The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  “I know,” said Arin.

  “I doubt you know anything that doesn’t have to do with that wraith of yours.”

  “Enough.”

  They had been talking like this for some time, Roshar gradually dropping his veneer of needling humor to vent real frustration, Arin growing quiet, entrenched. They were in an office adjacent to the library, the table between them blanketed with maps and papers. The room had been chosen for privacy. Prob ably no one could hear them beyond the locked door. Or if people did, down the first floor’s north hallway, they heard not words but muffled tones. Despite the hot day, the diamond-paned windows remained shut because Roshar had complained of a chill. In truth, the prince hadn’t wanted their conversation to carry into the garden. But this meeting, which was supposed to develop tactics to keep the Valorian general off the peninsula’s shores, was deteriorating to the point that Arin wouldn’t have been surprised if Roshar broke something, possibly one of the windows, if only because they’d make the loudest noise.

  “We lost that island, and you . . . where are you?” Roshar’s tight hands opened and spread wide. “Are you even here? No, you’re not. You’re upstairs, roaming her halls, roaming her head. Arin, this needs to end.”

  But Arin said nothing.

  Roshar swore at him in Dacran, the curse so intricate and colorful that Arin didn’t even try to make sense of the grammar.

  In the silence that followed, Arin thought about how the god of death had deserted him. He had strained to hear his god. He’d also prayed to the god of war—confederate of death, drinker of blood—but the prayers had found no favor. Ithrya Island had been lost. It was now occupied as a Valorian base, south of Herran. It wouldn’t be long before the general’s army tried to land again on the peninsula—though where was uncertain.

  Roshar said, “My sister is going to have some hard questions for you.”

  Arin couldn’t avoid remembering the queen’s kiss last spring. He’d pressed her against the shut door. She had wanted him. Kestrel had said that she didn’t. He hadn’t wanted Kestrel either, not then. Or so he’d thought. His gut twisted with shame.

  “Arin, you will do me the courtesy of responding when I speak.”

  “Your sister is none of my concern.”

  The prince pressed palms to his face so that his hands made a mask that showed only his disbelieving eyes. Then his fingertips crept up and rubbed against squeezed-shut eyelids.

  But what could Arin say? He couldn’t explain how it felt, mere days after Kestrel had come to his rooms and said that she liked the dagger, to hear the rich cascade of the piano played in a far-off room. To hold his breath as he heard the initial stammer of notes. Then: mistakes worked through. Rhythms made right. He’d felt this new thing, giddy and bright. It spun inside him, soft and warm and summery.

  “We have used this city as a base.” Roshar dropped his hands. He’d switched to Arin’s language. He was speaking with the kind of bell-like tone one uses with children. “It’s been a convenient point of return. We’re here now because the bay provides a good base to attack or defend anywhere along the eastern coast between here and Ithrya. And the city, as the general’s greatest prize, must be protected. But the general’s not likely to bite at it, not yet. Not when we’ve avalanched again the mountain pass he used for the first invasion. Not when our fleet is in this bay. He can seize the easy fruits of your countryside and march north, inland to the city, where he’ll breach the wall and take what he wants that way.”

  Arin didn’t disagree.

  “I’m heading south soon, little Herrani. I don’t plan on returning to your lovely home with its new and fascinating guest. Will you see fit to join me in defending your very own country, or will you waste away here with your Valorian ghost until her people break down your doors and murder you both?”

  “I’m coming with you,” Arin said . . . but not immediately, and with the prick of offense that comes when an accusation hits home.

  “My prince. ‘I’m coming with you, my prince.’ ”

  But Arin wouldn’t say it, not even in the same mean mock-play of Roshar’s tone. He swallowed, throat tight. His mouth had the same taste it had years ago when a Valorian had shoved a horse bit into it.

  “I do hope,” Roshar said, “that what you lack in grace and self-preservation will be recompensed by a return to your usual brutal and uncanny gift for battle. I want you to kill them all. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about your gun?”

  Roshar’s word for Arin’s invention was accurate in the vaguest sense, since the term had long been used to refer to any shape and style of cannon.

  “Our supply has increased,” Arin said, “but I’m worried about the device’s accuracy.” He shuffled through the papers on the table until he found the sketches for the weapon. He selected a particular page and traced the sketch of a barrel and matchlock. “If we use what we have now, we’ll risk hitting our soldiers when we fire. We can surprise the Valorians with this weapon only once, and—”

  A slender hand reached between them to take the sketch.

  Roshar spun around. Arin didn’t move.

  Kestrel stood there, ignoring the prince, who had sucked in his breath and hardened his expression into a death’s-head mask. She glanced up at Roshar once, coolly, then continued to study the design. She hadn’t looked at Arin at all. Her slippered feet sank into the plush, vividly patterned carpet as she stepped quietly away from them and closer to a window. A shaft of light hit her cheekbone, made the paper glow. It set her hair on fire. Arin’s stomach twinged. His throat tightened. Her eyes were still too shadowed. But she’d gained weight and looked less frail. Once again, Arin dared to hope.

  He had forgotten what she was looking at until she spoke. “The ordnance is wrong.”

  “What?” Roshar was just barely keeping his composure.

  “It’s round. You’re planning on shooting a ball like a cannon does. But this is not a cannon. Cannons aren’t intended to be especially accurate. They’re designed to do the most amount of destruction in a generalized space. This thing—a gun, you said?”

  Only now did Arin wonder when she’d entered the room, and how much she’d heard. He didn’t think she understood the eastern language, but he and Roshar had been speaking in Herrani for some time now.

  “This seems designed for specific harm to a person or that person’s parts,” Kestrel said. “In that sense, it’s like a bow and arrow. An arrowhead is not round. It’s tipped. That makes the arrow fly true. It drives into the flesh. If you want greater accuracy, that little cannonball should not be a ball. It should be conical, perhaps. Tipped.”

  She returned the sketch to Arin. Then she left as silently as she had come, closing the door behind her.

  “Arin.” Roshar’s voice was menacing. “That door was locked.”

  “I gave her the keys.”

  Roshar exploded.

  Kestrel was on the grounds at the edge of the orchard when he found her. The eastern prince kept his distance, but he was unmistakably there to speak with her. Ripe ilea hung heavily from the trees. Some of the purple fruit had fallen to the grass. Wasps climbed over it. They didn’t bother her, but the sun made her tired.

  “What do you want?” she said when he approached.

  “I’d like to know how much you know.” Roshar saw her expression. What he saw changed his. A little more gently, he said, “It’s a matter of safety.”

  “Mine, or yours?”

  “I care about as much for my safety as I think you do for yours.”

  “His, then.”

  “This is war. The safety of many people is at stake.”

  “If you play war safely, you’ll lose,” she said, then was uneasy. Those words hadn’t felt like hers. They belonged to someone else, a person who knew war well and enjoyed discussing it with her.

  She shook her head. She didn’t want to think about that. It made her dizzy, pricked by invisible pins. She
focused on the prince: his mutilations, his finely drawn black eyes. “How do you speak my language so well?”

  Roshar raised his brows.

  “I mean, his.” She knew that Herrani wasn’t her first language. Still, it often felt that way.

  “I was enslaved by your people. Then I was sold into this country.”

  She looked again at the missing nose. The slitted, reptilian nostrils. “Did they do that to you?”

  He smiled with his teeth.

  Testing the truth of it as she spoke, Kestrel said, “I knew that they did that to runaways. I don’t remember seeing it happen.”

  “You might not have. You were a lady. Part of privilege is not having to look at ugly things.”

  “You’re not ugly.”

  “What a sweet little liar you are.”

  “Except when you smile. You make yourself look like a grinning skull. You do it on purpose.”

  “Not so sweet, then.”

  “Not a liar.”

  “But you were a liar. A very good one, if what I hear is true. Who’s to say you’re not lying about your lost memory?”

  She gave him a look of such plain hatred that he drew back. The wasps buzzed.

  “I have a confession,” he said. “Sometimes I offend on purpose. It’s like my smile.”

  “That’s not an apology.”

  “Princes don’t apologize.”

  In a swift move, she had her dagger in her hand at his throat. He jerked his head back with a hiss.

  “Apologize,” she said.

  “I’m not sure giving you that dagger was wise. You’re not exactly stable.”

  She pressed the dagger. He stepped back. She stepped forward. “Every one says I’ve done these marvelous things. Traitor to my country for the greater good. I was so noble.” Her mouth became a sneer. “Poor girl. Poor Kestrel with her worthless weak body, her empty mind. Why would I lie now?”

  “To torment him.”

  Startled, she lowered the blade.

  Roshar said, “You torment him.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To protect your friend from me?”

  This time, Roshar’s smile was a mere twist of the mouth.

  “I don’t want anything from him,” she said.

  “That might be part of the problem.”

  She spoke as if she hadn’t heard. “I don’t care about your war.”

  “Did you, or did you not, just advise us on how to improve a weapon designed to riddle your people with holes? A weapon that if we are very lucky will kill your father.”

  “My father.” The blue sky went black. Wasps buzzed inside her head. She opened her mouth to speak. Nothing came out.

  “Yes,” Roshar said. “He’s leading the Valorian army. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  The hand that held the dagger sagged. She thought about her conversation with Arin in his rooms. He had tried to tell her.

  Roshar touched her shoulder. Her vision cleared, but her heart was racing. He said, “I apologize. I’m sorry for what I said earlier.”

  She felt far away and horribly grounded at the same time, like her heart had been torn from her body and lost, and she didn’t know whether she was her heart or her body.

  “Kestrel?”

  It was one thing to perfect a weapon that would kill her people. It was another to discover that she hadn’t considered her father, had never even thought about his role in this war, though she’d had enough information to guess it without being told.

  She realized she didn’t regret perfecting the weapon. Part of her wanted her father to be a target. Her own father. What kind of person was she?

  Abruptly, Roshar said, “I don’t remember how I used to look.”

  It took her a moment to absorb what he had said.

  “When I look in a mirror, this is all I see,” he told her. “There’s no memory of what I was before.”

  The scent of ilea fruit was heady. She forgot her father. She did not want to remember him. Bringing her gaze up again to Roshar’s face, she met his lovely, untouched eyes. And saw the satiny brown skin of his cheek. She asked, “Do you miss who you were?”

  At first, she thought his reply would be mocking. Yet he simply shrugged and spoke in a voice that was light yet thin. “Oh, what’s the use of missing?” He squinted one eye and, apparently aware of how the mood had changed between them, he said, “You’re good with a blade.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head. “I never was.”

  “I said good, not divinely talented. You’ve got an ease that comes from training for a long time.”

  “Is that what you see, or what you know about me from before?”

  “What I see. I didn’t know you before.”

  Kestrel watched him smile yet again, softly this time. She waded into the sheer relief of being with someone who knew her only as she was now.

  The piano and the horse were hers in an uncomplicated way.

  They didn’t talk, which helped. It wasn’t that they expected nothing from her. Even the piano seemed expectant, each key ready for the strike. Javelin chewed her loose sleeve and slobbered and shamelessly leaned in for her caress. Yet both the horse and the piano knew her and didn’t care how she compared with her former self. They were hers. She was theirs. There were no questions.

  She saddled Javelin. It wasn’t easy. But if she lifted the saddle to his back every day then a day would come when her weak arms were strong. She tightened the girth. An irrielle bird hopped in through the open stable doors, pecking at the dirt. It cocked its head, watched Kestrel with tiny green eyes. Tipped its long, narrow tail. She got a mounting block, which she thought she prob ably hadn’t used since she was a child, and set her foot in the horse’s stirrup. The stallion was enormously tall. Mountainous, really. A warhorse. He shouldn’t suit her, but he did.

  She pulled herself up clumsily, but the horse didn’t seem to mind. The bird launched itself back out into the unclouded sky, dipping and weaving. Irrielles don’t fly straight.

  Kestrel took the reins and spurred the horse to follow the bird.

  She rode away from the house, taking a path that led to another path. She didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t long until she was surrounded by trees in full leaf. The path stretched out into a green tunnel. She rode for some time. She saw a day owl with her owlets. There was little wind. It wasn’t too hot. Good weather for war.

  She’d heard enough of the conversation between Arin and Roshar a few days earlier. They were biding their time here. If she were them, she wouldn’t stay long.

  Her stomach swayed. It matched the horse’s movement. She loosened the reins, letting Javelin go as he pleased.

  But she found that he was surging forward, hooves clopping. Arin’s house lay far behind. The path forked. The horse went left. He was stepping surely. He was, she realized, going somewhere he recognized and she didn’t.

  She jerked his head around and ground him to a halt. He snorted, hooves shifting.

  Kestrel was sweating. Her dress stuck to her skin. She made Javelin go back the way they’d come—fast, then faster, his hooves beating the rhythm of her terrified heart.

  She somehow wasn’t surprised to find Arin waiting alongside a stream close to his house, but she was surprised that she was grateful. Her heart still stammered inside her chest.

  Arin had no horse, though a bit of stable straw stuck to the sole of a boot. He was crouched by the water, fingertips sunk only past the first knuckles. Barely in the water at all. Just feeling the slight current, she thought. He hadn’t glanced over his shoulder. Still, he was aware that she was there. He listened to the slowing thump of Javelin’s hooves. Arin’s hair hung in his eyes.

  She had wanted to sweep it aside. She remembered this. It had been on the first day. When she had bought him. She had wanted to see him clearly.

  She stopped her horse.

  Arin straightened, water dripping from his hand. He came close, put his fingers i
nto Javelin’s mane, and met her eyes. She was held in the palm of that memory: curiosity, hesitation, a sense of wrong, a violation. Yet still the compulsion to see. This person. She remembered his rigid shoulders, hard mouth. He had avoided her gaze. His whole body: a silent snarl.

  He wasn’t like that now. He looked up at her, his expression was unguarded, growing worried. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Javelin shifted beneath her.

  Arin frowned. “Do I frighten you?”

  “No.”

  “Your face is bloodless.” He touched her hand. She saw that she was clenching the reins and let them slacken.

  “It’s not because of you,” she said. Then, because she had decided to be honest, she said, “Yes, you, a little.” She stopped, confused, unable to explain to him or herself the difference between the fear that had sent her tearing back down the horse path and the bright stitch of nervousness that traveled up her skin now as she looked down at him. “In the woods, Javelin wanted to take a path. I didn’t. It upset me.”

  His eyes went crystalline. “Where was this?”

  “Is there something dangerous in the woods?”

  He grabbed the pommel and mounted the horse behind her. “Show me.”

  She kept the reins. He drew his sword. It was a different sword than the one he’d had on the tundra. She thought about that, which kept her from thinking about how dread mounted in her throat as they rode, how her breath was again too fast. The damp dress still clung to her, and as she strained to be alert to every thing around them, each little life that moved in the woods, it was hard not to be aware of him, too.

  But there was no telltale snap of a twig. No enemy shadow in the trees. Kestrel almost wished there were. It would explain the terror that had seized her . . . and seized her again as they stopped at the fork in the path. The stallion stamped.

  Arin sheathed his blade.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s the way to your house.” She felt his voice travel up her back. There was a long pause. “We could go.”

  “No.”

  “Nothing’s there. It’s empty. I’d be with you.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  He took the reins from her frozen hands. He turned back Javelin, who showed more reluctance this time. Arin kept the pace slow, at a walk.