The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  A group of senators were drinking. The Broken Arm had a very mixed crowd that night, more than its usual share of courtiers. These were talking about the east.

  “… an impressive victory,” said one. “Exactly the sort of thing I’d expect from General Trajan.”

  “He can’t take all the credit,” said another. “The idea was his daughter’s.”

  “Really?”

  “I was there. There was a gathering in the Winter Garden the morning after the engagement ball. Only the most important members of the court were invited, of course. A group of us discussed how best to take the eastern plains. The emperor even asked my advice. If I say so myself, my idea was very good. Yet let no one believe that I am ungenerous. I understand why the emperor preferred Lady Kestrel’s plan. It was she who suggested that the general poison the horses. The eastern savages won’t be able to live without them, she said. We all knew that would do the trick. And didn’t it just?”

  Laughter.

  “To Lady Kestrel.” The senator raised his cup.

  “To Lady Kestrel!”

  * * *

  Kestrel had stood to leave the table and find Arin when she heard the cheer.

  Had she been recognized?

  No one was looking at the maid in the corner. Still, Kestrel grew even more anxious.

  She couldn’t see Arin. He was lost in the swarm of people by the bar.

  Or had he left the tavern entirely? Had she offended him that much?

  Kestrel was reassuring herself that Arin wouldn’t leave their game unfinished, when he emerged from the crowd empty-handed.

  He dragged his chair back from the table.

  “Arin … what I said earlier, about the wound—”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.” He sat, and repositioned his tiles.

  “But I need to tell you. Arin, your face—”

  “I don’t care about my face!”

  Kestrel shut her mouth. Arin refused to look up at her. With a nauseating dread that she didn’t yet understand, she sank into her chair. “Why were those senators drinking to me?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Do you know why?”

  Arin met her gaze with an unflinching stare. “Play.”

  “You’ve no glass after all.” She poured wine into her own. She spilled a few drops. She wiped them away with her thumb, rubbing hard at the glass, and offered it to him. He ignored her.

  So Kestrel played, and watched Arin toss down tiles and claim others. She felt the pulse of his fury. It was worse than when he’d left the table. It had grown fierce, practically solid. It was the kind of anger that comes close to trembling. The game slipped from Kestrel’s control.

  In the end, she welcomed the loss. She would tell Arin the truth. She swore to herself that she would. Everything could be explained. She was afraid of it, afraid of the anger in him now, and of what he would do with the truth. But she would give it to him. She could no longer bear not to.

  Arin said, “Did you tell the general to poison the horses of the eastern plainspeople?”

  “What?”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes,” she said haltingly, “but—”

  “Do you realize what you’ve done? Hundreds of people—innocent people—died in the exodus to the queen’s city.”

  “I know. It was a horrible thing—”

  “Horrible? Children starved while their mothers wept. There are no words for that.”

  Guilt swelled in her throat. “I can explain.”

  “How do you explain murder?”

  “How do you?” she said with a flash of her own anger. “People died because of you, too, Arin. You have killed. Your hands aren’t clean. The Firstwinter Rebellion—”

  “This is not the same.”

  He seemed to choke on his words, and Kestrel was appalled at how everything she said went so wrong. “I meant that you had your reasons.”

  “I can’t even speak of my reasons. I can’t believe that you’d bring them up, that you would compare…” His voice shook, then dropped low. “Kestrel. The empire’s only reason is dominion. And you have helped.”

  “I had no choice. My father would’ve—”

  “Thought you weak? Disowned you for not being his warrior girl, ready with the perfect plan of attack? Your father.” Arin’s mouth curled. “I know you want his approval. I know that you’d marry the prince to get it. But your father’s hands run with blood. He is a monster. What kind of person feeds a monster? What kind of person loves one?”

  “Arin, you’re not listening. You’re not thinking clearly.”

  “You’re right. I haven’t been thinking clearly, not for a long time. But I understand now.” Arin pushed his tiles away. His winning hand scattered out of line. “You have changed, Kestrel. I don’t know who you are anymore. And I don’t want to.”

  Later, when Kestrel remembered this moment, she said the right things. In her imagination, he understood.

  But that was not what happened.

  Arin’s anger curdled into disgust. He was sick with it. She could tell. She could tell from the swift way he stood, as if escaping contamination. She saw it in the set of his shoulders when he turned his back, even as she called to him. Arin walked away. He let the tavern door slam behind him.

  * * *

  It was silent in the palace gallery. Bones must be silent like this, Kestrel thought, when they lay deep in the earth.

  She stood in front of Tensen’s painting longer than she actually looked at it. Finally, she set a moth on its frame. She told herself the kind of lie that knows itself for what it is. Kestrel decided that it was better that Arin think this way of her.

  Yes. It had all been for the best.

  21

  “And what,” said the emperor, “is so urgent that you must return to Herran now?”

  “My duty to you, Your Imperial Majesty,” said Arin.

  “He speaks so handsomely,” the emperor said to the court, and the senators and lords and ladies hid their smirks in a way that showed them all the more. There was no longer anything handsome about the governor of Herran.

  Risha didn’t smile. From across the room, Arin caught the easterner’s gaze: somber and steady.

  “I’m not sure what to think about this request for my permission for you to leave,” the emperor said. “Governor, have you been … treated badly here?”

  Arin smiled with the cut side of his face. “Not at all.”

  The courtiers whispered delightedly. It was as good as a play. The disfigured face. The emperor’s slippery mockery. The pretense that nothing was wrong.

  “What if we enjoy having you at court?” said the emperor.

  Arin stepped more fully into the light. He saw, as if outside himself, the way he stood before the emperor in this echoing state room. Arin hadn’t slept since he’d left Kestrel in the city the night before, but he felt extremely lucid. He knew how the morning sun caught the dust motes around him. It cast a harsh glare on his slashed face. It picked out the frayed threads of his clothes. And it paused, lingering, over the dagger strapped to his hip, and the way Arin’s hand was curled around the hilt and covered its seal. The blade was unsheathed. It had two cutting edges. The crossguard was short, meant to protect a much smaller hand than Arin’s, and was hooked in the Valorian style. Everything about the dagger was Valorian.

  The courtiers buzzed.

  His face.

  Who did it?

  That blade.

  Whose is it?

  That’s a lady’s dagger. How did he get it?

  Stole it, maybe.

  Or … could it have been a gift?

  Arin almost heard the whispered words.

  “Your welcome has been so much more than I could expect,” Arin said. The emperor smiled a little. His eyes didn’t leave Arin’s hand on the dagger’s hilt. Arin was glad. He thought that the emperor was quite pleased with his son’s engagement to the military’s favorite daughter. The marriage would m
ake General Trajan part of the imperial family … and would renew the soldiers’ loyalty to the emperor.

  But there were those rumors. Even the minting of an engagement coin hadn’t laid them to rest. It was the first time that Arin thought of the rumors about him and Kestrel coldly. He thought about them as something he could use. Yes, Arin bargained that if he lifted his hand to reveal the hilt and seal of Kestrel’s dagger, it would be recognized. Courtiers would gasp.

  Arin could make rumor look real.

  A Valorian always wore her dagger, except in the bath or bed. Whether the courtiers judged it a theft or gift, they would think very hard about how close Arin must have been to Kestrel in order to take her blade.

  “As much as I would dearly love to stay,” Arin said, “if I’m to govern your territory in a way that will please you, I must return to it.”

  “A serious young man, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Arin shifted his grip on the hilt—not so much as to reveal the seal, but to show that he would.

  The emperor didn’t like that. Neither would Kestrel if she were here, or Tensen, who had gone to his beloved gallery at dawn and was probably there still. The minister wouldn’t like anything at all about what Arin was doing. Blackmail the emperor? In front of the court?

  Arin wasn’t supposed to be in possession of that dagger. He was supposed to be dead, or mutilated beyond recognition. Or both. It felt good to remind the emperor of his mistake. It felt good to threaten him with having to explain to the court why the dagger of his son’s bride was strapped to another man’s hip.

  “Am I free to go?” Arin asked.

  “My dear governor, what a question! We’ll miss you, of course, but we would not hold you here.”

  Arin thought that he was going to leave the state room without any mention made of the prickling red-and-black wound that crawled down his face. But the emperor said sweetly, “Those are very neat seams,” and then Arin was dismissed.

  * * *

  “Fair tides to you,” called a voice behind him in the empty hallway outside the state room.

  Arin turned and saw Risha. Her words had a warm but stilted quality that suggested that her farewell was an eastern one, translated into Valorian.

  “I’m glad to see you go,” Risha said. “You don’t belong here. People who don’t belong pay for it.”

  Arin instinctively touched his cut cheek and winced. Then he grit his teeth. His face wasn’t his face anymore, but so what? Maybe it suited him. Maybe Arin had been too soft, too trusting, too baby-skinned, too much like that boy he’d been before the war, the one who had made him turn back to find Kestrel standing by the moonlit canal.

  Arin was glad that boy was gone. He was glad to be someone new.

  “I don’t know how you bear it,” he told Risha in Valorian. The words came slow and heavy. He hated the feel of that language on his tongue.

  Risha frowned. “Bear what? Living in the imperial court?” She shook her head. “My place is here.”

  It was dangerous to mention Tensen, or the information Arin’s spymaster had suggested Risha might give them. They were alone for now, but the state room doors could open at any time. Quickly, in his own language, Arin said, “Thank you.”

  A look of confusion crossed Risha’s face. “I don’t speak Herrani,” she reminded him in Valorian.

  Arin might have said more, but then the state room doors did open. The court began to file out and look at them. He turned away. He left with his unsaid words burning inside him. Thank you, he wanted to say again, with wonder at the thought that Risha would risk herself for a people not her own.

  How different she was, Arin thought as he walked away. His mouth was tight and tasted metallic, as if he’d bitten his tongue.

  How different Risha was from Kestrel.

  * * *

  A fish thrashed against the board. Kestrel saw the fishmonger bring the mallet down hard. She flinched, though she knew that a palace maid wouldn’t be bothered by this sight. A maid wouldn’t glance twice at the pink slush of frozen blood at the base of the stalls in the Butcher’s Row. A palace maid wouldn’t stare at the slick organs in the gutter and realize that she’d never seen the inside of a chicken, or paid any thought to it.

  Kestrel made herself look hard at the slurry that ran down the Row. When her throat closed up, there was a reason right before her. It was there in the disgusting street. It was on the damp wood of the fishmonger’s mallet. It wasn’t in the Broken Arm tavern last night, or in Arin’s wounded face turning away from her. It wasn’t in what she’d done to deserve it.

  She pulled the sailor’s coat tight around her, and lifted the blue-and-white hem of her work dress as she walked down the Row.

  A little Valorian girl ran ahead of her, braided ropes of white-blond hair bouncing against her shoulders. The girl gripped a cloth doll by the arm. Something about the doll caught Kestrel’s eye, and she wasn’t sure why until the child caught up to her mother and begged for another toy the woman carried in her basket. It was a boy doll dressed in black. Then Kestrel noticed the golden thread stitched across the girl doll’s brow and realized who these toys were supposed to be.

  Kestrel pushed past the girl and her mother. She tried to forget the doll. She looked for Tensen.

  She found him inspecting a gutted suckling pig that hung from a hook in a stall. “Oh, good,” he said when he saw Kestrel. “Just in time. I might have had to buy a pig to keep up appearances, and who knows how I would have smuggled that back into my rooms.”

  They merged into the crowd of shoppers—servants, mostly, sent to get the morning meat while it was fresh. Kestrel and Tensen worked their way to the end of the line of stalls and up the slope of a hill, where there were few people.

  “The Senate leader has been to southern Herran,” Kestrel told him. “I can think of only one reason. The emperor asked him to inspect the hearthnut harvest and gauge how large the crop will be. The emperor must plan to take it all from Herran. He’ll know if you try to hold back any for yourselves.”

  Tensen looked older in the outside light, his wrinkles deeper, his eyes nearly lashless. “This will mean famine.”

  Slowly, Kestrel said, “I have an idea.”

  Tensen waited. When she remained silent, he raised his brows.

  “It might not be a good idea,” she said.

  “It must be better than nothing.”

  “I’m not so sure.” She thought of the horses of the eastern plains. She heard Arin saying murder. That word had raked claws through his voice. It had sunk them deep into her.

  Tensen placed one hand on her shoulder. For all that his hand was light while the general’s was heavy, the gesture reminded Kestrel of her father. “You could harvest the crop early and hide it,” she told Tensen, “but leave some hearthnuts on the trees. Then infect them. Choose your favorite pest. Gull wasp, beetles, caterpillars … whatever will breed quickly. When the emperor asks for the crop, it won’t be your fault if you’ve nothing to give him.” Tensen’s smile warmed. Kestrel wondered what her father’s father had been like, or her mother’s, and whether if she had had a grandfather, he would look at her like this. “If the emperor believes you’re lying, he can see the wasted fields for himself. But … it might ruin the trees. You might starve next year when nothing but worms grow in your fields.”

  “We’ll worry about next year if we come to it,” said Tensen. He squinted at a few pinpricks of snow. They were just starting to come down. “Arin’s been pressing me to say who provided the information about poor Thrynne.”

  Her heart jumped. “What did you tell him? You can’t tell him it was me. You promised.”

  “Don’t worry. We both know what it means to lie for the right reasons. I won’t share your secret. I insisted on my informant’s anonymity. I called her the Moth. That doesn’t bother you, does it? Being named after a lowly household pest?”

  The corner of Kestrel’s mouth lifted. “I don’t mind being a moth. I would probably star
t eating silk if it meant that I could fly.”

  * * *

  The sleeve’s cuff had finally frayed. Arin pitched the shirt into the trunk. He unstrapped the sheathed dagger, whose almost slight weight made him uneasy. He didn’t like to have Kestrel’s dagger on him. But he also didn’t like the idea of packing it away, or leaving it behind. He glanced back at the openmouthed trunk. The unraveling shirt rested on top of its contents.

  Arin set the dagger aside. He reached for the shirt again and tugged on a thread. It spun free, a spider’s line that Arin wrapped around one finger until it cut off the circulation. He gave a sharp yank. The thread broke from the shirt. He stared at it.

  It was crazy, the thought that a simple string could help Herran. But Arin left his rooms, sought Deliah, and asked her for spools of thread in many colors.

  * * *

  “You smell like fish,” Arin told Tensen when the minister entered the suite.

  “My shoes, I think. I stepped in something.” Tensen glanced up and saw the closed trunk with its tightened straps waiting by the door. “Arin, are you leaving me?”

  “I’m no good here.”

  “Do you think you will do more good in Herran? I hate to be rude, but surely you understand by now that being a governor means little more than giving the emperor whatever he wants. Your cousin’s been able to manage that just fine in your absence.”

  “I’m not going to Herran. I’m going to the east.”

  Tensen blinked, then frowned. He passed a palm over the trunk. He fiddled with the straps. “What could you hope to find there?”

  “Allies.”

  “The east doesn’t make allies. The east is the east. They don’t like outsiders.”

  “I’m not asking for your advice.”

  “Apparently not. Because if you were, I would remind you that people who go to that country rarely return, and those who do aren’t the same.”

  “I could use a change.”

  Tensen studied him. “You were out all night. I wonder what has inspired this decision of yours.”

  “Tensen, we’re already at war. We need to face facts. Herran will have to fight free of the empire, and we’re no match for it. The east might be.”