“It’s illegal for a foreigner to enter Dacra.”
“I’m no ordinary foreigner.”
Tensen cupped his hands and opened them wide as if scattering seeds to the floor. It was the Herrani gesture of skepticism.
“Don’t doubt me,” Arin said.
“It’s not you I doubt, but the idea. It’s not safe.”
“Nothing’s safe. Staying here isn’t safe. And going home is useless. You asked me when we first came here what I would choose, myself or my country.”
“That’s true,” Tensen said slowly. “I did.”
“This is my choice.”
“A choice like that is easy when you don’t really know what it will cost.”
“Whether it’s easy or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s mine.”
Tensen pursed his lips. The loose flesh of his neck sank gently beneath his lowered chin. Abruptly, he leveled his gaze and met Arin’s. Tensen pulled the gold ring from his finger. “Take this.”
“I can’t take that.”
“I want you to.”
“It was your grandson’s.”
“That’s why I want you to take it.”
“Tensen. No.”
“Am I not allowed to worry for you?” Tensen didn’t look at the ring in his outstretched hand. He kept his eyes on Arin. “You’ll go east no matter what I say. If you won’t take my advice, the least you can do is honor an old man’s gift by accepting it.”
Still reluctant, Arin took the ring. It fit on his smallest finger.
“Off you go, then.” Tensen patted the strapped trunk with deliberate lightness, in a way that avoided the emotion of the moment and yet also didn’t, because the avoidance was evidence of Tensen’s difficulty. He no longer looked at Arin directly. It made Arin wish he hadn’t accepted the ring. It made him remember his mother’s emerald. It made him wonder which pain was greater: to give up something precious, or to see it taken away. In a flash that he would have resisted if he could, Arin remembered Kestrel in the tavern, her lips bitten white as he’d accused her. She had looked cornered. She had looked trapped.
No, caught. That’s how the guilty look.
“Stop in Herran on your way east,” Tensen said, and Arin was glad to be torn away from his thoughts. “I have a job for you.” The minister told Arin about the hearthnut harvest.
“Where’d you get this information?” Arin asked.
Tensen smiled.
“You met with the Moth,” Arin said. “Outside the palace. That’s why your shoes smell like fish.”
“I should have cleaned them,” Tensen said mournfully.
Arin tried to imagine Risha talking with Tensen on the wharf, or maybe in the Butcher’s Row, but failed. “When was this meeting? It’s almost noon. You weren’t in the state room this morning.” Neither had been Kestrel.
Arin was suddenly furious with himself. He knew exactly which way his thoughts were going. He couldn’t believe it. Even now, even when he knew what Kestrel had done, even when he’d heard her admit it, heard it from her very lips, Arin’s mind kept playing its favorite sick game. It noted that Risha certainly hadn’t smelled like fish. Not like Tensen. How conveniently Arin’s imagination ignored the possibility that Risha might have spoken with Tensen and then changed her shoes before going to the state room. No, Arin’s unruly mind didn’t care for that logical explanation. Instead it presented Arin with the image of Kestrel in her maid’s dress. Meeting with Tensen. Telling him secrets.
“Stop,” Arin snapped. Tensen closed his mouth, his expression puzzled. “Just stop.” Arin pressed his fingers to his temples. He rubbed hard. “You don’t have to tell me where you were or when. I don’t need to know.”
“Arin, have I made you angry?”
“No.”
“Why are you angry?”
“Only at myself.” Arin’s hand shifted to pinch the bridge of his nose, his thumb digging into the corner of his closed left eye. He ignored how it made the scratched eyelid smart. He wanted that image of Kestrel to go away. “It’s stupid.” Arin felt worn out. He’d been ill, hadn’t slept. His body was very heavy.
“Gods, Arin, sit down. You look ready to fall asleep on your feet.”
Yes, the tired mind plays tricks. Arin knew that. His hand dropped from his face. He found a chair, sat, and felt better. More focused. “I went into the city last night,” he told Tensen. “I asked the bookkeeper about bets on the wedding dress. The chief palace engineer knows how to play the odds.”
Tensen listened to Arin explain what he had learned from the bookkeeper. “So if the emperor paid the senator for his secret trip to Herran with a golden bet,” Tensen said, “it’s possible that the water engineer is profiting from some similar favor.”
“Look into it.”
“I will, but what would you have me do with what I learn? Sending a message to you in the eastern queen’s city is impossible.”
“There’s the temple island,” Arin said. Dacrans worshipped one god, and since all were free to worship her, foreigners were allowed to dock at a holy island off the country’s southern coast. It was a great center of trade. “You can send a message there.”
“Even so, we’d risk the message falling into unfriendly hands. Messenger hawks can be captured, codes broken—”
“First someone would have to realize he’s looking at a code.” Arin produced the sack of spooled threads. “Do you remember Favor-Keeping?”
The hours lengthened. The time for the midday meal came and went, and Arin and Tensen ignored their gnawing hunger as they sorted out the threaded code, how each color would represent a person, as did the Favor-Keeper’s ball of strings throughout the years of slavery. Arin tied a different number of knots for each letter of the Herrani alphabet. He braided meaning into the way one color would cross another, and in the end he held something that looked like a piece of trim that could be sewn on the cuff of a sleeve and worn openly. A new fashion. To most eyes, it would look like nothing more than decoration.
Black was the emperor. Yellow, the prince. Tensen chose green for himself. “Here.” Arin had handed him the spool of gray. “For your Moth.” He added, “For Risha.”
Tensen smiled.
It wasn’t until they had assigned a color for almost every key courtier that Tensen said slowly in a way Arin would remember, “Don’t you want a thread for Lady Kestrel?”
“No. I don’t.”
* * *
From Kestrel’s windows that day, she saw banners on the barbican rise and blow toward the sea with a wind that must have been warm. A fine rain—not snow—blurred the view. Firstspring would come sooner than Kestrel wanted. Then Firstsummer, and the wedding.
Alone, she shook dead masker moths from their envelope of paper onto a mosaic marble table. She’d given half of her moths to Tensen in the market, in case he wanted to leave one for her on the painting in the gallery.
Kestrel watched moths change to match the mosaic. Then she pushed one with a delicate finger and watched it change again.
She felt a surge of anger at the moths for hiding so well. She resisted an urge to crush them.
Couldn’t she try to explain herself to Arin? Last night, Kestrel had been ready to tell him everything. She still could.
Uncertain, Kestrel swept the moths back into their packet.
Deliah came. Kestrel had forgotten that she was supposed to be fitted for a day dress. The Herrani woman pinned around her. Kestrel watched the window mist with rain.
Deliah paused in her pinning. “I think you should know that Arin left today. He sailed when the wind rose.”
Kestrel’s gaze flinched away. She looked again toward the window as if she would be able to see the harbor, and beyond that, the waves, and on the waves, a ship. But all Kestrel saw were the battlements of the palace. The rain had stopped. It had lifted its gray veil. The sky was clean now, and brutally clear.
22
Young courtiers were making kites for the city’s war
orphans. Waxed black parchment was glued to stick frames and painted with the golden eyes and feathers of birds of prey. Kestrel and Verex would bring them to the orphanage on Firstspring.
In the large solarium, which had been added to the palace after the Herrani invasion as if the emperor had seized the whole history of Herrani architecture along with its country, Kestrel made a paper chain for a kite’s tail. At other tables, courtiers talked quietly. Kestrel sat alone. Her fingers moved quickly, but she felt as if someone else was making them move, and that she was no more than that cloth doll she’d seen carried through the crowd of the Butcher’s Row.
Kestrel thought of visiting the children. She thought of telling them how their parents had brought honor to the empire. She thought of a ship sailing far away from her.
Her fingers stopped. Her throat closed. Kestrel summoned a new set of paints. She began to cover her kites with swirls of green and blue and pink.
Kestrel heard a rustle of silk as a woman claimed a nearby chair.
“Very pretty,” Maris commented. “But not military colors.”
Kestrel dipped her brush in a jar of water, rang it noisily around, and then set it in a pot of violet. “They’re children, not soldiers.”
“Why, you’re right, of course. This is much more cheerful! Here, let me help.”
Kestrel eyed her briefly, but Maris contented herself with painting in silence. After making her second kite look like a gaudy butterfly, Maris said, “Your friend has a delicious brother. Tell me all about him. Is he taken?”
Kestrel lifted her brush. Paint dribbled down her sleeve. “What?”
“Lord Ronan. Very lucky, isn’t it, that the conquering of Herran gave us so many more titled young men? All that new territory, so nicely portioned out by the emperor ten years ago, with lovely titles to go with it. Too bad the land is gone. But a lord is a lord forever. And he is such a lord! Just the other day, I saw Ronan fight in the city, and—”
“You didn’t. You can’t have.”
Maris’s eyes flashed. “He’s not yours to keep or give.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“We can’t all be empresses. I must marry. I am nearly twenty.” Maris’s voice dropped. “I don’t want to go to war.”
“I meant that you must have seen someone else in the city.” Kestrel tried to speak evenly, but she already didn’t believe her own words. “Ronan isn’t in the capital. He went with Jess and their parents to the south.”
“I assure you, he didn’t.”
“They went away.” Kestrel’s lips had gone numb. “For Jess’s health.”
Maris’s expression changed. Kestrel saw it shift from confusion to a curious understanding before it settled, finally, into a kindness that made Kestrel’s stomach clench. “Lady Kestrel,” said Maris, “you are mistaken. I have wondered why their family avoids the court, but Jess and Ronan attend many functions in the city. I have seen them several times. They’ve been in the capital ever since your engagement ball.”
* * *
Kestrel went to Jess’s townhome in the city. Jess’s footman took her card, embossed with her personal seal, and accepted her into the receiving room, which was lined with polished, crossed spears. There was no trace of dust. The house showed no signs of having been closed up for a family journey south.
“The lady is not at home,” the footman said.
“But the family’s in residence?” Kestrel pressed. “Is Jess usually here?”
The footman shifted, and was silent.
“Is her brother home?” Kestrel asked.
When the footman still said nothing, Kestrel said, “Do you know who I am?”
The footman confessed that Ronan kept odd hours. “He’s often not here. And his sister—”
“If she’s not here, then I’ll wait in the parlor until she returns,” Kestrel said, though this proposal risked seeing Ronan.
The footman fidgeted. “I wouldn’t recommend that, my lady. I believe that both brother and sister will be out for a great deal of time.”
“I’ll wait.”
And she did. She was determined to sleep on the parlor divan if she must.
The fire throbbed low. Her tea grew cold.
She remembered Jess frowning in her sleep. She remembered crushing the glass petal of Jess’s necklace against the marble mantel.
Was Jess’s silence—her absence, her lies—because of that broken gift? Maybe that was Kestrel’s offense. But she had told Jess, and Jess had forgiven her. Hadn’t she?
Or …
What had Ronan told Jess? Kestrel had thought his pride would keep him from ever telling his sister about his marriage proposal to Kestrel on Firstwinter night—and his rejection, and whom Kestrel had preferred over him.
Dread ate at her. When the clock struck the third hour, she shifted against a cushion. It released a trace of Jess’s perfume. A white flower from Herran. It bloomed behind Kestrel’s eyes.
The scent was fresh.
The parlor had a view of the road. Kestrel could see her own carriage, and her escort waiting inside it.
Kestrel fought the realization. She didn’t want to understand. But she did … she envisioned so clearly how Jess had been sitting on this very sofa when Kestrel’s carriage had pulled up. Jess had left word with a footman. Then she’d retreated to another part of the house. She was waiting there. She was waiting for Kestrel to leave.
The perfume watered Kestrel’s eyes.
“I’ll return another day,” she told the footman on her way out, but when she stepped into the carriage, Kestrel glanced up over her shoulder and caught a flutter of fabric in a high window of the town house. A curtain had been drawn aside. Someone was watching her.
The instant Kestrel looked at it, the curtain fell.
* * *
As Kestrel walked through the barbican, she overheard palace guards laughing.
“Where’s he disappeared to these days?” one of them said.
“The kennels,” answered another. “He’s been playing with puppies in the muck. The perfect place for our illustrious prince, if you ask me.”
Kestrel stopped. She returned, and approached the guards. They weren’t afraid, which meant they thought she shared their contempt.
She looked at the guard who had spoken last. Kestrel slapped his face. In the shocked silence that followed, Kestrel clenched her stinging hand and walked away.
* * *
Verex was holed up in one of the kennel’s pens, sitting on a nest of filthy straw and nursing a puppy with a rag sopped in milk. The puppy was peacefully floppy in Verex’s hands, its skin wrinkled and loose, eyes closed.
When Verex saw Kestrel, he almost looked like an animal himself, cornered and wary. “Don’t say it,” he told her.
“Say what?”
“Whatever you’re going to say.”
She leaned over the barrier of the wooden pen. “Will you show me how to do that?”
The hand holding the rag lifted in surprise. Milk dripped onto the puppy.
Kestrel entered the pen, sat next to Verex on the straw, and held out a cupped hand.
“No.” He brought her left palm up to meet her right and form a bowl. “Like this.” He eased the little animal into her hands. It was a yielding warmth, soft and boneless. Its whole body moved with its breath. Kestrel wondered if she’d been like this, as a baby in her father’s arms, and if he had been quieted and comforted to hold her as she held this creature.
“It’s a runt,” Verex said. “Its mother won’t nurse it.” He showed her how to nudge the milk rag into the puppy’s mouth.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
The prince fiddled with a bit of straw. “Oh, I figured it out. It’s not hard to guess what my father holds over you.” He caught her startled look. “Not when you know him like I do. He’d have this hound’s neck snapped even if its dam nursed it after all. He doesn’t like weaklings. But he loves to discover a weakness. And now your gover
nor is gone.”
She kept her blurred eyes on the puppy. “That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I wanted to say.”
“But it’s the truth. You love him. That’s your weakness. One way or another, it’s why you agreed to marry me.”
Kestrel smoothed a thumb over the soft flip of one tiny ear. She looked at the puppy, blind and asleep even while sucking at the milk.
Verex said, “No one likes to be used.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to use you.”
“Honestly, I expect to be used. This is the court. I never thought … well, I’m my father’s son, aren’t I? Of course my marriage would be arranged. Of course I wouldn’t get to choose. I know that I’ve been angry. I know that I am, and that it eats at me, but … I would have understood, Kestrel, about the engagement. I understand you now. You could have told me why.”
“Do you think that why really matters?”
“Don’t you?”
“Verex, I’ve done something horrible.” The puppy’s ribs rose and fell as Kestrel told Verex about her plan to poison the horses of the eastern plains, and why she’d suggested it.
He was silent. One hand twitched in the straw. Kestrel thought he meant to take the puppy away from her, but he didn’t.
She said, “I’ve heard that you don’t agree with the war in the east.”
“My father says I’m soft. He’s right.”
“You must blame me all the more.”
“For being hard?” He brushed his fair hair out of his eyes so that he could see her better. “Is that what you think you are?”
“If I hadn’t suggested poison, maybe the plains wouldn’t have been burned after all. Maybe our army would have done nothing.”
He gave a cynical laugh.
She said, “If I’d never talked with your father, at least whatever did happen wouldn’t have been my fault.”
“I’m not sure that not knowing is the same thing as innocence.” He leaned back into the rustling, smelly straw. “I think that you did the best that you could. Risha will think so, too, when I tell her.”
“No. Don’t tell her. Please.”
“I tell her everything,” he said simply.
The Winner's Crime Page 16
