The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  She felt like she was both her body and her shadow, like she was her own ghost.

  She had done all this before. Had opened those doors, had crossed these twin gardens.

  His sunroom was dark.

  She opened its door anyway. Moved past the potted plants. Lamp lifted, she found the door to his suite. The hallway. Her footfalls were silent now, treading plush carpet. A set of silent rooms. The furnishings masculine in a way that didn’t look like what he would have chosen, yet suited him. Or what she knew of him.

  Which was little.

  The lamp lowered. She wasn’t sure what she was doing. Maybe she wanted to frighten him awake, to rip him out of sleep. Make him feel the way she’d felt when she’d woken minutes ago. She imagined screaming into his sleeping ear.

  Or what if she woke him a different way? She seemed to see herself as if looking at a painting of a girl from a tale, kidnapped by a creature who showed his true form only at night. The girl held the lamp over the bed. Crept closer. A drop of hot oil fell to his bare shoulder. He woke.

  Maybe Kestrel had come for answers. He had them . . . or pretended that he did.

  Maybe this was a very bad idea.

  She entered the room that she knew must be his bedroom.

  It was empty. The bed was large and neatly made.

  The windows, she realized now, were all shut. The air was stale. No one had been in this suite for days.

  Her arm was tired. Her whole body was. She set down the lamp, the keys.

  She touched the pillow. It was just a pillow. She touched the blanket. A blanket. The bed: a bed. Nothing more and nothing less than the thing she needed now. She sank into the bed. She told herself that she didn’t care what it meant that she did this.

  She lay on her stomach because she no longer slept on her back. She pressed her face into the pillow. His scent was there. She was stupid to have come, yet didn’t have the strength to leave.

  The ghost of him between the sheets. The shadow of her old self curled into the shadow of him.

  Kestrel woke at dawn because she’d always woken at dawn in the prison. She saw where she was. She felt flat. The light was pink and pretty. Insulting.

  It was habit, she told herself. That’s why she’d come here last night. There’d been no mystery, no tangle of reasons to untangle. It was simple. She’d gotten used to sleeping next to him on the tundra. She had been cold and he had been warm. Habits die hard. That was all.

  But she felt humiliated when she slipped from his bed. This time, she did remember what she had dreamed.

  She straightened the sheets and made every thing as it had been. She made sure there was no trace of her presence when she left.

  “So you’re his sister,” Kestrel said, some days later.

  Sarsine had coaxed her into her suite’s sunroom. Kestrel’s skin looked amber in the light. As the heat sank in, she realized that she wasn’t sore anymore, except in the worst places. She wore the dagger. It rested against her thigh.

  “No.” Sarsine laughed. “Nor his lover.”

  Kestrel frowned, uneasy. She didn’t understand the laugh or Sarsine’s quick leap to something that hadn’t even been suggested.

  “It’s what you asked when I first met you,” Sarsine explained. She blew a cooling ripple into her tea. “ ‘ Sister, or lover?’ I’m his cousin.”

  “Where is he?”

  Sarsine made no reply—not, Kestrel thought, because she had no intention of giving one, but because she was finding her words, and in that pause Kestrel remembered his empty suite and no longer wanted to know the answer to her question. She shoved a new one into its place. “Why not his lover?”

  Sarsine choked on her tea.

  “Cousins sometimes marry,” Kestrel said.

  “Arin? Gods, no.” She was still coughing.

  Kestrel didn’t like her own impulse to keep opening and closing and opening again the subject of him.

  “I love him,” Sarsine said, “but not like that. I was an orphan. My mother’s brother took me into his home. Arin’s parents were kind to me. His sister wasn’t. And Arin . . .” She shook droplets of spilled tea from her fingers, then stopped, thinking. “As a child, he was a little world unto himself. A reader. A dreamer. Skinny thing. Whenever I managed to convince him to come out of doors, he’d squint like he’d never seen the sun. But he’d come out to please me.

  “I was in the countryside with my nurse when the Valorians conquered this city. My parents had an estate south of here. It was thought that I’d want to choose some of my things to be brought here before the country house was closed. The Valorian general—your father—attacked the city first. The countryside after. My nurse and I had tried to close up my parents’ house and hide inside. The shutters were ripped open.

  “I don’t know what became of my nurse. I never saw her again. I was forced to work on my family farm. There’s work even a ten-year-old can do. Then I was sold to another country estate. It hurt to leave, though it had hurt to stay.

  “I could make myself do what was wanted. Not everyone can. Arin couldn’t. Never for very long. But I wasn’t tied to a whipping post. I was good and sweet and I did things that maybe, in the end, were worse than punishment. One of my masters decided, eventually, to bring me to the city.

  “Before the war, on my last day before I left this house to drive into the countryside with my nurse, Arin gave me a flower he’d pressed. It was pink, spread in a fan. I put it in a locket. I got into the carriage. Later, I lost the locket, lost the flower. But I remember it.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Sarsine looked at her in the too-strong light. “So that you will understand me.” She added, “And him.” She paused again. “You asked where he is.”

  “I don’t care where he is.”

  “He’s been away. He’s just come back.”

  After these words, Sarsine abruptly took her leave.

  The obviousness of Sarsine’s hint to go see him so annoyed Kestrel that she nearly did nothing. The annoyance grew, became larger than life. If Sarsine had put that pressed flower in Kestrel’s hand, she would have crushed it in her fist, would have been glad to see the arrowed pink flakes. She felt exactly the same as when she’d woken in his empty bed.

  Ultimately, it was anger that got Kestrel to her feet and out the door.

  As she strode down the hallway that led from his sunroom, and then into another chamber, she heard muffled thumps coming from the recesses of his suite. A short, metallic clatter. Quieter sounds.

  Silence.

  Then the quality of the silence seemed to shift. It changed the way a thought does: from soft idea to exploration to firm decision.

  To footfalls, coming toward her.

  Her pulse jumped. She had frozen in place. She held on to her anger . . . and somehow lost it when he appeared at the threshold of the room she had entered. He didn’t look like she’d expected. Boots off, jacket half undone. Grimy. Unshaven, the scar a white line cutting into the black.

  Startled, he stared. Then smiled a little. The smile was sweet. It was so different from what she felt that it surprised her how two people in the same room could feel such different things. As she thought about this difference, it became clear to her that she no longer knew what she felt.

  She recognized the rusted smears on his skin. It was easier to focus on this. Simpler to decode. She remembered that earlier, metallic clatter. He had come from war.

  “Did you win?” she asked.

  He laughed. “No.”

  “Why is it funny that you lost?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just . . . the question is very much like you.”

  She lifted her chin, felt her body go hard again. “I’m not her. Not anymore. I’m not the person that you—” She shut her mouth.

  “That I love?” he said quietly.

  She made no reply. He looked down, rubbed at his dirty hands.

  “Excuse me,” he said. He moved to leave the room,
then hesitated, one finger on the curved wooden ripple of the doorjamb. “I’m coming back.” A note in his voice made her realize that it had been obvious to him that he’d come back, and that it hadn’t been to her, and that his pause had been from the understanding that what was obvious to him wasn’t obvious to her. “One moment. Please don’t go.”

  “All right,” she said, surprising herself.

  He left. Nervousness swarmed inside her.

  She refused to be ruled by nervousness. That refusal held her there a little longer. Then: the realization that despite the way he’d looked, he’d had a kind of gentleness. It gentled her, and even if this was exactly what he had hoped, she found it hard to resent someone for being gentle.

  She was still thinking about this when he returned. His jacket was changed for a fresh shirt. Soft shoes. Hands and face clean. A scrolled paper tucked under his arm. He unrolled it onto a small, octagonal table (delicate, with worked legs. For two. A breakfast table).

  The paper was a map. “We lost Ithrya Island,” he said, pointing south. “It’s uninhabited, but . . .” He pressed a palm down on the buckling paper and looked up at her. “Do you want to know this?”

  “Is there something wrong with me knowing?”

  “No. But you might not like it. My people are at war with your people.”

  Her people were the ones who’d held her captive. They had hurt her. She crossed her arms over her chest. “So?”

  “Your father—”

  “Don’t talk about my father.”

  Her pulse was high again, stammering in her ears. His dark brows had gone up—his hand, too. The palm had risen off the map, fingertips still pinned down. His skin was clean, but the fingernails were ringed with black. Odd. She concentrated on that. As she did, she evened out. It calmed her to concentrate, and to find his blackened nails familiar. At least she could recognize familiarity, even if she couldn’t translate it. She said, “You didn’t wash your hands very well.”

  He glanced down at his hand. It came entirely off the map. The paper curled up. “Oh.” He swept a thumb once across his nails. “That. That doesn’t come out for a long time.” His eyes went, strangely, to the dagger at her hip, then darted away, making her think that he was thinking of the battle he’d just been in.

  She said, “Does losing this battle mean you’ll lose your war?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How many did you kill?”

  He shrugged. He didn’t know.

  “Does it bother you?”

  He met her eyes. Slowly, he shook his head.

  “Why not? Do you like killing?”

  “They want my country.”

  “So you do like it.”

  “Lately, sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “There are many reasons.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “But you are one of my reasons, Kestrel. You don’t want to hear that. I think you might be pushing me to say something that will make you leave.”

  This gave her pause. She thought of how painstakingly she had neatened his bedsheets to erase her presence.

  “I don’t—” The words caught in her throat. She let herself sit at the table and studied a symbol carved onto its surface. The symbol of a god, prob ably. The Herrani had many. “I don’t understand why I’ve forgotten so much.”

  “You were drugged.” There was something unspoken in his voice.

  “You think it’s more than that.”

  He took the other chair, but sat at a distance, his body turned from her, directed toward an eastern window, face in profile, scarred side hidden. As he spoke, it occurred to her that maybe he, too, felt like two people, that maybe everybody does, and that it’s not a question of whether one’s damaged, but of how easily or not that damage is seen.

  She studied him. Captor, rescuer, culprit.

  He kept talking. She began to listen. It was a terrible story, told softly, never stopping. He barely paused for breath. As he described the night of the Valorian invasion and himself as a child, she began to see how natural the reflex of self-blame was for him. Ingrained. Insidious.

  You’re the reason I was in that prison.

  Yes.

  It occurred to her that he might have taken blame he didn’t deserve.

  It occurred to her that she had already guessed this even before he’d begun telling his nakedly awful story.

  And that maybe she had been cruel.

  This thinking was not the same as trust. Still, she listened. After he finished, she listened to his silence.

  He spoke again. “Maybe, for you, it’s not just the drugs. Maybe . . . there are things that you can’t bear to remember.” He glanced into her eyes, then away, and she saw that it wasn’t because he was afraid of letting her see how he could or could not bear his memories, but because he was afraid of what her own lost memories might be, and didn’t want to show this fear, for fear of frightening her.

  She said, “I didn’t choose to forget.”

  The corner of his mouth lifted. It wasn’t a false smile, but only as true as it could be. He spoke lightly, like some joke had been played upon them both. “I don’t choose to remember.” He shifted to face her fully. “May I ask you a question?”

  She thought about it. She wasn’t sure.

  “I’m not asking for information,” he hastened to say. “I don’t want anything. Or, I suppose I do want something, but it’s to understand. That’s different, isn’t it, from asking for a favor, or . . . an emotion?” He stopped, blocked by the difficulty of holding himself to honesty and finding the way language fails, sometimes, to get honesty right. “Maybe it’s not different. You don’t have to answer.”

  “Just say it.”

  “You’ve not wanted me to talk about what you can’t remember. Not to ask. Not to tell. You’re . . .” He didn’t say the words. Kestrel thought them anyway. Angry. Terrified. “Is it because you really don’t want to hear it, or . . . because you don’t want it to be me who tells you?”

  “I want to ask a question of my own first.”

  This took him aback. “Of course.”

  “On the tundra, you said that it was your fault that I was in prison.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “How . . . ?”

  “Did you tell someone I was spying for Herran?”

  He recoiled. “No. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “What exactly did you do?”

  “I . . .”

  “I have the right to know.”

  “You lied,” he burst out. “You lied to me, and I believed you. I didn’t ask you to risk yourself. I never wanted you to do any of what you did. I never would have wanted this.” His mouth was tight, eyes wide: flooded with something hot and rich and hurt. “I had so many chances to see what you were doing. And I didn’t. I didn’t stop you. I didn’t help you. I despised you.”

  She said, “I lied.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me my lies.”

  “Gods.” He raked a hand through his hair. “You lied about the treaty. You agreed to marry someone else so that I could have a piece of paper. You tried to help the eastern plainspeople, yet let me think that you were responsible for their deaths. The way you acted. Selfish. Horrible. You worked for my spymaster and you lied about that, too, and he lied to me, and it makes me hate him now. I hate myself for not seeing it. He knew. He let you. You committed treason, Kestrel. How could you do that? You should be dead.” His voice lowered, dug in deep. “The worst—I don’t know—the worst is that you lied about—” He stopped himself, drawing a ragged breath. “You lied for a very long time.”

  There was a silence. Slowly, Kestrel said, “I did all that for you.”

  He flushed. “Maybe you had other reasons.”

  “That’s the one you care about.”

  “Yes.”

  She warred with what to say. It was strange to talk about reckless choices she didn’t remember. It h
elped to see his anger, the way it blistered the surface of things. It was a relief not to be alone in her anger. It was folly, what her old self had done, but brave, too. She could see that. She could see how he saw it, and how it made things worse for him.

  Easier, though, for her: to know she hadn’t always been this husk of a vanished person. Then harder, to glimpse who she’d been. She saw the great difference between that person and the one sitting in a chair because she was too weak to stand. Emotions whirl pooled inside her. “Your question.”

  “Never mind.”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  He shook his head. “Not necessary.”

  “It is you. It’s true, I haven’t wanted it to be you who tells me things I can’t recall. Not you.” She saw his flinch, and the effort to hide it. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Who are you, that you get to know so much about me that even I don’t know? Why do you get to tell me who I am? How did you get so much power? I have none. It’s not fair. You are unfair.” Her voice broke. “I am unfair.”

  His expression changed. “Kestrel.”

  She held her breath until her lungs ached. She couldn’t speak. Here was the truth, it peeled itself open: she was the reason she was in that prison. She had made some fatal, unknown mistake. Arin looked like a good culprit, but he wasn’t the right one.

  She was. It had been her fault, hers alone.

  He reached across the table. His warm hand dwarfed hers. She saw it through her swimming vision. Those black-rimmed nails.

  Blacksmith.

  A sudden understanding held her still. She became aware of the weight of the dagger at her hip. Her sight cleared. She looked at Arin. He looked young. And too careful, and worried, and uncertain, and . . . something new was emerging, she saw it. It changed the quality of his expression the way light changes every thing. A small sort of hope.

  “Maybe,” he said, “we could try being honest with each other.”

  She wondered what was in her expression that hope would grow in his. She wondered what he saw. “Arin,” she said, “I like the dagger.”

  He smiled.

  Chapter 13

  “They have a foothold in the south now,” Roshar said.