestrel with a pickax. She was starting to worry that they never would. A small ax was a real weapon. With it, she might be able to escape. In her clearer hours, on the days when she ate and drank less, Kestrel was desperate to lay her hands on one of those axes. Her nerves screamed for it. At the same time, she was afraid that by the time a guard gave her one and sent her down into the tunnels, it would be too late. She’d be like all the other prisoners: wordless, eyes wide, minds gone. If Kestrel was sent into the mines underground, she couldn’t be sure that she wouldn’t lose her sense of self along the way.

  One night, she managed to avoid consuming anything before being locked in her cell. She regretted it. She shook with hunger and fatigue, yet nothing could make her sleep. She felt the dirt floor beneath the holes in her shoes. The air was chilly and damp. She missed the velvet warmth of her nighttime drug. It always swaddled her thickly. It smothered her to sleep. She’d grown to like that.

  Kestrel knew that she was forgetting things. It was horribly unsettling, like walking down a staircase in the dark, hand on the rail, and then the rail vanished and she held nothing but air. Try as she might, Kestrel couldn’t remember the name of her horse in Herran. She knew that she had loved Enai, her Herrani nurse, and that Enai had died, but Kestrel couldn’t remember how she’d died. When Kestrel had first come to the camp, she’d had the idea of searching the prisoners for the face of someone she knew (a disgraced senator, wrongfully convicted of selling black powder to the east, had been sent here last autumn), but she found that she didn’t recognize anyone and wasn’t sure if that was because she knew no one here, or if she did and had simply forgotten his features.

  Kestrel coughed. The sound rattled in her lungs.

  That night, Kestrel pushed away thoughts of Arin and her father. She tried to remember Verex instead. When she’d first met the prince she’d agreed to marry, she’d thought him weak. Petty, childish. She’d been wrong.

  He hadn’t loved her. She hadn’t loved him. Yet they’d cared for each other, and Kestrel remembered how he’d set a soft black puppy into her hands. No one had given her such a gift. He’d made her laugh. That, too, was a gift.

  Verex was prob ably in the southern isles now, pretending to be on a romantic excursion with her.

  Maybe you think that I can’t make you vanish, that the court will ask too many questions the emperor had said as the captain of his guard had held Kestrel and the sour scent of terror rose off her skin. Her father had watched from the other side of the room. This is the tale I’ ll tell. The prince and his bride were so consumed by love that they married in secret and slipped away to the southern isles.

  Verex would obey the emperor. He knew what happened to people who didn’t.

  The emperor had whispered, After some time—a month? two?—news will come that you’ve sickened. A rare disease that even my physician can’t cure. As far as the empire is concerned, you’ ll be dead. You’ ll be mourned.

  Her father’s face hadn’t changed. Something fractured inside Kestrel to remember this.

  She looked out the bars of her cell but saw only the dark hallway. She wished she could see the sky. She hugged her arms to her.

  If she’d been smart, she would have married Verex. Or she would have married no one and joined the military like her father had always wanted. Kestrel tipped her head back against the stone wall with its cushion of mold. Her body shuddered. She knew that this wasn’t just from cold or hunger. It was withdrawal. She craved her nighttime drug.

  But it wasn’t simply withdrawal, either, that racked her limbs. It was grief. It was the horror of someone who’d been dealt a winning hand, had bet her life on the game, and then proceeded (deliberately?) to lose.

  The next night, Kestrel ate and drank every thing she was given.

  “Good girl,” said the silver-haired guard. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to. I’ve seen you spill your soup and pretend to drink from a cup. This way”—the woman pointed at Kestrel’s empty bowl—“is better, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Kestrel said, and was tempted to believe it.

  She woke to see, in the weak dawn light that filtered from the corridor through the bars to her cell, that she had been drawing in the dirt floor. She jerked upright.

  One vertical line, four wings. A moth.

  She had no memory of doing this. This was bad. Worse: maybe soon she might not even understand what such a drawing meant. She traced the moth. She must’ve sketched it last night with her fingers. Now they were trembling. Crumbs of dirt shifted beneath her touch.

  This is me, she reminded herself. I am the Moth.

  She’d betrayed her country because she’d believed it was the right thing to do. Yet would she have done this, if not for Arin?

  He knew none of it. Had never asked for it. Kestrel had made her own choices. It was unfair to blame him.

  But she wanted to.

  It occurred to Kestrel that her moods weren’t her own.

  She wondered if she’d feel so desolate and alone if she weren’t constantly drugged. In the morning at the mines, when she was a tireless giant and prying sulfur blocks from the ground was an obsession pushed into her by the drug, she forgot how she felt. The worries about whether what she felt was real were far away.

  Yet at night before sleep, she knew that her darker emotions, the ones that curled inside her heart and ate away at it, were the only ones she could trust were true.

  One day, something was different. The air—hazy and chilled, as usual—seemed to buzz with tension.

  It came from the guards. Kestrel listened to them as she filled her baskets.

  Someone was coming. There was to be an inspection.

  Kestrel’s fast heart picked up even more speed. She discovered that she had not, in fact, lost hope that Arin had received her moth. She hadn’t stopped believing that he would come. Hope exploded inside her. It ran through her veins like liquid sunlight.

  It wasn’t him.

  If Kestrel
had been herself, she would have known from the moment she’d heard about an inspection that it couldn’t be Arin, pretending to have come in some official imperial capacity to inspect the work camp.

  What an idiotic, painful idea.

  Arin was visibly Herrani—dark-haired, gray-eyed—and scarred in a way that announced his identity to anyone who cared to know it. If he’d received her message, and if he’d understood it, and if he came (she was beginning to despise herself for even contemplating such implausible ifs), every Valorian guard in the camp would arrest him, or worse.

  The inspection was just an inspection. From the prison yard that evening, Kestrel saw the elderly man who wore a jacket with a senator’s knot tied at the shoulder. He chatted with the guards. Kestrel winnowed through the prisoners, who milled aimlessly in the yard after a full day’s work, the morning drug still jangling inside their veins as it did in hers. Kestrel tried to get close to the senator. Maybe she could get word to her father. If he knew how she suffered, how she was losing pieces of herself, he would change his mind. He would intervene.

  The senator’s eyes snapped to Kestrel. She stood only a few feet away. “Guard,” he said to the woman who’d cut Kestrel’s skirts on the first day. “Keep your prisoners in line.”

  The woman laid a heavy hand on Kestrel’s shoulder. The weight settled, gripping hard.

  “Time for dinner,” the guard said.

  Kestrel thought of the drug in the soup and longed for it. She let herself be led away.

  Her father knew full well what the prison camp was like. He was General Trajan, the highest-ranking Valorian save the emperor and his son. He knew about his country’s assets and weaknesses—and the camp was a huge asset. Its sulfur was used to make black powder.

  Even if the general didn’t know the details of how the camp was run, what did it matter? He’d given her letter to the emperor. She’d heard his heart thump calmly as she’d wept against his chest. It had beaten like a perfectly wound clock.

  Someone was stabbing her. Kestrel opened her eyes. She saw nothing but the low black ceiling of her cell.

  Another prod against her ribs, harder.

  A stick?

  Kestrel climbed out of gooey sleep. Slowly—it hurt to move, she was a tangle of bones and bruises and blue rags—she pulled herself up into a sitting position.

  “Good,” came a voice from the hallway, clearly relieved. “We don’t have much time.”

  Kestrel shifted toward the bars. There was no torchlight in the hallway, but it never got fully dark this far north, even in the dead of night. She could make out the senator, who pulled his cane back through the bars.

  “My father sent you.” Joy rushed through her, popping and sparkling all over her skin. She could taste her tears. They ran freely down her face.

  The senator gave her a nervous smile. “No, Prince Verex did.” He held out something small.

  Kestrel kept crying, differently now.

  “Shh. I can’t be caught helping you. You know what would happen to me if I were caught.” In his hand was a key. She took it. “This is for the gate.”

  “Let me out, take me with you, please.”

  “I can’t.” His whisper was anxious. “I don’t have the key to your cell. And you must wait until at least several days after I’ve left. Your escape can’t be tied to me. Do you understand? You’d ruin me.”

  Kestrel nodded. She’d agree to anything he said, if only he wouldn’t leave her.

  He was already backing away from her cell. “Promise.”

  She wanted to scream at him to stop, she wanted to grab him through the bars and make him stay, make him get her out now. But she heard herself say, “I promise,” and then he was gone.

  She sat for a long time looking at the key on her palm. She thought about Verex. Her fingers curled around the key. She dug a hole in the dirt and buried it.

  Curling up with her hands beneath her cheek, she rested her head right above the buried key. She tucked her knees in close and toyed with the knots that bound her cut dress to her legs. Kestrel’s mind, though still sticky and slow, began to work. She didn’t sleep. She began to plan—a real plan, this time—and as she arranged the different possibilities there was a part of her that reached for Verex in her mind. She embraced her friend. She thanked him. She dropped her head to his shoulder, breathing deeply. She was strong now, she told him. She could do this. She could do it because she knew that she hadn’t been forgotten.

  The senator left. There were several lean, thirsty days. Once Kestrel caught the guard in charge of the women prisoners watching as she spilled her drugged water to the dirt, but the guard just gave her the sort of look a mother gives a misbehaving child. Nothing was said.

  It worried Kestrel to grow weaker than she already was. She wasn’t sure how she’d survive the tundra in her condition. But she needed to keep her wits about her. She was lucky it was summer. The tundra was brimming with fresh water. It was full of life. She could raid birds’ nests. Eat moss. She could avoid the wolves. She could do anything, as long as she got out of here.

  Her body didn’t like being weaned off the drugs. She shook. Worse, she craved the nighttime drug. In the morning, it wasn’t so hard to pretend to eat and drink, but at twilight she wanted to gulp every thing down. Even the thought of it made her throat dry with desire.

  She waited as long as she could for the senator’s sake. One warm night in her cell, she untied two lengths of rope from around her legs. She adjusted her makeshift trousers, which were held together with the remaining knots the guard had tied on Kestrel’s first day in the camp. The trousers looked more or less the same as they had before.

  Kestrel knotted her two pieces of rope together. She tied them with the strongest knot her father had taught her to make. She tugged at the new length—about as long as four of her hands, from fingertips to wrist. It held. She curled it up and shoved it down her dress.

  Tomorrow would be the day.

  Kestrel made her move after the prisoners returned from the mines.

  In the fuzzy, greenish twilight, Kestrel pretended to take her meal. Her heartbeat still held a trace of the morning drug; it tripped over itself. Then it seemed to steady, pulse strong. Kestrel should have been nervous, but she wasn’t. She was sure. This would work. She knew that it would.

  The silver-braided guard led Kestrel and the other female prisoners into their block of cells. They turned down Kestrel’s hallway. Unseen, Kestrel slipped the knotted rope from her dress. She made a fist around it and let that fist rest against her thigh in the shadows. The guard imprisoned women one by one. Then, her back turned, she stood before Kestrel’s cell and unlocked it.

  Kestrel came up behind her, rope stretched taut between her hands. The rope went down over the woman’s head and tightened around her throat.

  The woman thrashed. Kestrel had the wild thought of having caught an enormous fish. She clung hard, ignoring the wheezing. Even though she was rammed back against a wall, she didn’t let go. She tightened the rope until the woman slumped and collapsed.

  Kestrel ran into her cell and feverishly dug up the key to the gate. When she came back into the hallway and saw the woman on the floor, the cell door key having fallen from her hand, she registered the other prisoners, standing where they had been, their faces blank but their bodies uncertain, fingers twitching at their sides. They were aware enough to know that this was not how evenings went. None of the women, though, seemed to know what to do about it.

  “Come with me,” Kestrel said to them, though this offer was foolish enough to border on suicidal. How would she get them to the gate without being noticed? She couldn’t save the entire camp. How would they survive on the tundra, and not be caught? But . . . “Come with me,” she said again. She moved back down the hallway, toward the exit. She beckoned them after her. They stood still. When Kestrel took a woman’s hand, it was snatched back.

  Finally, Kestrel picked up the cell door key that had fallen to the ground a
nd pressed it into a prisoner’s hand. The fingers stayed loose. The key dropped.

  Frustration surged through Kestrel—and relief, and shame at her relief. She wanted to apologize. Yet she wanted most of all to live, and she knew—the knowledge was sudden, lancing, sharp—that if she didn’t leave now, she would die here.

  Kestrel clutched the gate key. “I’ll leave the gate open,” she promised.

  No one replied.

  She turned and ran.

  It wasn’t dark enough. She cursed the greenish sky. Someone was going to spy her shadow, creeping along the outside wall of her prison block.

  But no one did. The windows of the guards’ barracks burned brightly. She heard laughter. She saw one lone guard by the gate. The young man was leaning lazily against the bars.

  Still crouched in the shadow of the prison barracks, Kestrel shifted the heavy key in her palm, its jagged teeth pointing out.

  The guard at the gate shifted. She thought she saw him close his eyes as he sighed and settled into a more comfortable position.

  Swiftly, her tattered shoes silent over the ground, Kestrel sped toward him. She swung her fist with the key at his head.

  He lay in a heap at her feet, his temple bleeding. Kestrel fumbled with the key, her breath loud, gasping. It wasn’t until she moved to set the key into the gate that she thought of the possibility that it was the wrong key, that she had been tricked, or Verex had, or the senator.

  Horror spiked through her. But the key went in smoothly and it turned, making no more sound than a knife in butter.

  A giddy rush. Her heart soaring in her chest. Her ribs spread wide with relief. A laughing breath.

  She pushed the gate open. She slipped out onto the tundra, stealthy at first, then running as fast as a deer.

  She was free.

  Her foot plunged into a puddle. The ground was soggy, the vegetation short and shrubby. Little cover. Nowhere to hide. She was too exposed. Her breath rasped. Her heart faltered. Her legs were hot and thick and slow.

  Then: horses.