The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  Roshar tilted his head, regarding her. “Do you know the codes?”

  Kestrel nudged her memory. It pushed back. “I might have,” she said slowly, “once.”

  “I’m sure the scout knows something useful.”

  “There’s no point torturing her for information she doesn’t have. Let her be.”

  His expression was difficult to read. “I’ll do as you wish,” he said finally. “For now.”

  “Thank you.”

  He slouched against a tree. “Do you forgive me for earlier?”

  “That piece of pageantry in the village? I’m not the one you should be asking.”

  “It’s good for Arin.”

  “Good for you, too.”

  His black eyes met hers. “You want to win?”

  “Yes.”

  “If Arin is admired and my people are trusted, does that help or hurt?”

  “Help,” she acknowledged.

  “Come try your armor. I think it’ll fit.”

  Arin came into Roshar’s tent just as the prince tightened the last buckle on Kestrel’s armor. Arin was shaven, his hair wet. What ever he was going to say died on his lips.

  “Aren’t you pleased?” Roshar said.

  Arin immediately left, dropping the flap of the tent’s opening behind him.

  Kestrel found him by his fire at the edge of the camp. It had grown late. He’d pitched his tent on the outskirts. She realized that, at each day’s end, he’d been setting his tent farther from every one else.

  He fed the fire. She crouched beside him, the leather armor creaking. He flinched at the sound. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “It’s hard to look at you like that.”

  “I’m still me,” she said, and was surprised at herself for trying to convince him that no matter how she seemed to change, she remained the same person. This wasn’t her usual line of argument. As she thought about how she looked in Valorian armor, and whether she looked like herself or not, a germ of an idea began to grow.

  “Promise me you’ll stay out of harm’s way,” he said. “I don’t want you on the battlefield.”

  “It’s not fair of you to ask that when you’d never do the same.”

  “The risk is different for you and me.”

  She became angry. “Why, because you’re god-touched? Because you’re good with a sword and I’m not?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “That matters less than you think. People who are good at fighting die in war all the time, and people who aren’t can find ways to win.” Her idea—the armor, the Valorian scout, a plan—took shape. Kestrel’s anger carved its details and made it perfect.

  “Yes,” Arin said, “but even so, the risk for you is still different—”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “It is.” His face was unhappy. “There is a difference between you and me. If I die, you’ll survive. If you die, it will destroy me.”

  Her shoulders sagged. She couldn’t bear his hollow expression. The anger drained from her.

  “Please,” he said. “Promise me. You’ll still play a role. Tell Roshar and me what to do, and we’ll listen. But not the battlefield. You’re to stay safe.”

  Slowly, she nodded.

  “Swear.”

  “I won’t be part of the battle. I give you my word.”

  She moved to leave. She’d not gone two paces before he stood directly in her path. His eyes were narrow. “A trick.”

  She spread her open hands. “You asked. I swore. We’re done.”

  “You swore very specifically. I need for you to promise. You’ll stay off the battlefield and be safe. Say it. I beg you.”

  “I’ll make no promises to you that you won’t make to me.”

  She pushed past him.

  Chapter 23

  She entered Roshar’s tent. “I need your help.”

  Blinking, he propped himself up on his bed. He said groggily, “And I need a real door. With a lock.”

  “I have an idea.”

  “I don’t know you all that well, and still hearing you say that makes me very, very worried.”

  “Listen to me.”

  “If I do, can I go back to sleep? Being a fearless leader is exhausting.”

  “It’s about the Valorian scout.”

  “You said she was useless.”

  “In terms of what she can tell us. But if we play things right, her capture will be to our advantage.”

  Roshar was fully awake now. “Go on.”

  “The general is in his position with his troops at the estate they captured. A scout station is set between his position and a target. An officer remains at that station with message hawks. Meanwhile, scouts run from the station to evaluate the enemy, then report back to the station. The officer sends a coded message by hawk to the general, so if a scout’s captured, she can’t share much with the enemy, and since scouts get close to the target, they can’t launch a hawk. Too visible to us. We might shoot it down, then track and capture the scout. That Valorian you caught spying on us can’t tell us any codes, and won’t be able to say much about the general’s forces. But she will know the location of the relay station and to whom she reports.”

  “You want us to hunt down and extract information from the officer?”

  She shook her head. “Something better.”

  “Pray tell, little ghost.”

  “Send me in her place.”

  He stared.

  Kestrel said, “I’ll pretend to be her.”

  “Please understand. When I look at you as if you’re crazy, it’s not that I judge you for your insanity.”

  “I fit in her armor. I’m her size. I’m Valorian.”

  “You don’t look like her. Just because you’re Valorian doesn’t mean the officer at the relay station won’t notice that you’re a completely different person.”

  “It’s night. I can report to the officer while keeping my distance.”

  “I’m going back to sleep. Wake me when you’re sane.”

  Impatiently, Kestrel said, “What color is her hair?”

  “Different.”

  “How different?”

  “Brownish. All right, maybe not that different from yours in the dark, but—”

  “I’ll braid my hair like hers, wear every thing she wore. Did you search her pockets? She’ll have had a token. Sometimes the general sends an officer to relieve the one at the station. Then the new officer and a scout—and there are many of these scouts, not just this one reporting to a station—present a token to confirm their identity. We might get lucky. There might be a new officer at the station, one who’s never seen the scout but knows her only by name. Roshar, no one would expect someone in your army to impersonate a Valorian scout. Normally, it wouldn’t be possible. Not for an easterner. Not for a Herrani.”

  “What if the Valorians know you’re with us? That stationed officer might be aware of it.”

  “If my father knows, he’ll do his best to keep it hidden from as many people as possible.”

  “Why?”

  There was a lump in her throat. “He’s ashamed of me. It would shame him, for others to know.”

  Roshar settled back into the bed, arms folded. “What would we gain if you pretended to be the Valorian scout?”

  “Misinformation. Let’s assume the general knows of our presence here. If he doesn’t, he will soon enough. The issue isn’t whether he’ll attack. It’s how. I can influence that. I’ll say you have a light force, which other Valorian scouts—if they’re eyeing us—will confirm. But I’ll also say that I overheard plans that you’ll entrench yourselves in Errilith’s manor.”

  Roshar was already off the bed, leafing through the maps spread out on the table in the tent’s center.

  “He’d take the main road then,” Kestrel said. “He wouldn’t expect resistance along the way—or at most he’d expect stealth attacks by small bands of soldiers. There to strike and run, to whittle away at him, like by burning the supply wagons. Not
hing serious. Nothing he couldn’t handle. Nothing that would stop him from taking the easiest—and most obvious way—to Errilith.”

  “ There are hills along the main road outside the estate. I can set our forces on either side.”

  “Use the guns. They have a longer range than crossbows. If you position the gunners far enough away, they can shoot without ever being touched by Valorian fire.”

  “I’m sorry I said you were crazy, little ghost.”

  Kestrel remembered how it felt to lose to her father at Bite and Sting, at Borderlands, at anything he chose to play. The dig at her pride. A hurt certainty that she’d never be able to prove herself to him. Embarrassment for wanting to prove herself.

  She remembered her hands clinging to his jacket, her whole self reduced to two claws as she pleaded with him.

  War wasn’t a game, but she wanted badly to make her father know how it felt to lose.

  Roshar said, “Tell me what you need.”

  “A horse. Javelin might be recognized. Prob ably not—I don’t intend for the horse to be seen—but better not risk it, and I want to get there while it’s still dark. Scouts run on foot, so I’ll have to tether the horse at a distance from the station. As for the station . . .”

  “You need the location.”

  “And the scout’s gear.”

  Roshar clicked his teeth; a chastising sort of sound. “The gear is easy. If you want the location of the scout’s camp, we need to revisit our conversation this after noon about not-so-nice means of extracting valuable information.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I don’t enjoy it. But she’s not likely to tell us just because we ask nicely.”

  “You can’t.”

  He drew an impatient breath, and she knew what he’d say, knew the arguments, the costs and benefits. She knew that Roshar, with his mutilated face, understood what it was like to be subjected to pain. She wanted to say all this before he did, and to find a convincing reason that he was wrong. There was no reason she thought he’d accept. She couldn’t think of another way.

  Then she did. “Don’t do it. Trick her instead.”

  Roshar squinted. “Explain.”

  “When Valorians enlist, they do so partly because of friendships. There are lovers in a camp. Even without that, there’s a sense of belonging. People you’d die for, and do anything to protect. She’ll have someone she cares about among the scouts. Take her token. Cast it with a mold. A bit of soap, maybe, or wax. Melt down metal to match the token and make a new one. Return hers, show her the other one. Say you found its mate on another scout who claims to be her friend. Promise to torture her fellow scout if she doesn’t give up the location of the officer.”

  “She might care more about the officer than this other scout.”

  “Try.”

  He shrugged, then nodded. “I hope that in your bag of delightful schemes, you have one for how to deal with Arin.”

  “No.”

  “Dear ghost, he will tie you and me up and dump us both into a very deep hole before he allows you to do what you plan to do.”

  “No more allowing,” Kestrel said, “and no more lies.”

  Chapter 24

  Arin woke to the sound of screams.

  He shoved out of his tent and into the night. But the camp was calm, undisturbed—though soldiers near their fires seemed to have stopped in midconversation to eye the tent from which the screams came and then choked off into a sob.

  Arin asked the whereabouts of the prince and was directed to a nearby tree, where Roshar leaned over the bound Valorian scout, hissing a threat too low for Arin to understand. The Valorian girl—just a girl, Arin saw, younger than Kestrel—had her eyes squeezed shut. She strained back against the tree, bare heels digging into the dirt and moss. She wore an eastern tunic and trousers. A bandage on her arm was rusted with blood. She opened her eyes: glazed with fear, darting all over, skittering across Arin’s face as he froze. How wide they were, how dark, how like the eyes of the woman he’d killed on the ship.

  Another scream broke the night. It came again from the tent.

  Arin strode to the prince. “Roshar. A word?”

  “I was wondering when you’d join the fun,” the prince answered in Valorian. He grinned at the girl. “I’ll be back.”

  When they were out of earshot of the scout, Roshar dropped his smile. “To be clear, this was Kestrel’s idea.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Faking a torture.”

  Arin thought he understood, and calmed down a little. “Is it working?”

  “It might, if you don’t interrupt again.”

  “Let me know if you learn something.”

  “Of course.”

  “Where’s Kestrel?”

  “She wants to be alone right now,” Roshar said after a slight pause. “Better let her be.”

  But Roshar’s tone made Arin remember how the prince had smiled at him, the reins of two horses in his hands on the grounds of Arin’s home. This made him think of Kestrel’s refusal earlier, before nightfall, to make him any promises. Ever since the sun had gone down, Arin’s nerves had tightened with anxiety even as he’d warned himself not to push things, to be different from how he usually was, to not overreact or feel too much or say too much. Let her be, he’d told himself, exactly as Roshar was telling him now. But another scream rose in the distance, and even though Arin knew that this was a trick, it was Kestrel’s trick. Her tricks tended to be shaped like a nest, each twig and straw in place, hiding a dangerous creature Arin never saw until it was too late.

  Arin said, “Where is she?”

  Reluctantly, the prince said, “She hasn’t left yet.”

  “Left? What? Where?”

  “Ask her. She’ll tell you—against my better judgment, I might add.” Roshar nodded in the direction of his tent.

  Arin took one rapid stride toward it. The prince’s hand came down hard on his shoulder. “Arin, her plan is a good plan.”

  Arin shrugged off his grip and walked away.

  He found her sitting on Roshar’s cot, lacing up high Valorian boots. She wore trousers—the scout’s trousers. Kestrel had bound her breasts with tight cloth. Her midriff was bare, her shoulders and arms, too: skin a dark gold fired by the lamplight.

  She’d heard him enter, yet kept her head down, ignoring him, her braid hanging heavily over one shoulder. It swayed slightly as she jerked laces over the boots’ hooks and cinched them. When she reached for the Valorian tunic and jacket on the cot beside her, he caught the trace of a mottled line on her shoulder, saw the lash that curled up over her neck. She paused—had she heard the sore thump of his heart? Or the way he’d swallowed, caught in the nightmare of those scars, in the memory of seeing them for the first time, in his awful imagining of how they’d been made?

  She stood and turned her back to him. Just before she drew the tunic over her head, he saw almost the full maze of marks, white and raised. She put on the earth-colored jacket. All the scout’s clothing, dyed to match the woods.

  “Kestrel.” His voice was rough.

  She faced him and told him her plan. When he started to argue (he couldn’t even hear what he said; his pulse was shuddering, the blood draining from him), she said, “Trust me.”

  He did, he wanted to say so, then realized that he didn’t, that he could not and would not, if trusting her meant this. “No.”

  She was angry now, too. “You can’t keep me in a cage.”

  “I’m not—” Yet that was what he meant to do, in a way. Even as he saw the wrongness of that, he couldn’t imagine letting her go. “It’s too dangerous.”

  She shrugged.

  “Why do you insist on risking yourself? You were caught once. You’re not infallible. Are you trying to prove that you are?”

  “No.”

  “Are you trying to punish me?”

  “No.”

  “I deserve it, I know, but—”

  “This isn’t about you.
”

  “You are going to get caught!”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’ll be killed. Worse. I can’t—”

  “Yes, you can. You had better.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is me.” Her eyes were wet. “This is the sort of person I’ve always been.”

  He wanted to tell her that wasn’t true. You remember wrong, he could say, and this time he’d be the one who was a good liar.

  Kestrel said, “I want to be like her.”

  No, you don’t, he’d persuade, even though he’d never been able to bear the way she thought of herself as two people. Not like her at all. His stomach curled.

  “Am I the only one who’s supposed to worry?” she asked. “As I did when you went to sea. As I will tomorrow. Every day after that. You can worry for me like I worry for you.”

  He looked at his hands. They trembled.

  “Trust me,” she repeated.

  He felt the misery of his fear, the desperate certainty that he would lose her again. He trusted that certainty. He trusted his fear. It ruled him like a god.

  “Arin.”

  He met her eyes. They were strange and familiar—rich, in his mind, with every thing he knew about her, and with the mystery of her thoughts, which he’d never know for sure. He saw—the knowledge cracked open his shell of fear—that death wasn’t the only way to lose her. He would lose her if he couldn’t do this. He didn’t trust her. He did not. Yet he understood that there are some things you feel and others that you choose to feel, and that the choice doesn’t make the feeling less valid.

  “Do you?” she asked.

  He made his choice. “Yes.”

  She stepped into his arms. He held the rope of her braid gently. He was drowning. He was far below the surface. He’d forgotten how to breathe.

  Then his lungs opened and his mind grew quiet and clear. “Come back to me,” he murmured.

  “I will.”

  Chapter 25

  She rode hard. Crouching low over the saddle, Kestrel pressed the horse to a gallop, drove it straight down the main road from Errilith to the south. The map was in her mind. She saw again the shaky mark made on a forest two leagues from the general’s camp. Roshar had brought the map to her with the scout’s token.