The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  * * *

  Kestrel waited for a night when she wasn’t called upon to appear at a function. This took some time. There were dinners, game nights, and friendly, bloodless swordfights performed for an applauding audience. The prince’s bride was expected to attend everything.

  The governor of Herran, however, seemed to feel no such pressure.

  Arin never came. More than a week had passed since she’d seen him in the art gallery. Kestrel didn’t dare to ask for any news of him. When she met Tensen’s eyes once across a crowd of courtiers, he shook his head.

  Unless she had information to give Tensen, she should keep her distance—especially after what happened the last time. Kestrel could still feel the emperor’s nails digging into her skin.

  He hadn’t carried out his threat to her—or so she thought. But his mood had soured. The entire court felt it. Kestrel wasn’t the only one relieved when finally a night arrived when no one was expected to put on finery and gather in the emperor’s presence. A holiday-like atmosphere ruled the palace. There were rumors of lovers who would meet for frosted kisses in the Winter Garden’s hedge maze. Some courtiers swore they would crawl into bed early with hot bricks at their feet.

  Kestrel had plans of her own. That night, she wiped her forehead clean of its engagement mark and tied a scarf over her hair. She pulled on the rough blue-and-white work dress and searched for a pair of comfortable shoes.

  When she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror she hesitated. Her features looked somehow smaller. She was too pale.

  You disobeyed me, she heard the emperor say.

  “No” doesn’t exist anymore, only “yes,” said her father and the captain of the guard in one voice.

  But:

  You are better than this, Arin said, and then she heard her own voice, calling out the highest bid to buy him. She heard the calm, cultured tones she had used to persuade the emperor to poison the eastern horses. Guilt swelled inside her.

  Kestrel left her suite. She kept her head down and her pace brisk.

  No one saw Lady Kestrel. Aristocrats in the halls didn’t even glance at her. Servants did, but saw someone familiar yet unrecognizable, which wasn’t strange in a palace staffed with hundreds of servants and slaves.

  She was only a maid. If her step was a little too proud, it went unnoticed. If she occasionally looked lost in the servants’ quarters, it was shrugged off as the problem of a new girl.

  The maid tightened her scarf. She found her way out one of the back kitchen yards. She stepped past palace guards, who ignored her. Though women not in the military weren’t supposed to walk alone, few people cared if a maid broke the rules. She was beneath notice.

  Kestrel walked into the frozen city.

  * * *

  “At last,” Tensen said. “A night with nothing to do.” He turned an appraising eye toward Arin, who lay on a divan near the sitting room fire. “You look better. Almost fit for society.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Well, you’re no longer feverish, are you? And the swelling in your face has gone down. You don’t look quite so puffy. One more night of rest, Arin, and then it’s back into the fray. You can’t avoid the court forever. Besides, the reactions could be telling.”

  “Yes, stifled gasps and open disgust will be very informative.”

  “You’ll cause a stir. Stirs are good. They churn up all kinds of gossip and conjecture … and the occasional truth.”

  “I’m surprised you need me. I thought you had the perfect access to information. Where’s your Moth, Tensen?”

  The minister said nothing.

  Arin stood and went to the fire. He was weak from the fever, his movements disjointed. The heart of the fire was as red as the ruby set in the hilt of the dagger Arin kept in his boot. “Still no word about who arranged for the ambush?”

  Tensen shrugged. “The emperor isn’t happy. I can think of a good reason why. You’re alive, and your assailant isn’t.”

  “There’s no proof that the emperor’s behind it.”

  “The palace guard’s insignia on that dead man isn’t good enough proof for you?”

  “If it was the emperor, why does he do nothing? Say nothing?”

  “I think,” Tensen said, “that he wouldn’t want to acknowledge a failure.” His green eyes narrowed. “What makes you believe that the emperor wasn’t behind it? Do you have other enemies I don’t know about?”

  “No. It was him.”

  “So you’re just being difficult.”

  “One of my enduring qualities.”

  Tensen rose from his chair. “I’m going to visit the art gallery.”

  “You go there a lot.”

  “I played an art connoisseur once, in the Herrani theater festival fifteen years ago. Old habits die hard.”

  “Then you must enjoy looking at all of the emperor’s pretty things.”

  Tensen paused with his hand on the doorknob. He glanced back at Arin. “You might not believe me, but certain people will respect you more for how you look now. The emperor is going to regret making his mark on you. Be ready for tomorrow, Arin. It’s time you left this suite. You’re well enough, and there’s no excuse to avoid the world.”

  Arin mulled over Tensen’s words long after the minister left. He thought about his fevered dreams, which he couldn’t quite remember, though they had filled him with a nameless urgency. A restlessness.

  In Arin’s boot there was a sheath, in his sheath was Kestrel’s dagger, and in the dagger’s groove was his dried blood.

  In the capital city was a tavern, in the tavern was a bookkeeper, and in the bookkeeper’s hands was a book of bets.

  Arin pulled on his winter coat, made sure he had everything he needed, and set out for the city.

  17

  The cold was exhilarating. It pinched Kestrel’s cheeks and chased her down sloping streets. She wanted to laugh. The palace was at her back, high on its hill, and she was here, winding through the city’s wealthy quarter with its haughty town houses and blazing oil lamps. The cobblestone streets were marbled sheets of ice. Carriages moved slowly, but Kestrel didn’t. She skidded through this quarter. She wanted no part of it.

  She wanted the tight, dirty streets of the Narrows, the fishy smell of the wharf. And she would have it.

  I wanted to feel free, Arin had told her once in Herran. She breathed in the cold, and it felt free, so she felt free, and it felt alive, so she felt alive.

  Kestrel wondered what would happen if she never went back to the palace.

  She hugged her arms to her chest. She had entered a darker quarter of the city. Streetlamps were few. Soon there were none. Kestrel took any street that went down, for that was the way to the sea. The streets became a network of alleys: the Narrows.

  She sidestepped a cat that streaked into the shadows. The cold was loud here. It rang off the jam-packed buildings. It shattered with noise tumbling from the flung-open door of a tavern. Kestrel saw its sign, which showed a broken arm, and watched as a man with the looks of a Valorian aristocrat stumbled outside the tavern and was sick in the street. He lifted his head, wiped his mouth, and blearily stared at Kestrel without really seeing her.

  Then he squinted. His gaze was fuzzy, but gaining focus. “Do I know you?” he said.

  Kestrel hurried away.

  * * *

  “You don’t look so good,” the bookkeeper said. She had her hands stuffed in her trouser pockets and her boots up on the table. She studied Arin over the steel-toed tops of them.

  It was early for the Broken Arm to be this lively. But a ship had come in, and its sailors were already drunk. In a corner, Valorian soldiers argued over a game of Bite and Sting.

  The bookkeeper, however, was calm—tipped back serenely in her chair, surveying the scene, smoking, waiting. People came to her.

  “Want to place a bet?” she asked Arin. About his age or a bit older, the bookkeeper was only part Valorian. Her loose hair was a color that turned up sometimes in Valori
ans, who called it “warrior red,” but her flat black eyes and light brown skin hinted at a northern heritage.

  Arin smiled. The smile tugged painfully at his stitches. “What I want,” he said, “is a word.”

  “Just that? You strike me as the type to want more than what’s good for him. That mark on your face is fresh.”

  “I want to see the bets.”

  She exhaled a cloud of smoke. “I was right. You are a mad one. No one sees the bets … unless they ask very nicely.”

  “I can be nice.”

  She nodded at the empty chair beside her.

  Arin sat. “I can share information.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve got no call to trust it.”

  “I could work for you.”

  “What I need you can’t give. I’m a one-woman business. I’ve got thugs, sure, to remind people when they need to pay up. You’d fit that part. But—no offense—that’s not worth what you’re asking.”

  Arin hesitated, then reached into his pocket. He opened his hand. On his palm lay an emerald earring, its stone the size of a bird’s egg. It had been his mother’s.

  “Would this do?” he said.

  * * *

  Kestrel’s delight in the cold wore off around the time she reached the wharf. She’d worn as many layers as would fit under the work dress, but she shivered as she neared the harbormaster’s house. Rocks and oyster shells crunched beneath her boots.

  The house’s entrance faced the sea and its torchlit promenade. Kestrel kept to the building’s back and the shadows gathered there. She heard sailors joke as they entered the house to leave their names with the harbormaster, who recorded them in his ledger. He noted everything that entered and left the harbor—sailors, come ashore for leave in the city, and ships that docked. He wrote down the ships’ point of origin and the goods they carried.

  In his ledger should be written what Kestrel needed to know about the Senate leader’s ship. He’d brought back no luxuries from his voyage to the southern isles for his daughter. Perhaps he had felt stingy, or angry with Maris … or his ship had brought back no such luxuries at all—which was strange indeed, since usually the sole purpose of a trip to the isles was for their goods.

  What if the Senate leader hadn’t been to the isles? He could have traveled elsewhere, to another place where the sun shone hot even in winter, hot enough to tan his skin. What if he’d gone to the very southern tip of the Herran peninsula, where hearthnut trees grew? She remembered Arin’s anxiety over the harvest, and how much of it the emperor would seize. Maybe the Senate leader had been secretly estimating the crop’s worth.

  Kestrel waited until the sailors left the house and took the curve of the promenade that led up into the city. Then she reached for a rock encrusted with tiny shells, weighed it in her hand, and broke a back window of the harbormaster’s house.

  A thump came from inside the house: a chair, tilted back, had been dropped down on all four legs.

  The sound of heavy boots. A sea-weathered door whining on its hinges. Feet on rocks, crunching closer.

  Kestrel could be sure his dagger was drawn. Hers was, too. She’d chosen the plainest scabbard she owned and had wrapped the dagger’s jeweled pommel with a scarf, but she still seemed to see the diamonds’ sharp eyes through the cloth.

  The harbormaster rounded the back corner of the house. He was large—a former soldier, like all harbormasters. He held a sword, not a dagger. He didn’t see her yet.

  If Kestrel played this wrong, she was likely to lose. A fight with this man could mean death … or arrest. She would be brought before the emperor.

  She would be asked to explain.

  The freezing sea was in Kestrel’s blood. Her veins ran with it.

  She grabbed another rock and pitched it into the shadows. It hit farther up the beach.

  The harbormaster instinctively turned to see what had made that sound.

  Kestrel swung the pommel of her dagger at the back of his head.

  * * *

  The bookkeeper whistled. “You do surprise a girl.” She touched the emerald on Arin’s palm. “How do I know it’s real?”

  “That’s your risk. My offer’s good for tonight only. Take it and give me what I want … or doubt me, and I’ll walk away.” He closed his hand around the earring. Arin could tell the bookkeeper was hungry for the sight of it again. She looked exactly how he felt.

  “Earrings come in pairs,” she said. “Where’s the other one?”

  “Gone.”

  “Got any more surprises like these?”

  “No.”

  Her black eyes were bright in the rushlights. Even though the Broken Arm tavern had in fact grown louder since they’d started speaking, Arin had the sense of things quieting: a muffling of the world, a breath held as the bookkeeper made her decision. He desperately hoped she would say yes. He desperately wanted her to say no.

  “Give it here,” she said.

  Arin’s hand didn’t move. Then, slowly, he loosened his hold on the jewel. He let it slide, green and glowing. He held the memory with the bare tips of his fingers: his mother’s face in the nighttime, hung with twin green stars. She rested her palm on his forehead and said the blessing for dreams. She lifted her hand away, and Arin opened his, and dropped the earring into the bookkeeper’s waiting grasp.

  * * *

  Kestrel dragged the harbormaster’s unconscious body. Her arms burned, her bad knee screamed in protest, but Kestrel dug her heels into the rocks and pulled until the man was hidden behind the house where the shadows were darkest. Then, her breath sharp and thin in her throat, she stepped inside, locked the door, and went to the ledger open on the man’s desk.

  She flipped back to entries from earlier that winter. She found the Senate leader’s ship—the Maris.

  Point of origin: the southern isles. Goods: none.

  Kestrel let go of the page. It sighed down.

  She’d been wrong to suspect that the Senate leader had traveled to Herran instead of the isles. Here was the proof of it.

  What else might she have gotten wrong? Her pulse sped with fear of herself, fear of her choices, her certainty. Kestrel’s heartbeats flew, one right against the other, like flipped pages of a book.

  Were all her lies to Arin worth it, if she couldn’t see the truth? Kestrel had thought she’d known what was best for Arin. Perhaps her greatest lies were the ones she’d told to herself.

  But then …

  Kestrel paged again through the ledger.

  What if the Senate leader had lied to the harbormaster? What if the harbormaster had lied to his book?

  She found the latest entries. The Maris was docked in the harbor now. The ledger listed the number of its pier.

  Kestrel left the book open on the desk exactly as it had been. She riffled through desk drawers until she found a purse filled with silver. She pocketed it, pulled out the drawer, and dumped it and its contents on the floor.

  Did you hear that the harbormaster was attacked? she imagined city guards saying. A case of petty thievery.

  Kestrel left the house and headed for the piers.

  * * *

  “You understand,” the bookkeeper said as she tucked the emerald away, “that you can’t make any bets after you look in my book. Not with me, not ever.” She sat more seriously now, all business, the four legs of the chair firmly on the floor. She pulled a slim book from her inner jacket pocket. “Got something in particular you’d like to see?”

  “Show me the entries about the wedding.”

  The bookkeeper raised one brow, which made Arin wonder if she knew who he was. She found the list and held the book out to Arin, her thumb wedged in its open seam.

  These bets concerned the wedding night. They went into great detail. The wagers showed a breadth of curiosity and imagination that made Arin wish he’d never looked.

  “Not that,” he said. “That’s not what I meant. I want to see bets about the dress.”

  Both of the bookkeeper’s
brows were arched now, this time in disdainful boredom. She turned a few pages and offered the book again.

  Arin saw the Senate leader’s bet. It was in the middle of several entries that concerned the dress. Others had guessed the same color the Senate leader had wagered on—red—but no one else had bet on the number of buttons, the neckline, the length of the train, the style of the scabbard …

  Arin examined the pages again. He’d been mistaken about something. He’d gone through the dress wagers too quickly before, racing to find the Senate leader’s name and to escape the memory of the first set of bets he’d seen. He saw now that the Senate leader wasn’t the only one to have gone into careful detail about the wedding dress. Another person had bet in the exact same way, and more recently.

  Arin tapped the name. “Who’s that?”

  The bookkeeper peered. “A palace engineer. She works on water. Aqueducts. Canals. That sort of thing.”

  Arin closed the book and handed it back.

  “That’s it?” she said.

  “Yes.” He added, “If you want a tip, that bet’s the correct one.”

  The bookkeeper drew up her boot so that it was planted on the seat of her chair as she sat, one leg dangling down, the other bent into the perfect position for her to prop an elbow on the knee, drop her chin onto her fist, and look up at Arin. “I think you’ve overpaid me. How about I give you something extra before you go?”

  * * *

  Sailors strolled the wharf. Kestrel hung back, chafing her arms for warmth. Waves slapped the sides of large merchant ships docked at piers that reached out into the black, glassy sea.

  She kept her eyes on one ship in particular. She saw several sailors from the Maris clatter down its pier, ready for shore leave, but she let them go.

  Then Kestrel spied the perfect target. He walked alone, cheeks ruddy from the cold and drink. His merry steps wavered a little. He was humming.

  “Sailor,” she called as he passed, “care for a game of cards?”

  He stopped. He came close, and Kestrel could see that he wasn’t drunk after all. His eyes were alert, his expression a mix of friendly and sly. The sailor reached into his coat pocket for a pipe, and the slow, deliberate way he packed it told Kestrel that he wouldn’t be an easy opponent.