The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  Thrynne tore his gaze from the captain to glance at her. “Money,” he said. “This is the year of money.”

  “Ah,” said the captain. “Now we come to it. You were paid to listen, weren’t you?”

  “No—”

  The captain’s knife came down. Kestrel vomited, her dagger falling into the shadows. The sound of it hitting stone was lost in Thrynne’s shriek. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve; she was not looking, she was pressing hands to her ears. She barely heard the captain say, “Who? Who paid you?”

  But there was no answer. Thrynne had fainted.

  * * *

  Kestrel took to her rooms like someone sick. Infected. She bathed until she felt boiled. She left her ruined dress where it lay, balled up on the bathing room floor. Then she climbed into bed, hair loose and damp, and thought.

  Or tried to think. She tried to think about what she should do. Then she noticed that the feather blanket, thick yet light, quivered like a living thing. She was shaking.

  She remembered Cheat, the Herrani leader. Arin had answered to him, followed him. Loved him. Yes, she knew that Arin had loved him.

  Cheat had always threatened Kestrel’s hands. To break them, cut off fingers, crush them with his own. He had seemed obsessed with them, until he became obsessed with her in a different way. She felt it again: that cold roll of horror as she began to understand what he wanted and what he would do to get it.

  He was dead now. Arin had gutted him. Kestrel had seen it. She’d seen Cheat die, and she reassured herself that he could not hurt her. Kestrel stared at her hands, whole and undamaged. They were not peeled and bloody meat. They were slim, nails kept short for the piano. Skin soft. A small birthmark near the base of the thumb.

  Her hands were pretty, she supposed. Spread against the blanket, they seemed the height of uselessness.

  What could she do?

  Help the prisoner escape? That would require a strategy hinged upon enlisting the help of others. Kestrel didn’t have enough leverage over the captain. No one in the capital owed her favors. She didn’t know the court’s secrets. She was new to the palace and had no one’s loyalty here, not for help with such an insane plan.

  And if she were caught? What would the emperor do to her?

  And if she did nothing?

  She couldn’t do nothing. Having done nothing in the prison had already cost too much.

  This is the year of money, Thrynne had said. He had spoken the words as if they were meant for her. It was an odd phrase. Yet familiar. Perhaps it was as the captain had assumed: Thrynne was revealing that he had been paid to gather information. The emperor had many enemies, not all of them foreign. A rival in the Senate might have employed Thrynne.

  But as the feather blanket stilled, transforming into a peaked field of snow over Kestrel’s tucked-in knees, she remembered her Herrani nurse saying, “This is the year of stars.”

  Kestrel had been little. Enai was tending to her skinned knee. Kestrel hadn’t been a clumsy girl, but she had always tried too hard, with predictable bruised and bloodied results. “Be careful,” Enai had said, wrapping the gauze. “This is the year of stars.”

  It had seemed such a curious thing to say. Kestrel had asked for an explanation. “You Valorians mark the years by numbers,” Enai had said, “but we mark them by our gods. We cycle through the pantheon, one god of the hundred for each year. The god of stars rules this year, so you must mind your feet and gaze. This god loves accidents. Beauty, too. Sometimes when the god is vexed or simply bored, she decides that the most beautiful thing is disaster.”

  Kestrel should have found this silly. Valorians had no gods. There was no afterlife, or any of the other Herrani superstitions. If the Valorians worshipped anything, it was glory. Kestrel’s father laughed at the idea of fate. He was the imperial general; if he had believed in fate, he said, he would have sat in his tent and waited for the country of Herran to be handed to him in a pretty crystal cup. Instead he’d seized it. His victories, he said, were his own.

  But as a child, Kestrel had been charmed by the idea of gods. They made for good stories. She had asked Enai to teach her the names of the hundred and what they ruled. One evening at dinner, when her father cracked a fragile dish under his knife, she’d said jokingly, “Careful, Father. This is the year of stars.” He had gone still. Kestrel became frightened. Maybe the gods were real after all. This moment was a disaster. She saw disaster in her father’s furious eyes. She saw it on Enai’s arm the next day, in the form of a bruise: a purple, broad bracelet made by a large hand.

  Kestrel stopped asking about the gods. She forgot them. Probably there was a god of money. Perhaps this was the year. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t understand what the phrase had meant to Thrynne.

  Tell him, Thrynne had said. He needs to know. The captain had assumed that Thrynne had meant himself. Maybe that was it. But Kestrel recalled the prisoner’s gray eyes and how he’d appeared to know her. Of course, he was a servant in the palace. Servants knew who she was without her knowing all their names or faces. But he was Herrani.

  Say that he was new to the palace. Say that he recognized her from her life in Herran, when everything had been a series of dinners and dances and teas, when her greatest worry was how to navigate her father’s desire for her to join the military, and his hatred of her music.

  Or maybe Thrynne recognized her from when everything had changed. After the Firstwinter Rebellion. When the Herrani had seized the capital and Arin had claimed her for his own.

  He needs to know, Thrynne had said.

  Slowly, as if moving tiny parts of a dangerous machine, Kestrel substituted one word with a name.

  Arin needs to know.

  But know what?

  * * *

  Kestrel had questions of her own for Thrynne. She would seek a way to help him, and to understand what he had said—but this meant seeing Thrynne alone … and that required the permission of the emperor.

  “I’m ashamed of myself,” she told the emperor the next morning. They were in his private treasury. His note accepting her request to see him, and naming this room for the meeting, seemed to have been made with good grace. But he was silent now, inspecting a drawer pulled out of a wall honeycombed from floor to ceiling with them. He was intent on the drawer’s contents, which Kestrel couldn’t see.

  “I behaved badly in the prison,” Kestrel said. “The torture—”

  “Interrogation,” he said to the drawer.

  “It reminded me of the Firstwinter Rebellion. Of … what I experienced.”

  “What you experienced.” The emperor looked up from the drawer.

  “Yes.”

  “We have never fully discussed what you experienced, Kestrel. I should think that whatever it was, it would make you encourage the captain in his proceedings instead of jeopardizing his line of inquiry. Or do we have a different understanding of what you suffered at the hands of the Herrani rebels? Do I need to reevaluate the story of the general’s daughter, who escaped captivity and sailed through a storm to alert me to the rebellion?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think that an empire can survive without a few dirty methods? Do you think that an empress will keep herself clean of them?”

  “No.”

  He slid the drawer shut. Its click was as loud as a bang. “Then what have we left to address but my disappointment? My grievous disappointment? I had thought better of you.”

  “Let me redeem myself. Please. I speak Herrani very well, and my presence made the prisoner ready to talk. If I were to question him—”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Dead, and whatever information he had with him.”

  “How?”

  The emperor waved an irritated hand. “Infection. Fever. A waste bucket.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The prison is designed to prevent suicide. But this man—Thrynne—was clever. Committed. Desperate. Any number of qualities that mig
ht make someone decide to infect open wounds by plunging them into a waste bucket.”

  Kestrel’s nausea threatened to return. And guilt: a bad taste at the back of her throat.

  The emperor sighed. He settled into a chair and gestured for Kestrel to sit in the one across from him. She sank into it. “You know his kind, Kestrel. Do you think that someone like him would resort to such measures to protect a Valorian senator who had paid him to learn which ways he should vote?”

  “No,” she said. Any other answer would seem false.

  “Who do you think hired him?”

  “The east, perhaps. They must have spies among us.”

  “Oh, they do.” The emperor held her gaze in a way that didn’t wait for an answer, but to see if she would voice what he already believed.

  “He worked for Herran,” Kestrel said slowly.

  “Of course. Tell me, is their leader an inspiring sort of man? I’ve never met him. But you were his prisoner. Would you say that this new governor has … charisma? The sort of pull and power that lure people to take extreme risks on his behalf?”

  She swallowed hard. “Yes.”

  “I have something to show you.” He pointed at the drawer he had closed. “Bring what lies inside.”

  It was a gold coin stamped with the emperor’s profile.

  “I had this series minted in celebration of your engagement,” he said. “Turn the coin over.”

  Kestrel did. What she saw left her frightened. It was a symbol of crossed knitting needles.

  “Do you know what that is?”

  Kestrel hesitated to speak. “It’s the sign of Jadis.”

  “Yes. The perfect story, I think, to represent you.”

  Jadis had been a warrior girl from ancient Valorian legend. A lieutenant. Her army had been defeated, and she was taken prisoner by an enemy warlord who added her to his harem. He liked all his women, but developed a particular taste for the Valorian girl. He was not, however, stupid. He summoned her to his bed naked, so that she had no chance to hide a weapon. And he had her bound as well, at least at first. He didn’t trust her hands.

  But Jadis was sweet and easy, and as time passed and the warlord’s camp traveled, he noticed that she had become friends with the other women in his harem. They taught her how to knit. Sometimes, when not at battle, he saw her outside the women’s tent, knitting something shapeless. It amused him to know that the reputation of Valorian ferocity was nothing more than myth. How domestic was his little warrior!

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s for you,” Jadis said. “You’ll like it, you’ll see.”

  The woolly thing grew over the months. It became a private joke between them. He would ask if it was meant to be a sock, a tunic, a cloak. Her answer was always the same: “You’ll like it, you’ll see.”

  One night, in the warlord’s tent, long after he’d stopped ordering her hands to be bound, he gazed upon her. “Do you know which battle comes tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” Jadis said. The warlord planned to strike at the heart of Valoria. He would likely succeed.

  “You must hate me for it.”

  “No.”

  The word brought tears to his eyes. He wanted to weep against her skin. He did not believe her.

  “My love,” she said, “I have almost finished your present. Let me knit it here beside you. It will bring you luck in battle.”

  That made him laugh, for he couldn’t possibly imagine how she expected him to wear that ugly, lumpy mass of wool. He was cheered as he remembered how dedicated she was to her hapless knitting. So what if she had no skill for it? It was proof of her devotion to him.

  He went to the tent’s opening and called for her knitting basket.

  He set it beside the bed and enjoyed her again. Afterward, she knitted beside him. The warlord was made sleepy by the needles’ quiet chatter. “Aren’t you finished yet?” he teased.

  “Yes. Just now I’ve finished.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Don’t you see? Don’t you like it? Look closely, my love.”

  He did, and Jadis stabbed her needles into his throat.

  The coin lay heavy on Kestrel’s palm. All the breath had gone out of her.

  The emperor said, “We were talking earlier about your captivity under Arin.”

  “It wasn’t like this.” She tightened her fingers around the coin. “I’m no Jadis.”

  “No? The governor, I hear, is an attractive man.”

  “I didn’t think so.” She hadn’t, not at first. How miserable that she hadn’t seen Arin for what he was, how worse when she did understand it, and how perfectly awful now, when he was lost to her and the emperor was asking for her secrets. “He was never my lover. Never.”

  That much was true. The sound of her voice must have convinced the emperor, or the way she clutched the coin. His response came gently: “I believe you. But what if I didn’t? Would it matter if the slave had shared your bed? Oh, Kestrel. Don’t look at me with such shock. Do you think that I’m a prude? I’ve heard the rumors. Everyone has.” He stood, and came near to tap the fist she had closed around the coin. “That’s why you need Jadis. This is a gift. If the capital thinks you favored the governor of Herran, let them think that it was for a purpose.

  “You made a choice when you stood before me and pleaded for Herrani independence. You chose my son. You chose my cause.” He shrugged. “I’m a pragmatist. I had no desire to mire myself in a battle with Herran when the east beckons. Your solution—Herran’s new status as an independent territory of the empire—has been politically costly in some ways … but valuable in others. And militarily necessary. An added benefit? The military loves me now that its general’s daughter will marry my son.

  “I think we understand each other, don’t we? I get a daughter intelligent enough to manage the empire one day, and in the meanwhile I can count on the goodwill of her father’s soldiers. You get a crown and absolution from any past … indiscretions.”

  Kestrel lowered her hand, fist loose, but not loose enough to let the coin slip.

  “Your dagger, please, Kestrel.” He held out his palm.

  “What?”

  “Give me your dagger.” When she still didn’t move, he said. “It’s too plain. My son’s bride must have something finer.”

  “My father gave it to me.”

  “Won’t I be your father, too?”

  The emperor had just made it impossible for Kestrel to refuse without offending him. She drew the dagger, which she cherished. She pressed her thumb once against the ruby set into the dagger’s hilt and carved with her seal: the talons of a bird of prey. She pressed hard enough for it to hurt. Then she gave her weapon to the emperor.

  He placed it in the drawer that had held the coin and pushed it shut. He regarded Kestrel, his own dagger gleaming at his hip. He touched the golden line on her brow that marked her as an engaged woman. “I have your loyalty to the empire, don’t I?”

  “Of course.” She tried to ignore the weightlessness of her scabbard.

  “Good. And what’s past is past, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  The emperor seemed satisfied. “There will be no hint of any sympathy you might have toward Herran—or its governor. If you have any, rub it out. If you don’t, you won’t like the consequences. Do you understand?”

  She did. Kestrel saw now that the emperor hadn’t intended her visit to the prison to be a mere test or lesson. It had been a warning of what came to those who crossed him.

  4

  Kestrel carried the Jadis coin with her everywhere. It was in her pocket on the day she surprised the prince in her music room.

  She was drawn up short by the sight of Prince Verex sitting at a table set with the pieces of an eastern game. He glanced at her, then down at the marble pieces. A blush seeped into his cheeks. He toyed with a miniature cannon.

  “Borderlands is a game meant to be played by two opponents,” Kestrel said. “Are you waiting fo
r me?”

  “No.” He dropped the gaming piece and shoved his hands under his arms. “Why would I be?”

  “Well, this is my room.”

  Within her first days in the palace, the emperor had given Kestrel a new piano and had had it installed here in the imperial wing, saying that this room’s acoustics were excellent. This wasn’t true. The room echoed too much. It sounded larger than it really was. Its stone walls were bare, the furniture stiff. Shelves were sparsely decorated with objects that had nothing to do with music: astrolabes, gaming sets, a clay soldier, collapsed telescopes.

  “Your room,” Verex repeated. “I suppose everything in the palace is here for your taking. My father is giving you the empire. You might as well have my old playroom, too.” His shrug was tight-shouldered.

  Kestrel’s gaze fell again on the clay soldier. She saw its chipped paint, its place of prestige in the center of a shelf. The room was a cold, uninviting place for any child. She recalled that Verex, too, had lost his mother at an early age.

  Kestrel went to sit across from him. “Your father didn’t give me this room,” she said. “He probably hoped we would share this space and spend more time with each other.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “But here we are together.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here. I paid one of your ladies-in-waiting. She told me you planned to spend the afternoon in the library.”

  “One of my servants reports to you?”

  “It seems that the general’s daughter, despite her reputation for being so very clever, thinks she’s immune to all the petty espionage a court is capable of. Not really that smart, is she?”

  “Certainly smarter than someone who decides to reveal that he has her maid in his employ. Why don’t you tell me which maid, Verex, and make your mistake complete?”

  For a moment, she thought he’d overturn the table and send the Borderlands pieces flying. She realized then what he’d been doing as he sat alone in front of the Borderlands set, a game that was the rage at court. The pieces were organized in a beginner’s pattern. Verex had been practicing.

  It seemed that the hurt lines of his expression spoke in the clearest of words.