The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  With all the grace in the world, Arin’s body said mine, and cut the man’s soul right out of him.

  Where was Arin’s breath?

  He gasped. With one good eye, Arin looked down at the bloody mess of the Valorian at his feet. He dropped the sword. He tried to wipe away the red-black blindness from the left side of his face. Blood streamed. No matter how Arin pawed at the flowing wet curtain, he couldn’t see through it.

  He gave up.

  He was still holding the Valorian dagger. He was holding it strangely, as if it belonged to him, which was impossible. Yet his fingers clutched it and refused to let go.

  His breath still shuddering through him, the pain still hot, Arin lifted the dagger into the weak light.

  He knew this blade.

  How could he know it?

  The dagger was light, well balanced. It hadn’t been made for a strong hand. Arin had been a blacksmith; he knew quality when he felt it. The tang was simple yet strong. The hilt had been chased in gold, but not overly so—nothing gave the dagger too much weight or interfered with its clean efficiency.

  And it was loved. Someone had taken very good care of the blade that had carved Arin’s face open.

  None of this explained why Arin’s hand held the weapon so tightly. He frowned, then rubbed at the blood on the hilt. There was something red beneath the red. A ruby.

  It was a seal.

  The dagger’s seal showed the hooked talons of a kestrel.

  15

  Once Tensen had recovered from the sight of Arin dripping blood on the carpet of their suite, the old man was remarkably matter-of-fact. “Let me see,” he said, and gently pushed Arin down into a chair.

  Arin kept the sodden cloth to his face. In that dark hallway, he had ripped the sleeve from his inner shirt and pressed it against the pulsing cut. He hadn’t lifted it away since. He was afraid to know what lay beneath. Everything hurt too much to tell exactly how badly he’d been injured.

  “Arin.” Tensen tried to peel Arin’s fingers away from his face. Arin sighed, and let him. He thought about things like depth perception, and how it would be to fight if he had one eye. He thought about a monster’s face.

  The cut bled freely. Blood ran into Arin’s mouth and down his neck as Tensen inspected him.

  “Open,” Tensen said.

  Arin’s lashes were sticky with blood. “Open,” Tensen said again, and when Arin still didn’t, the minister fetched a pitcher of water from the bathing room and poured it onto Arin’s face.

  Arin hissed. He choked on the water. He pressed back into the chair, soaked, and trembled like an animal as Tensen’s fingers went to the corner of his eye and pried the lids apart.

  Arin caught a glimpse of light, then the blood ran in again.

  “It missed the eye,” Tensen said. “You’re cut from the middle of your forehead down through the brow and into the cheek. Your eyelid’s even scratched, just a bit. But the bone of your brow caught the worst of it.”

  Relief flowed through Arin.

  Tensen produced a clean handkerchief and padded it onto the left side of Arin’s face. “You need stitches. And”—he looked more carefully at Arin’s right hand, curled against his thigh—“tweezers.”

  The shards from the lamp. They had embedded deep into his palm when he’d hauled up the iron gate to escape his trap.

  Tensen said, “The god of luck must love you.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “Give the gods their due, Arin, or they might not look kindly on you during the next assassination attempt.”

  “I’m not sure he meant to kill me. At least not right away.” Let’s make you pretty, the man had said. Arin had the sense that his face had been a piece of paper meant to be scrawled with a message. Arin told Tensen as much, including that the dead man had worn the insignia of the palace guard. But Arin said nothing of the dagger and its seal. He had slipped it inside his boot, where it fit badly to the sheath for his own knife. He felt the Valorian blade rattle whenever he shifted his feet. The pommel peeked out over the top of Arin’s boot, but he had tugged the legs of his trousers down to hide it.

  Tensen went to work on him. The cut to Arin’s forearm had been a glancing blow muffled by the wool of his jacket. Tensen cleaned the wound, bound it tightly, and left it alone. Then he began to rub soap into a froth in his hands until they held a quivering white cloud, bubbles popping lightly. It was lovely, this cloud. It smelled of summer flowers; it was an airy poem. It looked very innocent. But Arin knew what Tensen meant to do with it.

  “This,” Tensen said, “will feel very pleasant.” He patted the foam into the slash on Arin’s face.

  Murderous. The soap ate into the wound. It licked a burning tongue into Arin’s flesh. He couldn’t breathe. If he breathed, he would scream.

  Tensen rinsed it all away. Then more soap. More water. By the time he finished, Arin was limp in his chair and desperately grateful when Tensen pressed a new cloth to the cut. The fire in his face throbbed down. Arin kept his eyes closed and slipped back into the old, familiar, seeping pain as easily as into a warm bath. How much better that old pain seemed now. How comforting, how like a friend. Arin was half in love with it.

  But Tensen was moving around in the suite, and Arin knew what would happen next. He opened his good eye to see Tensen sterilizing a needle in the flame of an oil lamp.

  “No,” Arin croaked. “Get Deliah.”

  “You’re not a dress.”

  “Do it,” he said, though he’d seen Tensen patch wounds together on a battlefield. It was why he had agreed to take an elderly man on every military mission in Herran—that, and the fervency in Tensen’s green eyes, the truth in his voice when he had sworn to do anything for his country. Tensen had an actor’s knack for becoming whatever he wanted to be. If it was a doctor, he would be one. He used to joke that it was because he had once played the role of a doctor in a theatrical production. Arin didn’t much care where Tensen’s skills came from. He appreciated them. But he wouldn’t let Tensen sew his face.

  “I’m not sure it’s wise for Deliah to know,” said Tensen.

  “Do you think this can be kept a secret?”

  Tensen gave a slight smile to show that a point had been made. Arin would never look the same again.

  The minister left.

  When he returned with Deliah, the cloth on Arin’s face was seeping blood and he felt almost sleepy. Deliah gave him a grim look edged with weariness, as if Arin were a child who had gotten himself hurt doing exactly what she’d told him not to do. The expression made her look a little like his mother. That’s what Arin imagined as she threaded the needle and put her cool hands on his hot face. It wasn’t hard to see his mother when he squinted through one eye that watered. The needle went in. It pushed out. There was the grating tug of the thread. A tightening pain. Tensen blotted away blood so that Deliah could see better, and it began again. A bolt of lightning stitched down his cheek.

  Maybe it was because half of his face no longer felt like his face. Maybe it was because he wanted so very much to forget what Deliah was doing, or needed to believe that things could be worse. Arin thought of the beating he’d received the day before Kestrel had bought him. He had been shoveling gravel with other slaves put to laying a new Valorian road. He’d been keeping his head down. He was being good … until there came a scuffling sound.

  Arin had looked up. Two Valorians were dragging an easterner toward the other slaves. A murmur went through the Herrani working on the road. From what Arin heard, the eastern slave had managed to escape several days before. He had just been caught.

  The Valorian law on runaway slaves was clear.

  Arin had lunged forward. He shouted at the Valorians. He cursed them.

  His masters that day didn’t understand Arin’s language well, or his punishment would have been worse. The overseer punched Arin in the face. The Valorians ordered the Herrani to hold Arin down. They did. They shoved him into the gravel. The overseer h
it again, and even from where Arin lay he could see the other masters preparing the eastern runaway. They dragged the slave’s head back by the hair.

  The easterner caught Arin’s gaze as a Valorian drew his dagger. “Don’t worry,” the slave called to Arin in Herrani, which wasn’t very different from the eastern language of Dacra. “The emperor will get what he deserves.”

  Then the Valorians cut off his ears and nose.

  “There,” Deliah said, snipping the thread. “Thirteen stitches, two separate seams: forehead and cheek. I left the eye alone.”

  The blood merely oozed now. Arin opened his stinging left eye. With both of his eyes open and clear, Deliah didn’t look like his dead mother at all. She washed her red hands in a bowl.

  “Nicely done,” said Tensen.

  “Don’t ask me to do this again,” she told them, and left.

  Tensen pulled a chair up to Arin’s, sat, and began to dig the glass out of his right hand. After everything else, the sensation of this was oddly satisfying.

  “Deliah had some interesting things to share earlier today,” Arin said. Tensen’s tweezers caught a big piece and dragged it out.

  “Oh?” Tensen dropped the glass onto a nearby end table.

  Arin told him what she had said. The older man listened. The bloodstained shards grew into a little heap.

  “This is worth looking into,” Arin said.

  “I don’t think Lady Kestrel’s choice of dress is Herran’s greatest priority.”

  Arin tightened his hands, then winced as this drove the glass deeper. Tensen, his tweezers lifted, gave him a cool look that told Arin he got what he deserved. “You’re wrong,” Arin said. “The fact that the Senate leader must know about the dress is important. The winnings from a correct bet could buy the Senate leader a small island, and none of the money would come from imperial coffers. Thrynne overheard something between the Senate leader and the emperor. What if the emperor was collecting a favor, and repaying the Senate leader with a tip for the perfect bet? We need to find out what that favor was.”

  Tensen prodded a tiny shard to the surface of Arin’s palm. He inspected it.

  “And the ruined dress,” Arin continued. “Something dangerous is going on with Kestrel.”

  “Vomit on a sleeve and dirt on the knees? Let’s not be dramatic. So the lady drank too much wine and tripped during a tipsy stroll through the Winter Garden. It’s none of our concern.”

  “She’s scheming,” Arin insisted. “I can feel it.”

  Tensen set down the tweezers. “You’re seeing what you want to see.”

  “No, I’m not. That makes no sense. I don’t want her to be in trouble.”

  “But maybe you’d like her to be troubled. Unhappy with her new life. What would you do then, Arin? Rescue her from it?”

  Arin said nothing.

  “She seems happy to me,” said Tensen.

  “The dress’s seams were ripped. The skirts were filthy. There’s no mud in the Winter Garden. The garden has flagstones. Where did the stains come from?”

  Tensen stared at him. “Arin. I don’t mean to be unkind, and I know you feel that what Deliah said is important, but all I am hearing is an obsession with the prince’s bride and what she likes to wear.”

  Arin closed his mouth. He shivered, suddenly chilled by doubt.

  “Please,” said Tensen. “Leave the spying to me.”

  “But you’ve learned nothing. Not since you told me about Thrynne.”

  “All in good time.”

  “Is it your new recruit? Has he learned something?” Arin saw Tensen’s expression change slightly. “Or she?”

  “Not yet. I’m encouraged that we’ll hear something soon.”

  “I don’t like this. I don’t like how happy you seem about nothing at all from somebody whose name I don’t know.”

  “I think of my informant as the Moth.”

  “I want a name.”

  “I see. You’re concerned about whether we can trust this person. Don’t be. The Moth is highly motivated to give us what we need.”

  Arin slammed his good hand down on the end table. “I will send you back to Herran. I swear that I will pack you onto the next ship there if you don’t tell me who your informant is. Now.”

  Tensen swept the scattered shards back into their pile. He relaxed into his chair. His small green eyes were bright. “I noticed you speaking with Princess Risha the other night.”

  He fell silent, and the silence began to speak to Arin.

  “Yes,” Arin said slowly. “She was upset.”

  “Of course. What happened in the plains was tragic. Its people are refugees in the eastern capital. Hundreds died during the trek from the plains.”

  “Are you telling me—?”

  “It can’t be easy to be a knife held to the throat of one’s own people. That’s why Risha was kidnapped as a child. The emperor can make the eastern queen grieve at a moment’s notice. I’m surprised the emperor hasn’t killed the queen’s little sister already—but then again, that’s a card he can only play once. He must be waiting for the right moment. I wonder what Risha thinks, while he’s waiting.”

  Arin absorbed what his minister was saying—or what Arin thought he was saying. It occurred to him that it might be wise to suspect one’s own spymaster, who’d been employed to traffic in deceit. And Tensen had been an actor before the war. But Arin could see no reason for Tensen to pretend that Risha was his Moth. Arin could see why she would work against the empire.

  The old man looked at him, his expression kind. Arin suddenly craved kindness. He was seized by a horrible feeling, a familiar one. He’d been caught in its fist for ten years. He was sick of it. Why couldn’t he outgrow it? He was no child. He had no business feeling lonely.

  Loss of blood made Arin light-headed. His thoughts seemed to float and drift.

  Tensen rose and brought a fresh bowl of water to Arin, who sank his right hand into it.

  “Risha is very beautiful,” the minister commented.

  “Yes,” Arin said. “She is.” It was hard to think. Arin was so tired.

  “Well, I’m going to bed,” Tensen said. “Unless I need to pack for an abrupt departure over the tempest-tossed winter sea?”

  “No. Go to sleep.”

  Tensen smiled and left him.

  Arin sat for a long time in that chair. He considered what he knew, what he thought he knew, and what he knew he didn’t know. Then he reconsidered everything.

  His thoughts began to take strange shapes. They beat their wings and fluttered away. Arin found himself borne on those wings and flown into sleep.

  He had dreams where moths were crawling on his face. Their legs became black stitches. They laid eggs in a long line down his forehead and over his cheek. The eggs hatched.

  He dreamed of Kestrel. He dreamed of Risha.

  He dreamed that Kestrel had become Risha, that the sun had become the moon, and he couldn’t tell whether he was blinded by the light or the dark.

  An infection set into the wound. Arin’s fever raged high.

  16

  No one looks at a slave, Arin had said. Kestrel began to look very closely at hers. She settled on one. This particular woman was in fact not a slave but a paid servant, one of the Valorians selected to be a lady-in-waiting to Kestrel. It was a mark of high status to be served by one’s own people; in return, the Valorian ladies-in-waiting were decently paid and their blue servant dresses trimmed with white.

  Kestrel couldn’t remember the woman’s name. But she was about Kestrel’s height and size. She would do.

  One morning not long after the reception in the imperial gallery, Kestrel contrived to be alone with the servant and spill a large glass of water on her.

  “I’m so sorry!” Kestrel cried. “Oh, I am clumsy.”

  “No matter, my lady,” said the flustered woman. “It’s just water.”

  “But water is very wet. You must be uncomfortable. Here, change into this.” Kestrel offered one of
her dresses, carefully selected for being simply cut, without ornament, yet made from a rich fabric.

  “I couldn’t,” said the maid.

  “Of course you can! And you will keep it. Do you think I would miss it? Now, you’ll insult me if you believe that. Go on, you may use my dressing room.”

  The maid was reluctant, but Kestrel placed the dress firmly in her hands. The woman’s expression changed as she began to think things through. Kestrel saw her thoughts. If the maid worked for an entire year, she could still never afford a dress like this. It was a treasure. She could wear it and be stunning. Or maybe she would sell it. The fabric was velvet. It would fetch a fine price.

  The maid went to try on Kestrel’s dress.

  When the woman emerged into the sitting room, Kestrel could tell that it took all of her control not to spin around and feel the skirt swing. “It fits perfectly,” the woman said. “Are you sure I may keep it?”

  “Of course.” Kestrel took the woman’s work dress from her crooked arm.

  “Oh. I have to take my work dress back to the housekeeper.”

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  “But I can’t let you—”

  “I insist.” Kestrel smiled. Later, she would apologize to the housekeeper. She’d explain that she had no idea where she’d put the dress. She’d cover any cost.

  After the maid had left, Kestrel took the damp work dress into her bedroom and dried it before the fire. She hid it in the back of a wardrobe filled with summer clothes that would remain packed away for the next two seasons.

  It was possible that this maid reported to Verex—or worse, to the captain of the palace guard, or the emperor. But Kestrel didn’t think that an exchange of dresses would seem noteworthy. It was only the whim of a kind mistress.