The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  “Yes.” Arin tapped the map where he’d made notches on the even ground that bordered the road and ran open and smooth to the forest on either side. “Exactly.”

  “What is it like,” Kestrel asked Risha as they rode, “to be gifted with weapons?”

  Coolly, the princess said, “You’ve no proof that I am.”

  But Kestrel remembered an archery contest on the palace lawn, and how Risha aimed arrows with studied mediocrity until one final arrow punched so hard into the target’s center that it drove through the canvas halfway up its shaft. “I used to wish I were talented that way. Then I didn’t. Now I do again.”

  Risha shrugged. “It’s gained me little.”

  “Roshar was even younger than we are when he brought you into Valorian territory. When you were captured.”

  “Betrayed.”

  “You didn’t agree to go with him?”

  The princess shifted in her saddle. “I was a mere child, and eager to prove myself. Children seek to please. They try so hard. My brother and sister used that against me.”

  “Roshar has suffered for it.”

  “And so?” Risha twisted in the saddle to meet Kestrel’s gaze. The princess’s eyes burned, her brown skin was sleek with rain, her full mouth pinched.

  “You could speak with him.”

  Risha snorted. “You mean forgive. Forgiveness is so . . . squishy. Like all this mud.”

  Kestrel thought of her father’s fire-lit face on Lerralen beach.

  “It drags you down,” Risha said. “You know this.”

  She had an uneasy feeling of not knowing what Risha would say next, but already not wanting to hear it.

  “You, who seek your own father’s death.”

  The bodies lay tumbled in a ditch not far from the Sythiah vineyards.

  The rain had washed away any tracks. Still, Kestrel understood the story.

  It leached into her: how the emperor’s company had seized the manor and dragged the Herrani who lived there out onto the grounds. Forced them forward. A girl in the ditch had lost her shoe. Her little foot was black with mud. The shoe . . . Kestrel searched for it in the rain, feeling a growing panic and need, as if finding a lost shoe could blot away the image of ashen corpses, the way a dead woman still gripped the child’s hand. The inching insects. A shoe could take away the smell, the rot of it strong in the rain. A shoe could keep down the bile that rushed up Kestrel’s throat.

  But when she found the shoe, stuck in the root of a tree, the inner leather sole still held the shape of the girl’s foot. Kestrel could feel its imprint.

  The shoe took away none of the horror. It planted it deep in the bottom of Kestrel’s belly, as solid as a grown man’s kick.

  They crouched in the stubby vineyards with the other five Dacran soldiers. Risha eyed the manor’s kitchen yard, the house’s weakest entry point. Several of the house’s windows glowed through the night rain.

  Kestrel licked her sour lips and gripped the satchel. She imagined the game tiles rattling inside their velvet bag.

  She remembered dining with the emperor. A dessert served with a disintegrating sugar fork. How encounters with him had always felt like that: as though every tool at her disposal was crumbling in her grasp. She remembered how, on the imperial palace grounds, after a hunt, she’d realized that the emperor would steal or maim her dog simply because she loved it. My father needs for you to love him best, Verex had said.

  You need to watch yourself, he’d said.

  If you play against my father, you’ ll lose.

  A light hand touched her arm. “I don’t know you well,” Risha’s voice was low. “But I know what Verex has told me about you, and what I see for myself. You don’t need to be gifted with a blade. You are your own best weapon.”

  Kestrel stared back at Risha, who was almost pure shadow—a mere glint of eyes. Kestrel felt a slow, slight throb, a shimmer in the blood. She knew it well.

  Her worst trait. Her best trait.

  The desire to come out on top, to set her opponent under her thumb.

  A streak of pride. Her mind ringed with hungry rows of foxlike teeth.

  Later, at dawn, when the emperor pulled Kestrel’s dagger from its sheath and touched its tip to her throat, she remembered that Sythiah’s manor had always been a trap. The question had only been whether it was a trap she set for the emperor, or one that she’d fall into.

  Kestrel touched Risha’s hand. “Thank you.”

  The seven of them moved through the dark to the house.

  The dawn broke bright. Clear sky. A sheen of water wavered over the road toward Lerralen, deeper in the cracks between paving stones.

  Arin and Roshar had moved the army as quickly west as they could. They had reached the location Arin had chosen.

  The first task: to unload the hundreds of sharpened staves Arin had ordered made.

  The second: to drive them into the sodden earth bordering the road.

  The third: to set their last sacks of gunpowder on the road. A snug and deadly little bundle.

  And the fourth: to wait, to try not to think about Kestrel, about how she must have already reached Sythiah by now, and might have already played Bite and Sting against the emperor, and had won or lost.

  The seven of them wound their way through the night-shadowed corners of Sythiah’s manor. Risha moved with ethereal fluidity, and when they encountered a pair of Valorian soldiers stationed in a hallway, her knife split their skin as smoothly as if cutting through cream. The Valorians made no sound. It was quiet enough to hear the drip of blood.

  They accessed the upper floors and began checking bedrooms. Kestrel knew where they’d be situated—Herrani architecture usually had bedrooms face east or west. Risha crept in alone, her posture stiffening with annoyance when the other Dacrans made as if to accompany her. She let out a low hiss. They didn’t follow.

  She’d return, her blade wetter than before.

  “Enough of this,” she whispered.

  “We must go quietly,” Kestrel reminded her. “We need to get to the emperor’s room without waking the entire house. We can’t fight them all.”

  Risha snorted. “I can.”

  The princess’s impatience wore thin. The next time they encountered Valorian guards—again, a pair of them—she let a Dacran soldier shoot one of them with a crossbow, but pulled the other Valorian out of the quarrel’s path at the same time that her other hand came down on the woman’s mouth.

  Risha touched her knife to the fragile skin beneath the woman’s wide eye. “Stay silent,” Risha whispered, “and you’ll keep your eyes. Lead us to the emperor’s suite.”

  The soldier led them to a broad door made of tiger maple, the wood smooth in the Herrani style, with little carving other than the rippled doorjamb. An oil lamp glowed in the hallway’s sconce, its stained glass casting a jeweled light over the wood’s natural stripes.

  “Here?” Kestrel asked. Light glowed through the door’s keyhole.

  The woman nodded.

  Risha killed her. The body slumped. Blood welled up to Kestrel’s boots. She made herself remember the girl’s lost shoe, the Bite and Sting set, Arin’s scar, the way he heard the god of death because he believed he had no one else, the small houses in the wheatfields, the baring of her back to the cold tundra air, the way she had hoped that the nighttime drug would make her forget.

  “Open the door,” she whispered.

  One of the Dacran men, selected by Roshar for his skill at this, knelt and unfolded a leather-wrapped set of tools, then he inserted two of them—long and thin, like knitting needles—into the keyhole. He poked, then levered the tools until they heard the soft clunk of the lock’s tumblers releasing.

  He eased the door open—softly, as if his hand were no more than a small gust of wind.

  Risha first, and Kestrel behind her, they entered the suite’s antechamber.

  They were attacked by the emperor’s personal guard, who had been waiting as they’d listened to the cli
cking of the picked lock.

  Arin set the army into formation on the western road. He made the vanguard’s ranks broad, running across the road and the bordering wet earth, all the way up to the trees. Behind the vanguard, the center ranks were confined to the road.

  Roshar’s horse flicked its tail, shifting. The prince eyed the forest. “Those trees turn this place into something resembling a ravine. We won’t have much room to maneuver.”

  “Neither will they.”

  The morning light was sheer and fresh, as pale as the flesh of a lemon. Arin imagined squeezing it down his throat. It would taste like how he felt: stingingly alive.

  Kestrel couldn’t count them, couldn’t see how the guards carved open the bodies of the Dacran soldiers, couldn’t fathom Risha’s speed, the way the princess had shoved Kestrel against a wall, creating a halo of safety around her. The snick of Risha’s knife against a windpipe. Her swivel and dance. Unerring strike. Counter. Bodies thumped to the floor.

  “Hold,” someone called. “I want to see.”

  The Valorians pulled back. Risha’s knife flicked blood as it arced through the air. She had no intention of obeying the voice. Kestrel caught her arm. The princess spun, her face frustrated, as if she’d been listening to a voice whose last words had been lost in the interruption.

  The emperor stood at the threshold where the antechamber flowed into the rest of the suite, his posture light and easy. For a moment, there was no sound but the rain on the roof. “You,” he said wonderingly as his gaze found Risha.

  Then Kestrel.

  His eyes widened in delight. “And you.”

  He laughed.

  The day blazed. The sun seemed to soar into the sky, all the way to its height.

  Arin waited.

  Nothing.

  Waited.

  Nothing.

  He touched the hard leather shell of his armor. Hidden beneath it: his chest. His lungs. Skin. A speckled yellow feather tucked inside his tunic pocket, right above his heart.

  Forget the feather, death said. You are the road.

  The sun.

  The sky.

  The horse beneath you.

  Comforted, Arin said, The gods used to walk among us.

  True, said death.

  Why did you leave?

  Ah, sweet child, it was your people who left us.

  “Lady Kestrel, you look like a dirty little savage. What are you doing here?”

  She tried to speak.

  “Did you hope to murder me in my sleep?”

  Her throat was too dry.

  “Maybe you’ve come for court gossip. Surely the barbarian princess has told you every thing of interest. No?”

  Kestrel swallowed. She saw her hand gripping her dagger. The knuckles were white knobs.

  “You want news of your father, I imagine. Let me tell you. He doesn’t mourn you.”

  Kestrel heard the emperor as if from far away.

  Doesn’t miss you.

  He never did. You remember how little time he spent at home. How awkward he became in your company. You had to beg him to stay in the capital. Oh yes, I heard. And here, a secret for you: he was relieved when you were sent north. I saw how a burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

  He looked lighter.

  Younger.

  Free.

  The emperor looked from her to Risha to the Dacran soldiers, dead on the bloody floor.

  “You’re resourceful, Kestrel, I’ll give you that. You’ve survived the mines, the tundra, the war . . . thus far. You’ve made”—his gaze flicked again to Risha—“interesting allies. But my guard outnumbers you both, and it will take an instant for me to rouse the entire house. I don’t have many regrets, but my decision to imprison rather than kill you smacks of squeamishness . . . or, shall I say, an unnecessary concern for your father’s well-being. Do you know, he hasn’t mentioned you once since he told me of your treason?”

  “He wouldn’t, no matter what he feels.”

  “Regardless,” the emperor said softly, “I could have you killed right now and he’d never know. And if he did, why would he care? What would the life of one dishonorable would-be assassin mean to him?”

  “I didn’t come here to murder you.”

  He bit back a thin smile.

  She said, “I came to challenge you.”

  “Oh?”

  “One game of Bite and Sting. If I win, you’ll end the war. Leave. Cross the sea with every last Valorian. Never return.”

  The emperor made a surprised half laugh of a sound. He lightly traced the deepest line of his brow, then unfolded his hand in a flourish. “What would I gain, should I win?”

  “What you like. What ever I can give you.”

  He tapped one finger to his lips, considering. “That’s not much.”

  “I’m sure you can think of something.”

  “And if I agree, and lose? You’d trust me to keep my word?”

  “A Valorian honors his word.”

  “Yes,” he said, drawing out the word. “He does.”

  “Risha goes free, no matter what the outcome.”

  “I’ll wait here,” said the princess. “With your guards, if you like.” She gave them a disdainful look, making clear that she thought little of their chances of survival if she chose to finish what she’d started. “Until the game is done.”

  Kestrel said, “We play in private.”

  “You set quite a lot of terms,” the emperor said, “but this particular one I wouldn’t have any other way.”

  “So you agree?”

  “I confess, I’m curious.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “A fair warning. I’m better at this than you are.”

  “We shall see.”

  Arin heard a crash in the trees.

  A Herrani scout. He ran to Arin, his face shiny with sweat.

  The Valorians were coming.

  The emperor led her to his bedroom. The summer hangings on the bed were gauzy, the sheets disturbed. She could see the dent left in a pillow by his head. The room smelled of his oils: powdery pepper, bitingly sweet balsam. Rain tapped the black windowpanes.

  “Wash your face,” he said.

  There was a mirrored basin in the corner. Kestrel did as ordered, though her face wasn’t particularly dirty. She was startled by the stranger in the glass and tried not to stare at herself. She caught a glimpse of shocked, light eyes, made lighter by tanned and freckled skin. A strong face.

  She folded the towel and joined the emperor where he stood near an octagonal table. He had produced a bottle of wine and two glasses.

  “I’ll serve,” she said, which made him give her a sleek look of amusement. She poured the red wine, but neither of them touched their glasses, and they both knew that the other suspected that some sleight of hand had poisoned the cup.

  “Disarm,” he said.

  “I will if you do the same.”

  He unbuckled his dagger and set it gently, yet heavily, on the table. Her fingers fumbled as she undid hers.

  The dagger Arin had made her looked plain next to the emperor’s—but strong, like her unexpected face in the mirror.

  “Interesting.” The emperor stroked it where it lay. “A new acquisition? Perhaps this will be my prize when I win.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “I haven’t decided what I want.”

  She opened the satchel, set the velvet bag of tiles on the table, and moved to sit.

  “Not yet.” He held out his hand. She gave him the satchel, which he examined. Satisfied that it contained nothing else, he dropped it to the floor, then said, “You’ll have no objection, I’m sure, if I make certain that you hide no weapons on your person.”

  Her skin prickled. “I give you my word that I don’t.”

  “The word of a traitor is hardly to be trusted.”

  So she stood rigid as his hands moved over her unarmored body. They didn’t linger, except when he pressed his fingers to her thro
at, and then pressed harder to feel her pulse jump and run.

  He said, “You’re welcome to do the same to me.”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” He seemed to dare her to admit that she didn’t want to touch him.

  “I trust you.”

  “Well then, little liar, let’s play.”

  The approaching Valorian army shone in a silver river under the sun.

  Arin looked through a spyglass. He couldn’t find the general.

  There was a thin, whistling whine.

  Arin lowered the spyglass.

  The whine stopped.

  A cry of pain.

  An arrow, studded into a Herrani soldier’s throat.

  More arrows sped through the air. Valorian Rangers were shooting at them from the trees on either side of the road.

  They sat. Kestrel, her back to the bed, loosened the velvet bag’s tie and poured the tiles onto the table.

  She reached to mix the tiles, but as she had thought he might, the emperor stopped her. “Let’s confirm that this set is standard, shall we?” he said.

  He checked the tiles to account for their values. When he saw that the set showed the proper amount of each Bite and Sting tile, he turned them onto their faces and mixed them. His face was calm, but his gestures were eager. He touched each tile, but barely. He wanted to get to the game.

  Kestrel studied his smooth expression. He didn’t seem to notice that four ivory tiles were shinier than the rest. The gloom of the late hour helped. He drew his tiles.

  Her stomach clenched to see the four shiny tiles left in the boneyard, from which she and the emperor would pull tiles throughout the game.

  She drew her own hand. Arin had warned her that when she had a high chance of winning, her very lack of tells showed her confidence. I don’t think most people notice, he’d said. Your expression doesn’t change. You’ve no tic or gesture. I just get the sense that there’s an energy inside you I can’t reach, and that if I did, it’d strike like lightning.

  She tried not to think about her plan, worrying that even the mere thought of it would show on her face. She felt her expression harden as clay does in a kiln.

  Play, Kestrel.

  She set down her first tile. The emperor did the same.