The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  “I won’t be here in summer.”

  The other man said nothing.

  As they passed through the castle gate, Arin tried to peer into the wall. “Are those … statues inside?”

  “They are the dead.” When Arin shot him a startled look, the man said. “Our ancestors. Yes, I know that some people from other countries set the people they loved on fire or dump them in a hole in a ground. But Dacra is a civilized nation.”

  They entered the castle. Arin was so wet it felt as if the rain was still drumming down on him. His boots squelched. Inside the castle, some walls were built from solid white marble, and others from that glassy rock. It had a dizzying effect. Arin found it hard to judge the space and shape of things.

  “Well?” said the Dacran. “Where do you keep your family dead?”

  “I don’t know where they are,” Arin said shortly. The other man went silent, and that made Arin uncomfortable, resentful. He wondered when he would stop sharing things he shouldn’t. It was a bad habit.

  It had begun with her. He could swear that she was the start of it all.

  “The ground,” Arin said, though he had not in fact seen what had been done with the bodies of his parents and sister. “We bury our dead, as I’m sure you know if you lived in my country long enough to learn its language.” The Dacran didn’t admit to it, or that he might have been needling Arin with questions whose answers he knew. This made Arin angrier. “You’re no more civilized than I am.”

  “You asked to walk. Here you are, walking. You asked to speak with my queen. You will. You’ve broken our laws three times—”

  “Three?”

  The man ticked them off, starting with his smallest finger. “You entered our country. You bore the weapon of our enemy. And you struck a member of the royal family.”

  Arin stared at him. The man gave a slow smile. “But we have been polite,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  The man led the way down a hall lined with palm-size paintings.

  “Wait.” Arin caught the man’s arm.

  The Dacran glanced down at Arin’s hand on him, then gave a look that made Arin let go. “You are also not supposed to touch a member of the royal family. It’s not so grave an offense as striking me, but still. I don’t know what my sister is going to do with you. The queen can hardly sentence you to death more than once.”

  “Your sister?”

  “That last offense bears a lesser punishment, though I don’t think you’ll like that one either.”

  Arin had stopped, only vaguely aware that they had entered a high-vaulted chamber. “But if you’re the queen’s brother, that means you’re Risha’s brother, too.”

  The Dacran stopped as well. “Risha?”

  There was a silent energy in this new room that kept Arin from saying anything else.

  It was wariness. It was the watchful eyes of guards.

  It was the hard expression of the young queen, who looked at Arin as if she had already pronounced his death.

  28

  “Don’t say that name again,” muttered the skull-faced man to Arin.

  The queen asked a sharp question. Her brother’s answer was slow, complicated. It was marked by pauses. Each pause gave life to a new tone of voice.

  The rain must have stopped. The peaked ceiling, made from that sheer stone, glowed with sudden sun. Prismatic light lit the room. Arin watched the queen’s changing face as her brother spoke. Her black eyes, lined with elaborate patterns of color, narrowed. She stopped him.

  “This is the part where I translate,” the Dacran told Arin, “and you hope that I tell the truth.”

  The queen said, “You’ve broken three of our laws”—here, her brother stopped his translation to hold up four fingers—“what keeps you alive is our curiosity. Satisfy it.”

  Arin said, “I have a proprosal—”

  “No,” the man told him. “Don’t start there. We don’t even know your name.”

  So Arin gave it, and his rank.

  “Governor is a Valorian title,” said the queen. “You are Valorian.”

  The insult went bone deep.

  “You cannot deny it,” said the queen. “We have heard of you. Arin of the Herrani, who once bit his masters’ heels, is a tame dog once more. Did you not swear an oath of loyalty to the emperor?”

  “I’m breaking it now.”

  “Do you so easily break your oaths?”

  “Wouldn’t you, for your people?”

  “I’m not translating that,” the skull-faced man told him. “It’s insulting. You’re a little self-destructive, aren’t you?”

  Impatient, the queen interrupted. She told Arin to explain his possession of the Valorian dagger.

  “It’s a reminder,” he said.

  “Of?”

  “What I despise.”

  The queen considered this. Her face was leaner than Risha’s, but much like her younger sister’s. It was easy, looking at the queen, to feel again his admiration for Risha, the way it had grown from the first moment Tensen had revealed her to be his Moth. Arin said to the queen, “I know that your country has suffered. I know that my own is too small to stand alone against the empire. If I had a choice, the empire or the east, I’d choose you. Let Herran be your ally.”

  She cocked her head. “What exactly would we do with you?”

  “Let us fight for you.”

  “In exchange for our protection of your little peninsula, no doubt. As you have pointed out, Herran is small. Your soldiers would hardly swell our ranks. Do you want your people to be our cannon fodder? Even if you did, how would that work? We do not even speak the same language.”

  “We’ll learn yours.”

  The queen raised a skeptical brow.

  “I’ll prove it to you,” Arin said.

  “I would like to see you try.”

  “Good,” Arin said, using the one Dacran word he knew, the one that the skull-faced man had said to him on the pier.

  The queen’s surprise was clear. But she didn’t smile, and what she said next made Arin wonder if he hadn’t just somehow deeply offended her.

  “Let us turn,” she said, “to the subject of your punishment.”

  * * *

  For bearing an enemy’s weapon, Arin was forbidden to carry any at all.

  For entering Dacran territory, Arin was not allowed to leave it.

  For his crimes against Roshar, the queen’s brother, the injured party was given permission to exact his choice of punishment.

  “I’ll have you killed later,” Roshar told Arin after bringing him to the room where he would stay. “I need time to decide the very best method.”

  Arin looked at him. The mutilations made it hard to see any resemblance to Risha or the queen. Roshar must have caught the quality of Arin’s gaze. The way it examined. Roshar sneered. “Or maybe I’ll find a punishment better than death.”

  Arin glanced away.

  Roshar began unpacking Arin’s things—with the exception of the dagger—from the satchel onto a table. Food, water, clothes. “What’s this?” Roshar held up the packet that contained spools of thread.

  “Sewing kit.”

  Roshar tossed it on the table. Then he stared down at all of Arin’s things as if they could add up to the answer to a hard question. “You’ve come a long way.”

  “Yes.”

  “All the way from the imperial capital.” Quietly, Roshar said, “Is my little sister well?”

  “Yes. She—”

  “I don’t want to talk about her. I just wanted to know how she is.”

  “Did you discuss her with the queen when we first entered that room?”

  Roshar looked at Arin as if he were insane. “Of course not.”

  “Then what took so long to tell the queen?”

  “Your crimes. In loving detail.”

  “No,” Arin said, “it sounded like a story.”

  Roshar prodded a flask of water. “Clearly you didn’t know anything about our c
ountry, if you bothered to bring this.”

  “Why won’t you tell me what you said?”

  Roshar kept poking at the flask, making it rock against the table. Slowly, he said, “Maybe I did tell a story. Maybe it was about two slaves in a faraway land, and how one helped the other.”

  “But I didn’t.” Arin remembered it again. He tasted the dirt in his mouth, felt the gravel under his cheek. He heard the cries. He felt his shame.

  “You saved me,” Roshar said.

  Arin was confused. At first he thought this was sarcasm. But there had been something open in Roshar’s voice, like yearning. Was Roshar reinventing what had really happened? Maybe he was imagining a version of the world where the Valorian’s knife had never cut his face. A fiction. A story with a happy ending.

  “I’m sorry,” Arin said carefully. “I tried. But I couldn’t do anything.”

  “You did. You saved the thing in me that decided I would run away again.”

  29

  “I want you to do something for me,” Kestrel’s father said.

  Firstspring had come and gone. Kestrel had missed most of the celebrations to be with her father in his rooms, as she was every day. The only event she’d attended was the one at the orphanage, where the children had looked dubiously at the bright kites she offered. “They’re not the right color,” a little girl had said. “I want a black one.” Afterward, Verex had gone through the leftovers. “May I keep this?” He lifted a pink-and-green kite. “It’s my favorite,” he said. Kestrel had smiled.

  Now she looked warily at her father as he lay in his bed. She waited to see what he would ask.

  “I want you to go to the battling clubs in the city,” he said, “and recruit people to the military.”

  Kestrel edged her chair away from the bed. The wooden squeak was loud. She toyed with a bit of embroidery on her sleeve and imagined that her disappointment was a thread that could be tied into knots and stitched down tight. During all the hours she had sat by her father, this was the first time he’d asked her for anything. What had she hoped he would ask?

  Perhaps to be brought a glass of water. Or to be told what had happened to the dagger he’d given her. He couldn’t have missed its replacement. The emperor’s gaudy blade was right there in full view, strapped to Kestrel’s waist.

  It seemed impossible to tell her father certain things unless he asked for them.

  But some words came easy, because they were angry and had been said many times before. “I want nothing to do with the military.”

  “Kestrel.”

  “Look at what it’s done to you.”

  “I will heal.”

  “And the next time? You are going to keep fighting until the day you’re killed, and I have to set an empty plate at the table for my father’s ghost.”

  “We don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Then you’ll leave me with nothing at all.”

  “We need more soldiers,” he said. “The army is stretched too thin.”

  “Then stop trying to take new territory.”

  “That isn’t what the emperor wants.”

  “What do you want?”

  “That,” he told her, “is a foolish question.”

  Was it because he had known her all her life that he knew exactly which words would hurt most? But no, it couldn’t be time that gave someone that power. Arin had it, too. I don’t know you anymore, he’d said. And I don’t want to.

  If she went to the battling clubs and signed more soldiers into the army, did that mean that their deaths would be her fault? Would the blood of the people they killed be on her hands? And the grief and anger of those who were left behind—was that her doing, too? She remembered how the war orphans had wanted black kites.

  “Recruit them yourself,” she told her father.

  He was silent as she strode to the door. It was that silence that ultimately stopped her. Though Kestrel’s back was to him, she still saw him as he lay wounded on the bed. Pale and drawn. Tired in a way she’d never seen.

  If she recruited more Valorians … it might help him when he returned to the field. More soldiers could mean that he’d be kept safe for another year. Maybe two.

  Kestrel sighed. Her back still to him, she said, “I don’t know why you think that I could persuade anyone to sign up.”

  “The people love you.”

  “They love you. I’m just your daughter.”

  “You escaped from Herran. You alerted us to the rebellion. And by now everyone must know how I won the eastern plains.”

  “I wish you’d claimed that idea for your own.”

  “I would never do that.”

  Kestrel turned, set her shoulders back against the door, and crossed her arms. She thought of Tensen’s latest request for information. “Do you know the chief water engineer?”

  “Elinor?” From his bed, the general looked at Kestrel with eyes narrowed in pain. This conversation had exhausted him. His breath was uneven. If he’d been anyone else, he would have already asked for medicine. “I know her a little.”

  “From your campaigns in the east?” With the exception of the plains, the lands there were watery, especially farther south, though Valorian soldiers had never reached the queen’s city in the delta.

  “Yes, and in Herran. Why?”

  “She has a townhome here. I thought that maybe … after I go to the battling clubs, you’d like for me to pay her a call. I could ask her to join the regiment when it returns east. You might need someone to build bridges, or dams—”

  “Yes.” If he’d had more energy, the general would have looked amused. “I do. But she’s the emperor’s now. He doesn’t like to share. Don’t waste your time visiting her.”

  Kestrel paused, then said, “I’m going to the battling clubs under one condition.”

  “Ah.” His head leaned back into the damp pillow. “A bargain. What must I do now?”

  “Drink your medicine.”

  * * *

  The battling clubs were not-very-secret societies. There were four in the city, and they each served young aristocrats with luxurious headquarters designed for private parties, sultry moments in hidden rooms—and, of course, fighting.

  Each club came equipped with an impressive variety of weaponry. There were keyed rooms for combatants who wished to be alone, and arenas for matches meant to be seen.

  Everybody knew the few club rules. Clean up your own blood. Money up front for gambling. Members only. Even Lady Kestrel would have had problems at the door if she hadn’t shown her father’s signet ring.

  The clubs unsettled her. It didn’t matter how much dark wainscoting lined the walls, or that the furnishings were backed by southern isle silk. The rooms still smelled like wine and sweat and blood. It made her think of fighting Irex in Herran. His boot cracking against her knee. She remembered Cheat’s weight flattening her against the floor.

  Kestrel’s mouth was chalky.

  She asked for water. She was served. Then she went about her business.

  After three clubs, she had collected about twenty names. It wasn’t much. Several Valorians who signed were wild-eyed and laughing. Some were flattered. Others—especially those closest to twenty years old—were resigned, because the empire would soon make them choose between marriage and the military anyway. If a citizen wouldn’t make babies to boost the imperial population, she would have to make war.

  In one club, two young women signed up together. They insisted on writing their names on the same line. This made Kestrel realize that they were a couple. People who loved that way—or who otherwise didn’t want to marry against their desires—often joined the military. Kestrel watched the women sign, and thought of her own marriage, and felt even worse than before.

  Kestrel reclaimed the list. She shoved it inside her skirt pocket.

  In the last club, a fight was on.

  The small arena was packed and loud, the air heavy. Kestrel was a latecomer and had to stand at the back of the crowd. Peering
over someone’s shoulder, she caught a glimpse of the fighters, both men, both with blond hair tied back. The one whose back was to her was slender but quick.

  It was a fistfight. Kestrel couldn’t see any weapons either in the combatants’ hands or strapped to their bodies, so this wasn’t a duel fought over honor, but for pleasure.

  The larger man crashed a fist into the face of the thinner one. He cried out. The crowd surged forward.

  Kestrel did, too. She knew that cry. She would swear that she recognized that voice. But the gap that had given her a view of the fighters had closed. She could see nothing now, and people were shouting, and she couldn’t even tell if they were shouting someone’s name.

  She did. She called out a name. The noise swallowed it.

  Kestrel elbowed her way forward. She pushed her way to the front. The slender man was coming up from the ground. He delivered a series of uppercuts to his opponent’s gut, yanked on an ear, and punched his face.

  The big fighter went down. He wasn’t getting up.

  The crowd began shouting again, and this time they clearly were shouting a name. It was the same one on Kestrel’s lips, the one that she said again as the winner turned around, wiped blood from his mouth, and saw her.

  Ronan.

  30

  After the crowd cleared, Kestrel told the club owner to find her a private room. Ronan was a member, and could have arranged this himself. Instead, he watched and listened to Kestrel’s instructions with something like amusement, or the air of someone pleasantly surprised by the appearance of an old friend. But his smile was bitter.

  He ordered a carafe of cold wine. Once he and Kestrel were alone, he drank half of it down at once.

  “A private audience with the future empress,” Ronan said, unwinding bloodied linen strips from his knuckles. “I’m honored.” He settled his long frame in a chair and looked up at her. He had a split lip. His blond hair was loose and sweaty, his finely drawn face purpled with bruises. He ran a finger along the rim of his glass until it hummed.

  When Kestrel was little, Jess’s older brother had ignored her. Then one evening, when Kestrel was perhaps fifteen, she and her father had been invited to a society dinner at his house. Over the third course, she asked a senator whether he’d marry all of his mistresses if he could have more than one wife.