Slowly, Kestrel said, “To watch him.”
“What will my father think if he watches that minister watch you?”
Kestrel swallowed a bubbling nervousness. Her hands, though lightly gloved, were very cold. But she strove to sound confident and careless. “People look at me all the time. I can’t help it.”
Verex shook his head and turned to eye the archers.
“I assure you,” she said, “I care nothing for Herran’s minister.”
He gave her a sidelong, reproachful look. “Kestrel, I know what you care about.”
She tried for a teasing tone and change of subject. “Since we’re gossiping about who watches whom, don’t you think it’s time you told me which of my maids is in your pay?”
“What would that change? Don’t you realize by now that all of them are watching you? I bribe one, but who bribes the others?” Verex faced her fully now. “You asked me whether I would have liked to become a physician. Yes. I would have. Once. I even had books on the subject. My father burned them. Kestrel, I know you think that you’ve hidden your heart where no one can see it.” Verex’s dark eyes held hers. “But you need to hide it better.”
An arrow flew high above its target, its feathers whistling.
“Verex, what has my maid told you?”
“Not much … so far.” He must have seen the worry she was trying to hide. His expression softened. “Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”
Kestrel mustered a bright, tense smile.
Verex sighed. “Come on,” he said. “I want to see Risha shoot.”
Kestrel let him lead her to the archers. She was glad that she’d made no promise to enter the archery contest. Her fingers would tremble on the bowstring.
Risha notched an arrow. She had a fine, strong line. Kestrel focused on watching the eastern girl. If she watched Risha with the same intensity that Verex did, she might be able to forget, if only for a moment, Verex’s warning.
Risha let the arrow go. It soared lazily and hit the target’s edge. All of her arrows in the target were badly placed. Kestrel would have thought from the way Risha held her bow that she would have been able to do better. Then again, the day was full of sneaky little breezes.
Risha aimed again.
“… born first?” Kestrel heard someone saying. “A baby prince or princess?”
Verex went still beside her. Kestrel spotted the gossiping courtiers. She realized they were looking right at her and Verex. Their words came clear on the wind. It shouldn’t have taken so long for Kestrel to understand what they meant. When she did, her cheeks burned.
Risha let the arrow fly.
It drove deep into the target’s very center.
32
Learning the eastern language made Arin feel like he was remembering something he didn’t know he knew. Dacran was very similar to Herrani. It had some of the same patterns, and though the vocabulary was different, the words didn’t sound completely alien, either. Arin learned quickly.
If the eastern language felt familiar, much in this new country was strange. Dacran cuisine focused far more on color than taste. Clothes were plain but cosmetics were not, and men as well as women used them. Roshar in particular liked to line his eyes with vivid, dramatic flair, as if to show that he knew this drew attention to his mutilations, and he didn’t care.
Arin was allowed to roam the castle and city. “Everyone knows who you are,” Roshar had said with a shrug. “If you wander too far away, the city militia will happily shoot you.”
“What exactly is ‘too far’?”
Roshar told him to figure it out for himself.
The queen, meanwhile, kept her distance.
At first, Arin stayed inside the castle, thinking that the structure was a shell that housed not only the queen, but her internal self. If he knew its hallways and alcoves and chambers, he might be able to guess at what would persuade her to an alliance with Herran.
But the dizzying mix of transparent and opaque walls gave him no clues. He wandered. Sometimes he heard distant music played in other rooms. There was an instrument like the Herrani violin, except with a flatter bridge, and here the strings were tuned more sharply and played with a percussive quality: lots of plucked notes and aggressive bow strokes.
Arin rarely saw the queen. When he did, she ignored him in an icy way that never failed to remind him that he had no weapon. His parents had thought that openly carrying a blade was the height of barbarism. Now, though, Arin felt strange without Kestrel’s dagger at his hip. Its lack made him uncomfortable … and even more uncomfortable about what that discomfort might mean.
The easterners were always well armed. They favored small weapons. Their crossbows were smaller than Arin had ever seen. From Roshar, he learned that they weren’t as powerful as a western crossbow, but more accurate and easier to load quickly.
The eastern love for the miniature was everywhere within the castle. Paintings no larger than a handspan adorned the walls. Basins collecting rainwater that funneled down from the roofs were decorated with tiny mosaics of dragonflies. Shelves in rooms meant for smoking held clocks the size of watches, and porcelain eggs that, when opened, showed coiled snakes made from jointed green glass. Some eggs hatched tiny tigers that gnashed their mechanical teeth.
Once, Arin strayed far into the recesses of the castle and found a model of the castle on a pedestal. Inside, suites had details that made Arin wish for a magnifying lens. With a fingernail, he turned a faucet in a bathing room. Water filled the teacup-size bathtub. It all made Arin feel too large: thuggish and fumbling.
“I was told that you were here,” said a voice behind him. It was Roshar.
Arin turned off the bathtub’s water.
“That was my sister’s.” Roshar’s tone made clear which sister he meant. He stared at a suite of rooms that looked fit for a little princess. A chest sat at the foot of a canopied bed. Arin moved to open it. He expected Roshar to snarl an objection, but Roshar simply looked at him, black eyes curious and narrow, like the eyes of the snakes in the porcelain eggs. With one finger, Arin reached inside the chest.
He snatched his hand back. Blood speckled his finger. It felt as if he’d been bitten by a host of tiny fangs.
Roshar took the chest from the small room. He tipped its contents onto his palm, which he held out for Arin to see.
Miniature weapons. Swords the size of matchsticks. Daggers like sharp, steel filings. Roshar squeezed his hand around them, then flung the bloody little weapons into Risha’s dollhouse suite.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
* * *
“A beheading would be spectacular,” Roshar said as Arin steered up the canal. It was a clear day. “Don’t you think? You’re too heavy for a good hanging. Your neck would break the moment you dropped.”
“Beheading’s quick, too.”
“Not if the ax is dull.”
It was a typical conversation between Arin and Roshar, who had very helpfully taught Arin his country’s words for various deaths by execution and reminded Arin on a daily basis that his life was in the prince’s hands. Usually, this kind of talk cheered Roshar, who lay settled into his end of the canoe, his arms crossed over his chest. One leg draped over the side of the boat. His eyes were on the blue sky. But the lazy posture looked like a lie today. Roshar’s body was set with hard lines.
Then his gaze lowered and cast out over the city. Something caught his attention. It changed his face. It stole all the pretending from it, and left nothing but the same naked anger that had made him clench a fist around Risha’s toy weapons.
Arin saw what he saw.
A woman wandered near the edge of the canal. She wore the tapered trousers of the plainspeople. Nestled in her arms was a cloth bundle of blue, the color worn by Dacran children. She held the bundle like a baby. But it had no face. It had no hands. It was nothing more than a rag wrapped around itself. She touched it tenderly.
Arin stopped rowing. The water swirled away from his still oa
r.
Sometimes, Arin almost understood what Kestrel had done. Even now, as he felt the drift of the boat and didn’t fight its pull, Arin remembered the yearning in Kestrel’s face whenever she’d mentioned her father. Like a homesickness. Arin had wanted to shake it out of her. Especially during those early months when she had owned him. He had wanted to force her to see her father for what he was. He had wanted her to acknowledge what she was, how she was wrong, how she shouldn’t long for her father’s love. It was soaked in blood. Didn’t she see that? How could she not? Once, he’d hated her for it.
Then it had somehow touched him. He knew it himself. He, too, wanted what he shouldn’t. He, too, felt how the heart chooses its own home and refuses reason. Not here, he’d tried to say. Not this. Not mine. Never. But he had felt the same sickness.
In retrospect, Kestrel’s role in the taking of the eastern plains was predictable. Sometimes he damned her for currying favor with the emperor, or blamed her for playing war like a game just because she could. Yet he thought he knew the truth of her reasons. She’d done it for her father.
It almost made sense. At least, it did when he was near sleep and his mind was quiet, and it was harder to help what entered it. Right before sleep, he came close to understanding.
But he was awake now. He was staring as the glassy-eyed woman cradled her cloth baby. He saw her caress the blue folds. He saw the end of understanding.
Arin wished that Kestrel could see what he saw. He wished that he could make her pay for what she had done.
33
Spring pinched the world open. Tight buds split along their seams and spilled out their colors.
Kestrel stayed indoors. It didn’t help. Thoughts, too, have their seasons, and she couldn’t stop what worked its way up through the underground of her mind. And what were her thoughts? What did she gather in secret, in guilt? What did she hold, and lift to the light to see better, and what did she drop as quickly as she could, as if it were hot to the touch?
That last kind of thought grew like flowers with fire for petals. They blackened the grass around them. They burned from root to stamen. Kestrel avoided them.
Except when she didn’t. Sometimes, she went to them first. Sometimes, she lied to herself along the way.
She thought about the piano she had left behind in Herran. And it was allowed for her to think about that, because why wouldn’t she miss the instrument she’d grown up playing, and had been her mother’s? There was nothing wrong with thinking that the palace piano had a rich, ringing sound, that it was probably the finer instrument, but that it made her long for the one she’d played almost all her life. She could practically feel the cool keys.
Her piano was in Arin’s house. She knew the house well. It had been her prison. It had become—almost—her home.
But then she thought that this was not true. She didn’t know Arin’s house all that well, and her insistence on this truth made it clear that she had told herself that earlier lie only so that she could correct herself. Because wasn’t there a part of Arin’s home that she had never seen?
This was her correction:
This was the burning flower:
Kestrel had never been in Arin’s rooms. Yes, she’d visited his childhood suite. She’d been there once with him. But that wasn’t where he had slept during her time there. That wasn’t where he passed his private hours, where he bathed and dressed and read and looked out windows. No, she’d never seen those views.
Arin had lived on the other side of the twinned rooftop gardens that joined his suite to hers. He’d given her the key to its door. In her mind, Kestrel held the key. She fitted it to the lock. She eased the door open.
She imagined what she would find. Maybe the hall that led into Arin’s rooms from his garden would have a tiled floor that had been glazed so that it glittered in the dark like the scales of a magic creature. In her imagination, night had fallen hours ago. The darkness felt ripe.
Arin wouldn’t burn lamps in every room, especially the rooms he wasn’t using. That was something Kestrel would do. No, Arin would light one lamp and turn it down low, in the way of someone who had long been forced to conserve what little he had. There’d be one light to follow. When she found it, she would find him.
Sometimes, she found him in his bedroom.
Sometimes, this was too much to think. It made her heart flinch. It stole her courage. So she found him in other places: in a chair by the sitting room fire, or crouched by the fire itself, feeding kindling into the flames.
Once she found him, what happened next was always the same. Her imagination gave him something to hold so that he would set it aside when he saw her. The kindling. A book.
He was surprised to see her. He didn’t think she would come.
He straightened. He stood. He came close.
Arin had won the truth from her that night in the capital city. He’d won it fairly. This time he would collect what she owed. This time, he demanded all her reasons. She would pay them fully. The truth lay on her tongue. But not just there. Kestrel felt the truth in her throat, too. It stemmed down deep inside her. She wondered if this was how it felt to sing. Was this the moment before song, the way the body set and readied itself?
She could ask Arin. He would know. But she was afraid of speaking.
But he was listening. He was waiting for his answers.
This was the moment. This was when it always happened. And this was what it was: Kestrel lifted her mouth to his, and sang the truth into him.
* * *
She could no longer bear Jess’s silence. Too many letters had gone unanswered. Kestrel had been turned away from Jess’s door too many times. Kestrel hated to force a meeting … but in the end, that’s exactly what she did. She sent an announcement embossed with the imperial seal. The heavy paper proclaimed the day of Kestrel’s arrival at Jess’s townhome. It appointed the hour.
And Jess was there.
Kestrel was ushered into the parlor, where Jess sat on a needlepoint sofa near a fire stoked high even though the day was fair. Kestrel stood awkwardly, twisting and untwisting the ribbon of her purse. Jess looked even thinner than before, her hair dull, her eyes not quite meeting Kestrel’s. They were focused a bit higher—on the engagement mark on her brow, Kestrel realized.
Jess’s gaze flicked away. “What do you want?”
Kestrel had been queasy in the carriage the whole way here. That feeling was worse now. Her insides screwed into a wormy knot. “To see you.”
“Well, I’m here, just as you commanded. You’ve seen me. And now you may leave.”
“Jess.” Kestrel’s throat closed. “I miss you.”
Jess picked at the needlepoint image stitched into the sofa’s seat cushion. It showed a warrior girl hunting a fox. Jess’s nails tugged out a thread.
“Was it the necklace?” Kestrel asked. She’d been quick—unfeelingly, cruelly quick—to crush the glass petals of Jess’s gift into dust. She caught herself hoping that a broken gift was all that had made their friendship go wrong.
“The necklace.” Jess’s voice was flat.
“I didn’t realize how much it meant to you. I—”
“I’m glad it’s broken.” Jess leaped to her feet and went to a crystal tray set on a side table. It held a cut-glass pitcher of water and a small vial filled with a murky liquid. Jess poured water into a glass, splashing a little. She tipped the vial over the glass. Several drops fell into the water and clouded it. Jess drank deeply, her brown eyes too shiny, and hard.
Kestrel’s father would recognize that look, because it was made for war.
But he wouldn’t see Jess’s unshed tears. Or if he did, he’d pretend they weren’t there.
Kestrel’s own eyes stung. “Tell me what I’ve done.”
“You know. You’re the one who knows everything. I know nothing. I’m a little innocent, struggling to keep up. Why don’t you tell me? Tell me that I’m slow. Laugh at how I fell asleep in your bed, how tired I was, how I had
looked for you at your wretched ball and you never spoke with me there, not once. How I hid in the crowd and drank glass after glass of lemon water, just to have something to do. Tell me how I saw that slave of yours, pushing through the crowd. He looked dirty. He wore rags. He was dark and disgusting.
“Yet he glittered.” Jess’s voice came low, ferocious. “His mouth glittered. His jacket did, too. Why don’t you explain that, Kestrel? I’m too stupid to figure it out on my own.”
Kestrel felt herself go slowly, icily pale.
“I didn’t think anything of the way his jacket caught the light,” Jess said. “Like crystals, I thought. Or bits of glass. Strange. But I didn’t want to look at him. I would not look at him. I turned away.
“And then I went to sleep. You woke me, you told me about the broken necklace. I’m so slow. Can you believe that it wasn’t until morning, when I was alone in your bedroom, that it occurred to me that there was a very simple explanation for everything?” Tears trembled on Jess’s lashes. “Why don’t you tell me what it is, Kestrel? Tell me the truth.”
Kestrel didn’t understand how the truth could be so two-sided, like a coin. So precious—and ugly. She stood in the center of the parlor: silent, trapped by her own silence … and by how her silence became her answer.
Jess wept freely now. “He took everything from me.”
Kestrel stepped toward her. Jess threw up her hands as if in defense. Kestrel halted. “Jess,” she said quietly, “he didn’t.”
Jess gave a short, hard laugh. She swiped at the tears on her cheeks. “No? He took my home.”
“Not for himself. It was part of the emperor’s treaty to give the colonial homes back.”
“Which he signed.”
“It wasn’t your house to begin with.”
“Listen to yourself! We won that land. It was ours. That’s the rule of war.”
“Whose rule, Jess? Who says that this is the way it must be?”
Jess’s eyes narrowed as if seeing something from far away. “He has done this to you.”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“You’ve been my friend for more than ten years. Do you think I can’t tell when you lie?”
The Winner's Crime Page 21
