The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  Roshar rolled and stowed the map. Arin lowered the blanket, which was soaked. He’d have a wet night.

  Roshar looked up into the rain, blinking. “Almost feels like home.” He squinted at Arin. “Do you want to go with Xash to Lerralen?”

  Arin shook his head.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  The army divided. Arin rode south with Roshar.

  Near dusk the rain stopped, but it had been falling so long that Arin seemed to still see it dribbling across his vision.

  The diminished army set up camp for the night, swearing at the mud, the mood miserable. Arin’s tent had stayed mostly dry in its tarp. A change of clothes, too, buried at the bottom of a saddlebag. Every thing else was damp. He unbuckled his leather armor, which shed water and smelled like a soggy cow. Shrugged off his tunic. Had nothing to hang it with. He draped it to dry on a low-hanging branch of a nearby tree, then sighed when a breeze showered droplets down from high leaves.

  Every one wanted a fire, but the wood in the forest along the road was wet. Nothing would burn. Arin resigned himself to the damp. He pitched his tent, peeled a broad strip of thick bark off a tree (the unexposed side was dry), and sat on it rather than the mud outside his tent while he used his one dry shirt to wipe rain off anything metal so that it wouldn’t rust: his sword, dagger, shield, armor buckles, the horse tack.

  It felt nothing like summer. Arin was chilled, the skin along his back unpleasantly tight. A lock of wet hair flopped down along his cheek. He shuddered, brushed it away, and kept polishing with the shirt, rubbing at the bit and buckles on the bridle and girth. He warmed a little from the activity.

  “Well, well, look at you.” Roshar stood in front of him, hands on his hips, armor unbuckled but still on. “So industrious. Cold, too, I bet.”

  Arin ignored him.

  “While you’re at it,” Roshar said, “want to dry my things, too?”

  Arin paused, looked up, and made a gesture he’d learned in the east.

  Roshar laughed. He squished his way toward his tent. Arin heard him call for one of his underlings. Then Arin stopped paying attention.

  After a while, though, a prickle crept up his neck. At first Arin thought it was the cold. But he wasn’t finished with his task, and so didn’t pull the mostly dry shirt over his head, which was what he longed to do. He kept at what he was doing.

  Slowly, he became aware of a surprised quiet stealing over the camp. The sodden thuds of a lone horse’s hooves, approaching. Then someone—a Dacran—said, “Stay where you are!” Arin heard the crank of a crossbow.

  He looked up just as the rider stopped.

  There—high up on her stallion, hair plastered to her head, expression bleak—was Kestrel.

  Chapter 20

  He went to her, yanking his clammy tunic off the tree as he passed, shrugging into it.

  Her hands clenched the reins, body stiff. She’d been riding for a long time. She had a stunned look that reminded him badly of the tundra. Every thing about her was rigid and wrong.

  He took her by the waist and lifted her down. Vivid with confusion and worry, he said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t keep my promise to you.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “I gave you my word. A Valorian honors her word.” She swayed slightly.

  He flipped open Javelin’s saddlebag. No food. No clothes. Not a match, not a bit of tinder. Not even a canteen. Just a burned-out lamp. “Kestrel, you’re scaring me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He got her to his tent, ignoring the curious stares, and was grateful—without quite knowing why—that Roshar was nowhere to be seen. Arin grabbed his dry shirt from where he’d let it fall to the ground and dug his clean trousers out of a saddlebag. His canteen. Some hardtack, gone sticky with the damp. “Here.” He pressed it all into her hands. “Change. Eat. I’ll be outside.”

  She nodded. He was shakily relieved to get a response that seemed, small as it was, normal. Then she dis appeared into his tent and he became anxious again.

  Moments passed. There was a rustle from inside the tent. It subsided. He asked if she was all right. No answer. Finally, he was too concerned not to come inside.

  She was sitting, staring into her lap, holding the unopened canteen. She’d changed into his shirt, then appeared to have reached the limit of what she could do. She still wore her wet trousers, the riding boots, her dagger. The hardtack lay to the side, untouched.

  He knelt and took her freezing hands. “Please tell me what’s wrong.”

  She opened her mouth but choked on the words. She looked brittle. He began to feel the way she looked. He tried a different question. “How did you know where we’d be?”

  “I guessed.”

  Arin stared.

  “I thought—maybe Lerralen—but my father, he . . . I know what he’s like. So I thought—” She halted. He didn’t like the way her voice collapsed when she mentioned the general. “The Errilith estate. Livestock, meadows, trees. Water. It’d make sense. To him. I worried. Maybe you wouldn’t think of Errilith. Or you would and ignore it. But I hoped.”

  He felt a flash of wild fear. To wander vaguely south . . . unsupplied, alone, practically unarmed . . . on a gamble. A guess. It shook him. “You don’t even have a map.” He tried to say nothing else. He worried that she’d see the extremity of what he felt and recoil from it.

  “I’ve seen the right maps, before. I remembered. I—” Her face contorted.

  “You don’t have to say.”

  “Let me. I want to. I went to the villa. My house. After I left your suite. I didn’t mean to stay there so long. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve nothing to apologize for.”

  “Yes. I was so sure. On the tundra, I blamed you. The blame: rotten inside me. But when I went home, I remembered. The prison wasn’t your fault. It was mine. It was his.”

  Arin went cold. His suspicion took its final shape. “Your father.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father betrayed you.”

  “I wrote a letter to you when I was in the capital. So stupid, to put it all in writing. Every thing I’d done. The information I passed to Tensen. The way I worked against the empire. What I felt. My father read it. He gave it to the emperor.” She was weeping. “And I know, I know that it hurt him, that I broke something, that he felt it break. Maybe I wasn’t me anymore, to him. Do you understand? Not his daughter. Not anyone he knew. Just a lying stranger. But how could he? Why couldn’t he love me most? Or enough. Why couldn’t he love me enough to choose me over his rules?”

  Arin pulled her onto his lap. He held her shaking form, tucked his face into the crook of her cold neck as she sobbed against him. He murmured that he loved her more than he could say. He promised that he would always choose her first.

  She was exhausted, and she fell asleep quickly. Arin sat beside her for a few long moments after. Murder rose in his heart.

  The general was out of reach, for now. But someone closer by would do.

  He left the tent and didn’t have to go far. Roshar was waiting for him. “I hear we have an unexpected guest,” said the prince.

  Arin clamped a hand down on his shoulder and drove him into the trees.

  Roshar—oddly enough—made no sound until enough distance had been put between them and the army. When they wouldn’t be overheard, he said cautiously, “Arin, why are you . . . manhandling me?”

  “You knew.”

  “Specificity, please.”

  “On the morning we left, you knew that her horse wasn’t in the stables. That’s why you saddled a horse and brought it to me: so that I wouldn’t notice that she was gone. You are a liar.”

  “That’s not a lie.”

  Silence.

  “Arin, you are crushing me. Fine, yes, all right. I might have gently deceived you, in the name of your greater happiness. Is that really a lie? Or if it is, isn’t it a very, very small one?” He showed with hi
s fingertip and thumb just how small.

  “You don’t know what makes me happy.”

  “I know that you’re not. I know that you’ve no sense of reason where she’s concerned. Maybe I did observe that Javelin wasn’t in his stall that morning. Maybe I knew how things would unfold: how you’d notice, and go tearing off after her, wherever she was, and my sister would learn of it. What would my soldiers think if I waited for you? Or if we marched south without you? It’d all fall apart. So yes, I lied. I’d do it again. My only other option was to watch you throw every thing away for the sake of someone who doesn’t even love you.”

  Arin released him. He felt brutally gutted.

  “You wanted the truth,” said the prince.

  Arin thought of Cheat, Tensen, Kestrel. He wondered if some part of him was drawn to lies. What was it that made him so easy to deceive?

  “Oh, Arin. Don’t look like that. I apologize.”

  He stared at his friend, who was still his friend. It struck him that Roshar had gone quietly into the trees because if he had protested, his army would have cut Arin down.

  Arin apologized as well, then said, “It’s not you who angers me.”

  “Oh no?”

  “You’re just a close target.”

  “How flattering.”

  “Kestrel was caught by her father. He had proof that she was spying for Herran and exposed her to the emperor.”

  Roshar considered this, his expression guarded. “A new memory?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else does she remember about the general?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You should ask.”

  “No.”

  “This isn’t prying, Arin. This is gathering information potentially relevant to our current operation. I’m happy to talk with her if you won’t.”

  “Leave her alone.”

  “You underestimate my charm. Granted, she once pulled that dagger on me, but we’ve put that behind us. She likes me. I am very likable.”

  Arin didn’t want to tell him about her raw eyes, or the stripped, thin quality of her voice. The way she’d wept, the utter abandonment. Her face: so alone, no matter what he said to her.

  “She’s in no shape to talk to you,” he said flatly. “She rode for two days and a night with no food or water except maybe what she gathered along the road—if she bothered to do that. She didn’t even know for sure that she’d find us. She guessed where we’d go and pushed herself to catch up.”

  The prince lifted his brows. “Impressive.”

  His tone made Arin wary. “What do you mean by that?”

  “She’s got a knack for survival.”

  It struck Arin that Roshar could have pressed Kestrel for information before, back in the city, and if he hadn’t, it wasn’t likely out of deference to her ill health and recovery, or because he’d assumed there was nothing to be gained from digging around in Kestrel’s uncertain memory. It was because Roshar wouldn’t have trusted what she had to say . . . then. If he trusted her word now it was only because she’d been damaged by their enemy. Which made her—Arin saw the idea take shape in Roshar’s eyes—a motivated asset to their cause.

  “I don’t like what you’re thinking,” Arin said.

  “She could be useful.”

  “You will not use her.”

  “The general’s daughter? We’d be fools not to. You talk about her as if she’s made of spun glass. Know what I see? Steel.”

  “You won’t make her part of this war. I’m taking her back to the city.”

  “No,” Kestrel said from behind them. “You’re not.”

  Arin turned.

  The sight of her. It wasn’t just that she looked lost in his too-large shirt, or how her eyes were tired holes. It was the set of her jaw. The way she lifted her chin. He’d seen this before. All the ships that shattered against the rock of her determination. How she’d break herself, too, if she must, to get what she wanted.

  Lock this slave up. Her words, uttered the day she’d fought a duel for his sake, still hurt. What had followed: the clench of helplessness. Being outnumbered by her father’s private guard. The first blow. The way she hadn’t looked back as she’d let the door shut behind her. Humiliation. A sort of appalled admiration. Indebtedness. Later: her, injured and limping across the villa’s lawn.

  It had changed him. Exposed something running inside him like a vein of soft gold. A slow attraction. Growing, despite himself, into care . . . and more.

  That incident last autumn when she’d tricked him, had him locked in a cell while she rode to the duel, loomed in his mind as a little story that told the larger one of how she’d been broken, and he’d been kept safe, and how his safety and her brokenness had broken him.

  Now she stared him down. His gaze traced the fall of a single, newly plaited braid over her shoulder, its color obscure in the twilight. He recalled the fold of the dead Valorian girl’s body over his blade. His sister being dragged to the cloakroom.

  “You can’t stay,” he told her.

  “It’s not your choice.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “I won’t allow it.”

  “You don’t command this army.”

  Roshar smiled.

  “No,” said Arin. “Don’t.”

  “What do you propose, my lady?”

  “My prince, I wish to enlist. I swear to serve, and rout your enemy, and wash my blade with his blood.”

  “How savagely Valorian of you. Is this the traditional military oath? I like it. I accept.”

  She nodded slightly and cast Arin an unreadable look—tinged, perhaps, with something like regret, though it was hard to know exactly what had affected her. Maybe it was his expression, or maybe a memory floating invisibly in the darkening summer air, seen only by her.

  She left them.

  “If you send her into battle,” Arin told Roshar, “ she’ll fall in the first wave.”

  “Why, because she’s half your size? I’ll wager she’s had more training than the average foot soldier.”

  “She has no talent for it and little experience.”

  “She wants this, Arin. I don’t blame her for wanting it, and quite frankly I think her help could be crucial.”

  “Her advice. Let her advise, then. Enlist her, rank her, if you must. But keep her out of combat.”

  “All right,” Roshar said. “For you.”

  Arin turned to leave. His head was brimming, his heart sore.

  Roshar touched his shoulder, surprisingly gentle. “I know you want her to be safe forever, but it’s just not that kind of world.”

  Arin begged a pair of Herrani officers to share a tent. He shouldered the spare one, loosely bundled. He found a woman about Kestrel’s height and bartered a little boot knife for a set of decent clothes. He rummaged through supply wagons and stared dully at the extra suits of armor: all far too large. Swords: too heavy. He considered a gun among the many rows of them, hidden in a false bottom below bales of horse feed. Unsure, he left the guns where they lay. Finally, he snagged an eastern crossbow. Even if Roshar kept his word and tried to keep Kestrel from any real military action, there was always the possibility of a surprise attack.

  He brought every thing to Kestrel. It was full night. Light from a nearby fire flickered in her face. He tried not to look at her. He crouched and began to set the tent’s frame. He drove a stake into the earth. Drier now.

  There was a pause after he hammered the first stake in. He straightened.

  “I thought . . .” Kestrel’s voice trailed into the dark. She didn’t say what she thought. She touched his wrist, light as a moth.

  Arin flinched. He didn’t mean to. He wanted to undo it, yet flitting through his mind was a nightmarish sequence of images: a masker moth, the signed treaty in Kestrel’s wintry hand, the Valorian girl he had killed at sea. His mother’s bloody black hair.

  Kestrel drew back. He seemed to feel her ech
o his hurt. “I can do that.” She took the stone from his hand. “My father taught me how to pitch a tent. I remember.”

  What else do you remember? Arin wanted to ask, and was repulsed by himself. He knew how much what she did remember wounded her. He hadn’t thought it’d be possible to hate the general more, yet there it was: a hot jet of hatred. He said, “I won’t spare your father.”

  The shadows were too deep between them. He couldn’t read her face. She said, “I don’t want you to.”

  Chapter 21

  They continued south. Arin kept his distance from her. Once or twice, she rode Javelin alongside his horse. It went badly. He didn’t know how to fix himself. He couldn’t accept this.

  The first time she drew her horse up to him, he burst out, “For gods’ sake, you don’t even have armor.”

  “I know you’re worried,” she said quietly.

  “Your father wanted you to enlist. You fought him. Your music. You loved it more. You told me once that you didn’t want to go to war because you didn’t want to kill.”

  “This is important to me.”

  “You wouldn’t have done this before.”

  “I know. I’ve changed.”

  He heard the truth of this in a way he never had. She’d said this many times, even insisted on it: the woman he’d known was gone. He heard again his promise to her in his tent. He felt the absence of hers.

  Yet it was wrong to feel hurt in the face of her larger grief, and the wrongness of it made him feel small. He looked at the sun in her hair, the ease of her seat in the saddle. Beyond her: a file of cavalry, an eastern pennant snapping blue and green. Fear choked him. It was hard to hear what she said next. A promise to be careful, to take no risks. It was so impossible and absurd to make any promise like that in war that he couldn’t even reply.

  Eventually, she fell silent.

  The next time, also on the road, he noticed her weaving Javelin through the ranks to approach him. He twitched his horse left and found a reason to be somewhere else. At night, he waited until she had pitched her tent. He made sure not to set his nearby.

  She continued to glow at the edge of his vision. When camp broke at dawn, he’d catch sight of her bright hair, notice her talking effortlessly with the Herrani, or trying to learn Dacran from the easterners. He watched the soldiers’ wariness dissolve. They began to smile at her arrival, to like her despite themselves and her appearance: the very image of a Valorian warrior girl.