The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  Kestrel’s hand fell, and her gaze jerked away to find Sarsine standing behind her in the open doorway. Kestrel hadn’t been alone after all. The woman’s expression had the thoughtful cast of someone who’d been watching for a while. She carried a bundle of fabric in her arms.

  “That’s not me,” Kestrel said.

  Sarsine draped the fabric (a dress) over the back of the pearl-gray chair. She came close and rested a hand on Kestrel’s shoulder—warmly, yet at a careful distance from the raised marks she could prob ably see on Kestrel’s back through her shift.

  Kestrel glanced again at the too-thin girl with the sunken eyes. Cracked lips. The knobs of her clavicle.

  “Here,” Sarsine said, and gathered Kestrel’s hair. She wove a quick, practical braid.

  “He did that,” Kestrel said suddenly. He had braided her hair, before. That (that?) was the unnamed, lost plea sure she had tried to remember. He had taken his time. A sensual slowness. The brush of his thumb against the nape of her neck. Mesmerizing. Then later, the next morning: all those little braids transformed into miserable knots.

  “What?” Sarsine tied the braid with a ribbon.

  “Nothing.”

  Sarsine met her eyes in the mirror, but said only, “Come, let’s get you dressed.”

  “To do what?”

  “To look more like yourself.” Sarsine pulled her to her feet.

  The dress was too loose. But it fit well in the shoulders and was the perfect length. The fabric. That pattern of sprigged flowers. “This is mine.”

  “Yes.”

  “But this isn’t my home.”

  Sarsine’s fingers paused in their buttoning. “No.”

  “Then what am I doing here? Where did you get this?”

  Sarsine fastened the last button. “How much do you remember?”

  “I don’t know.” She was frustrated. “How am I supposed to know how much? For that, I’d have to know what I’ve forgotten. You tell me.”

  “Better if you asked someone else.”

  Kestrel knew whom she meant. There it was again: his fingers sliding through her hair. It was true, what she’d suspected on the tundra was true. A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise.

  “No,” Kestrel told Sarsine. “I trust you.”

  Sarsine knelt to put slippers on her feet. “Why?”

  “You don’t want anything from me.”

  “Who says I don’t? A maid might seek any number of things from her mistress.”

  “You’re not my maid.”

  Sarsine glanced up.

  “Why are you doing this?” Kestrel asked. “Why are you kind to me?”

  Sarsine dropped her hands to her skirted lap. She worried a thumb over the opposite palm. Then she got to her feet and helped Kestrel to a full-length floor mirror. Kestrel, fully tired now, and confused by a number of conflicting things, let herself be led.

  “There,” Sarsine said, once Kestrel stood before the reflection. “You look almost like a proper Valorian lady. That’s what you are. When I first saw you, I hated you.”

  Kestrel stared at herself. She didn’t see what was worth hating. She didn’t see much of anything. Just a shadow of a girl in a nice dress. She whispered, “Am I despicable?”

  Sarsine’s smile was sad. “No.”

  There was a silence that Kestrel didn’t want to break, because it seemed, for that moment, that there was a downy safety in not deserving hatred. Maybe she didn’t need to be anything else. Maybe it was all a person needed to be.

  Sarsine said, “Almost eleven years ago, your people conquered this country. They enslaved us. You were rich, Kestrel. You had every thing you could want. You were happy.”

  Kestrel’s brow furrowed. She recognized some of what Sarsine had said, saw it far off, hazy in the distance. But . . .

  It was want, she realized. And happy.

  “I don’t know every detail,” Sarsine said. “What I do know is that last summer, you bought Arin in the market.”

  “So it’s true.”

  “You won him at an auction and brought him to your house. But the auctioneer, a man called Cheat—”

  Kestrel felt an ugly pang.

  “—wanted you to win. Arin did, too. Your father is the highest-ranking general in the Valorian army. Arin was a spy for the Herrani rebellion. He was crucial. Nothing could have been done without him. Or you. You gave him useful information, though you didn’t mean to. You wouldn’t have done it if you’d understood what Arin was after and what he’d do with what you told him. Valorians were attacked all over the city, taken by surprise, killed. Your friends, too.”

  Tears on dead skin. A girl in a green dress. Poisoned purple lips. Kestrel swallowed.

  “After the rebellion,” Sarsine said, “you were brought here.”

  Kestrel’s voice came out strangled: “A prisoner.”

  Sarsine pursed her mouth, but didn’t deny it. “You escaped. I’m not sure how. The next thing we knew, the Valorian army was here and we were under siege. But you came and presented Arin with a treaty.”

  Heavy paper beneath her thumb. Snow floating onto her cheeks. White paper, white snow, white heart.

  “It offered us our independence as a self-governed territory under the emperor’s rule. It seemed too good to be true. It was. Several months later, people in this city began to fall ill. I did, too. We were being slowly poisoned by tainted water from the aqueducts. The emperor wanted to kill us without risking any of his soldiers’ lives. We know this—and stopped it—because of you. You were passing information to Tensen, Arin’s spymaster in the capital. Arin didn’t know who Tensen’s source was. Tensen refused to name her, and instead called her by a code name: the Moth.

  “You were caught. A Herrani groom in the mountains brought news that a woman in a prison wagon bound for the tundra had given him a moth and asked him to give it to Arin. Arin went for you. Here you are.”

  Kestrel’s teeth were set, her shoulders stiff. She didn’t remember most of what Sarsine had said, wasn’t sure what to make of the few vague images that pulsed in her mind. She fought fatigue. “That’s crazy.”

  “Implausible, I know.”

  “A story.” Kestrel groped for the way to say it. “Like something out of books. Why would I do such things?”

  It was you, she’d told him on the tundra. You’re the reason I was in that prison.

  Yes.

  Flatly, Kestrel said, “I sound very stupid.”

  “You sound like the person who saved my life.” Sarsine touched three fingers to the back of Kestrel’s hand.

  Kestrel remembered what that gesture meant. The knowledge opened inside her. The gesture was Herrani. It meant gratitude, or apology, or both.

  She plucked at the loose dress. Her thoughts whirled. Her eyelids were heavy, lowering. She tried to imagine her former self. Enemy. Prisoner. Friend? Daughter. Spy. Prisoner again. “What am I now?”

  Sarsine held both of Kestrel’s hands. “What ever you want to be.”

  What Kestrel wanted to be was asleep. She wavered to the nearest piece of furniture—a divan, but the blackness came too quickly for her to see it for what it was. It was just an object that wasn’t the floor. She surrendered herself to it and sank swiftly into sleep. A cushion. A drawn coverlet. A dress that had been hers.

  Someone had moved her back into her bed. Not Sarsine.

  It was dark, but a low-lit lamp had been left. The chair was empty.

  She lay curled on her side. Her back had healed into a dull ache. A few deep grooves stung. On the tundra, she hadn’t noticed pain much while the drugs were still in her. Then they weren’t, and the sickness and craving had been worse than anything else.

  The ache gnawed through her back, coming up through her heart. She eyed the empty chair.

  It occurred to her that after the last time, when she’d woken in the night, he’d decided to keep a better distance.

  It occurred to her that the cold, small thing
she felt was abandonment.

  Which should have made her queasy with anger at her own confusion. Who was she, that she would strike the person who had saved her, and then feel bereft at his absence?

  She wasn’t a person, really, but two. The Kestrel from before and the one now, each grating against the other like halves of a split bone.

  She turned onto her other side, faced the wall, and reached to touch, for the first time, the ridges on her back. Wincing flesh. Long, clotted scales. Repulsed, she withdrew her hand and tucked it close to her breast.

  Go back to sleep, she commanded herself.

  She didn’t need the nighttime drug anymore. Not exactly. Yet the thought of it made her throb with longing. If offered a cup, she’d gulp it down.

  The following day (at least, Kestrel thought it was the following day. It seemed entirely possible that she might have slept straight through more than one night), Sarsine helped her walk to the breakfast room. The table bore ilea fruit, bread, tea, milk, a set of iron keys, and one other item, muslin-wrapped. Large. A clunky-looking shape. Set right next to the keys at the head of a plate.

  “For you,” Sarsine said.

  “Is it Ninarrith?” The word came to her, alien in her mouth. From the ancient Herrani tongue, she remembered, which was so old that it was its own language. No one spoke it, though a few words lingered. Before the war, Herrani used to give each other gifts on Ninarrith. A holiday.

  “Not yet.” Sarsine peered at her.

  “What?”

  “It’s an odd thing for you to remember.”

  “I can remember some things.”

  “It’s been eleven years since we’ve celebrated Ninarrith.”

  “What does the word mean?”

  “It’s two words, joined together. For ‘hundred’ and ‘candles.’ The holiday marks the last day the gods walked among us. We celebrate the hope of their return.”

  Kestrel pulled at the memory, drew it out, thick and slow. “My nurse. She was Herrani. I celebrated with her in secret.” She wondered what would have happened if they’d been caught. Fear puddled in her heart. But there was no one to catch her now, no one here who’d punish her. “I loved her.” Yet she couldn’t remember the woman’s name anymore. Kestrel’s fear condensed into loss. She tried to smile, felt it waver.

  “The tea will get cold.” Sarsine bustled unnecessarily with the pot, and Kestrel was grateful to have a moment for her expression to be what ever it was without the burden of someone else’s gaze.

  She told Sarsine, “I’d like to celebrate Ninarrith with you.”

  “If we’re here come then,” the woman said darkly, but shook her head when Kestrel peered at her. “Go on. Take them.”

  The keys were heavy.

  “They’re for the house,” Sarsine said. “A full set.”

  Their weight on her palm. Something she thought she should remember.

  She set the keys aside. “And this?” She ran a finger down a crease in the muslin of the clunky, wrapped thing.

  Sarsine lifted her brows—a little sardonically, Kestrel thought, although the edge of the woman’s expression appeared less to do with Kestrel and more to do with a knowledge Sarsine had and Kestrel didn’t. The black brows, their quality of curbed cynicism, dry amusement . . . again Kestrel recognized him in her. He’d looked at Kestrel like that, before. She wondered why she felt comfortable with Sarsine and not with him, and if that ease was despite the resemblance, or because of it.

  “See for yourself,” Sarsine said.

  It was a dagger, bright beneath the opened muslin. Nestled in its scabbard, hooked to a slim belt. The leather of the belt was sturdy yet supple, not made with any particular elegance but with an eye for durability and comfort. There were few holes for the buckle’s tongue: a sign that the maker was assured of the belt’s fit. The scabbard, like the belt, was clean and strong in design, not given to the fanciful, though the ferrule was more severely pointed than Kestrel had seen before (yes, she realized. She knew daggers well). Not so sharp that it’d be likely to hurt the bearer, but pointed enough to do damage if the scabbard were gripped in the fist and driven into an opponent. And the scabbard wasn’t entirely without decoration. Just below its throat was a symbol: two rings, one fitted inside the other, distinguishable only because the raised texture of each was different. The symbol was echoed on the dagger’s hilt, in the round of the pommel, which was weighted enough to kill if brought down on certain parts of the skull. The hilt—Kestrel wrapped her fingers around it—was a perfect fit for her hand, cross guards hooked to protect the fingers.

  She pulled the blade free. It was very Valorian. Save for the straightened point and that unknown symbol, its every element showed the Valorian style, from the hooked cross guard to the double edge to the blade’s beveled shaft. The steel’s faint blue hue showed its quality, but Kestrel would have known it anyway. The dagger felt light in her grip, agile. Beautifully forged. Balanced. Fine in its proportions. Made by a master.

  Kestrel touched a thumb to its edge. Blood sprang to the skin. “Gods,” Kestrel said, and sucked at the cut.

  Sarsine laughed. “A convert now, are you?”

  Kestrel was startled. She’d forgotten about Sarsine. She frowned, unsure why she’d said what she had. It had been the kick of instinct. Or maybe someone else’s instinct, rooted inside her, inhabiting a hidden space that made it feel natural for her to invoke gods she didn’t believe in. She pushed the blade back in, set the whole thing back on the table with a thunk.

  “Why are you giving this to me?” The keys she understood. She was not meant to be a prisoner here, but a guest. More than a guest, if she read the gift rightly. Guests don’t have access to their host’s every room.

  But the dagger . . .

  “I could kill you with this,” she said. “Right now.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Sarsine still looked amused. “You’re hardly in fighting form.”

  “That’s not the point.” It was starting to upset her a little, the keys and the dagger together. The way each gift, in its own way, showed a trust absolute.

  “The thinking,” Sarsine said carefully, “was that you shouldn’t feel defenseless.”

  Kestrel opened her mouth, then shut it, not realizing until then that this was how she had felt, and that the first emotion that had claimed her after falling under the visual spell of the dagger was a sense of security.

  Sarsine said, “We—”

  Kestrel looked at her sharply.

  “I’m not worried that you’ll hurt someone else,” Sarsine said. The phrasing of the words indicated exactly what the worry had been—or maybe still was.

  “I see.” Her mouth thinned. “I don’t need a dagger for suicide. But I wouldn’t do it. I’m no coward.”

  “No one,” Sarsine said, “thinks that you are a coward.”

  Kestrel took the sheathed dagger onto her lap, gripped it with both hands. It felt irrevocably hers. It would pain her to give it back. She thought from the way Sarsine looked at her that the other woman understood this. Kestrel relaxed her hold. The dagger was hers, and it was all right. She was trusted with a weapon, and that was right, too.

  Sarsine drank her milk.

  Kestrel said, “Is this dagger like the dresses?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “It was made for me. Do you have other things of mine from before, like the dresses? Like this?”

  Sarsine hesitated, as if she wanted to speak but the words lodged in her throat. Finally, she said, “Your piano.”

  The instrument rose before her eyes: black, massive, too large for her heart, which suddenly strained with desire. “Where?” she managed.

  “Downstairs, in the salon.”

  The surge of remembered music. The arch of her fingers. Glittering notes.

  “I want it,” Kestrel said. “Now.”

  “Honestly, I’m not sure you’d make it down the stairs.”

  “But—”

 
; “You could be carried, though not by me.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re not that light.”

  Kestrel was silent.

  “Shall I arrange for it?”

  She knew whom Sarsine would ask. “No.”

  “Then eat your breakfast.”

  She did, without another word.

  Sometimes she’d step gingerly out onto her memory and it would creak and sway beneath her like a bridge that couldn’t bear her weight. She’d retreat into what she knew best: the prison. There, she’d learned to love the earth beneath her cheek. Dry, cool. The sunless smell of it. The way it heralded sleep. She’d drink the nighttime drug. She’d swallow and swallow. Then she’d drift, and love the guard who led her, and love the moment right before sleep, because it was only a moment, and in one mere moment she wouldn’t have to think about how she’d given in—and given up. She’d never had any other kind of life. This was all there was.

  Sleep was there. It shoved her down. Pressed her lungs. The drug crept soft fingers across her mouth and shaped it into a loose smile.

  No one stayed with her anymore at night. Not Sarsine. Not him. And she didn’t need company, she was no child. She wasn’t frightened by nightmares, or by the way she couldn’t remember them after she woke, like now.

  Her fingers trembled as they reached for the low-burning lamp on the bedside table. She took the lamp. The keys. She pulled on a robe and made her way through the suite, through the sunroom, and out onto the rooftop garden. Her feet were bare on the egg-shaped pebbles. The darkness was velvety, and warm enough that Kestrel knew that she shouldn’t be cold.

  She should know whether it was cold or warm.

  She should know whether it was normal to be nervous. Would her pulse race like this if she were still the same person she used to be?

  She tried the heavy keys on the ring until she found the one that fit into the door set into the opposite wall of the garden. Opened it. Saw another garden, just like hers. She tried to walk on the pebbles without making noise. Failed. It occurred to her that the pebbles were there for the very purpose of making noise. She thought about this, about why someone might want to hear another person coming, and this distracted her from the forgotten nightmare that seemed to have snapped her in two.