The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  Javelin knocked his nose against her shoulder. Her fingers tightened around the curry brush. There was no precisely. There were only undercurrents of meaning to this situation that pushed Kestrel into a place she couldn’t name. She forced herself to shrug. “I’ll move my things.” The thought of that day on the horse path rose unbidden in her mind: the fork in the road. The general’s villa. She almost saw the house in her mind. Her house. Then came the fountaining fear, and Kestrel knew she couldn’t go there, she never would, not even if there was no place for her here. “I’ll speak with Sarsine.”

  “Yes.” Roshar was relieved. “Thank you.” He moved to leave.

  “Did Arin tell you to ask me this?”

  Roshar turned, surprised. “Of course not.”

  Questions rose within her. She was too proud to ask them.

  “Arin,” Roshar added, “is likely to kill me when he returns. But I never have any peace when my sister doesn’t get her way. Death might be preferable. Be a good friend and make my next few days pleasant ones, for they’ll be my last.”

  “Then he’ll be here soon.”

  “My sister has summoned him.”

  Kestrel stared at Javelin’s brown coat. She rubbed a dark dapple on his shoulder.

  “Arin turned pirate for a while, but all for the best of causes,” Roshar said. “Now that the queen has assumed command of the city, I won’t linger. Neither will he. We’ll both head south. After his royal audience, of course.”

  Her eyes pricked. She brushed a thumb against her fingers and looked at the dust from the ride through the city, then glanced up and found Roshar studying her, his expression sympathetic but also searching, and when she understood what it was he sought she became determined that he not find it. Her eyes cleared. She took the house keys from the pocket of her riding trousers and unhooked the key to the suite in the east wing. She offered it to Roshar. As she dropped it in his palm she knew perfectly well what had hurt her at the sight of the queen.

  She did not give him the key to the rooftop garden.

  “You’ll share my rooms,” Sarsine decided.

  “All right.”

  “We can’t offend her.”

  “I know.”

  Sarsine looked at her closely. “Arin would offend her. He wouldn’t agree to this if he were here.”

  Kestrel wasn’t so sure. She thought that Roshar knew a secret about the queen and Arin that Sarsine didn’t. She said, “It doesn’t matter to me.”

  But it did.

  Four days later, Kestrel was in the kitchen gardens on the grounds. She weeded. She liked it. She enjoyed knowing what belonged and what didn’t. There’d been a few mistakes at first, particularly with cooking herbs, but she knew what she was doing now. There was a plea sure in snapping pea pods from their stems and dropping them into her basket. She liked the bitter, ashy scent of the stunted plants that bore striped erasti, a fruit that grew only on this peninsula and only in this month. It was used in savory dishes. Kestrel picked them carefully. The cook, who’d been amusedly gentle with Kestrel’s gardening and her mistakes, had sucked in his breath when she’d first brought in a basket of erasti. They’d been unripe. “You must wait.” His tone was as close to chastisement as it ever got. “Leave them on the vine until they look like they’ll explode if you touch them.”

  Her skin had burned on the first day of gardening, then peeled. She tanned. At first, she’d used a little knife to scrape out the dirt beneath her nails. Now she didn’t bother.

  Today the wind was high. The earth was soft. She didn’t hear Arin approach.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  Kestrel glanced up at him. The wind swirled her hair into her face. She couldn’t see his expression and wanted to hide her own. She didn’t like what she felt. Relief, that he was safe. And a very different emotion: simmering, awful.

  He said, “I need to speak with you.”

  She knew from his tone what this was about. Knew that she had been right. She turned back to the plants. “I’m busy,” she told him. Green juice trickled down her wrist. The fruit went into the basket.

  He crouched next to her between the plants. Gently, he pushed the stray, windborn strands of hair from her face. His thumb touched her cheek. She looked at him then. He was unwashed, hair knotted, clothes rimed white with salt, his jaw green and yellow from an old bruise. His boots were Valorian, high and hooked.

  She didn’t want to see how the sun jeweled his eyes, or for her skin to feel suddenly alive simply because he had touched her. She didn’t want him to look at her as if there were a door inside her he wanted to open and enter.

  She said, “You should marry the queen.”

  He dropped his hand. “No.”

  “Then you’re a fool.”

  “I’ve asked Inisha to move into the governor’s palace.”

  “Twice a fool. Beg her back.”

  “Listen, please. When I was in the east, I thought all the wrong things of you. And you were engaged. You wouldn’t change your mind. I asked you . . .” Arin stopped.

  She heard the memory of his voice: Marry him. But be mine in secret.

  She ached at the memory of it, saw her hurt mirrored in his eyes as he remembered it, too, saw the echo of his expression last winter, in a tavern. He had begged for scraps. Hated himself for it. Asked anyway.

  “It was a kiss,” Arin said. “Nothing more. There are no promises between me and the queen.”

  “You have no sense of self-preservation.” Her heart was pounding hard. “If you’ve made no promises, you had better make them now. Why do you think she has allied with you?”

  “Why doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it does.” She leaped to her feet. He followed her, caught the hand that held the basket. “Was it a ploy?” she demanded. Her heart was beating in a double rhythm now. Fear and anger, fear and anger. “Did you kiss her so that she’d believe your alliance would be permanent?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because I wanted to!” The words burst from him. “Because she wanted me, and it felt too good to be wanted.”

  Kestrel took a shuddering breath. How was it possible to be wounded by someone she didn’t even love? The wind rode high. It whipped hair across her mouth. She waited until she could speak evenly. “I think that you don’t understand the politics of this situation. Did you expect the queen to come to Herran?”

  “No.”

  “Did Roshar?” But she knew the answer.

  “Yes.”

  “Yet your friend didn’t tell you.”

  Arin paused. “No.”

  “Why is she here?”

  “To take command of the city.”

  “Arin. Why is she here?”

  He was silent, and she saw from his expression that he guessed what she was going to say.

  “She’s here,” Kestrel told him, “to show her soldiers that this land is as good as hers. The Dacrans don’t like the alliance. They don’t see what they get out of it. But they will begin to see, once she establishes herself in this city. It’s not just for your new weapon, or for the sake of keeping the empire at bay that she agreed to help a small country with a weakened population. It’s because if you win this war, she can annex Herran and make it part of the east.”

  He didn’t deny it. “She doesn’t need me to do that,” he said finally. “She could take it by force. Using me wouldn’t help much.”

  She saw what he meant. It was true: Arin’s people loved him—she’d seen it, it was plain and powerful, the love flared up every time he smiled at someone, said a brief word—but he was no governor. No resurrected member of the massacred royal family. His political power was uncertain. Kestrel didn’t think she was wrong about the queen’s designs on this country, but her stomach clenched as she recognized how unavoidably, obviously true it was that the queen had wanted Arin for himself alone. “She must enjoy you, then. Maybe marriage isn’t exactly what she wants from yo
u. Still, you should give her what she wants. You might get a nice future out of it. At the very least, you should ask.”

  His expression seemed to shrink and tighten. “I won’t.”

  She hitched the basket into the crook of her arm. “I must go. The cook needs these supplies.” She was mortified to hear her voice break.

  Arin’s face changed. “Kestrel, forgive me.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t care.”

  He shook his head, eyes not leaving hers. He was wholly altered now, quiet with surprise, alive with some new idea. He touched fingertips to her cheek, traced the path of a tear. “But you do,” he said wonderingly.

  She broke away.

  “Wait.”

  She kept her back to him as she hurried, basket banging against her hip. “Don’t follow me.” She wiped her dirty wrist across her face, heard her breath escape in an ugly sound. “I will never speak with you again if you follow me.”

  He didn’t.

  Kestrel turned down the lamp and climbed into the high bed next to Sarsine. She could have slept on a divan in another room in the suite, but Sarsine wouldn’t hear of it, and Kestrel, though shy, had been touched.

  Sarsine turned beneath the light blanket and studied Kestrel, her loose hair and lashes and brows very black against the white pillow. She was looking at her in a way difficult for Kestrel to name, though maybe only because her own emotions were such a mess. Sarsine looked too much like Arin.

  Abruptly, as if changing a conversation, Kestrel said, “I used to share a bed with my friend Jess.”

  “I remember her. You saved her life.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I was there. She’d been poisoned. She would have died if not for you.”

  But all Kestrel could recall was Jess’s accusation of betrayal. She tried to explain to Sarsine, but didn’t have enough pieces of the story for it to make sense. Sarsine listened, then said, “Maybe you both changed too much. Or you’ll see her again one day, and things will be clearer between you. But I saw what you did for her. How you loved her.” Sarsine pulled the blanket up over Kestrel’s shoulder.

  Protective. That was the word for Sarsine’s furrowed brow, her gentle mouth.

  “Does something else trouble you?” she asked. “You can talk to me. I can keep a secret.”

  Kestrel felt her eyes glitter. She started and stopped and finally said, “I don’t know how to say what’s wrong. I don’t know anything.”

  “I’m your friend. That much, you can know for certain.” Sarsine touched Kestrel’s cheek, letting silence be a comfort. Then she blew out the light.

  But Kestrel couldn’t sleep. Sarsine was an eerily quiet sleeper. Kestrel was used to Jess, and remembered how her friend would kick. Jess muttered as she dreamed. Kestrel missed her, remembered and missed her at the same time, which made her wonder if memory is always a kind of missing. The pillow was hot and damp beneath her cheek.

  Kestrel imagined a melody. A tight rhythm, each note crisp and clean. She imagined how she’d play it. The control. Little bright pops of sound. She focused on that, because if she didn’t, she knew where her thoughts would go next . . . though as soon as she glimpsed what she’d have to avoid, it rose up within her in full being.

  Jess’s rejection. It had been in Jess’s townhome in the Valorian capital. Fawn-colored curtains. Kestrel couldn’t remember all the exact words, but she knew now why the friendship had broken. She heard herself quietly saying the very things that Jess would never forgive, saw her former self choosing against her own people, her friends, her father.

  He has done this to you, Jess had accused.

  No one has made me change.

  But you have.

  Kestrel turned onto her other side. Arin had been in the queen’s city then. She knew that now.

  She sat up, flung the sheet aside.

  It was not natural. It wasn’t possible that she’d given up so much. And for what?

  She was ready to believe in enchantments. How else could it be that her body still felt the pull of Arin, seemed to remember him all too clearly when her mind didn’t, and sent her to his empty bed, sealed her between his sheets, made her care where he went and what he risked and what he did and with whom?

  She reached for her set of keys.

  Chapter 17

  She went swiftly through the dark house, her feet bare and noiseless on the tiles, the carpet, the steps. Up one flight, hand skimming the balustrade. At the landing, her palm spun around the newel. She went left. She knew Arin’s home well.

  Knew it now, knew it then. She felt time layer. The present slipped over the past.

  She’d never taken this path before. But she’d thought about it.

  She flipped through the keys, found the right one, set it into the outermost door of Arin’s suite, and opened it.

  She stepped into white light. It startled her, seemed hallucinatory, impossible, as if she’d dropped into a silver pond. But then she glanced up and saw a skylight above the entry way. The moon hung low and large. Though the oil lamp sconces were unlit, the hallway was almost as bright as day. At the other end of it: darkness.

  A brief clinking sound came from the recesses of the suite.

  She drew closer to the shadowed end of the hallway, passed through a dark receiving room. She barked her thigh against a console table and swore under her breath.

  Another hallway, a turn. Then . . . a soft glow. A lamp.

  A liquid sound. A muffled thump. Glass on wood?

  She stepped into the lamplit room.

  Arin looked up from where he sat. His fingers tightened around the glass in his hand. He stared.

  She flushed, realizing that she’d forgotten to throw a robe over her thin nightdress.

  Or had she forgotten? Had she not decided in some way too quick for thought that this was exactly what she’d wanted? She glanced down at the shift’s hem, which hit just below the knees. The cloth was as sheer as melted butter. Her flush deepened. She saw the expression on Arin’s face.

  He glanced away. “Gods,” he said, and drank.

  “Exactly.”

  That brought his gaze back. He swallowed, winced, and said, “It’s possible that I’ve lost any claim to coherent thought, but I’ve no idea what you mean.”

  “Those gods of yours.”

  His dark brows were lifted. His eyes had grown round. The glass in his hand was a tumbler, the liquid a thumb’s width high and deep green. It looked like the blood of leaves. He cleared his throat. Hoarsely, he said, “Yes?”

  “Did you pray to them?”

  “Kestrel, I am praying to them right now. Very hard, in fact.”

  She shook her head. “Did you pray to your”—she rummaged through her memory—“god of souls?” She was ready to believe in a supernatural reason. It would explain his power over her.

  He coughed, then gave a short, rasping laugh. “That god doesn’t listen to me.” He set the tumbler next to the carafe on the table. He paused, thinking. In a new, slow tone, he said, “Except perhaps now.” He dropped his cheek into an open palm and rubbed fingers into one closed eye. He nodded at the chair across the table from him. “Would you like to sit?”

  Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure she actually wanted to get closer to him. Her pulse had gone erratic. “I’m fine here.”

  “I’d really rather.”

  “If I make you uncomfortable, why don’t you leave?”

  He laughed again. “Ah, no. No, thank you. Here.” He slid the glass across the table. The remaining liquid sloshed but didn’t spill. When she sat, curious (what would the blood of leaves taste like?), he said, “You might want to try only a bit first.”

  “That’s not wine.”

  “It decidedly is not.”

  “What is it?”

  “An eastern liquor. Roshar gave it to me. He said that if you drink enough of it, the dregs start to taste like sugar
. I suspect a prank.”

  “But you’ve no head for drink.”

  He looked as startled as she felt. “Of all the things, you remember that.”

  She had remembered something else, too, as she’d tried to sleep. She’d come to ask him about it, but the words stuck in her throat. Instead, she appraised him. “You seem clear-minded enough.”

  “It’s early. Still, I don’t know. This conversation feels just shy of a delusion.”

  She fiddled with the glass. “I want to understand a few things.”

  “Ask me.”

  She wasn’t yet ready to share what she remembered. She set the glass down. “What did you tell the queen?”

  “I told Inisha about you.”

  “What, exactly?”

  He hesitated. “I’m afraid to say.”

  “I want you to.”

  “You might leave.”

  “I won’t.”

  He stayed silent.

  She said, “I give you my word.”

  “I told her that I belong to you, and no other. I said that I was sorry.”

  She couldn’t help the rush of plea sure . . . and jealousy. His words did make her want to leave. She felt so unalterably his. It was bewildering, because she didn’t know him, not really, and he knew two halves of her that she couldn’t fit together.

  He was waiting for her to speak. He was so still. She realized he was holding his breath.

  She said, “That’s political suicide.”

  He smiled a little.

  “How did she respond?”

  “She said, ‘You overestimate your importance.’ ”

  “Is that why you’re drinking?”

  “Kestrel, you know why I am drinking.”

  She looked into the shadowed corners of the room. Talking with him was like having a flower unfold inside her chest, then close up tight. Creep open. Collapse in on itself. Voice low, she said, “Why do you call her Inisha? That’s not her name.”

  “It’s . . . her little name.” The pause made Kestrel think that he’d been translating a Dacran term in his mind before speaking it, but also that he’d been translating her question, and recognizing the implied intimacy it exposed between him and the queen. He held Kestrel’s eyes. “There never would have been anything between her and me if I’d known the truth about you. I should have known it. I can’t forgive myself for not knowing it. As it was . . . yesterday, in the garden, you asked if I used her for political gain. I didn’t. I used her to forget about you. You prob ably don’t want to know that. It’s ugly. But I must tell you, because there’s been too much hiding. More would break me.”