The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  Foam dribbled from his locked mouth.

  His breath rasped. It became glottal, the sound of bubbles popping.

  Then it ended.

  Arin struck back.

  As they fought, viciously silent words thudded in his blood: Mother, father, sister. Kestrel.

  Arin didn’t care that the blows his sword hammered against the man’s metal body were useless, that there was no art to this, that nothing would pierce the armor, that a few smashed buckles where the general’s armor joined was no victory. He could see too little of the man’s flesh, couldn’t reach it, and he desperately wanted to make him bleed. If he couldn’t carve into the general, Arin would bludgeon him. He’d beat until something broke.

  The buckles, death said.

  Arin shifted the path of his sword in midswipe and curved it down toward the elbow of the general’s sword arm, aiming right for where the broken buckles of the general’s arm guard flapped loose.

  Arin sheered the man’s arm off at the elbow.

  Blood pumped onto Arin. If the general made a sound, Arin didn’t hear it. He was warm and wet.

  The general fell. He lay blinking up at the sun, at Arin, his eyes glazed, mouth moving as if speaking, but Arin heard nothing.

  For a moment, Arin faltered.

  But there was nothing of her in this man, this enemy at his feet. Arin drew back his sword—more power than necessary for the death blow. He wanted to pour himself into this act.

  Vengeance: wine-dark, thick. It flooded Arin’s lungs.

  Those light brown eyes, on him.

  There was that.

  That one thing that Kestrel shared with her father.

  Arin heard himself speak. His voice sounded far away, as if some part of him had left this road and was as high as the sun, looking down on the half that he had left on earth.

  He said, “Kestrel asked me to do this.”

  For she had.

  Arin was a boy, a slave, a grown man, free. He was all of this at once . . . and something else, too. He realized it only now, as he plunged his sword down toward the general’s throat.

  He hadn’t been blessed by the god of death.

  Arin was the god.

  Chapter 40

  But he stopped.

  Regret wasn’t the right word for what he felt later. Disbelief, maybe. Sometimes, even years after the war, he’d tear out of sleep, sweating, still trapped in the nightmare where he had butchered the father of the woman he loved.

  But you didn’t, she would tell him.

  You didn’t.

  Tell me. Say it again. Tell me what you did.

  Trembling, he would.

  His brain had been a glass ball. Nothing in it but echoes. His mother’s scent. Father’s voice. How Anireh’s gaze had held him from across the room, and her eyes said, Survive. They said, Love, and I’m sorry. They said, Little brother.

  And then silence. It became silent in Arin’s head as he stood on the road. He stopped hearing voices. He thought about how it had seemed strange that Risha would plot the emperor’s death, yet refuse to kill him herself. Arin understood now. He knew how it was to have no family: like living in a house with no roof. Even if Kestrel were here, and begged him—Let your sword fall, do it, please, now—Arin wasn’t sure that he could make her an orphan.

  And he wasn’t sure that she would beg that if she were gazing down as he did on the graying face of her dying father, the man’s eyes sky-bright as he tried to speak, his remaining hand fumbling against his chest, just above his heart.

  A throbbing radiance burned inside Arin; he hadn’t realized the pitch revenge could reach, how murder could come this close to desire.

  He felt his eyes sting, because he knew what he was going to do.

  He didn’t want to be here. He wondered why we can’t remember when our mothers carried us inside them: the dark and steady heart, how it was the whole of the world, and no one harmed us, and we harmed no one.

  Arin thought that if he didn’t kill this man his memory of his mother would fade. It already had, over time. Someday she would be as far away as a star.

  But he couldn’t do it.

  He had to do it.

  Tell me what you did.

  Arin dropped his sword, dropped to his knees, yanked the woven baldric from the fallen man’s shoulder, and used it to make a tourniquet to save the person he hated most.

  After the battle, and after Roshar had accepted the Valorians’ surrender, when Arin was sick with worry because Kestrel hadn’t yet returned from Sythiah, he went to the healers’ tent.

  The general was asleep, his cauterized arm swathed in bandages, his armor removed. A drug had been forced down him. It had been a violent scene. Even now, asleep, the man was under guard and bound in chains at the ankles, his remaining hand strapped tight to his side.

  Arin tugged at his hair until his scalp hurt. If Kestrel wasn’t back by noon he was going to ride to Sythiah. His brain was crawling in his skull, his stomach was a shriveled lump.

  He hated seeing the general. He hated seeing even Verex (whom he halfway liked) limping around the camp, teeming with worry—for Risha, but also for Kestrel, which made Arin feel absurdly possessive, as if Verex were trying to rob him by feeling in any way similar to Arin. Arin became insufferable, he knew it, but he was constantly having to wrestle down the knowledge that if something had happened to Kestrel his heart would turn to salt.

  He didn’t know what to do with his hands as he looked down at the sleeping general. Arin thrust them into his pockets before they went for the throat. He reminded himself why he had come.

  He ripped open the man’s jacket. Arin reached for the inside breast pocket, located exactly where the man had tried to touch his chest as he had lain bleeding on the road.

  Arin’s fingers met paper. He pulled it out, its texture suede-soft from having been handled so much. It had been unfolded and folded many times.

  It was sheet music. At first, Arin didn’t understand what he looked at. Kestrel’s handwriting. Herrani script. Musical notation in crisp black. His own name leaped off the page.

  Dear Arin.

  Then he recognized the music as the sonata Kestrel had been studying when he’d entered her music room at the imperial palace in late spring. It had been the last time he’d seen her before the tundra. He had thought it would be the last time he would ever see her.

  Arin hastened from the tent. He couldn’t read the letter here.

  But he didn’t know if he could read it anywhere, if any place would be private enough, because being alone meant he’d still be with himself, and he hated to remember how he’d left Kestrel that day, and what had befallen her after.

  He was desperate to read it.

  He couldn’t bear to read it.

  He resented that her father had kept it.

  He wondered what it meant that her father had kept it.

  Arin was only vaguely aware of having stumbled through the noisy camp and into the woods. The thought of reading the letter felt like a violation, like he’d be reading a letter meant for someone else.

  Yet it had been addressed to him.

  Dear Arin.

  Arin read.

  “Are you all right?”

  Arin glanced up at Roshar, then returned his attention to the horse. He ran a hand down the inside of its front left leg and picked up the hoof, cupping its front. With his free hand, he cleaned the hoof with a pick, brushed it off, and used a knife to probe the outer edges of the hoof, looking for the source of the problem. Steam rose from a nearby bucket of hot, salted water. It was near noon.

  “Arin.”

  “Just thinking.” Kestrel’s written words still radiated through him, making him feel larger inside than he had been before, as if he’d swallowed the sun and it somehow fit, and blazed and ached and left him dazzled: half-blind but still seeing things more clearly than before.

  “Well, stop it,” Roshar said. “You’ve been looking either dour or dreamy and neith
er really suits the victorious leader of his free people.”

  Arin snorted. The horse, feeling his knife touch a sore spot, tried to pull her hoof away. He held it fast, supporting it from below with his knee.

  “You could at least make a rousing speech,” Roshar said.

  “Can’t. I’m riding to Sythiah.”

  Roshar made a strangled sound.

  “Not on this horse,” Arin said. “She’s lame.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “She was limping. It hurt to look at her. An abscess, I think. She must have stepped on something sharp.”

  “Arin, you’re not a damn farrier. Someone else can do this.”

  “Tssah,” Arin hissed in sympathy when he found the abscess. The horse tried again to tug away, but he punctured the sealed wound, which instantly dribbled black pus. He worked on opening the abscess, then pressed the rest of the pus out. “Bring that bucket closer, will you?”

  “Oh, certainly. I live to please.”

  Arin lowered the hoof into the bucket’s hot water. The horse, already in pain, stamped, splashing the water as she reared her head, but Arin grabbed the halter and brought her head down, soothing her as he watched the foot to make sure it stayed in the bucket.

  “Arin, why are you so transparent? Whenever you worry, you start fixing things. Draining nasty gunk from a hoof is the least of it. I don’t know what’s worse, watching you do that or knowing how hard it will always be for you to keep yourself to yourself.”

  Arin stroked the horse’s neck. She stamped again, but began to calm.

  “We won,” Roshar said, “and Kestrel is fine. We’ve discussed this. That poison is highly toxic.”

  “But she’s not back.”

  “She will be. You need to seize your political moment. If you don’t, someone else will.”

  Arin squinted at him. “You call me ‘transparent’ as if that’s a bad thing, but I don’t need to make a speech for my people to see what I am.”

  Roshar shut his mouth. He looked ready to say something else, then didn’t, because Kestrel and Risha rode into camp.

  Chapter 41

  The army moved at a slow pace toward the city, some on foot, and many wounded. Kestrel stayed away from the wagons that carried them. “I can’t see him,” she told Arin when the army paused to rest. But part of her wanted to use this time to see her father.

  “You don’t have to,” Arin said. In the silence that followed, as they walked away from the wagons, fragments of every thing he had told her gained shape and terribly vivid color: her father’s severed arm, Arin’s lost vengeance, the letter that she hadn’t even recognized when Arin gave it to her.

  It was a moment before Kestrel realized that a jittery energy had come over Arin. He was biting his lower lip and his hands were making stunted gestures as if he were trying to speak but couldn’t. Finally, he said, “You asked for his death. I didn’t do it. Should I have? Did I do the wrong thing?”

  A gentle feeling flowed into her. She caught his erratic hands and held them between hers. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

  That letter.

  She read and reread it, in the high summer grasses on the sides of the road, at night by lamplight. The pen’s ink had aged, gone brownish. She imagined her father reading under the sun during the campaign. Spots of the paper had a waxy transparency. The residue of oil, used to polish a weapon? Her father liked to clean his own dagger. She searched for meaning in the smudges of dirty fingerprints under certain words, but nothing, really, was evidence of anything except the urgent scrawl of her own handwriting. The bottom half of the letter was warped with rusted blood, the final sentences lost. Kestrel couldn’t remember what she’d written there. Like a worn map, the letter folded instantly under the slightest pressure.

  The paper looked quiet in her hand, tucked in on itself. Kestrel wanted to reach through time and comfort the girl who’d written it, even if the only comfort she could offer would be understanding. She wanted to imagine a different story, one where her father read the letter and understood it, too, and returned it to his daughter, telling her that she should never have had to write anything like that. I love you. I’d do anything for you, the letter said, and it was hard for Kestrel to keep from crumpling the paper in her fist when she realized that these words were what she had always wanted her father to say to her.

  Three days from the city, the army had made camp for the night. Kestrel went to the healers’ tent.

  Her father noticed the moment she entered. He flinched, then met her gaze, and she didn’t know what was right to feel—the sort of soft, heavy comfort that touched her at the sight of her father, simply because he was her father, or the rage in her chest, or how she wanted to mourn his maimed arm, and wanted to tell him that he deserved it.

  “Why did you keep my letter?” she asked.

  He said nothing.

  She asked again.

  He turned his face from her.

  She kept asking until she heard her voice crumbling and thought that Risha had been wrong when she’d said that forgiveness was like mud, as if it could take what ever shape you needed.

  It was hard; it was stone.

  She walked away from the tent.

  Verex said that he and Risha were leaving. They wanted to ride to the eastern plains, and maybe sail from Dacra’s eastern coast to see what lay in the unexplored waters beyond. He had no wish to inherit the empire. He asked that rumors of his death be spread.

  He saw Kestrel’s fallen expression. “You think I should go back to the capital instead, and become emperor.”

  “Honestly, I don’t want you to go anywhere. I’ll miss you.”

  His brown eyes warmed. “I’ll visit. Risha, too. She wants to train you in your weapon of choice until you feel properly dangerous.”

  Kestrel opened her mouth to say that’d be a useless effort, but then it struck her that it might not be, and whether it was or wasn’t didn’t matter as much as the happiness the offer gave her. “I like her, too.”

  They were leaning against the trunk of a very broad tree near the encampment. White spores from its flowering branches floated down. She wondered if a Herrani would think this the sign of a god, and if so, which one.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Verex.

  He knew what she meant. “I had no love for my father. He certainly had none for me.”

  “Still.”

  “I’m not sure what else you could have done. If anything . . .” He slouched against the bark. “I feel worst about being relieved.” A spore landed on the tip of his boot, then floated away. In a low voice, he added, “And a bit of a coward. I worry that if I became emperor, I’d become like him.”

  “Not you. Never.”

  “And guilty, because I’m abandoning a country that might collapse on itself. It’s not clear who’ll rule now.”

  “I bet you have some ideas. I can think of a few senators who’d claw their way to power. Or the captain of the guard. I don’t remember every one at court, though, or who owes whom, or bears a grudge. You could give me a clearer picture, and I could . . . well, keep an eye on the situation in the capital.”

  He raised his brows. “A spy again, Kestrel?”

  “Spymaster, maybe.”

  He picked up a thin, fallen twig and snapped it into tiny sticks.

  “I think Arin needs one,” she said.

  “You’d be the best. I wish, however, that you didn’t always risk yourself. You’re too fond of a gamble.”

  She shrugged helplessly. “I am who I am.”

  Affection tinged his smile. Then he sobered and said, “I used to believe I could stomach taking my father’s place. But Risha would be miserable. I would, too.”

  Kestrel, suddenly fierce, said, “Then be happy.”

  “I will,” he said, “if you will.”

  Feathery white fluff came down from the tree as he described the political intricacies of the Valorian court, and then told her about how the puppy h
e’d given her at court had grown into an enormous, sweet-tempered dog living with a family in the foothills of the Valorian mountains. There were small children who adored her, even when she chewed their shoes. Maris—a young courtier Kestrel had intensely disliked until she found that actually, she didn’t—had married well and was gleefully smug about it. As for Jess, Verex said that she had gone to the southern isles at the start of the war. “I wish I knew more,” he said.

  Kestrel longed to see her. She wondered if she ever would, and if they could mend the things wrong between them.

  “I saw you go to the healers’ tent the other day,” Verex said.

  “He won’t talk with me.”

  “Try again.”

  When Risha and Verex left, two days before the army would reach the city, Kestrel kept her smile as she kissed their cheeks. At first it was hard to be strong in that way, and not let the farewell overwhelm her. But then she noticed Roshar, who had avoided his little sister since her return as if afraid of her, lingering nearby. Risha approached him and whispered something Kestrel couldn’t hear. Roshar’s expression eased. He didn’t speak in reply; he simply clasped Risha’s hands and kissed them.

  Kestrel thought that maybe she had been wrong, and Risha had been wrong, about forgiveness, that it was neither mud nor stone, but resembled more the drifting white spores. They came loose from the trees when they were ready. Soft to the touch, but made to be let go, so that they could find a place to plant and grow.

  She went to the tent again.

  This time, her father spoke before she could. “Give me your dagger.”

  Hot tears rushed to her eyes. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Unbind my hand. Give me your dagger.”

  “No.”

  “Just this one last thing.”

  “You can’t ask me to help you kill yourself.”

  He no longer looked at her.

  “Why did you keep my letter?” she asked yet again.

  “You know why.”

  “What, regret?”

  “That’s not the right word.”

  “Then what?”

  “There are no words.”