The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  She ignored him as he continued to talk. The puppy looked at her expectantly, wagging its short tail, wuffling with excitement. Kestrel stooped to pick up the slobbery stick. She threw. The stick soared into the blue sky, whipping over itself. The dog raced across the lawn to fetch it. Kestrel smiled, and waited for the stick to be brought back.

  * * *

  “Sneaky,” Arin teased her.

  Kestrel shrugged a little helplessly at her imagination. She’d come to accept the way her mind would conjure up Arin. She’d come to need it.

  She’d left the physician in his garden to walk the lawn alone with her dog. The day had grown warm. Kestrel sat on the lawn. The green scent filled her senses. She seemed to even taste it.

  The puppy settled beside her. Kestrel took off her tight shoes. The grass prickled through her stockings. The palace was too large to appear distant. Still, Kestrel felt far from it, at least for now.

  “Not far enough.” Arin spoke as if he could read her mind.

  She faced her pretend Arin. His scar was healed. His gray eyes were startlingly clear. “You’re not real,” she reminded him.

  “I feel real.” He brushed one finger across her lower lip. It suddenly seemed that there were no clouds in the sky, and that she sat in full sunshine. “You feel real,” he said.

  The puppy yawned, her jaws closing with a snap. The sound brought Kestrel to herself. She felt a little embarrassed. Her pulse was high. But she couldn’t stop pretending.

  Kestrel reached beneath her skirts to pull down a knee-high stocking.

  Arin made a sound.

  “I want to feel the grass beneath my feet,” Kestrel told him.

  “Someone’s going to see you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “But that someone is me, and you should have a care, Kestrel, for my poor heart.” He reached under the hem of her dress to catch her hand in the act of pulling down the second stocking. “You’re treating me quite badly,” he said, and slid the stocking free, his palm skimming along the path of her calf. He looked at her. His hand wrapped around her bare ankle. Kestrel became shy … though she had known full well what she was doing.

  Arin grinned. With his free hand, he plucked a blade of grass. He tickled it against the sole of her foot. She laughed, jerking away.

  He let her go. He settled down beside her, lying on his stomach on the grass, propped up by his elbows. Kestrel lay on her back. She heard birdsong: high and long, with a trill at the end. She gazed up at the sky. It was blue enough for summer.

  “Perfect,” she said.

  “Almost.”

  She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. “I’m going to miss you when I wake up,” she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He was a dream.

  “Don’t wake up,” he said.

  The air smelled like new leaves. “You said you trusted me.”

  “I did.” He added, “I do.”

  “You are a dream.”

  He smiled.

  “I lied to you,” Kestrel said. “I kept secrets. I thought it was for the best. But it was because I didn’t trust you.”

  Arin shifted onto his side. He caressed her cheek lightly with the back of his hand. That trailing sensation felt like the last note of the bird’s song. “No,” he agreed, his voice gentle. “You didn’t.”

  Kestrel woke. The puppy was draped across her feet, sleeping. Her stockings lay in a small heap beside her. The sun had climbed in the sky. Her cheek was flushed, the skin tight: a little sunburned.

  The puppy twitched, still lost in sleep. Kestrel envied her. She rested her head again on the grass.

  She closed her eyes, and tried to find her way back into her dream.

  * * *

  Later, in the Butcher’s Row, Kestrel told Tensen to find out if the water engineer changed her bet on the wedding dress. If she did, then it meant that Elinor and the physician were working together.

  Kestrel plucked at her work scarf. She tugged it low. Her disguise felt very thin. “There’s something else…” The weather remained warm, but she shivered. “I was wrong to make you promise not to tell Arin about me.”

  Tensen raised his white brows.

  “I want him to know,” she said.

  “I’m not sure that’s wise.”

  “Of course,” she said hastily, “a letter sent to Herran would be too risky. But maybe you know of a way…” She heard the pleading in her voice, and stopped.

  Tensen’s expression shifted. It showed a flash of something—what, Kestrel couldn’t quite tell, it had come and gone too quickly—and then settled into sympathy. “Oh, Kestrel,” Tensen said. “I would tell him, but he’s not in Herran. I don’t know where he is.”

  “You’re his spymaster. How can you not know?”

  “No one does.” Tensen spread his hands. His gold ring caught the light. “If you don’t believe me, you can certainly ask around. But”—his voice grew concerned—“given your … history with Arin, I’m not sure such inquiries would be safe. They could come to the attention of the emperor. Or your father.”

  Kestrel felt horribly trapped and robbed, though she hadn’t known it was possible to feel robbed of something she had already given up. She struggled not to show this. Already, that dream on the grass had faded in her memory. It was as if she’d worn it out by thinking too much about it. But in the moment, it had felt so real. Kestrel couldn’t quite believe that it hadn’t been.

  She looked numbly at Tensen’s ring. He hadn’t worn it in a while. She supposed that it had been lost, and found again. Sometimes things happened that way. But sometimes, Kestrel knew, what’s lost stays lost forever.

  38

  Kestrel wasn’t sure how, but General Trajan had learned about the deserter: the well-bred son who had left his post in a brigade fighting in the east.

  “And he’s here.” Her father’s voice was flat. “Living in a palace suite.”

  “I haven’t decided what to do with him.” The emperor reached for his fork and knife and suggested that they begin the third course. He caught Kestrel’s eye. She began to eat.

  Her father did not. “What is there to decide?”

  “Trajan, he’s just a boy. No older than Verex.” The emperor smiled fondly at his son, who looked down at his plate.

  “He betrayed you. He betrayed me. He betrayed himself. Where is his honor now?”

  “I imagine it’s with his parents’ lucrative mills in the southern isles. Maybe it’s been ground along with their fine grain and baked into delicious bread.”

  “The law on desertion is clear.”

  The emperor drank his wine. “To be honest, I was saving him for you. Go see him if you like.”

  “I will,” her father said, “and then I’ll return to the east.”

  “You can’t even walk the length of the Spring Garden without catching your breath. Would you follow such a commander into battle?”

  Her father’s eyes squinted as if narrowed against a sudden glare of light. Kestrel brought her fork clattering down on her plate. Anger boiled up her throat. She opened her mouth to speak, but her father’s eyes cut to her, and it was the same as when he’d stood in the palace courtyard, his blood on his horse, and she had moved to help him.

  “All in good time, old friend,” the emperor said gently. His voice had an almost smoky sound, a quality that might have been love if love were like cured meat: hung, dried, and stored to be eaten a little at a time in hard conditions.

  Verex pushed his food around his plate. Kestrel’s father didn’t move.

  “I’m sorry,” the emperor told him. “I’m not ready to lose you yet.”

  * * *

  The general wanted her to come with him. “One day you’ll rule the empire,” he said. “You need to know what to do.”

  This was what he did.

  He went to the young soldier’s palace suite. He watched the young man, not
much older than Kestrel, grow pale. The general brought Kestrel into the sitting room with him, then drew the soldier to the side, one firm hand on the shoulder. The general murmured in his ear. The boy sank in on himself, and turned his face so that Kestrel couldn’t see.

  The general’s voice took the tone of a question. The boy inhaled a shuddering breath. Kestrel’s father said something that sounded soothing. Safe. She’d heard him like that before, when she was small.

  “Forgive me,” the soldier said in a strangled whisper.

  “I will,” the general said. “After.”

  Then he told Kestrel that it was time to go.

  * * *

  The deserter used his dagger. An honor suicide.

  For a few days, the gossip was on every courtier’s lips. Then news came from the east. The barbarians had burned the plains, said the report. The empire’s latest prize was black, barren, smoking.

  The names came later. A much longer list of casualties than usual.

  One name was passed around the court like a pearl. It was said slowly, in appreciation of its luster, its smooth weight, the way it rolled into the well of a palm and warmed.

  When Kestrel heard it, she realized that she had been expecting this since the day Ronan had snatched the recruitment list from her. The discovery of that expectation cracked some brittle thing inside her. She had known. She had known this would happen. And yet it was now clear that she hadn’t believed that she did, that she had shunted thoughts of it away into a part of her mind where things were kept but never looked at.

  How could she have hidden from that knowledge?

  How could she have known that Ronan would die, and yet not know it?

  It had been so clear.

  In her rooms, alone, Kestrel covered her mouth. The pearl of Ronan’s name lodged in her throat. She swallowed. It hurt.

  She had dreams that shamed her in the morning, dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet spoke in Arin’s voice. I made this for you, he said. Do you like it?

  The powder was so fine that she inhaled its sweetness, but always woke before she could taste.

  * * *

  Kestrel wrote to Jess. She was afraid to visit.

  The next day, Kestrel’s maid brought her a letter. Kestrel’s heart leaped to see Jess’s handwriting on the outside, and that familiar wax seal. Instantly, she blamed herself for that surge of relieved hope. It was wrong for her to feel this way when Ronan was dead.

  But she hadn’t thought Jess would answer her. And this letter—Kestrel weighed it in her hand before she broke the seal—was just as thick as the one she had sent Jess. Surely Jess wouldn’t write so much if she wanted nothing to do with Kestrel.

  Kestrel opened it. She felt again that strange mixture of knowing and not knowing, of shock and resignation.

  She unfolded the envelope. Hadn’t she seen this coming? Hadn’t it been obvious?

  The envelope contained the letter Kestrel had sent to Jess: unopened, unread.

  * * *

  Kestrel hadn’t played the piano since discovering the music room’s hidden screen, but she no longer cared who heard her. She wanted someone to listen to her grief.

  Her music was angrier than she had expected. A sweet prelude that twisted away from her, and darkened, and knitted its way down into the lower octaves. She played until her wrists hurt. She played until she fumbled. The room vibrated with dying chords.

  Kestrel rubbed her hot wrists. There was a ringing silence. Then, just as Kestrel was about to go over her mistake, she heard a faint chime.

  She knew that sound.

  There was someone behind that screen. A person likely to know about the palace’s hidden listening chambers. And why wouldn’t the emperor share such a secret with this man? The emperor valued him. The proof? Consider the emperor’s gift: a golden watch. It showed the phases of the moon. Its hour and minute hands were tipped with diamonds. It chimed the hour.

  Kestrel didn’t know what had made her father hide behind the screen. She didn’t know if he was still there, or if he’d left the instant after his watch had chimed and Kestrel had lifted her head at the sound.

  All she knew was that he had listened to her play. He’d never done that before.

  A memory came to Kestrel. Deep into her seventh year, when Kestrel was still weak from the same disease that had killed her mother, the general had decided to ride with his daughter out of the city. She had nearly fallen asleep on her pony. The Herran countryside was crisp. The chill had made her nose run. He had taken her hunting. He helped her notch the bow. He pointed out the prey. He shifted her elbow into the right position. When she missed, he didn’t say anything. He shot a pheasant, plucked it, and built a fire. She dozed before it, and woke to find herself covered with furs. It was dark. Her hair smelled like smoke and roasted fowl. When her father saw that she was awake, he reached into a saddlebag for a loaf of bread, which he broke. He gave her the larger half.

  In the listening silence of the music room, Kestrel lowered her hands to the piano keys and played the memory of that day. She played the sway of her pony beneath her, the phlegm in her lungs, the tension in the bowstring, the glowing heart of the fire. She played the way that her father, when he thought that she was still asleep, had brushed hair from her forehead and tucked it behind her ear. He had drawn the furs up to her cheek. She was young enough then to call him papa.

  Kestrel played the moment when she had opened her eyes, and he had looked away. She played the feeling of the bread in her hand.

  * * *

  Not long after, Kestrel went to the gallery. She was brought up short to see her father there. He was looking out one of the slender windows, his back to the art. He turned when she entered.

  “I heard that you come here every day,” he said. “I hoped to speak with you alone.”

  They’d been avoiding each other since she’d heard his watch chime. “You could have come to my suite,” she said.

  “I was curious. I wondered what you like so much about the gallery.” He came to meet her. His boots echoed in the vast space.

  “You know what I like.” How many times had he called her love for music a weakness? He had warned her: the Herrani had admired the arts, and look what had happened to them. They’d forgotten about the sword.

  A frown dented his brow. He lifted his gaze from the collection of sculptures and paintings and focused again on Kestrel. His voice low, he said, “Your mother played beautifully.”

  “And I?”

  “You, even more so.”

  “I was glad that you listened to me play.”

  He sighed. “That watch.”

  “I like your watch. You must continue to wear it. It’ll keep you honest.”

  “Listening like that was beneath me.”

  “What if I had invited you?” Kestrel asked.

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did, over and over, for years.”

  He was silent.

  “It was always an open invitation,” Kestrel said. “It still is.”

  Her father gave her a small smile. “Would you show me your favorites?” He gestured at the gallery.

  Kestrel had almost forgotten why she was here. She’d pushed thoughts of Tensen, the water engineer, and the palace physician away. Now they came back. She felt a stitch of fear, a thread of guilt pulled tight.

  She couldn’t really see the painting she now thought of as Tensen’s. It was farther down the gallery. From the entrance, it was a mere square of purple.

  She kept her father from it. She showed him an alabaster bowl she admired, and a bronze fisherman lifting a fish scaled with lapis lazuli. There was an eastern porcelain egg that opened to show an armed girl.

  But her father noticed the painting. “I remember that,” he said. “I took it for the emperor.”

  He approached it. Kestrel, silent with dread, had no choice but to go with him. If she tried to turn him away from the painting, she would only call more attention to it
.

  A masker moth lay on the painting’s frame. Kestrel’s pulse leaped.

  Her father studied the landscape. “It looks different here than it did in that southern mansion.” He didn’t appear to notice the camouflaged moth. If he did, what would he make of it? Nothing? It seemed impossible that something that meant a great deal to her could mean nothing to him. Carefully casual, she said, “Do you like the painting?”

  He shrugged. “The emperor does.” His gaze lifted from the canvas. Kestrel felt a terrible relief. Then her father spoke again, and as she listened, that relief shriveled into shame. “I know that you don’t want me to return to the east. I won’t lie, Kestrel. I need to fight. But the need … has been different over the years. It hasn’t been just for honor.” His light brown eyes were fixed on hers. “You were born a few months after Verex. I wouldn’t have made you marry him. But I hoped. On the battlefield, I hoped you’d inherit the empire. When you chose Verex, it felt like fate.”

  “You don’t believe in fate.”

  “I believe that the land I won was for you. You are my fate.”

  Guilt swelled in her throat. It made it hard to breathe, and she couldn’t hold his gaze any longer. But the instant her eyes fell from his, they darted quickly, helplessly, toward the moth.

  Her father saw. He blinked. He peered at the painting’s frame. He frowned.

  It was just a moth, Kestrel tried to tell herself. He couldn’t possibly guess what it meant.

  She thought her father might say something. She readied herself to answer him. But in the end, all he did was silently flick the moth to the floor.

  * * *

  “The water engineer changed her bet,” Tensen said. “She and the emperor’s physician are working together.”

  “I can’t meet with you again like this,” Kestrel said. “I’m going to be caught.”

  Tensen was instantly worried. He asked for her reasons, but it wasn’t so simple as her father seeing the moth on the painting’s frame, which Tensen dismissed. It was that feeling of skating close to ruin. She’d felt this before, or something like it, when she had first begun playing Bite and Sting and didn’t know when to leave the table, or stayed because she needed to know what would happen next. She needed to see all the tiles turned, the play played, the final measurement of who had what and who had come short. She’d lost easily at first, especially against her father. Then she had learned.