The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  As she saddled Javelin and tightened the girth, she tried to quell the leaping worry in her belly. She should not worry.

  After all, what could the general do that she could not do? Had she not learned war at his knee? Did his voice not haunt her? She thought about the way her memory—or imagination—of him seemed to advise her.

  She didn’t like the way he was right. How she listened. She wondered if there was any difference between how she listened to him and how Arin listened to his god.

  Hilly terrain smoothed as the army rode west. The land grew slightly arid. The dirt was a light grit.

  Kestrel saw how the Herrani soldiers lured Arin into riding with them in the middle ranks. There were requests that he consider the gait of an unruly horse. Or a story left dangling, a teasing challenge: finish it, Arin, why don’t you . . . if you can. Sometimes a question: was Arin sure he wasn’t related to the Herrani royal line? This flustered Arin, and was so likely to hold him in extended conversation and vigorous denials that it was the most common ploy used to keep him in their company.

  Once, when Arin let his horse fall back to ride with the Herrani, Kestrel caught Roshar’s sliding gaze. Pensive. Murky. A strange mixture of satisfaction and dis plea sure.

  Kestrel said, “I thought you wanted them to love him.”

  Roshar glanced over his shoulder at Arin in the middle ranks.

  They rode in silence beneath the hard blue sky. Then Kestrel said, “On the tundra, Arin had a ring with a stone in it. Did you give it to him?”

  “Never lend that boy anything. Careless. He lost it.”

  “It could put people to sleep.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that white salve, the numbing one—is that eastern, too? Is it made from the same thing?”

  “What an observant ghost you are. Yes, Kestrel. The liquid in that ring and the salve contain different quantities of a poisonous worm from our plains. A very little bit, mixed with ointment, will numb the skin. More will send you to sleep. More still? You take the goddess’s hand and live with her forever.”

  “Why don’t you dip crossbow quarrels in it? I remember my father complaining about the poisoned arrows of the eastern plainspeople.”

  “Alas, we’re far from the plains and my supply is limited.” He squinted at the sun. “Why do you ask?”

  She was quiet.

  He said, “You’re not thinking about crossbow quarrels.”

  “Sometimes I have trouble sleeping.”

  “In case I wasn’t clear, that part about taking the goddess’s hand means dead. As in, you die. In its highest concentration, you can die from simply touching the poison, even when the liquid dries.”

  “I’d be careful.”

  Roshar swiveled his horse in front of Kestrel’s, blocking her path. Javelin snorted and stopped.

  The prince said, “My answer is no.”

  He said, “You’re not the only one who suffers.”

  He said, “You could do what the rest of us do.”

  Roshar spurred his horse ahead.

  Kestrel looked down the open road. A lone black bird cut across the sky like a crack in blue paint. She thought about the white salve in her saddlebag, the missing ring, and how much she longed to sleep easily, without dreams. Nothing in dreams can hurt you, her father had said—which was another way of saying that life can. But she hadn’t understood that as a child. Kestrel recalled the old comfort of her father’s words, and had a sense of herself as she had been.

  That night, alone in her tent, she thought about the cruel cold of the tundra. Sulfur crumbling in her grip. The panic when her memory had begun to slip. The nighttime drug: soft, dense. The fear of dying far from home. No one would have mourned her. Sorrow: like marrow in the hollow of a bone.

  It had been real. It still was.

  But it wasn’t the whole of who she was.

  Kestrel blew out the little lamp. In the dark, she recalled the road she’d traveled that day with its cloud of dirt.

  You could do what the rest of us do.

  She would keep going.

  That night, she slept deeply. Afterward, she sometimes still wished for the nighttime drug, but it no longer held her in its power.

  In this region, a variety of wheat flourished. Dull gold fields rattled softly. The grain, fully flowered, bent the stalks.

  In the distance, Herrani harvested the fields. They were too old or too young for war. Other fields had been abandoned. Kestrel saw farms where chicken coops stood empty, smelling of sour straw. The animals had been slaughtered or carried away. A woven basket, left outside for months, had disintegrated into a spiky nest. When grasped, the handle came off.

  The farms unnerved her. She would have preferred to say that it was because of the waste. Most of the wheat would rot on its stalks. But it wasn’t that. It was the buildings. The rare Herrani villa, with a columned portico and fluted arches. The wink of an atrium’s glass roof. More common: a splendid and newish Valorian manse, sprawling, flat-faced.

  The slave quarters blistered in the sun. Paint peeled in long curls like an apple’s skin. Kestrel noticed, with queasy misgiving, that a little house lay near the slave quarters on each farm. At first, when she went with soldiers to forage for provisions to fatten the army’s supplies, she hadn’t known what the little houses were for. There had been no such house on her father’s property in Herran.

  One day, she saw Arin see a small house. His eyes tightened. His expression went bleak.

  She knew then that the houses had been for children. The memory came unwillingly, sticky and slow. She had to drag it out. When she did she understood that the knowledge had been the sort of thing she had once tried to unknow.

  It had been the practice to take a baby from its enslaved mother once it was weaned and sell it to a neighboring farm. The mother would be distracted from her work, went the Valorian wisdom. Meanwhile, her master would purchase other children from other farms. These children forgot that anyone but their owners could lay claim to them, and were raised in small houses by an elderly slave. By now, such a child could be as old as ten years.

  It had been commonly done in the countryside. In the city, not always. Some owners prided themselves on allowing their slaves to keep their children. Kestrel had once seen a Valorian lady coo over a Herrani child. The tiny girl had wobbled where she stood in the center of the parlor. Kestrel, who had come for tea, hadn’t noticed the girl’s mother at first, then had followed the toddler’s gaze to see a uniformed woman waiting in a shadowed alcove.

  Kestrel’s father had made clear that there would be no slave children on his property. If babies were born, they were soon sold. None were purchased.

  Each little house on each farm was a horror. Before—for years—she had let her mind close seamlessly, like an egg, around this wrong and other wrongs. They happened every day. It was life. But not her life.

  Hers, an inner voice—sinister, upsetting—had sometimes disagreed.

  Not hers.

  Hers.

  The words echoed now with the rhythm of Javelin’s hooves.

  Kestrel could say that she’d learned that one’s life is also the lives of others. A wrong is not an egg, separate unto itself and sealed. She could say that she understood the wrong in ignoring a wrong. She could say this, but the truth was that she should have learned it long before.

  The sky was frosted with stars. Kestrel found Arin seated near a fire, squinting as he retooled someone else’s leather armor. A buckle had come off.

  “Can you see well enough?” She remained standing.

  “No.” He pushed an awl through a strip of leather. “But there’s no time for this by day.” The army pressed as rapidly west as it could, though not as quickly as Kestrel would have liked. Roshar had warned against a forced march. Weary soldiers make for lost wars. Her father had often said the same.

  Kestrel tipped her head back. The night glowed. “How do you make a mirror?”

  Surprise tinged Arin�
�s voice. “Do you want a mirror?”

  “No. I just wondered how.”

  “You silver glass. It’s not something I’ve done.”

  She turned in a half circle to look toward the western constellations. Her boots released the scent of bruised grass. “Before, people must have used polished metal.”

  “Prob ably.”

  “Or bowls of dark water. The sky looks like a mirror, if a mirror was a bowl of black water.”

  There was a silence. Kestrel took her eyes off the stars and looked at him. He’d set aside the armor and was turning the awl in his fingers. He flickered orange and red in the light of the low fire. Quietly, he said, “What are you thinking?”

  She was hesitant to say.

  He came to stand next to her.

  “Arin, after the conquest, what was it like for you?”

  “I’m not sure you want to know.”

  “I want to know every thing about you.”

  So he told her.

  The stars, too, seemed to listen.

  They left the wheatlands. The soil became loose. Fresh water, seldom. On the fifth day out of Errilith, however, they reached a stream and replenished the water barrels stowed in the supply wagons.

  Kestrel watched Roshar approach Arin as he curried his horse. “Here.” The prince thrust something at him. “Do us all a favor. You’re filthy.” Roshar looked him over. “I think there’s still dried blood behind your ears.”

  It was a cake of soap. Arin appeared faintly startled, as if he lived in a world where soap hadn’t been invented. He broke the round between his hands and offered Kestrel half.

  It crumbled a little in her grasp. Its scent was sweetly smoky. She stood there longer than necessary, inhaling the gift of a gift. It occurred to her that if she used it, and Arin used it, her skin would smell like his.

  She tucked it carefully in her saddlebag, wrapping spare clothes around it so that it wouldn’t be broken.

  “Come with me.” Arin. Eyes illuminated. “I want to show you something.”

  Kestrel followed without question, though the army’s midday rest was nearly over. They took their horses.

  She kept stealing glances at Arin as they rode toward a grassy hill. He caught her at it. “A secret,” he said, and smiled.

  It felt as if his smile became hers. His secret, too. The day itself: the satin sky, a speckled yellow feather that spiraled down on a breeze to catch in Javelin’s mane. She held all this inside her the way a jewel holds light.

  They dismounted at the foot of the hill. Kestrel noticed stone steps, overgrown with green, leading up the slope. It occurred to her that the entire hill, rare for this terrain, might have been man-made.

  “What is this?” she asked. The stairs, as far as she could tell, led to nothing. The hilltop seemed bare.

  Arin plucked the yellow feather from Javelin’s mane and tucked it behind her ear. “A temple. At least, it used to be.”

  She touched the feather’s ticklish plume, the slight scratch of the quill. She explored it, trying to ignore her plea sure at his unexpected gesture. “Is that your secret?”

  “You wouldn’t ask”—Arin’s grin was mischievous—“if you didn’t guess that it is not. Come see.”

  The steps were broken in places and wobbled beneath Kestrel’s feet. When they reached the hilltop, she could see the jumble of marble that had been the temple’s foundation. Perhaps it had been destroyed after the conquest; the Valorians had razed all Herrani temples to their gods. But these ruins looked ancient. The marble was bleached bone white. The carvings, polished smooth by time, were blurred and mostly indecipherable, like a dream after one has woken.

  “It’s greener here, isn’t it?” Arin’s voice was hushed. “Than the rest of this region.”

  “Yes.”

  There were birds’ nests in the nooks of broken marble. A lizard darted over a fallen pillar. The place appeared at once ghostly and yet full of life. When Arin stepped into the center of the ruined temple and knelt, Kestrel thought it was to pray, but he was clearing away vegetation. “I recognize some of this.” He was eager; his words tripped over each other. He seemed unaware that she wouldn’t understand what he meant. “But other parts . . . I thought I knew all the stories.”

  Kestrel came to kneel beside him. A face glittered up at her beneath strands of ivy. Startled, she pulled the greenery away.

  It was a mosaic. An entire, immense tiled floor stretched out of sight beneath the vegetation. Kestrel palmed away dirt. The face flared in the sun, its tiled features slippery and cool. The man—woman?—had wings fanned wide, a peacock’s colors. Scaled skin. Carnelian claws.

  Kestrel tugged more ivy free. Gorgeous, impossible creatures appeared. An enameled snake with six tails. A horse made of water. A woman whose hair appeared to be paper scrolls written in a script close to Herrani, but with so many alien elements Kestrel couldn’t read it. Some of the figures looked only vaguely human. A string of eyes crowned a brow. One long, violet-skinned body had no limbs. Gold spilled in a ribbon from the lips of a god.

  They were all gods. They could be nothing else.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Arin said, but he didn’t mean it. His mouth was reluctant. He licked his thumb and rubbed a tile clean, not raising his gaze, the sun tumbling in his messy hair. A wide blade of light cut across the bridge of his nose, warming his neck and shoulders. He moved, and the sun caught his face in full.

  Her limbs were light, as if with fear. Her blood seemed to float. She said, “Not yet,” and saw his sudden happiness.

  She helped him clear the vegetation and expose the entire mosaic to the sky.

  Every chip of her being slid into place, into the image of a lost world. The boy discovering it. The girl who sees it spark and flare, and understands, now, what she feels. She realizes that she has felt this for a long time.

  Lapis lazuli, kiln-fired glass, onyx and gold and shell and ivory. Jade. Aquamarine. Kestrel barely saw where each tile of the mosaic joined, the taut line of contact. Piece to piece. She pressed her palm to its surface and imagined its image imprinted on her skin.

  Later, Kestrel wished she had spoken then, that no time had been lost. She wished that she’d had the courage that very moment to tell Arin what she’d finally known to be true: that she loved him with the whole of her heart.

  Chapter 31

  Kestrel was unusually quiet on the last day’s ride to Lerralen. At first, at the temple, Arin had thought that some new, delicate thing had grown between them. But since then she had kept her distance in a way he couldn’t explain, could find no cause for. He sifted through his memories of the temple, of her, the hot green leaves, the slick tile, the hidden world of the mosaic, and how Kestrel had wanted to see it, too. He could find nothing wrong. An error lay somewhere, that was sure. Still, each moment of each memory of that day made him want to hold them all in the palm of his hand, to stash them safely and close. In a deep pocket, perhaps. On his person.

  He was wary of this impulse. He suspected that he would be revealed as a child with a collection of precious things that were actually nothing valuable. A button, a river rock, a bit of string.

  Or a speckled yellow feather. He wished he’d kept it. He wondered if Kestrel had kept it. Most likely it had fallen from her hair as they’d galloped from the temple’s hill to rejoin the vanguard of the army.

  Tawny grass rippled on the bluffs. The air was brackish. They’d soon reach the sea.

  When the army stopped to water the horses from the barrels among the provisions (there’d been no fresh water in this land for two days), Arin found Kestrel brushing Javelin’s coat. She glanced up at him, then away, her gaze settling on something else that Arin wanted to identify, to understand whether it was him or—what? the white-threaded sky? that gull, tipped up against the wind?—that made her seem suddenly smaller.

  Her hair had reddened since coming to the south. Her skin was now the color of toasted bread. Long fingers plucked stray bits of noth
ing from Javelin’s mane.

  It was not the sky. It was not the gull.

  Arin tried to set her at ease. “So, strategist. What are our chances? Or do we ride to our dooms?”

  The corner of her mouth lifted—an acknowledgment both of his effort to ease her anxiety and also that what he’d asked, however lightheartedly, was an odd sort of way to do it. Yet it worked. She became more present. The skittering movements of her fingers stilled.

  Not the battle, then.

  Not her horse, nor the slight crunch of sand beneath their boots. Nothing, nowhere.

  Him.

  “There are three scenarios,” she said. “We arrive late, and my father has seized the beach. Or we arrive as reinforcements for a battle that has already begun. Or we arrive before my father, and wait.” She added, “Of course, there is a fourth: that I am wrong, he won’t land there, and we’ve disastrously shifted our strengths where they shouldn’t be.”

  “There is no fourth.”

  She shook her head. “I can be wrong.”

  “Is that what worries you?”

  “Even if I’m not wrong, and we arrive before the Valorians land, it’s a mixed blessing. Him landing late means he’s landing with a larger force. A robust artillery. More people and more cannon take longer to mobilize. They’re also harder to defeat.”

  Javelin knocked his nose against her shoulder. Arin saw her smile. A quiet, lost feeling stole over him like sleep or a farewell.

  “I told my father I loved him.” Her words were abrupt. “It was the last thing I said to him.”

  Arin didn’t look at her. He didn’t want her to see his face just then.

  “I saw a basket when we were in the wheatlands,” she said. “It had lost its shape entirely. You couldn’t hold anything in it. You couldn’t hold it.”

  “Kestrel, you are not a basket.”

  “I think—” She stopped.

  He wondered if something can be so hard to say that it becomes hard even to say that it is hard. “You can’t tell me what you think?”