The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  His fatigue. His bruises. The pain he was trying to hide. The way her heart had grown scales. But inside: hot as a live coal.

  He said, “We both know what will happen if we retreat to the city.”

  So she said it. “The east might look at its losses, see a likely defeat, and leave . . . even if Roshar wants to stay.”

  “And then it’s over.” Arin’s gray eyes were naked. “I can’t lose. There’ll be nothing left for me if I do.”

  “That’s not true.”

  But he had stood. The camp was awake. His small fire had gone out. The tea, forgotten, had cooled.

  She kept her head bowed. “We must retreat inland until I think of something better.”

  Arin stepped close to her, his footfalls hushed by the pale, sandy earth with its wisps of grass. He touched the nape of her neck, fingertips brushing down to the first bones of her back. He gently hooked the collar of her shirt.

  Her skin sang so loud that she couldn’t think of any words, let alone the right ones, and by the time she knew that she should, that it was now, that it wouldn’t hurt to say what she felt, that she could give her love to someone without being broken for it, Arin had already gone.

  Roshar had a litter brought to Arin, who glanced at it and the men assigned to carry it. “No,” said Arin.

  “Idiot,” the prince sneered. “You were knocked unconscious. You look like hell. Get in the litter.”

  “I’ll go in a cart,” Arin said, referring to wagons that carried the wounded. “I don’t need special treatment.”

  “Oh yes, you do.”

  Kestrel had never seen Roshar so angry.

  “Why?” Arin squinted at him. “Because of your concern or because you want to send a message to the army?”

  Kestrel could think of two messages: to show the Dacrans that the supposedly god-touched Herrani leader was weak, or to show the Herrani that the eastern prince valued Arin. Maybe both.

  Roshar’s mouth twitched into an unhappy smile.

  “Then I’ll ride,” Arin said.

  When the day ended and the army set camp on a low hill whose bushes bore thick, oily green leaves, Roshar stood near his tent as an officer set it up. The prince’s fingers drummed the muscles of his crossed arms.

  Kestrel didn’t know where Arin was. She thought he’d gone to water his new horse at a stream near camp, but when Roshar’s tent was up and the sun down, and Arin hadn’t returned, an icy mist of anxiety stole over her.

  “He’ll be more comfortable there.” Roshar jerked his chin at his tent.

  “And you?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Arin won’t like it.”

  “I don’t care.” Then he added, the words coming in a rush, “The litter wasn’t symbolic. No hidden message. Not every one speaks in code. I just want him to be well.”

  Slowly, she said, “I think that he is.” She had watched him during the day’s ride, and although his face had grown drawn, it seemed more from weariness than pain. He’d easily kept his seat and met her sidelong looks with a small smile. Her concern had lessened.

  Not entirely, though. Not enough to keep her from searching the camp after Roshar had left her by his pitched tent. Not enough to uncurl her fingers, squeezed into fists after the sky’s humid indigo had darkened. She returned to the tent and lit a lantern. Inside, she chafed her arms as if cold, eyeing the burning wick. She meant to measure it. After it burned down to a certain mark, she’d search for him. But the wick had barely begun to sizzle before she seized the lantern’s handle, hurried toward the tent’s canvas door . . . and smacked into Arin as he entered.

  She gasped. “Where have you been?”

  He ran a hand through his wet hair, glanced down at his damp shirt. He smelled of soap. “Well.”

  “A bath?”

  “ ‘Bath’ makes a cold creek sound so glamorous.”

  “In the dark?”

  “There’s a moon.”

  “I was ready to make Roshar help me find you.”

  “Oh, I saw him. He directed me here—emphatically.” Arin lifted his brows, impressed. “The wording he used was very creative.”

  Kestrel became aware of how close she stood to Arin. The lifted lamp gilded his face, illuminating the peak of the tent’s apex above. It radiated a small heat between him and her. She moved away.

  He touched the clenched hand that held the lamp. “Little Fists, what’s wrong? Both you and Roshar are angry. All I’ve done is get hit on the head.”

  “And sleep. And ride. And bathe.”

  “Well, I was disgusting.”

  Kestrel turned and strode to the table. She set the lamp down, practically slamming it.

  Arin followed. “I don’t know how to prove to you that I’m all right.”

  She kept her back to him. Something terrible was clawing up her throat.

  “I was lucky,” Arin said. “I had you. And a hard head. And the grace of my god.”

  “Damn your god.”

  Arin caught her arm above the elbow. She turned to face him. All trace of humor had left his face. His eyes were wide, urgent. “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? I can say anything. Anything except what really matters.”

  “Kestrel, take it back. You’ll offend him.”

  “Your god risks you.”

  “He protects me.”

  “You’re his plaything.”

  “You’re wrong. He loves me.”

  Saying those words made him look so alone. He reminded her of sails curved by the wind, full and yet empty at the same time. She found that she was jealous of his god. The sudden jealousy held her so hard in its grip that she couldn’t breathe.

  “It’s true,” Arin insisted.

  She saw then that she had hurt him, that his god’s love was all the more precious to him because of his fear that he would find it nowhere else. Her anger rinsed away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I ask your pardon. His, too.”

  Arin released her, his relief plain.

  “I’m not really angry at a god,” she said, “or you.”

  His brow creased.

  “All right, yes, you, a little.” She gently thumped his chest, then rested her palm flat and wide against his heart. He went very still. “Why is it so hard for you to take care of yourself?”

  He was silent. Her thumb rested in the hollow of his collar bone. She felt his pulse jolt, and her own answered. It sped, it felt like it was slipping from her grasp, and that she’d never catch her heart, never pin it down, never keep it safe.

  She did not want to keep it safe.

  She said, “Why can’t you see that people care for you?”

  She said, “I care for you.”

  “I know that you care. But . . .” He searched her face. “Anyone would, for a friend.”

  “You’re more than a friend.”

  “On the battlefield, you stayed—”

  “Of course I did.”

  “You have a strong sense of honor. You always have. I think you think you owe me something.”

  “I stayed because I love you.”

  He flinched and looked away. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  The night outside seemed to swell against the tent. The lamp smelled like a hot stone. His face slowly opened. He touched her hand as it pressed against his heart. His caress was light, secret, almost unsure of her knuckles, the thin tendons as strong as bone. She felt him become sure.

  There was no sound when he kissed her. None when she unthreaded the ties of his shirt and found his skin.

  He grasped her dagger belt, flexed his fingers once around the leather, then simply held on. He whispered something into her mouth that was almost a word. It lost its shape, became something else.

  He let go. She heard the brush of linen as he drew the shirt over his head, his fingertips grazing the tent’s sloped ceiling as if for balance. His ribs were bound with gauze, his body marked by scars. Old ones, badly healed and rai
sed. Others, pink and fresh. His shoulders bore pale gouges; they looked like sets of claws, almost deliberate, like tattoos. Curious, she touched them.

  He bit his lip.

  “That hurts?”

  “No.”

  “What is this? What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Later.”

  His hand strayed over her shirt, which was eastern, as Arin’s was, with no collar. Threadbare in places. Frayed at the neck. He worried the cloth there, rubbing it between fingers and thumb. Then he drew her shirt open, and she felt as if reality had grown larger and tremulous: a drop of water on the point of a pin.

  “Kestrel . . . I’ve never—”

  She whispered that this was new to her, too.

  There was a long pause. “Are you certain you want—”

  “Yes.”

  “Because . . .”

  “Arin.”

  “Maybe you—”

  “Arin.” She laughed, and then so did he, aware that they’d already found the bed. Words had fallen away. Maybe the words lay on the earth, nestled among clothes, curled into the undone dagger belt. Maybe later, language would be recovered and pieced together. Made to make sense. But not now. Now there was touch and taste and sound.

  When he eased into her, she was glad for the burning lamp, the fuzzy glow of it on his skin. The way it showed the black fall of his wet hair, the flesh and scars that made him. She didn’t look away.

  Later, when they were quiet, he looked down at her where she lay. Stretched out alongside her, Arin propped himself up on one elbow. “I think that I’m not awake.” His fingertips floated over her: nose, eyelashes, messy braid, shoulder. “Beautiful.”

  She smiled. “Like you.”

  Arin made a skeptical cough, scrunched his face. He found the end of her braid and paintbrushed it across her cheek.

  “It’s true,” she told him. “You never believe me when I say it.”

  The lamp’s wick fizzed and sparked in its oil. It would soon go out.

  “I love your eyes,” she said. “I have from the first.”

  “They’re common.”

  “No, they’re not.” She traced his scarred face. “This.” He shivered. “I love this.” She bit him on the jaw. “And this.” She continued to touch him.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “This, too.” Not quite a question.

  “That, too.”

  She felt laughter travel through him, and something else, quieter and more intense. “Your mouth,” she said, “is not bad.”

  “Not bad?”

  “Quite tolerable.”

  He cocked one brow. “I’ll show you.”

  They stopped talking.

  Chapter 35

  In the morning, When Roshar saw their faces he rolled his eyes. “I want my tent back,” he said.

  Kestrel laughed.

  She loaded Javelin’s saddlebags, listening to the sounds of the army breaking camp: clatters and thumps, someone urinating against a tree, the jingle of horse tack, the sifting grate of dirt kicked over a fire. Javelin flicked his tail. Nearby, Arin was checking the hooves of his horse—a mare, one that took a moment for Kestrel to recognize. His previous horse had been left on the beach. This one’s master was prob ably dead.

  Arin adjusted the saddle’s girth. As he ran his hands again over the horse, he said, “Why do you think we haven’t been attacked yet?”

  She slowly buckled an open saddlebag.

  He said, “This isn’t what I want to ask you.”

  He had sleepless eyes, his mouth a little swollen, the deeply tanned skin somehow burnished. Kestrel thought that she, too, must look like this: polished by desire, the way a river stone holds a luster from having been made so smooth.

  “I wish . . .” He caught himself, and from the way he was looking around the busy camp, she thought that Arin had almost said that he wished there was no war, or that they could lose themselves in each other without losing everything.

  But this wasn’t entirely true for him or for her, and she needed to win the war as much as he did. “We haven’t been attacked because my father’s strengthening his foothold on the beach. Supplying his troops. Recovering, too. It was a costly victory for them. He doesn’t need to eliminate us now, when his forces will be stronger later. But he’ll move soon. He’ll take territory along the road all the way to the city.”

  “Also?” Arin looked at her.

  “Also,” she said reluctantly, “he thinks he’ll conquer the city with little trouble.”

  “We’re herding ourselves into a trap.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  He waited.

  “It buys us time,” she said. “If we are retreating instead of simply seeming like we’re retreating, and his scouts report this, then when we’re able to find a way to counterattack it will catch him off guard. Sometimes it’s better to do instead of pretend—especially if you don’t intend to follow what you’re doing to the conclusion your enemy expects.”

  “What do you intend?”

  She stroked Javelin’s nose. “I’m not sure.”

  “Black powder is the biggest problem. If the Valorians didn’t have so much of it, we’d stand a chance against them.”

  “Well.”

  “What?”

  “I could destroy it.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and crinkled his brow as he listened to her explain what she had in mind.

  He didn’t like it.

  “You know I’ll go anyway.”

  He left his horse, dusting his hands free of the dirt from the animal’s hooves. When he came close, it felt as if she’d come in out of the cold and stood next to a fire. Arin touched the dagger at her hip and ran a thumb over the symbol on its hilt: the circle within a circle.

  “The god of souls,” Kestrel said. “It’s his symbol.”

  “Hers,” he corrected gently.

  Kestrel wasn’t sure how long she’d known what the symbol meant. Maybe for a long time. Or maybe she’d only realized it last night. It was the kind of knowledge that, once it enters you, seems like it’s lived there forever.

  His expression was soft and entranced and puzzled. “Do you feel changed? I feel changed.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  He smiled. “It’s strange.”

  And so it was.

  “We could reach Lerralen by nightfall,” she said, “if we press the horses. Will you come with me?”

  “Ah, Kestrel, that’s something you never need to ask.”

  The sun was gone when they reached the wind-twisted bushes that hedged the beach. Beyond were the fires of the enemy’s camp; the blue-black air smelled of smoke and salt.

  Kestrel cleaned her Valorian armor, strapped on a traditional-looking dagger she had taken from the arms supply wagon, and wordlessly handed Arin the one he’d made for her.

  “I don’t love my role in this particular mission,” he said. “It’s mostly watching you saunter into danger.”

  “You forget.”

  “That? That’s nothing.”

  “You could get hurt.”

  He blinked. “No.”

  “You don’t ever fear for yourself?”

  “Not for something like this.”

  “Then what?”

  He studied his hands. “Sometimes . . . I think of who I was. As a boy. I talk to him.”

  Slowly, she said, “Like you do to your god?”

  “It’s different. Or maybe I think about him like my god thinks about me. I’ve made promises to the child. I worry I won’t be able to keep them.”

  “What have you promised?”

  “Revenge.”

  “You’ll have it.”

  Arin nodded, but more in simple acknowledgment than actual confidence.

  She looked at him through the smoky night. Just light enough to see his expression, and dark enough that his body smudged into the shadows. Soon, night would truly fall. Waves folded and unfolded
against the shore.

  “We should wait for the moon to rise,” she said, “before we go down to the camp.”

  “And what,” he murmured, “will we do while we wait?”

  She brought his fingers to her lips so that he could feel her smile.

  His hand traveled the length of her braid and toyed with the leather string that bound it. He untied the knot. The sound of it coming undone was as soft as a breath. He unraveled her hair, and brought her close.

  When the moon was high, Kestrel and Arin gathered what they needed and made their way down to the beach, keeping close to the ragged bushes, blending in with their darkness. They waited, crouched near the edge of camp, where they could see the supply wagons, their domed canvas covers as pale as mushrooms in the moonlight.

  Finally, a sentry on his rounds walked close to their hiding spot. In one swift movement, Arin surged up, clamped a hand over the sentry’s mouth, and dragged him down to the sand.

  “Not a sound,” Arin hissed at the sentry, the point of his dagger pricking the hollow behind the man’s ear. Arin forced the sentry’s face to turn up to the moon. Eyes wide. Skin strained and white. “Tell us which wagon holds the black powder.”

  The sentry shook his head.

  “Do you remember,” Arin whispered, “the punishment for runaway slaves? No? Let me remind you.” He lightly drew his dagger over the man’s ear, down the tip of his nose. “Which wagon?”

  The Valorian shook his head again, but this time his gaze jerked in the direction of one of the larger wagons.

  Arin glanced at Kestrel. Enough? his eyes asked. Yes, she mouthed, but—“Don’t,” she whispered, ill at the sight of the sentry pressed down in the sand, his eyes as dark as her childhood friend’s, as that of any Valorian child. They were gleaming, glassy with the kind of fear a child eventually learns how to hide. But death will do that. It makes you unlearn all you know. “Don’t,” she told Arin again.

  He hesitated, then slammed the pommel of his dagger against the man’s head, knocking him unconscious.

  “Be swift,” Arin told her.

  She cut into the small bag of black powder tied to her waist. She felt grit flow thinly from the hole. Then she straightened and walked into the camp.

  She kept her head down, her tight braid trailing over one shoulder. Her face was dirty, she reminded herself as she passed campfires. She was changed. Her hair had reddened—was redder still, by firelight. No one would recognize her, surely. Not in armor. Not like this, with no trace of cosmetics, no finery, no silk or jewels or glittering gold engagement mark. She was not herself. She was simply one of them. Just another Valorian. But her throat was dry, and her stomach shrank into a stone.