The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  “You’re giving this to me?”

  “I should have given it to you before.”

  “This is the sort of thing people do before they kill themselves.”

  Arin shook his head. “Suicide is an undignified way to die.”

  Roshar drew himself up to his full height. He folded his arms, rippling fingers along the biceps. “I could keep you here by force. In my country, we have laws about making sure crazy people don’t hurt themselves.”

  Arin said, “There is something you can do for me.”

  “I dread to ask.”

  “Can I borrow your ring?”

  Chapter 7

  The tundra air was white with mist. Through his spyglass as he crouched behind a stunted bush, boots seeping into cold mud, Arin saw the dark line of prisoners emerge from behind rocks at the base of the volcanoes. He scanned each prisoner that passed within view. He couldn’t see her face. The mist was too thick. They filed through the work camp’s open gate. It shut behind them.

  He waited for nightfall. The temperature plummeted. A wolf howled in the distance.

  Ilyan, the messenger, had warned him about the wolves. He’d shown Arin a way into the tundra that kept them out of sight of the Valorian road to the work camp. They’d slept by day and traveled by night. Ilyan was waiting for Arin where they’d stopped to unload their gear and rest the three horses near a shallow lake. Arin remembered the way Javelin’s head had lifted to see him go.

  Arin went quiet inside. He stared at the shut gate. He was filled with a tense, solid stillness, the kind that wouldn’t let him think about anything other than what he needed to do. It stopped the emotions that had claimed him ever since Roshar’s news. It spread like a cold mist over the tarry grief, the elated hope. It kept at bay the feeling that had gutted him, had made it impossible to breathe: remorse.

  Another wolf called. It was now as dark as it was going to get.

  He left his cover and made for the volcanoes.

  At the base of a volcano, whose top dis appeared into the greenish half dark, Arin scrubbed loose sulfur into his hair. He rubbed the yellow, crumbly, stinking stuff into his face, smudging it along the line of his scar. He caked his hands with it. He rubbed it over Roshar’s ring.

  Arin’s plain clothes were streaked with mud from days of travel. If he could have seen himself, he would have seen a blur of yellow and brown. A man of uncertain age and origin, unless someone looked closely.

  He prayed that no one would. He went down into the mines. His heartbeat seemed to echo in the tunnel like a drum.

  He waited for morning.

  At dawn, when the prisoners came down into the tunnel with pickaxes, Arin stepped out of the shadows to mingle with them, become one of them. Furtively, he searched their faces. When he didn’t see her, he grew terrified that he was too late. A month. He hated himself for it. As he went deeper into the mines he couldn’t bear his thoughts: that she was sick, hurt. That she’d been transferred to some other kind of prison. Maybe he was wasting yet more time here while she suffered elsewhere.

  He couldn’t let himself think the worst thought.

  Kestrel was strong. She could survive this. She could survive anything. But when he saw the slack faces of the other prisoners—their blank stares, their shuffling gait—he wasn’t so sure. Fear slid down his spine.

  There were two Valorian guards down in the mines with him, but they paid little attention. They didn’t notice when Arin took a pickax right out of a prisoner’s hands. The guards broke their conversation with each other only when the empty-handed prisoner, wandering like a sleepwalker, tried to dig sulfur out of the rocky walls with his fingers, which bled, nails broken. Out of the corner of his eye, Arin watched the man’s mechanical determination. Arin kept his head down, his shoulders slumped, and his face as blank as the guards neared the prisoner and conferred. Then they shrugged. They found the man a pickax.

  Arin worked. He thought of Kestrel doing this. He drove his ax into the wall, swallowed the bile in his throat. He could not get sick, could not draw attention to himself. But the nausea didn’t leave him.

  Hours might have gone by like this. He couldn’t count time passing. The grayish light that filtered down from the tunnel’s mouth hadn’t changed.

  But the prisoners did. They went suddenly still. Arin snatched his ax back in midswing. He, too, made himself into a statue. He wondered what they were waiting for.

  It was water. The guards distributed it. The prisoners’ bodies went taut, and they eagerly drank.

  Arin imitated them. He swallowed the water.

  Moments later, his pulse shot up to the sky.

  He felt too big for his body. He knew, as if from a distance, that he’d been tampered with. The water.

  He struck the rock with an energy resembling delight. This wasn’t right. He told himself that this wasn’t right, that this wasn’t what he really felt. Yet he lovingly filled his double basket with sulfur.

  He was going to fail. He’d had a plan, he had come here with a plan . . . sweat soaked his shirt, the pieces of the plan scattered, and he became certain only of his failure.

  Because of you.

  Arin’s hands slowed. He heard Kestrel’s voice again, felt the sway of a carriage. Firstwinter. If he put his palm to the carriage window, he’d melt its feathered frost.

  Because of you, Kestrel had said. Her mouth had opened beneath his.

  The knowledge of what Arin was here to do drove into him and turned like a screw.

  He became himself again. He wouldn’t fail her, not again.

  The drug faded. It was still there—it grasshoppered in his blood—but his body was almost quiet now. Tired. His bones felt loose in their sockets. The guards led him to the surface, where other yellow-coated prisoners waited, too many to count at a glance, enough that they could have overwhelmed the guards even without weapons. And they did have weapons. Axes, some of them. Other prisoners could have grabbed the rocks at their feet.

  Arin understood obedience. After the Valorian invasion, it had been easy for him to obey. He saw what happened to people who didn’t. He’d been a frightened child. Then he grew and changed, resisted. He got what came next. Blood in the mouth. Elsewhere. Sometimes it felt like it was everywhere, in his eyes, too, changing his vision. It coated his thoughts. The taste of things. Once, to prove a point: a horse halter was tightened over his head, an iron bit set between his teeth.

  After ten years of slavery, Arin knew obedience in its many forms. The fear of pain, the gritty promise to oneself of vengeance. Hopelessness. A grinding monotony broken just often enough by the strap or fist. The way punishment made his master more his master, and him less himself. He’d been prone to defiance, no matter how stupid it was, because he could insist, at least in that moment, on the integrity of his will: unalterable by anyone. But then pain did alter it. Humiliation did. Obedience became a version of despair.

  But he’d never seen the kind of obedience he witnessed when the guards herded the prisoners into a line. They were cows. They weren’t even like people pretending to be animals, which he had seen and had done. There was no question of resistance here on the tundra, no glimmer of hatred.

  Arin couldn’t imagine Kestrel obeying like this. He couldn’t imagine her obeying at all.

  He strained to see her through the ragged line of prisoners. Was she at the front of the line? Was she so changed that he couldn’t recognize her?

  Was she there at all?

  A guard reached for Arin’s pickax. Arin’s hands jerked back. He wanted to swing the ax and nail it into the guard’s throat.

  The guard peered at him. Arin forced his fingers to relax. He let the ax go.

  He lined up like every one else and was led to the camp.

  He avoided the food and water served in the yard. He was slowly dribbling soup over his bowl’s lip and down into the mud when he saw her. Her back was to him. Her hair was matted. She was so thin that he had to swallow hard. For a moment he
believed that he was wrong, that this could not be her. But it was.

  She was being led to a cell block with the other women. Look back. Please. She didn’t, and then he was being led in the opposite direction, his heart shaking inside him, yet he had to do what he was told.

  Until, that was, the moment he was inside the men’s cell block.

  He came up behind the nearest guard, wrenched the Valorian’s head at an awful angle, and snapped his neck.

  There were other guards. They came at him. He stung them with Roshar’s ring and they slumped, unconscious, to the ground. Arin found keys on a fallen guard. He locked up the male prisoners. He stuffed as many as he could into as few cells as possible to save time.

  The women’s cell block was quiet. Most of the prisoners were already in their cells: shadows on the ground.

  At the end of the hall, a Valorian woman with silver braids saw him. She drew her dagger. Opened her mouth to shout. He rushed at her, dodged the dagger, clamped a hand down on her face, and stung her with the ring. Then the keys were in his grip and Arin was going cell by cell. He called Kestrel’s name in a hoarse whisper. There was no answer. A feeling frothed out of him, an acid mix of dread and hope and desperation.

  Then he stopped. He saw her sleeping on the dirt. Again, her back was to him, but he knew the curve of her spine and the spike of her shoulder and the way her ribs rose and fell. He fumbled with the keys.

  He kept saying her name. He was begging her to wake up. The same words spilled out of him over and over. He wasn’t even sure what he was saying anymore as he came into her cell and touched her cheek and, when she still didn’t wake, shifted her body up. Her head tipped back. She slept. Some part of Arin warned that he was going to have to slap her, that she must wake up, and then another part recoiled at the thought. He wouldn’t, he never would, he would kill the person who would.

  “Kestrel?” He couldn’t even shake her frail shoulders. “Kestrel?”

  Her eyes cracked open. He caught his breath. She came awake more fully, and saw him.

  He hadn’t allowed himself, before, to consider the possibility that she’d be like the other prisoners, that her mind would be gone, that there’d be no life in her eyes and her face would be drained of every thing that made her who she was.

  She wasn’t like that. She wasn’t, and as Arin watched her blink and take him in, and saw the mind behind her gaze, he was grateful. The gratitude came hot and flowing: a prayer of thanks to his gods. He cupped her face between his hands—too rough.

  Or he believed he must have been too rough, because she recoiled. He was afraid he’d hurt her. But she narrowed her eyes in the wan light, studying him. He saw her confusion, couldn’t translate it.

  She whispered, “Who are you?”

  Arin didn’t understand until she asked her question again.

  Understanding arrowed into him.

  She had no memory of him. She truly had no idea who he was.

  Chapter 8

  They stumbled over the tundra. He saw how unnaturally drowsy she was. Her ankles sometimes folded beneath her, as if her body was made of stuffed cloth and she was forcing it to move out of sheer will.

  “Lean on me,” he said. She did, but he could tell that she didn’t like it.

  “Just a bit farther,” he said.

  Eventually, he carried her. In the green-cast dark, she slept against his chest.

  Arin’s legs were slick with mud when he reached the shores of the lake where he’d left Ilyan and the horses. Arin saw what was left of the camp. His knees nearly buckled. He swore.

  Kestrel woke. He set her gently down. Then he crouched, burying his face in his hands.

  Ilyan’s half-eaten corpse had been dragged from the tent. The horses were gone.

  Wolves. Arin remembered hearing them howl the night before. His palms slid from his face. He tried not to think about the terror and pain of Ilyan’s death, and how this, too, was his fault. He tried not to think about how long it would take without horses to cover the tundra and the mountains that led into Herran. Kestrel’s condition . . .

  He glanced at her. The poverty of her frame. The wariness with which she regarded him, the way she was doing so even now.

  “They might have survived,” he said, meaning the horses. He was speaking quickly. “They’d have run. They’d stay together.”

  She looked like she might ask something, then her face hardened in suspicion and Arin was certain that the only reason she had come with him was because he was a better option than a prison cell.

  He turned. There was no high ground from which to see. The tundra night was light enough to see Kestrel’s face, but too murky to spot three horses wandering—how far away?

  Much too far.

  If they were there at all.

  “Javelin!” he called. The horses were good, but only one of them was intelligent enough to come when called—if Javelin could. Arin didn’t know. He’d never heard of a horse doing that, not from out of sight, not without the bribe of a treat.

  Arin thought they were far enough from the camp, and he’d left most of the guards unconscious—maybe dead. He hadn’t taken any care with how deeply he’d driven the ring’s stinger. Still, he and Kestrel might have been followed. Shouting wasn’t smart.

  Arin looked at her. She was fighting sleep.

  He called again. “Javelin!”

  He made himself hoarse. He walked as far away from Kestrel as he dared, shouting for the horse. Finally, he came back to her and knelt in the mud where she sat. “Call him,” Arin said. “He’ll come if you call.”

  “Who will come?”

  He realized that nothing he’d said provided any context to understand who and what Javelin was if someone didn’t already know. He realized that he’d been hoping that she hadn’t meant it, in the prison, when she’d asked who Arin was and looked at him like he was a dangerous stranger. Part of him had believed that she was pretending not to know him in order to wound him, because he deserved it, and it was clear how much she should hate him now.

  “Kestrel,” he said softly, and could tell from her expression that she accepted her name but didn’t trust it. “Javelin is your horse. You love him. He loves you. If you call, he will come for you. We need him. Please try.”

  She did. Nothing happened, and the look she gave him—as if he was tricking her, making some mockery she couldn’t fathom—made his throat close. “Please,” he said. “Again.”

  She hesitated, then did as he asked, though eyeing him the entire time the way you would a predatory creature.

  When Arin heard the thud of hooves in mud, he sagged in relief.

  Javelin led the other two. One of the mares was limping.

  Arin would set a sacrifice to the god of the lost. He swore that he would. Then he looked again at Kestrel, who rose unsteadily to her feet, and he knew he would have to sacrifice to all of his gods.

  Kestrel went to her horse. Arin couldn’t see her face, which rested against the animal’s neck. He didn’t see her moment of recognition. But he saw her chest heave. Javelin lipped her hair. She leaned against the horse as she had not leaned against Arin—fully, tenderly. Trusting.

  Chapter 9

  He unnerved her.

  She was grateful to him and didn’t argue when he said that they should ride Javelin together and lead the two mares. She saw his worried look. How it assessed her. She knew as well as he did that she was likely to fall asleep in the saddle. Javelin was sturdy enough to bear them both, at least for a while. The plan made sense. But she resented it.

  It was the way she felt, tucked up against the stranger’s chest, cradled by either arm. It was the way her body seemed to know him.

  Her head swayed. She let herself rest against him.

  It wasn’t right that her body should know this person when her mind didn’t. Hazily, she realized that he could tell her any lie he wanted.

  Her memory was a mouth with the teeth torn out. She kept reaching in, probing the h
oles, pulling back. It hurt.

  Yes, any lie.

  He had saved her, but she didn’t know what he wanted from her—or what he might say to get it.

  His heart beat against her spine. It lulled her even as she knew that it shouldn’t. She slept.

  In the morning, she got a better look at him. Her mind was clearer, she thought, than it had been in some time. He was building a fire. He slowed, though, when he caught the way her gaze inspected him. He went still.

  He was dirty all over. She had the fleeting thought that she’d seen him both dirty and clean before. Her gaze traced the long scar, quite visible now that the sulfur had rubbed away. A sort of half recognition shimmered inside her. But the scar wasn’t what made him memorable.

  His gray eyes flashed to hers.

  She should remember him. She went over the lines of his face again. Distrust coiled within her. It didn’t seem possible that she would have seen a person like this and not remember him.

  Something was wrong with the awkward claim he’d made after their escape that they were friends. If the tentative way he’d said it hadn’t alerted her to its not being wholly true, the way he’d just let her evaluate him and now waited, breath held, for some judgment, suggested his nervousness. If they were really friends, she wouldn’t make him nervous. She felt herself harden.

  Now he looked hurt, and like he was trying to hide it, as if he’d guessed her thoughts.

  This, too, she didn’t like: how easily he read her.

  They rode separately. She was on Javelin. He rode a mare. The next time they stopped to rest the horses, she came closer to the fire, even though this meant coming closer to him. She was achingly cold.

  He offered her bread and dried meat. He apologized for it. “I know you’re used to better.”

  Which was a stupid thing to say, given that he’d just rescued her from a prison.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was a stupid thing to say.”

  When she took the canteen, she couldn’t stop herself from doing what she’d done in the morning, which was to sniff the water.