The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  Before she could move, someone else appeared at the princess’s side.

  It was Arin. He spoke softly to Risha. Kestrel had no real way of telling that his voice was soft, not from so far away, not with the din of courtiers talking. But Kestrel knew. She knew, she could see compassion in his eyes, in the tender curve of his mouth. Arin would say nothing but soft words to this young woman. He leaned toward her. Risha answered him, and he touched three fingers to the back of her hand.

  And why wouldn’t Arin grieve with Risha? He had lost his family. He had lost everything to the Valorians. Of course that drew him to her loss. Their shared sorrow created a shelter around them that Kestrel could never enter.

  What would she have said to Risha anyway?

  It was my fault.

  Or: It could have been worse.

  That was as stupid as telling Arin the truth. Kestrel would have to swallow her words, and be silent, and swallow again until her belly was heavy with everything she couldn’t say.

  She wondered if Arin would lift his gaze and see her watching them. But his eyes remained on Risha.

  It seemed to Kestrel that her life had taken the shape of a folded knife, her heart a blade inside a body of wood.

  “You’d better go,” Tensen said suddenly. She had forgotten that he stood next to her, that they were surrounded by the court, and that she had meant her conversation with Tensen to be as brief as possible. She had meant to avoid the notice of the emperor.

  Who was staring across the gallery at them.

  His fury boiled. The courtiers nearest to him sensed it. They edged away.

  “Wait,” she told Tensen, though the emperor was bearing through the crowd toward them.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Wait. Why did my father poison the eastern horses?”

  “Why do you Valorians do anything? To win, obviously. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Was it his idea? The emperor’s? Or—what do people say?” How widely known was her role in seizing the plains?

  “The court doesn’t care how or why General Trajan did it. They rejoice in the result.”

  “Thank you,” Kestrel said, but Tensen had already gone.

  The emperor closed in on her. She tried not to reach for her new diamond dagger, or wish for the one her father had given her and the emperor had taken. The crowd gave them a wide berth.

  “I told you to stay away from the Herrani,” the emperor hissed.

  “No, you didn’t.” Her voice was a miracle. Calm. Steady. It couldn’t possibly be her own. “I don’t remember those exact words.”

  “I was perfectly clear.” The emperor’s hand came down on her arm. To the rest of the court, the gesture might have looked affectionate. They didn’t see how he worked his thumb into her inner elbow and pinched the flesh there.

  At first, the pain was small. Mean-spirited, almost childish. It didn’t seem serious, which gave Kestrel the courage to lie. “That’s what I told Minister Tensen. That I’m no longer the imperial ambassador to Herran. Isn’t that what you wanted? I thought it only polite to tell the minister in person.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t tell the governor.”

  “I don’t want to talk to the governor.”

  “No? You haven’t spoken with Arin?” The emperor’s nails were sharp.

  Kestrel almost saw her error, but another part of her insisted that there could be no error, not with him. Her mind filled with lead. It said deny. And although the knowledge of what she had done wrong suddenly fizzed through her, fear corroded her thoughts, and lied to her, and told her to lie hard enough to make the lie true. “No,” she told the emperor. “Of course not.”

  “That,” whispered the emperor, “isn’t what my librarians say.”

  He pinched harder. The pain deepened. It drove into her fear. It pinned her feet to the floor.

  “You disobeyed me, Kestrel. You disobeyed me twice.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  The emperor released her, his thumbnail bloody. “No, you’re not,” he said. “But you will be.”

  13

  Yet the emperor did nothing.

  Kestrel’s dread grew. There was a half-moon scab and a stormy bruise on her inside elbow. That couldn’t be her only punishment.

  Kestrel’s letters to Jess, filled with false cheer, went unanswered. It occurred to Kestrel that the emperor had intercepted the letters. But this, though it hurt, wouldn’t be enough for the emperor’s revenge. Something worse must come.

  She’d seen the way he was with others. A soldier had recently been found guilty of desertion, and his high-society parents had pled for leniency. Desertion was a form of treason. The punishment for treason was death. Courtiers gossiped that maybe, just this once, the soldier would “go north”—meaning, to the tundra’s work camp. But the parents clearly hoped for even better than that. Their gold made its way to certain pockets. They regularly petitioned the emperor to release their son. The emperor had smiled and said he would see. It amused him to wait, and watch people twist on the knife of his waiting.

  Kestrel felt the shame of her mistake. The instinctive guilt of being caught. And worse: a slippery, eel-like uncertainty in herself. What did she think she was doing, with her moths and treasonous promises to Tensen?

  She thought about what her father would say if he knew.

  She thought about the prison and Thrynne’s skinned fingers.

  But maybe the emperor planned a punishment fit for a child, like barring Kestrel from the piano.

  Maybe he would humiliate her at court.

  Maybe the stolen letters were enough.

  Kestrel’s bruise faded. The scab flaked away.

  Uneasy, Kestrel finally decided that the emperor wouldn’t risk doing anything extreme to General Trajan’s daughter.

  She dined with the emperor every day. He was slyly kind, even solicitous. He acted as if nothing had happened.

  Kestrel stopped tensing herself for a blow that didn’t come.

  Maybe it never would.

  * * *

  To Arin, the imperial palace was a big box of architectural tricks. It didn’t matter, though, how many dead-end hallways there were. He didn’t care about the dizzying array of chambers for leisure. He ignored the way that tight, winding staircases could split into several directions.

  In the end, the palace was really just a building, and in every building servants were housed in the same place: the worst.

  So when Arin went looking for Kestrel’s dressmaker, she wasn’t hard to find. He took staircases down. He went into the dark. He followed musty air. Insufferable heat. The kitchen’s fires. Sweat and fried onion smells.

  The Herrani servants were helpful. Too helpful. Their eyes were shining. They would have shared anything with him. Their faces fell to be asked so little as the whereabouts of a dressmaker. Even the slaves from various conquered territories, whose languages Arin didn’t speak, and who worked in tense and arcane hierarchies with the newly freed Herrani, watched Arin with expressions approaching awe.

  Arin’s failure felt hot within him. It was a kind of poison, steeping steadily. The Herrani servants asked to be told the story of how Arin had brought a mountain down on Valorian troops. How had he saved Minister Tensen during that assault on a country estate? Was it from a crossbow quarrel, or a thrown dagger?

  The stories were worthless. Everything Arin had done, from the Firstwinter Rebellion to his last stand against the Valorian general, had changed nothing. His people still belonged to the empire.

  “Deliah,” Arin reminded the Herrani gathered in the largest kitchen. “Where is she?”

  Her workshop was in a nicer section of the palace, on the ground floor in a room with enough light to make the bolts of fabric glow. When Arin entered, Deliah was sewing, her lap heaped with rich, wine-dark cloth. Her mouth was full of straight pins. She removed them slowly, one by one, when Arin asked his question.

  “I want to k
now who’s been bribing you,” he said.

  “That’s not what I thought you’d ask.”

  “I’ve been to the city.” Arin hated being in the palace. He felt better in the city, though he didn’t like that either, and never shook the feeling of being in enemy territory. He prowled it, and kept to the alleys. “There’s a tavern—”

  “I know the one you mean. It’s the only place that serves Herrani.”

  “They serve everyone—especially bet-makers and bookkeepers. If I were to bet on something, it’d be on the fact that you must have every courtier in the palace hounding you for a tip on what your lady will wear to her wedding. The payout could be huge.”

  Deliah had been stabbing pins into the small cushion strapped to her wrist. Now she stopped and ran a finger over the stiff silver grass of clustered pins. “I don’t tell anyone anything about the wedding dress. I don’t take bribes. Not even from you.”

  “I’m not saying that you do. That’s not what I want. Just tell me who’s been asking.”

  “If you want a list, it’ll be long.”

  “So tell me who isn’t asking.”

  She was still wary. “Why?”

  “Because that’s the person who already knows.”

  Deliah touched the pins again. “The Senate leader,” she said. “Most of the courtiers ask in person, even the important ones. They don’t want to risk that somebody else might learn what they think I’ll tell. But I’ve never seen the Senate leader. Even his daughter, Maris, wants to find out. Her bribe was the promise that I could work for her.” Deliah gave a short laugh. “I dress the imperial family. The emperor would never let me go.” Her eyes challenged Arin, daring him to promise that something would change, that he could make it change for her.

  His hot feeling of shame cooled into a black lump: a hard, burnt thing.

  He moved to leave.

  “Something happened to her,” Deliah said suddenly.

  He stopped. “What do you mean?”

  “Before you came—weeks before you came—Lady Kestrel’s maids brought me a dress. It was white and gold. And filthy. The hem had been dragged through something, I’m not sure what. It was on the seat of the dress, too. The knees. There was vomit on one sleeve. Some seams had split.”

  Arin’s mouth went dry.

  “The maids wanted to know if I could salvage it,” Deliah said. “Impossible. It was ruined. I tore that dress into rags.”

  Arin made himself speak. “When?”

  “I told you when.”

  “Was Kestrel with someone the day she wore that dress?”

  Deliah spread her hands helplessly. “I have no idea exactly when she wore it, or the company she might have kept. You’d have to ask her ladies-in-waiting, and I don’t recommend that. At least one of them is in the pocket of the prince, and only the gods know how many report to the emperor.”

  “You must know something more.”

  “I’ve told you everything.”

  “You see her. When you fit her to a dress … you see her skin. Was there … damage?” He had a gut-wrenching memory of Kestrel’s face after Cheat had attacked her. “Bruises. Scars. Anything. Anything around that time. Anything since.”

  “No,” said Deliah, which was a deep relief to him until she added, “not that I could see. I haven’t fitted her in the past week, though.”

  “Watch her.”

  “I can’t do that. I can’t keep reporting to you. The emperor…”

  “I am Herran’s governor.”

  She gave him a pitying look. “We both know how much that’s worth.”

  He covered his eyes. He shook his head. “At least let me know if there’s been anything else … strange.”

  She shrugged. “The usual. Orders for a new day dress. Minor repairs. Complaints about pests getting into the wardrobes and eating the fabric. That sort of thing.” Deliah still had that look on her face, and Arin wanted to defend himself, to say that the only reason she should report on Kestrel’s doings was that the general’s daughter was obviously up to something, that the ruined dress was evidence of what he couldn’t see and must see, because Kestrel had a knack for working her fingers through schemes, and sometimes she pulled the strings, and sometimes she tugged at the edges until she uncovered something she shouldn’t.

  Arin wanted to insist that if a secret concerned Kestrel, it concerned the emperor, and that concerned Herran. This was why he asked for Deliah’s help. It was for his country. Only for that.

  It was not out of worry for Kestrel.

  Not out of love.

  Not because the description of that dress made Arin try to imagine every possible thing that had been done to Kestrel while she wore it, or everything she might have tried to do.

  In the end, none of this was easy for him to say. He was silent as he made to leave Deliah’s workshop.

  “She cares for you,” Deliah said suddenly. “I know that she does.”

  It was so blatantly untrue that it almost seemed like a cruel joke.

  Arin laughed.

  * * *

  Arin’s mind had gone dark, which was perhaps why he didn’t notice that the hallway had, too. All the lamps but one had burned down. The last sputtered in its oil.

  He hadn’t been paying attention to where he was going. He’d intended to return to his rooms, but this hall was nowhere near that wing. He found himself in a disused part of the palace hung with frayed tapestries that—as far as he could tell in the dim light—glorified Valorian conquests from a century before, when Herran was at its height and Valoria was a speck of a country with unwashed warriors who liked the sight of blood so much they’d cut their own flesh to get it.

  The tapestries were crude. It might have amused him, if he were in the mood to be amused, how bad Valorians were at beauty. They stole it. They forced it. They had never been able to bring beauty to life.

  Yet this made him think of Kestrel’s hands springing from piano keys, and coming down again, and running wild, and this made him think of the ruined dress, and this made him stride farther into the shadowed hall as if he could escape his own thoughts, and that brought him smack against a blank wall.

  He swore. He looked up at the scrolled woodwork of the ceiling and tried to be very careful not to insult the god of the lost. Instead, he focused on the woodwork carvings of his dead end, and noticed an odd, rigid line cutting through the swirling pattern. Narrowing his eyes in the light of the dying lamp, he caught a gleam in the ceiling. Metal. There was a metal strip running horizontally across the ceiling—no, not across, not exactly. It was set into the ceiling.

  Arin was so distracted by wondering what that thing was that he didn’t see a shadow slip toward him and then behind.

  He heard a metallic cranking sound. That line burst into full being—an iron gate hurtling down from its slit in the ceiling.

  It hit the stone floor. It trapped Arin into the dead end. And even though he was already turning, adrenaline punching through his veins and singing high in his brain, he didn’t quite see the shadow behind him become a man. He didn’t see a face.

  There was a rush of air. Arin was shoved back against the grate, and then he didn’t see anything at all.

  14

  Arin lay on stone. His neck crooked painfully against something hard and cold. It took several blurry seconds before he thought gate, and then ambush.

  He didn’t move. He didn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t have been knocked out for long, because hands were patting him down for weapons. Arin wore no dagger at his hip. That was too Valorian. But his knife was pulled from one boot. His attacker came down on him, kneeling on his chest. Heavy. The air squeezed out of him.

  Arin’s head throbbed. It took everything he had not to be sick.

  The weight on his chest shifted. “Let’s make you pretty,” the man said, and set the tip of a blade against Arin’s lips.

  Arin’s fist cocked up and slammed into bone. He shoved the man off him. He was awake now, he was on h
is feet. He wouldn’t go down again.

  His attacker shook away the stun of Arin’s blow, his hair catching the lamplight. The man was blond. Valorian. Dressed in military black.

  And well armed. A knife in each hand, a short sword at his waist. One of those knives was Arin’s.

  He’d have to get it back.

  Arin was still trapped between the man and the gate. A bad position. The man swung the hand that held Arin’s blade, and Arin ducked. The knife raked the gate behind him, shot sparks. Hitting metal instead of flesh seemed to throw Arin’s opponent off balance, and Arin drove into the opening made when the man’s swing had gone wide and wrong. Arin thrust a knee up, sank it into the man’s gut, seized a wrist, and wrested back his knife.

  But not before the man sliced through the air with his own.

  That dagger was beautiful. Arin saw its flash. It arrested him somehow, it started him thinking when he had absolutely no business thinking. Arin didn’t flinch away fast enough. The blade cut into his face.

  Pain seared from forehead to cheek. Red flooded Arin’s left eye. He was blinking, he was half-blind, he was desperate to know if someone can still blink if an eye has been gouged out. He wept blood. His face had split. He could feel air inside the parted flesh, and his hand instinctively went to it.

  That saved him. Without meaning to, Arin had blocked a second blow, which caught him in the forearm. It tipped him sideways, and in his shock Arin didn’t fight the momentum, which knocked him against the long wall of the hallway.

  He had dropped his knife. But his hand was scrabbling the wall even as his mind screamed at it not to be stupid, there was no weapon there.

  Arin’s hand wrapped around a dead lamp set into the wall and ripped it free. He smashed it against the man’s head. He heard a cry. He ground the shards in.

  And now the fight was his. Now Arin was remembering every nasty trick he’d ever learned with his fists, elbows, and feet, and he was forgetting that he’d never really been trained to hold a weapon, except as a boy, and that boy’s arm had trembled under the weight of a child-size sword, and little Arin had begged not to be made to do it, and so what did his grown self know about the sword, which he yanked from the attacker’s scabbard? What did Arin know about the Valorian dagger that appeared in his hand as if a god had set it there? What could he do even as both of his blades were hurtling through the darkness, and the Valorian cried, “Please,” and Arin stabbed into him as if this was an art, this was his art?