The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  Kestrel hadn’t meant to upset the senator. She’d just been curious. She wasn’t aware that his wife, also at the dinner, hadn’t known about the mistresses.

  Kestrel was sent from the table to sit alone in Jess’s suite.

  Ronan smuggled her dessert. They ate white powdered cakes together, sugar dust all over their faces, and she laughed as Ronan imitated the senator’s reaction, puffing out his cheeks and holding his breath until his face turned red.

  After that, Ronan noticed her.

  Kestrel missed her friend. She missed him right now as he sat before her, everything about him playful and careless except for his eyes, which cared very much, and were cold.

  He drank his cup dry. “What do you want, Kestrel?”

  “Did you tell Jess?”

  Ronan arched one brow. “Did I tell Jess.” He twirled his glass by its stem. “Let’s see. Did I tell Jess that those rumors were true, that all autumn long you had a lover—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “That’s right. It began in summer, when you bought him. Did I tell Jess that? Did I tell her that you’d rather buy someone to bring to your bed than love her brother? Maybe we wondered out loud what was so repulsive about marriage to me that you chose a slave instead.

  “Maybe I told Jess, ‘I know, I know. You loved her, too. But on Firstwinter night she wasn’t there when you drank the poisoned wine. She wasn’t there when you gagged and choked and I dragged you behind a curtain to hide while slaves stabbed our friends. Kestrel wasn’t there when I held my dying sister. Because Kestrel left the ball with him.’” Ronan set the wineglass down on a table with infinitely delicate precision. “No, I didn’t tell Jess that. One broken heart in the family is enough.”

  Kestrel tasted the memory of those sugared cakes. Their lost sweetness made it impossible to speak.

  “Troubled, Kestrel?”

  Though she knew he didn’t really want to hear her answer, she couldn’t help telling him. “Jess won’t answer my letters. When I pay her a call, servants say she’s out. She’s not. She’s in her rooms, waiting for me to leave. I thought that maybe…”

  “I had been telling her some hard truths.” Ronan laced his fingers and then spread them wide, shrugging. “Have you considered that whatever has come between you two is your doing?”

  I saw him, Jess had said when Kestrel had slipped into bed beside her the night of her engagement ball. What exactly had Jess seen?

  “What’s this?” Ronan quickly leaned forward to tug on a corner of the folded paper peeking out of her skirt pocket. He pulled the recruitment list free.

  “Nothing.” She reached for it.

  He jerked the page away and unfolded it. “Ohhh. I know what this is. Look, you even got Caris to sign up. Now, where’s a pen?”

  “No. Ronan, don’t.”

  Holding the list of recruits high above Kestrel’s reach as if they were children, Ronan rummaged one-handed around the room.

  “Stop.” Kestrel yanked on his arm. She tried to snake her way into his path. He ducked, and twisted, and laughed. He opened a secretaire and found a jug of wine where papers should be. “Nice, very nice, but not exactly what I was looking for…” He pulled out drawers. He crowed when he found ink and a pen.

  Ronan, sent to war. Ronan, bleeding into the dirt.

  She was near tears. “Please,” she said, “don’t sign that paper.”

  He inked the pen and held the list down on the secretaire with both hands as if it might fly away.

  “I beg you,” Kestrel said.

  Ronan smiled, and signed.

  * * *

  Kestrel’s escort was waiting patiently by the club door. The maid said nothing as they stepped into the carriage and Kestrel gave the order to return to the palace. But the girl watched as Kestrel unwrapped the balled sheet of paper and let it fall to her lap.

  With a shuddering jolt, the carriage pulled forward. It trundled up the mountain.

  “It’s dirty,” the maid said. She was looking at the list.

  It was splotched with ink. Kestrel had knocked the bottle over when she finally snatched the list back from Ronan. The page had rusty smears right by his name; Ronan’s knuckles must have been still bleeding. And although the maid wouldn’t have been able to tell, not after the way the page had been crushed, the paper was a little warped, the way paper gets when exposed to water, or sweat—or tears.

  Kestrel gently folded the page. Destroying it would change nothing. It wasn’t the signature that was important, but the act of signing. The recruits would still report to the city barracks. They’d given their word, witnessed by Kestrel. A Valorian honored his word.

  “What is that?” said the maid.

  “A guest list.” Kestrel imagined a long, empty table set with bare white plates. She had set them.

  Suddenly, Kestrel leaned forward and rapped at the glass that separated her from the carriage driver. She had changed her mind, she said.

  Kestrel gave the driver a new destination.

  * * *

  “I didn’t realize you were interested in water engineering,” said Elinor as a southern isle slave served them a rare liquor that tasted like burnt caramel. It was very expensive.

  Kestrel sipped from her cut-crystal glass. Elinor’s townhome was modest. The walls were painted instead of papered. A long crack ran through the lacy white plaster molding in the ceiling.

  But the water engineer had expensive liquor. There were pale, sweet, imported berries heaped in a bowl on the low table near the divan where she and Kestrel sat. Of course, Elinor would set out her finest food and drink for a visitor of Kestrel’s rank. But the liquor and berries seemed too much for someone of her means, judging by the state of her house. Tensen had told Kestrel about the bets placed on her wedding dress. She thought that the berries, liquor, and even the crystal glasses could have been acquired on credit by someone expecting a large windfall in a matter of months. The Firstsummer wedding was, after all, not so far away.

  Kestrel forced a smile. “The emperor thinks I should be interested in anything that concerns the empire. And my father valued your skills during war.”

  The engineer’s plain face went pink with pride.

  “Didn’t you serve with the general in the east?” Kestrel said.

  “Years ago.” Elinor’s face lost its pleasure. When she caught Kestrel’s questioning look, she said, “The east is a savage land. Engineers might technically be members of the military, my lady, but I wasn’t ready. The Dacrans are devious fighters. I was supposed to build bridges and dams, not fight, but the reeds by the rivers were high. They were infested with tigers. They hid barbarians with poisoned crossbow quarrels. Your father kept me safe. He kept me alive.”

  If the emperor had rewarded the engineer, could it have been for a favor she had done in the east? Maybe it had nothing to do with Herran.

  The southern isle slave refilled the engineer’s cup. Kestrel watched her. She was a young girl, younger than Kestrel. The southern islands—the Cayn Saratu, as their people had once called them—had been one of the first territories Valoria had conquered. Kestrel’s father had been a lieutenant then. This girl was young enough to have been born into slavery. She’d never known another life. She might not have ever known her mother tongue—or even her mother.

  Suddenly Kestrel no longer cared whether the emperor’s secret was about Herran, or the east, or some other territory. She wanted the empire to be that long table that haunted her mind. She wanted to flip it over and send all those empty plates crashing to the floor.

  The slave stirred uneasily. Kestrel realized that she was staring at the girl, who said, “More, my lady?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The engineer said to Kestrel, “I suppose you don’t remember me. You were a little girl when I saw you last. It was just after the colonization of Herran.”

  Kestrel looked at Elinor again, at the solid, intelligent way of her. Kestrel had a faint memory of kneeling by the fou
ntain in her Herran villa and tipping red dye filched from the slaves’ workroom into the fountain. She’d been curious. She had overheard a word at dinner the night before, while her father talked with his guest. Dilution. It was a word she didn’t know.

  “I dyed our fountain pink because of you,” Kestrel told the engineer.

  “Really?”

  “I was trying for red, but I didn’t have enough dye.” Kestrel pressed her thumb into the pattern cut into her crystal glass and said, “Why were you in Herran then? Did you live there?”

  “No, I designed the city aqueducts. The Herrani system of running water was too primitive.”

  “Have you been to Herran recently?”

  “No,” said the engineer, but she was looking away. “Why would I?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I wish that you had, and that we could talk about it. Sometimes I’m homesick.”

  Elinor frowned. “Herran is a colony. This is your home.”

  “Herran was a colony. Now it’s an independent territory.”

  “By the grace of our emperor.”

  Quietly, and helplessly, the way one reaches for a lost thing that had always been there before, Kestrel said, “I miss the birds that sing there this time of the year. They carried straw in their beaks and built nests under the eaves. I miss the flickering light of the horse paths.” The engineer was staring with disapproval. Kestrel didn’t care. The words were said to Arin, who wasn’t there, and Jess, who wouldn’t listen, and Ronan, who was leaving, and her father, who had shared her home. She spoke to the southern isle slave, who had probably been born and sold and raised in the capital, and had never known her home, and so had been robbed, along with everything else, of homesickness. “There was a hill in the orange grove,” Kestrel said. “When I was little, I would lie there in summer and look at the fruit hanging in the trees like party lanterns. Then I was old enough to go to parties, and my friends and I would stay up until even the fireflies went to sleep.”

  “How nice.” Yet the engineer’s voice was cold.

  “Herran is beautiful.”

  “The problem has never been Herran. It’s the Herrani.”

  Then, as if neither of them noticed the great fault line that had opened up with their words to split the ground between them, Elinor said, “Do try the berries, my lady. They are very sweet.”

  * * *

  When the general was well enough to leave his rooms, the emperor insisted on a celebration. A mock sea battle was staged at night on the man-made pond in the Spring Garden. Two small boats were painted to look like ships of war and loaded with courtiers who shot off fireworks.

  “You don’t like it?” the emperor said when General Trajan remained silent during the applause.

  “Fireworks are a waste of black powder.”

  “Valoria has more than enough. Our enemies will never be able to compete with our cannons. Our stores of black powder are vast.”

  “Every resource has its limits.”

  “He’s always like this in the capital,” the emperor told Kestrel cheerfully. “He’s never happy unless he’s in the field.”

  Kestrel wanted to say that he had been happy in their home in Herran. In truth, though, he’d rarely been there, and she’d never dared to ask after his happiness.

  The general shifted in his wrought-iron chair. The walk to the garden had exhausted him, Kestrel could tell. Though the court physicians packed his wound with less gauze every day, it hadn’t yet closed.

  “Where’s Verex?” Kestrel wished he were there.

  The emperor shrugged.

  A firework popped into a shower of gold. It illuminated the crowd gathered around the pond. Its light glimmered on Risha’s face, and on Verex, who sat next to her on the other side of the pond.

  The emperor saw them, too. Kestrel was coming to understand that the emperor’s anger tended to coil itself tightly. It was the kind that could seem to sleep. Inevitably, though, it lashed out.

  “I hear that you paid a call to my water engineer,” he said to Kestrel.

  Another firework went off. It seemed to thud inside Kestrel’s chest. The emperor was looking at her in the same way he had looked at his son: as if he didn’t like what he saw.

  Kestrel said, “I thought that maybe I could convince her to return to the east with my father.”

  A firework lit the emperor’s face with exploded light. “That is my decision.”

  “It was just an idea. In the end, I said nothing about it to her.”

  “She tells me, however, that your conversation was nonetheless interesting.”

  The smell of sulfur was strong. The smoke burned Kestrel’s lungs. And she knew, from the threat in the emperor’s voice, that she had been prodding at a secret about the water engineer.

  She looked at her father. He was staring straight ahead, watching as a drunk gentleman stood in one of the boats, teetered, and fell into the water. The crowd laughed.

  Kestrel held her breath. The fireworks cracked and burst inside her. She waited for the emperor to speak again. She worried that her father would say that he had told Kestrel not to go to the engineer’s house.

  “Perhaps the capital isn’t entertaining enough for you,” the emperor said to Kestrel. “I hear that you long for Herran.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?” General Trajan said curtly. “She grew up there.”

  The sky rained green and red. The two men looked at each other. Kestrel knew that expression on her father’s face.

  Her fear slowed. She breathed again. Though the spring night was chilly, she felt suddenly warm. She felt the cloak of her father’s protection. She pulled it tightly around her.

  “Of course,” the emperor said silkily, and turned to watch as another fuse was lit.

  31

  When the general’s wound finally closed, the emperor gave him a gold watch.

  Kestrel stood with her father and the emperor on the pale green lawn of the Spring Garden. Archery targets had been set up, and courtiers took their turns. The sky was heaped with whipped-cream clouds. The wind blew soft and warm. Kestrel’s maids had packed away her winter clothes and brought out dresses of lace and toile.

  She thought of Arin in his twinned rooftop garden in Herran. She wondered what bloomed for him there now.

  The watch struck the hour.

  General Trajan raised his brows. “It chimes.”

  The emperor looked pleased, and Kestrel supposed that it might have been easy to mistake her father’s expression for wonder. But she saw the uncomfortable line of his mouth.

  “Don’t be jealous, Kestrel,” said the emperor. “I haven’t forgotten that your birthday is coming up.”

  She would turn eighteen. Her birthday was near spring’s end: right before the wedding. “It’s more than two months from now.”

  “Yes, not so far away. Trajan, I insist that you stay in the capital right through until the wedding.”

  The general shut the watch. “We just seized the eastern plains. If you want to hold them—”

  “Your lieutenants can manage. You’re barely healed. You can’t expect to lead a regiment in battle, and quite frankly, you’re no good to me dead. You’ll stay here. We’ll celebrate Kestrel’s birthday together.” With the air of someone presenting the best idea in the world, he added, “I thought that she could perform for the court.”

  There was the soft, faraway thump of an arrow hitting canvas.

  The general said nothing. Kestrel watched his mouth harden.

  “She has such a gift for music,” said the emperor, “like your wife did.”

  The general’s hatred of Kestrel’s music had always been clear. It embarrassed him: her love for an instrument that one bought slaves to play. Sometimes, though, Kestrel thought that it wasn’t just that. The piano was his rival. He had wanted her to enlist in the military. She wouldn’t. He wanted her to stop playing. She wouldn’t. The piano became her way of refusing him … or at least this was how she had thought he saw it. O
nly now did it occur to her that he hated to hear her play because it hurt.

  “I confess,” the emperor said, “that I want to show Kestrel off. I want everyone to see what talent my future daughter has.” With a smile, he excused himself to speak with the Senate leader.

  General Trajan’s hand closed around the watch.

  What a silly gift to give a man who led nighttime assaults where stealth could mean the difference between life and death. “Give it to me,” Kestrel said. “I will find a nice convenient rock to drop it on.”

  The general smiled a little. “When the emperor gives you a gift, it’s best to wear it.” He glanced at the new dagger at Kestrel’s hip. “Sometimes what he gives is actually a way of saying what’s his.”

  I’m not his, she wanted to say, but her father was already gone, walking slowly across the lawn to greet an off-duty naval officer.

  Someone must have struck a target’s center. She heard a smattering of applause.

  “Are you going to shoot?”

  It was Verex. He had approached without her noticing.

  “Not today.” The wind was tricky and her father was here. She didn’t want to miss.

  Verex offered her his arm. “Let’s see who wins.”

  As they walked together, Kestrel said, “You seem to know a good deal about medicine.”

  He shrugged.

  “Would you rather be a doctor than an emperor?”

  Verex peered down the low slope. He didn’t say anything. Kestrel wasn’t sure if it was because he had been offended by the question or because he didn’t know how to answer it. Then he said, “The Herrani minister of agriculture is looking at you.”

  Kestrel glanced to see Tensen sitting in a chair under the trees, folded hands resting on the cane planted into the grass in front of him.

  “No, don’t look back,” said Verex. “Be careful, Kestrel.”

  Her step faltered. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “You know why my father keeps him at court, don’t you?”