The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  They were silent as they rode. Then Kestrel heard herself say, voice low, “I feel foolish.”

  “No, Kestrel, you’re not.”

  “There was no reason to be afraid.”

  “Maybe we just don’t know what your reason is.”

  Javelin, whose ears flicked crankily to have been thwarted twice in his plans to take the fork in the road, whuffed and shook his head. “Shh,” Arin told the horse, and hummed a few low notes. Then he stopped and was quiet before saying, “Even if you had no reason at all, fear isn’t foolish. I get frightened, too.”

  She remembered how he’d held his sword earlier. “You thought there were Valorians in the woods. You weren’t frightened then.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what are you afraid of?”

  “Spiders,” he said gravely.

  She elbowed him.

  “Ow.”

  She snorted. “Spiders.”

  “Or those things with a thousand legs.” He shuddered. “Gods.”

  She laughed.

  Quietly, he said, “I was afraid when I came to the stable and saw that Javelin wasn’t in his stall.”

  Startled, she turned her head, catching a glimpse of the line of his jaw and the shadows of his throat. She returned her gaze to the road. Lightly, she said, “Worse than spiders?”

  “Ah, much worse.”

  “If I ran away, I wouldn’t get very far.”

  “In my experience, it’s a very bad idea to underestimate you.”

  “But you didn’t try to ride me down.”

  “No.”

  “You wanted to.”

  “Yes.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “Fear,” he said, “of what it would mean for me not to trust you. I saddled a horse. I was ready to ride . . . but I thought that if I did, I’d be nothing more than a different kind of prison to you.”

  His words made her feel strange.

  He changed his tone. There was mischief in it now. “Also, you’re a little intimidating.”

  “I am not.”

  “Oh, yes. I didn’t think you’d appreciate being followed. I’ve seen what happens to people who get on your bad side. And now you know my weakness, and will drop spiders down the back of my shirt if I cross you, and I’ll have a hard life indeed.”

  “Hmph,” she said, but she had calmed. Her bones didn’t feel so jammed up against each other in tensed certainty of a blow about to fall. There was the day. It was green and blue and gold. There was the powerful slow horse. His steady step. A murmur in the trees. Branch and twig. Arms on either side of her. Roots buckling up and disappearing back into the ground.

  Words clogged in her throat. But there was a soft feeling in her chest, a warmth that gave her courage to speak. “You said that we don’t know the reason I stopped Javelin from taking the path to my house. What do you think is the reason?”

  He hesitated. Finally, he said, “I have no thoughts.”

  “You always have thoughts.”

  She felt some quality of surprise in him. He’d been surprised by the familiarity of her tone.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “I’m thinking that I don’t want to assume anything. It’s—” He broke off. “Dangerous for me. Where you’re concerned.”

  As they neared his home, they had an easy rhythm in the saddle. He rode one-handed now. She was a bit sorry for Javelin, who had to bear both their weights. She’d make it up to him. She knew where the carrots were kept.

  But eventually her mental list of which treat to offer and which curry brush to use came to an end. She was left with images that wouldn’t go away.

  The fork in the path. Arin by the creek. That brief memory of the first time she’d ever seen him. His refusal to look up. His face bruised, armored by hatred.

  She said, “Was I horrible to you when you worked for me?”

  “No.”

  “Did I hit you?”

  “Kestrel, no. Why would you ask that?”

  “I remember you bruised.”

  “You didn’t do that. You wouldn’t.”

  “Well,” she pointed out, “I have hit you in recent memory.”

  “That was different.”

  She remembered how powerless she’d felt when she’d struck him. She thought she understood what he meant. “How was I, then, when I owned you?”

  There was no sound but the leaves and Javelin’s hooves on the dirt. The trees thinned. Arin’s house rose into view.

  Kestrel said, “You hated me.”

  He stopped the horse. “Please look at me.”

  She turned in the saddle and did, meeting his gaze.

  “At first I hated you,” he said. “It was for what you were, not who you were. I didn’t know who you were. And then I did, a little. You seemed kind. Kindness isn’t good in a master. Not to me. It’s another way of making you beg. You become grateful for things you shouldn’t be grateful for. When I was a child I was so grateful for it. Then I grew, and I almost preferred cruelty because it was closer to the truth, and no one hid behind the lie of being nice. I broke rules. Especially with you. I kept pushing for you to punish me. I tried to force your hand. I wanted you to show your true self.”

  His expression was difficult to read. The crook in her neck was painful. She dropped her gaze to Javelin’s mane.

  “But this was your true self,” he said. “Intelligent, brave, manipulative. Kind. You made no effort to hide who you were. Then I found that I wanted you to hide it. This was the luxury of your position, wasn’t it, that you didn’t have to hide? It was the doomed nature of mine, that I did. And that’s true. Sometimes a truth squeezes you so tightly you can’t breathe. It was like that. But it also wasn’t, because there was another reason it hurt to look at you. You were too likable. To me.”

  She wasn’t sure what to say.

  “I’m trying to be honest,” he told her.

  “I believe you. But it’s hard to believe you could have really known me. Some of what you say doesn’t make sense.”

  “Which part?”

  “My character seems contradictory.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think you can be manipulative and kind at the same time.”

  He laughed. “You can.”

  There was a silence. Javelin shifted beneath them.

  Arin touched a fingertip to the nape of her neck. He found, beneath the edge of her dress at her shoulder, a healed scar, thin and long. The skin where the whip had fallen was deadened, but the skin that bordered it was alive, and shivered. She was glad that she no longer faced him.

  “You are changed,” he murmured, “and you are the same. Honorable. I honor you.”

  That shiver dissolved into fear. Fear, for the fork in the path that loomed in the forest behind them. For what it meant that Arin knew her before and knew her now and honored her.

  She did not ask him to honor her. She was suspicious of honor.

  She nudged her knees into Javelin’s sides. Arin’s fingertips fell away. The horse headed for the stables.

  Arin said nothing more to her that day, beyond an offer to curry Javelin. She accepted. She wanted to be alone. Even when she retreated into the house, her skin felt vibrant. Wakeful, unruly. Like it would give her no quarter. It would insist and insist, all because of a touch that had seemed intended to soothe.

  But it was not soothing.

  Although the day had not been without comfort, Kestrel kept the last potent moment of it in mind. She decided that Arin was the opposite of relief.

  Chapter 14

  Arin was gone again. He left Kestrel A note that announced his departure but gave no reason for it nor an indication of how long he’d be away. She assumed it had something to do with the war, and that he hesitated to explain anything in writing, which begged the question of why he hadn’t spoken with her, which in turn reminded her of how she’d flinched from his touch.

  She understood the note. But she didn’t like it.


  She asked Roshar where Arin was and why.

  “Nosy, nosy,” said the prince. His tone was arch. Friendly enough. Still, it drew a clear hard line that warned she’d waste her time pressing for more information.

  They were playing Borderlands in the parlor. The windows were open and a storm was brewing, but the rain hadn’t come yet. Dark clouds knotted on the horizon. The wind that stirred the curtains smelled raw. Roshar shifted, and shifted again, eyeing the game pieces.

  Arin hadn’t taken Javelin. No horses were missing from the stables. She’d counted them.

  Roshar glanced at the darkening sky.

  “Is he at sea?” Kestrel asked.

  “Dear one, what do you care?”

  “You’re nervous.”

  “I’m nervous about you. You’re going to beat me.”

  “I thought you were at war. You should have better things to do than stay here and play Borderlands with me.”

  He lifted one brow, but merely said, “Your move.”

  She made it. It had been a plea sure to discover that she remembered how to play. How was not a problem for her. She knew how to do things. Play a game, play the piano, ride a horse, speak a language. If there was anything she no longer knew how to do, she wasn’t conscious of it.

  The issue was what. Her memory was a gaming set where she could see the board and knew the rules of the game yet didn’t recognize all the pieces.

  She said, “Who commands the Dacran-Herrani alliance?”

  “Need you even ask? Do I not exude an air of irrefutable authority?”

  “What’s Arin’s role?”

  “That,” he told her, “is a good question.”

  The wind billowed a curtain. She moved her engineer, keeping her eyes on the board. “I’m surprised your people support the alliance.”

  He shrugged, muttering something short and irritable in his language.

  “Dying for someone else’s people is not usually how war works,” Kestrel said. “What exactly does your queen want from Herran?”

  “That deadly little invention of Arin’s, for one.”

  “You have that already. He’s given you the plans.”

  “The empire must be kept at bay. If they take this peninsula, it’s only a matter of time before they take the east.”

  “Is your sister intelligent?”

  He gave her an impatient look. She saw his answer. “Then she must want something more,” Kestrel said. “Does Arin know what she wants?”

  Roshar’s green-rimmed eyes narrowed. “Arin knows a good deal when he sees one. We’re the best thing that could have happened to him.”

  “Yes, clearly. You are great benefactors. If you care so much for his well-being, why have you sent him to sea in the middle of a storm?”

  “Arin sent himself.”

  She fell silent. Roshar made his move. “Tell me, little ghost: do you enjoy my company?”

  She was surprised. “Yes.”

  “I enjoy yours, too. I can see why you like me. I’m intelligent, charming—not to mention handsome.”

  “And skilled at preening. Let’s not forget that.”

  “Lies, all lies.” He met her eyes across the gaming board. “The reason you enjoy my company is because I look like how you feel.”

  “That’s not it,” she said, though when she looked again at his damaged face she realized that what he’d said was true. Yet it was only partly true, and she didn’t know how to put the other parts into words.

  “Arin is my friend,” Roshar told her. “I trust him with my life, and he trusts me with his. That’s rare. I won’t have it questioned by someone who, for all I can tell, has no love for him.” He knocked over his general: the gesture of surrender. The marble game piece rolled. “Go away, little ghost. Go haunt someone else.” But he was the one who left.

  Rain tapped the panes. She went to draw the windows shut, then paused, seeing how the trees bent, lashed by wind blowing in from the sea. It smelled like a cut-open oyster.

  Dear one, what do you care?

  A small serpent of worry lifted its hooded head inside her.

  Rain drove into Arin’s eyes. The deck heaved. It wasn’t a green storm, but just as bad. They’d seen the signs. They’d been warned against sailing by the Herrani captain who’d taken Arin east last winter.

  “We must,” Arin had told Roshar. “The general holds Ithrya. He’ll use it to supply a strike at the mainland and can sustain that attack only if he’s able to supply his forces. He’s stockpiling Ithrya. We must break his supply lines with the Valorian capital. I’ll sail to the Empty Islands between our western shores and Valoria.”

  “ You’re no sailor.”

  Arin spoke as if he hadn’t heard. “A Herrani ship, with Herrani crew.”

  “I’ll send Xash.”

  Arin shook his head. “My people have recovered. They want to fight. As it is, your soldiers wonder when we’re going to pull our own weight.”

  So Arin’s ship had set sail.

  Now it quaked under each hit from a monstrous wave. The sea swelled into purple hills and valleys. The sails had been stowed lest they be shredded by the wind. The captain had set a drogue in the water to slow the ship and stabilize it, but its prow punctured wave after wave. The deck was slick. Arin struggled to keep his footing. He slid, hit the railing, and gripped it. Vomited.

  “God of madness.” The captain seized Arin’s upper arm and hauled him upright. The captain was three times Arin’s age and growled with that lilt that Herrani sailors had had before the war. “Get below, boy. What good’re you on deck? You know nothing of the sea.” Then the captain’s attention darted away, and he was gone.

  The captain was right. Arin was headed toward the bolt-hole, his face stinging with salt and rain, eyes burning, when it struck him that he was too seasick to be afraid. This made him remember his conversation with Kestrel as they’d ridden her horse, and how, if he’d had to touch her, he should have known better than to touch her where they had hurt her, even if he had wanted to say, without words, that he understood how they had hurt her.

  His boots skidded. The world was a dizzy, wet blur. The ship shuddered and leaned on its side. Again, Arin tumbled against the railing. This time, he went over. He plunged into the seething water below.

  Chapter 15

  He punched to the surface. Broke it. Gasped. Was shoved under again by a swell of water. His lungs blazed.

  This time, when he came up from the silence into the roaring air, he was smarter. He broke the laces of his boots with a savage yank, kicked the heavy things from his feet. He sucked in his breath, swam straight through the next wave, and struck out for the tempest-tossed ship, which wasn’t far. The water was blood-warm. It tugged at him. Dragged and pushed. His shoulders ached. He swam through another wave. He prayed. He was closer.

  A rope? Could someone lower a rope from the deck?

  Maybe . . . if anyone had even seen him go over.

  He kicked harder. Don’t leave me, he prayed again to his god. Not like this.

  There was no sound but the sea.

  I’ ll serve you, Arin promised.

  His god didn’t answer. Arin was close enough to see the barnacles on the ship’s hull. He looked up. No one looked down. He pushed forward.

  How can I serve you, if I drown?

  And now the fear. Weariness. His limbs felt as if they were plowing through mud. Salt in his throat. His lungs. His death wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

  By the sword. Please.

  Not like this.

  Not alone.

  Not yet.

  A current sucked him away from the ship.

  Arin almost surrendered himself to it. You can’t fight the will of the gods, and never this god.

  A tattered desolation fluttered through him. Again: Not alone, not yet. But he was alone. He had been alone for a long time.

  I wish, he thought, that I could hear your voice again. He wondered if he would, in the end.


  The current still gripped him. But it turned on itself. It flung Arin forward, muscling him swiftly through the water until he slammed against the hull’s side.

  He almost blacked out. Head ringing, vision weird, Arin went up and down. He swallowed water. Scrambled against the hull. His hands sought something, anything.

  And hooked hard. Squeezed.

  The hull ladder.

  Arin looked up and saw the line of rusted rungs leading up the hull. For a moment, he couldn’t move. He was rapt with wonder.

  In your name, Arin swore. I’ ll bring glory to you.

  Shaking, grateful, he climbed.

  The next day broke clean, like it had been spat on and polished to a shine.

  The black powder stored in the magazine deep in the ship’s hold had stayed dry. Some sacks, though, had been kept at the ready on the gundecks. They were soaked. The sea had swamped the gunports before the sailors had hauled back the cannons and bolted the ports.

  Arin and some of the sailors opened the sacks and spread powder out in shallow pans laid out on the quarterdeck. The sun was hot on his bare shoulders. He bowed with the weight of a full sack. The powder was damp and cakey as he jostled it out of the bag and sifted the grit with his hands, spreading it into a fine layer. His palms became black. They looked familiar. Not so different from how they’d used to look after a day in the forge. A normal day.

  But today was not normal. He kept his eyes on his task. The black powder, made from sulfur extracted from Dacra’s northern plateau, was precious. The eastern supply was limited, so it was important that the powder, useless when wet, dry well. It was important that Arin take care. And it was very important that he keep his gaze averted from the other sailors, who kept sneaking glances at him.

  Because Arin was not normal. No one fell into the sea like that and lived.

  He felt the stare from the girl scraping scales from a freshly caught fish half her size. Other sailors stared, too. The ones mending a sail and tarring the rigging. Those nearest to him, emptying their sacks.

  Sweat dripped from his brow and vanished into the powder in its pan near his bare feet. Arin wondered when that powder would be used. He wondered what damage it would do, and if, when the powder exploded, some essence of himself would burn with it.