The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  Villagers lined the main road, packed thickly, small children lifted onto grown shoulders. When the villagers saw Arin, their eyes widened with excitement. There was a murmur. People surged forward. They tried to touch him.

  Arin’s horse didn’t like it, and it huffed and stamped. Arin hissed fiercely at Roshar in the eastern tongue; it sounded like a curse.

  “If you’re so worried they’ll be trampled,” Roshar drawled loudly in Herrani, “get down off your horse and greet your people.”

  Arin glanced over his shoulder at Kestrel: a wordless plea. Then he dismounted and she lost sight of him in the sea of people.

  She drew Javelin up alongside Roshar. “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t you think our boy deserves some love?”

  “I think you’re using him to make yourself and your people look good by association.”

  The prince smiled, spreading his hands helplessly.

  Kestrel dismounted and made her way through the villagers. She used her elbows. A few sharp words, too, which drew surprised looks that quickly hardened into shock. She saw them see her Valorian features.

  Suspicion and hatred unfolded on their faces. They hadn’t noticed her when she’d ridden with the army. Their eyes had been on Arin. But they noticed her now.

  “Please let me through,” she said.

  The press of bodies grew more solid. This wasn’t the city, where every one knew about her. All the villagers knew was their own past engraved in her eyes, her hair, the shape of her face. Murder and oppression, mixed right into the color of her skin.

  “You,” someone said, hard and flat.

  Wary, she backed away. People surrounded her.

  Someone from behind seized her hand. She yanked it free, pulse high and stuttering. She tried to turn, then heard, “Kestrel.”

  Arin shouldered someone aside and reached for her hand again, gripping it firmly this time. She felt a rush of relief—and foolishness, for thinking to help Arin and becoming the person who needed help. But the crowd’s anger wasn’t going away. If anything, it intensified.

  “What is she doing here?” Kestrel couldn’t tell who’d said it.

  “She’s my friend,” Arin answered. “Give her room.”

  They did.

  It was strange to look at Arin through her own eyes and also through theirs, to see the real and imagined person, and to know that what they imagined him to be was true, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. There was a solid command in his voice, his frame. There was the aura of Arin’s singularity, the way he seemed like no one else, like he was a little more than human. But there was also his anxiety, traveling through their interlaced fingers, and the hunted quality to his expression. His mouth wasn’t right. She didn’t think they saw that.

  “Stay with me?” he murmured in her ear.

  “Yes.”

  With her beside him, he walked among the villagers. They kept touching him. Each time, she felt the slight tremor of his reaction, quickly stilled. He tried to be at ease, yet mostly failed. She wasn’t sure if the villagers noticed. They smiled, asked questions, voices riding high. Arin didn’t let go of her hand.

  At least, he didn’t let go until a woman pressed her swaddled infant against his chest. Awkward, quick, Arin brought both arms up to hold the baby against his leather armor. He stared at the mother as if questioning her sanity.

  “Bless him,” the woman said.

  “What?”

  “Bless him by your god.”

  Arin looked down at the cradled boy, who slept, eyelids delicate, his cheeks round with health. A tiny flower of a hand peeked out of the swaddling. It flexed and curled against the cloth. Hoarsely, Arin said, “My god?”

  “Please.”

  “But you don’t know. Who, I mean. My god—”

  “It doesn’t matter. If your god cares for my son the way he cares for you, that’s all I want.”

  Arin’s eyes flew to Kestrel’s.

  “Is there any harm?” Kestrel asked, but still he wouldn’t do it.

  Sternly, the mother told him, “You’ll offend your god if you don’t share his blessing.”

  Arin shifted the baby more securely against him. Fingers tentative, he touched the baby’s brow. The child sighed. Arin’s face changed. He softened, grew luminous, the way certain early hours of certain days are pearled, quiet, and rare. Kestrel seemed to feel with her own fingertips the baby’s fresh skin beneath Arin’s touch.

  The baby opened his eyes. They were Herrani gray.

  Arin murmured words too low for Kestrel to hear. Then he settled the baby into the waiting arms of the mother, who appeared satisfied. She made the Herrani gesture of thanks, which Arin returned. There was something about the way he did it that reminded Kestrel that the gesture could mean an apology as well.

  Arin’s hand found hers again. He felt slightly unfamiliar. Something had changed between them.

  She knew why it changed her to see Arin hold this child. She understood the question that had opened inside her, but she was unprepared. She hadn’t thought of this. Her heart raced with an emotion too complicated for either fear or happiness.

  She released Arin’s hand. “Ready to go back?” Her voice didn’t match how she felt. It was cool, even careless. She realized that this particular voice was perhaps her most treasured armor.

  Arin’s expression closed. “Yes.”

  The crowd cleared a path for them. They returned to their horses and mounted.

  “See?” Roshar said, “wasn’t that fun?”

  Arin looked ready to shove the prince off his horse.

  The army moved from the road into a meadow that swelled into hills. It was near misery for the horses that dragged the light cannon and supply wagons, but Roshar wanted the high ground. Kestrel wanted the cover of the forest edging the higher hills, as well as the proximity to Errilith’s manor with its fortified walls—visible, but a day’s ride away. Arin didn’t say what he wanted. He said little of anything.

  A stream swiveled down through the meadow: a clear rill bordered by tufted grass. The air pulsed with the sound of cicadas. Roshar called a halt.

  Kestrel let Javelin drink and dropped to her knees beside him, cupping water to her mouth, down her sweaty neck. Delicious, chill. “The water,” she said to no one in particular. Her father would want this estate for its abundant fresh water even more than for the stores behind the manor walls, or for the sheep ranging the hilltops. This much water this far south was a prize.

  Arin’s horse nosed past her to reach the stream. She looked up, expecting to see its rider, but Arin wasn’t there.

  She found him sitting far off on a knoll overlooking the slopes that curved and gentled down. The village sat in the distance like a gray pebble.

  Arin glanced up as she approached. One tree shadowed the knoll, a laran tree, leaves broad and glossy. Their shadows dappled Arin’s face, made it a patchwork of sun and dark. It was hard to read his expression. She noticed for the first time the way he kept the scarred side of his face out of her line of sight. Or rather, what she noticed for the first time was how common this habit was for him in her presence—and what that meant.

  She stepped deliberately around him and sat so that he had to face her fully or shift into an awkward, neck-craned position.

  He faced her. His brow lifted, not so much in amusement as in his awareness of being studied and translated.

  “Just a habit,” he said, knowing what she’d seen.

  “You have that habit only with me.”

  He didn’t deny it.

  “Your scar doesn’t matter to me, Arin.”

  His expression turned sardonic and interior, as if he were listening to an unheard voice.

  She groped for the right words, worried that she’d get this wrong. She remembered mocking him in the music room of the imperial palace (I wonder what you believe could compel me to go to such epic lengths for your sake. Is it your charm? Your breeding? Not your looks, surely).

&nb
sp; “It matters because it hurts you,” she said. “It doesn’t change how I see you. You’re beautiful. You always have been to me.” Even when she hadn’t realized it, even in the market nearly a year ago. Then later, when she understood his beauty. Again, when she saw his face torn, stitched, fevered. On the tundra, when his beauty terrified her. Now. Now, too. Her throat closed.

  The line of his jaw hardened. He didn’t believe her.

  “Arin—”

  “I’m sorry for what happened in the village.”

  She dropped her hand to her lap. She hadn’t been conscious of lifting it.

  “That shouldn’t have happened,” Arin said.

  The crowd’s anger toward her had been unsettling, but not surprising. It wasn’t only that that troubled him. “What exactly did happen? With the mother and her baby.”

  He tunneled fingers through his hair and rubbed the heel of his hand against his brow. “A misapprehension.”

  “That you’re god-touched?” Kestrel had heard the rumors.

  “No, that’s true. I am.”

  She stared.

  “But I don’t think the mother would be happy if she knew which god.” He glanced at her, catching her surprise. “My twentieth nameday was on the winter solstice.” The start of a new Herrani year. “But I’m older than that by the way Valorians reckon time. I was born nearly two full seasons before. My mother waited to name me. It was her right, the priests didn’t disagree. The nameday is meant to celebrate not only the baby, but also the mother’s recovery. Women recover differently, so the mother decides when. But in the year I was born, each new mother found a reason to wait until the year turned. You know, don’t you, the way we mark time? Each year belongs to one god in the pantheon of the hundred, each hundred years measures an era. The sign of each god rules once every hundred years. My year—my birth year—belonged to the god of death.”

  “Arin,” she said slowly, seeing his anxiety, “do you think you’re cursed?”

  He shook his head.

  “Your mother named you in the following year. That’s your year, then, isn’t it? Herrani celebrate the nameday, not the birthday. It shouldn’t matter when you were born.”

  “It matters.”

  “Why?”

  “My whole family. I survived. There’s a reason.”

  “Arin—”

  “I didn’t know then that I was marked.”

  “Arin, the only reason for what you suffered is that my father is a monster and he wanted your country.”

  “It’s not so simple. I hear the god of death in my head. He advises me, comforts me.”

  Kestrel wasn’t sure what to believe.

  “I don’t know what his blessing means,” Arin said. “Do you see? When I look at what happened to me. What I’ve done. What I do. His favor is hard.”

  “Maybe the voice you hear is your own,” she said gently, “and you just don’t recognize it.”

  He made no reply.

  She didn’t like his belief that death had marked him. His fear—and pleasure—troubled her. A deep, alien satisfaction lurked in his eyes. “Isn’t it possible that you’ve made this up without meaning to?”

  “I’m his. I know it.”

  “And the baby in the village?”

  Arin winced. “It would have been a sin to deny the mother. I couldn’t. You understand, don’t you? I should have told her, but if I had and she withdrew her request, that might catch the god’s attention, and what might he do then? If she’d known it was the god of death, she never would have asked.”

  Kestrel tried to set aside his intricate understanding of cause and effect. It felt beyond her, and dangerous, operating on the whims of an unpredictable deity. “The mother knew whose blessing she sought,” she said. “It can’t be that hard to guess your age, give or take a year. Which god ruled your nameyear?”

  “Sewing.”

  She squinted, then laughed.

  He smiled a little, yet said, “You shouldn’t laugh.”

  She laughed harder.

  “Actually, I sew quite well.”

  “Perhaps. But you don’t exactly seem like the god of sewing’s chosen one. The baby’s mother knew what she asked for.”

  The wind stirred the tree. Shadows moved in patterns around them.

  Kestrel’s heart was in her throat even before she knew what she’d say. “Would you do what your mother did? Would you delay the naming of your child for the favor of one god or another?”

  There was a startled silence. “My child.” Arin tried the words, exploring them. She heard in his voice what she’d seen on his face in the village as he’d held the baby.

  She looked at the tree. It was a tree. A leaf, a leaf. Some things just are. They don’t signal other meanings. They aren’t like a god, casting its meaning over an entire year, or like a conversation, which is itself and also all the things that aren’t said.

  Her swift heart scurried along.

  “It wouldn’t be up to me,” he said finally. “It would be my wife’s choice.”

  She met his eyes. He touched her hot cheek.

  A tree was not a tree. A leaf, not a leaf. She understood what he didn’t say.

  She stood. “Come, the stream is amazing. Aren’t you thirsty? Your horse has better sense than you.” A smile. Teasing . . . a little shy, too, yet discovering a newfound safety in showing shyness. She held out her hand.

  He took it.

  The army camped in the forest on the height of the hills outside Errilith’s manor. Another stream coursed through the trees, wide and rough. It fed over rocks and went down deep. Kestrel went with the women soldiers to bathe. She thought about Sarsine, wishing she had the woman’s steady, clear way of seeing things. With a twinge of guilt, Kestrel realized that Sarsine had no way of knowing how or why Kestrel had disappeared from Arin’s house. Kestrel had been incapable of leaving any word behind and now it was too late. A message, no matter how obliquely worded, could be intercepted and understood. She imagined her father discovering exactly where she was. Her stomach shrank.

  So instead she thought about what she’d say to Sarsine when she returned to the city. I missed you, she’d say. I never thanked you for what you did for me.

  She shucked her clothes onto the grass. She needed to feel the water on her skin.

  It was freezing. She ducked under, opened her eyes, and looked up through the wavering water at the blue and yellow sky. The cold made her remember that her father must have held her once the way Arin had held the baby. She held her breath and treaded hard to keep her weight below the surface.

  It was cold, but the light was beautiful: broken and blurred by the water’s rippled silk, as if the sky wasn’t simply the sky but a whole other world. Magic, possible. Just within reach.

  She washed her clothes and didn’t wait for them to dry fully before putting them back on. She wrung out her hair and braided it.

  Wending between the trees, she stepped noiselessly, finding moss or dirt or stone for her feet, never leaves or twigs.

  You walk well, her father had said once.

  Being quiet is hardly a requisite skill for battle, Father.

  You could be a Ranger, he’d insisted, but this was after a spectacularly bad training session he’d watched. Her with a sword. The captain of her father’s personal guard screaming at her. She knew her father didn’t believe his own hope.

  His voice echoed in her head, and her heart cramped. It felt as if she were underwater again, with someone holding her below the surface.

  She shoved the memory away. There was only so much she could bear to remember.

  A game. Make a game of it. How silently can you walk? Let’s see.

  Toe, not heel. Tree root. This patch of earth, darker and therefore soft. Spears of sun pierced through the trees. Her damp braid bounced between her shoulder blades.

  But there was no one to witness her silence. No one to say You walk well. Although Kestrel understood the plea sure of doing something for herself
alone, had played the piano for hours for her own ears and to feel the stretch and jump of her fingers, the reach of her long arms, she also knew what it was like to play for someone. It makes a difference. It’s hard not to want to be heard, seen. To share.

  A twig lay in her path. She paused, then deliberately stomped it. Crack.

  “Pity.” The voice echoed in the quiet clearing. “You were doing so nicely.”

  Roshar. Her eyes found him several paces away, leaning against a tree, watching her. She approached. There was blood on him.

  “Sometimes, little ghost, you remind me of my sister,” he said.

  Her brows shot up.

  He laughed. “Not that one.”

  Kestrel wasn’t sure what connection he saw between her and Risha. Because his younger sister was a hostage in the imperial court? Maybe.

  “Whose blood?” She tipped her chin in the direction of his spattered forearms.

  “A Valorian scout. About your size. I came looking for you, thought you might like to try her armor. Stylish. Light. Very Valorian. Good condition. Nary a scratch in the leather.”

  “What about the scout?”

  “Hard to catch. Harder to subdue.”

  She gave him a level look.

  Roshar tugged a cropped ear. “She’s alive.”

  “When that scout doesn’t report back, the general will know we’re here.”

  “All the more reason to find out what she knows.”

  “Don’t . . . press her.”

  “Kestrel,” he said quietly, “the blood is from the fight when we captured her. Not torture.”

  “So you won’t?”

  “Now, it would be nice if information fell out of the sky. Given that it doesn’t, it is still nevertheless comforting that certain people do horrible things so that other people don’t have to. We should be grateful to such people. Or we should at least not ask questions when we don’t want answers.”

  “She can’t help us. Valorian scouts operate in relays. She doesn’t report directly to the general’s camp, but to a station between there and here. An officer remains at the station and sends hawks with coded messages back to the main camp, which keeps the scout from knowing too much: she won’t know how the general’s army might have shifted in formation, or what the conditions there are. She won’t know the codes.”