The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  He stripped off her forearm guard, swearing at the straps.

  “That’s not my blood,” she said.

  “You’re not hurt?”

  “Left leg.”

  He came around the horse, saw, and went quiet. “All right,” he said finally. “Come on.” He helped her down. “I can carry you.”

  She heard the question in his tone. “No. Roshar will see. He’ll tease us mercilessly about it.” She smiled, because she wanted Arin to smile. She didn’t like the way he looked: the drawn lines around his mouth, eyes hooded with worry.

  He didn’t smile. He cupped her face with both hands. An emotion tugged at his expression, a dark awe, the kind saved for a wild storm that rends the sky but doesn’t ravage your existence, doesn’t destroy every thing you love. The one that lets you feel saved.

  Nervousness rose within her. It simmered, sickened.

  Unreasonable. She knew that she could lift her parched lips to his and taste the truth of his love on his tongue. Still, she couldn’t say what she wasn’t sure she felt.

  Her thigh throbbed. “No carrying,” she said lightly. “But I’ll let you help me up the hill.”

  Leading the horse behind them, they moved slowly through the camp, Arin’s arm under Kestrel’s shoulders. He brought her to his tent.

  “I think—” He hesitated. “Inside. You could stay outside. But.” He glanced down at her bloody thigh. “The trousers need to come off. I can fetch someone else—”

  “No. You.”

  His eyes flicked to hers, then away.

  She went inside the tent. There was no canvas floor, only grass and a bedroll. She sat on the ground.

  Arin glanced at her dry mouth. “You’re thirsty,” he said, and left.

  He returned with a canteen, a bowl of water, a small pot, and clean gauze.

  She drank. The water seemed to fall down a long way inside her. She thought about the water, how amazing it felt to drink. She thought about that and not him.

  Arin knelt beside her. She set the canteen aside. The cut was a dull pain: almost nothing in the wake of her heightening awareness of him, her rapid heart. Outside the tent, cicadas sang.

  He unbuckled her armor and lifted it gently away. “Nowhere else?”

  “Just my leg.” It was a relief, at first, to be out of armor, yet once it was gone she felt exposed and too soft.

  Arin didn’t move. She knew what she was supposed to do next. Her fingers fumbled as she reached to unfasten the fall of her trousers.

  “Wait,” Arin said. “Just.” He stopped, then continued, “Leave them on.”

  He reached into the rent in the left trouser leg and ripped it open, carefully forcing the path of the rip to circle her thigh. Soon the cloth was almost entirely detached, save for the flap still stuck to the wound. He tipped water onto it to soften the fabric. “This will hurt.”

  “Do it.”

  He peeled the flap from the wound. She sucked in air as blood ran. He pulled the cloth free, leaving her left leg almost entirely bare.

  He rinsed the wound. “Ah.”

  “What?”

  Arin lifted his dark head and smiled. “It’s not so bad.”

  She glanced down at the blood.

  “I mean,” he hastened to say, “that you don’t need stitches. Which is good. Not that it’s not bad, for you, or that it doesn’t hurt, or—”

  She laughed. “Arin, I’m glad, too, that it’s not worse.”

  He began to clean it. Pinkish water ran down her leg. The ground beneath her grew damp. He blotted away blood with gauze, and it did hurt, yet his touch was tender and he was skilled at this, so that when he unscrewed the pot of whitish salve and began to dab it along the cut, she asked, “Did you learn this in battle?”

  His head remained bowed, and he kept his gaze on what he was doing. “Some things. Others, from books. Or—” He abruptly stopped.

  “Arin?”

  “Under Valorian rule, we learned to do what we could for ourselves. For others. When we were hurt.”

  “When they hurt you.”

  He shrugged, reaching for the roll of gauze.

  “I should have known. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “You can ask me anything.”

  The cream was cool and tingled. Her whole body relaxed with the absence of pain.

  He placed gauze on the wound and unwound the roll, wrapping it around her thigh. Her gaze followed the gauze as it circled her skin, came up between her legs, and down again. His palm brushed her inner thigh, rough and warm. They fell into silence.

  Arin came to the end of the gauze, which he threaded through its other layers and knotted to itself. He was done, yet didn’t move. The heels of his hands were against her knee, palms flush against her skin, fingertips skimming the gauze’s lower border. “Better?”

  Her body felt lax and alive. She didn’t want to answer him. If she did, his hands would slide away from her.

  “Kestrel?”

  “Yes,” she said reluctantly. “It’s better.”

  He stayed still. Outside, cicadas ticked and buzzed. He met her gaze, his eyes in shadow. His fingers traced a pattern that had nothing to do with healing and seemed to open her flesh in glowing lines.

  Her breath caught. He heard it, and rocked back onto his heels and stood and crossed to the other side of the tent in one rapid motion before she could say anything. And then there was nothing, really, to say.

  Arin sat near his bedroll. “What happened at the scouts’ station?”

  Kestrel sank her hands into the leftover water at the bottom of the bowl. She rubbed at the bloody grime on her right hand, concentrating on it. That glowing feeling ebbed (inconvenient, she told it. Problematic. Now, of all times. What is wrong with you, that you can’t respect a friend who has asked not to be used? That every thing sparks and burns at the hope of his temptation. That maybe he’ll heed it, sink down into it, and it will comfort. It won’t, not for him. Maybe not even for you). She washed her hand clean.

  Kestrel told Arin every thing from when she’d left camp last night to the moment when she drove a rock into the officer’s face. “I killed him,” she said, and would have said something else, yet faltered.

  Arin frowned. “You feel guilty.”

  “He wasn’t wearing armor.”

  Arin flicked an impatient hand. “His mistake.”

  “He cared about me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Alis, the scout. He was concerned about her.”

  “Are you saying that you’re sorry you killed him because he was a nice person?”

  “I’m saying that he was a person, and he’s dead, and I did it.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “I’m not.” Now she was angry, too.

  “Are you aware”—Arin’s voice hardened—“of what he would have done to you?”

  “If he’d tried to kill me, he would have succeeded. He didn’t want to. That’s the only reason I was able—”

  “He didn’t want to kill you because he wanted to capture you.”

  “I know. I can know that and still feel sorry.”

  “Don’t ask me to share your sentiment.”

  “I’m not.”

  “If he’d taken you . . .” Arin stopped, then said, “They’re murderers. Slavers. Thieves. I am not sorry. I will never be sorry.”

  “So you’ve never questioned a kill.”

  His eyes flashed, then looked haunted. “I won’t.”

  Kestrel searched his face, her anger fading with the reminder that their difficulties were different, and Arin’s own damage ran deep. Whether she meant to or not, she was probing into raw places. “I’ve upset you.”

  “Yes, I’m upset. It’s upsetting to hear that you feel guilty for defending yourself against someone who would have hurt you.”

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  He looked down at his hands, spotted with her blood. “You can change your mind. It’s all right i
f you do. You don’t have to be part of this war.”

  “Yes, I do. My mind isn’t changed.”

  “It was him or you,” he said softly. “You had to choose.”

  Her gaze fell to the wet grass beneath her, the wrapped bandage. She thought of her past. Her whole life. “I want better choices.”

  “Then we must make a world that has them.”

  When Roshar saw her ripped, one-legged trousers and Arin at her side as they stood outside the prince’s tent, his eyes glinted with mirth and Kestrel felt quite sure that the prince was going to say it was about time Arin tore her clothes off. Then Roshar might comment coyly on Arin’s inability to reach a full conclusion (Only one trouser leg? she imagined Roshar saying. How lazy of you, Arin), or on the quaint quality of Arin’s modesty (What a little lamb you are). Perhaps he’d offer condolences to Kestrel on the partial death of her trousers. He’d ask whether she’d gotten injured on purpose.

  Kestrel flushed. “Things at the scout station didn’t go according to plan,” she said, stating the obvious in order to shunt the conversation to where it should be. Not, absolutely not, about what had happened or didn’t happen in Arin’s tent.

  “She’s wounded,” said Arin—who, although he didn’t look it, must have also been flustered if he, too, felt he had to state the obvious.

  “Barely,” Roshar said. “A mere scratch, or she wouldn’t be standing.”

  “You could offer her a seat,” Arin said.

  “Ah, but I have only two chairs in my tent, little Herrani, and we are three. I suppose she could always sit on your lap.”

  Arin shot him a look of deep annoyance and pushed inside the tent.

  “But I could have said something so much worse,” Roshar protested.

  “Say nothing at all,” Kestrel told him.

  “That would be very unlike me.”

  She ignored him. When the three of them were inside the prince’s tent (Arin chose to stand), she explained in detail what had happened. “I wrote the letter to the general,” she finished, “and launched the hawk.”

  “How many sets of codes do Valorian scout runners use?” Roshar asked.

  Kestrel dug her thumbnail into the teak arm of her chair. “Many. I’m not sure exactly. I might not remember all of what my father taught me, or he could have chosen to teach me only some of them. New ones could have been created and put into use since then.”

  “So the chances that the letter you wrote is the correct code, and will be the one the general expects to see, are slim.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you choose which code to use?” Arin asked.

  “The officer had counters in his tent, which was unusual, unless he was in charge of accounting for the army’s supplies, and that’d be done at the main camp where supplies are kept. I remembered a numeric code. He could have been using counters to help him write in it.”

  “Or,” said Roshar, “your father will read the note, see one code when he expects another, and will send someone to the station, where there’s a dead body.”

  “If so,” Arin said, “then we’re no worse off than we were before.”

  “Oh yes, we are. The general will know the letter’s a ploy, and will do the opposite of what we want. He’ll ignore the main road. He’ll take back roads through the forests where our guns would be of dubious use and we wouldn’t have the advantage of height. You know this.”

  Arin shut his mouth, glancing uneasily at Kestrel. Yes. He had known this, as had she. She felt worse for his effort to make her mistake seem smaller. He knew its true size.

  Roshar leaned back in his creaking chair. His eyes slid from Arin to Kestrel, black as lacquer, the green lines around them fresh. “Can you tell me anything more cheerful than all this?”

  “My letter mentioned nothing about a plan to use plague bodies as a defensive attack during a siege. I had to say that to the officer, to make him keep his distance. But once he was dead that lie wasn’t necessary. Now the manor can seem to be an even easier and more appealing target.”

  “If your father takes the bait.”

  “She did what she could,” Arin said.

  The numbing properties of the ointment on the cut in her thigh were wearing off. She rubbed at the bandage, studying its interleaving, and tried to swallow her sense of failure, which grew worse to hear Arin defend her.

  “I know,” Roshar said, “but our force is small enough as it is. We can’t be in two places at once. He’s going to move on Errilith. I don’t want to fight a defensive battle. We can’t afford it. If conflict happens here, we’d have the height of the hills, but they’ve got the numbers to fan out and flank us. What I liked about the plan of attacking them on the road was the chance to pen them in, to pin them down so that they can’t move.”

  “Then trust her.”

  Kestrel glanced up at Arin.

  Roshar said, “Sending that coded letter was a desperate gamble.”

  “It was her desperate gamble,” Arin said. “That’s why I think it will work.”

  They were to break camp at dawn. Kestrel watched Arin dis appear among the supply wagons. She went to the river, washed the blood and sweat from her, then changed the shredded trousers, which had been the scout’s, for the pair she’d worn when she’d ridden south. She did not think very much. She watched leaves bend in the wind and show their pale underbellies. There was the rushing water. The cicadas’ metallic rasp.

  She walked back to the center of camp.

  Arin had set up a wet grinder and was, it seemed, going progressively through the spare arms stored in a wagon, inspecting each blade. He frowned at a sword and held it down at an angle to the grinder, setting its stone in motion. The sound was harsh.

  Then his gaze flicked up. He saw her, and the grinder stopped.

  She approached. “There are Dacran smiths in this camp. Other people can do this.”

  “Not well enough.” He spread oil on the blade to polish it. His fingers glistened. “I like doing it.” Arin held out his oiled hand. “May I?”

  For a moment she didn’t understand what he wanted, then she drew the dagger he’d made for her and gave it to him.

  Arin looked it over—surprised, pleased. “You take good care of it.”

  She took it back. “Of course I do.” Her voice was rough and wrong.

  He peered at her. Friendly, he said, “Yes, of course. Is there a saying for it? ‘A Valorian always polishes her blade.’ Something like that.”

  “I take care of it,” she said, suddenly both miserable and angry, “because you made it for me.” She hadn’t liked his surprise. She disliked herself for causing it, for the knitted confusion of her feelings, for the way she’d grown smaller to hear Arin defend her to Roshar, not simply because of the force of her sense of failure, but also because she’d asked Arin to trust her and now he did, unwaveringly, yet he’d asked her to love him and she offered nothing. She swung between the solid certainty of attraction and the apprehension of more.

  I love you, she’d told her father. A plea, an apology, and also simply itself: eighteen years of love. Was it really nothing? So worthless?

  Yes, it had been. She’d seen this when her father had lifted her clutching hands and pushed her away. She’d seen it in the dirt floor of her prison cell. Heard it in the sound of her soiled dress ripped open along its back.

  She thought of the hawk, which must have winged its way to her father by now. She imagined it slewing around trees, dropping down. Talons closing around his upraised fist. Her father unrolling the coded message. The trap she’d set for him.

  Walk into it, she willed.

  You have a mind for strategy, he’d said once.

  Come see, then.

  See what I can do to you. See what you have done to me.

  “Kestrel.” Arin’s voice was hesitant. She realized how she must look. Hand clenched on the dagger’s hilt, a storm in her face. When he started to speak, she cut him off. “Do you have more of that salve?�
��

  “Oh.” He fumbled under the leather apron he wore over his clothes and pulled the small pot from his pocket. “I should have given it to you earlier. I . . . was distracted. I forgot.”

  She took it and left.

  Usually she enjoyed her tent. It was private, which made her recall that she’d always felt watched, before the prison. In the capital, certainly. Even in Herran, when it had been a colony. Privacy was a relief. The circle of rough canvas cocooned her. It glowed or dimmed with the passage of the sun.

  Now, however, as she heard the noises of camp (people talking in two different languages; horses and birds and insects and the brrr of the grinder), she felt as she had on the first day Arin had pitched her tent: lonely.

  Kestrel removed her trousers and unwrapped the bandage. It was damp and heavy from the river.

  The cut wasn’t bleeding. It didn’t hurt that much. She spread ointment onto the cut anyway. When it numbed, she thought of the prison’s nighttime drug. Her chest throbbed with a slow pang. She missed the drink’s taste, and what it did to her.

  She painted the cream down her thigh where Arin had touched her. The skin went numb.

  Kestrel bandaged herself again and tried to envision the morning, when she’d break down her tent, break camp, and strike south to attack her father.

  Chapter 27

  They split their forces once more. A contingent was sent to Errilith’s manor to make it look ready for a siege. If Kestrel’s father trusted the coded note, he’d run scouts ahead to gather information on the manor.

  Roshar sent most of the supply wagons there. All of their cannons, too: a risk.

  “Fast and light.” He spoke as if this were an entertaining choice and not a dangerous necessity to leave their main artillery behind. But stealth was necessary (as much as a small army could be stealthy). Speed was important, too, and the terrain was bad for hauling anything. They’d need to work their way south through the forest and up to the hills overlooking the main road.

  “I’m worried about the trees,” Kestrel said to Roshar at the end of the first day of their move south. Irrielle birds hunted overhead, swirling into a black fingerprint against the violet sky. Kestrel flicked a playing card to the grass. A rabbit was roasting on a spit over the nearby fire, its skin a crackled brown. Arin slid a knife into it, separating the flesh. Too pink. He added sticks of resinous sirrin wood to the fire. They caught instantly, blazing blue.