“I just can’t,” she told Tensen.
He tried to flatter her. He appealed to her sense of good. He questioned her courage. He did everything but mention Arin, which he seemed to sense would end everything.
Tensen was a skilled player, too.
“Well,” he sighed, “you could keep your ears open, couldn’t you? If there’s something I need to know, tell your dressmaker.”
Kestrel was eager to leave the Butcher’s Row. She agreed to pass anything of note on to Deliah. She hurried away, the hem of her maid’s dress catching on her boothooks.
39
Temptation was the color white.
It was black ink, quivering at the point of a pen’s nib.
It was Kestrel, writing in her study. She wrote a letter to Arin. She wrote her reasons. She wrote her heart. Everything was inked in quick and heavy lines. Nothing was crossed out. It looked up at her: bare, black-and-white honesty.
That was temptation. But this was reality: the fire that burned low on the grate, despite the high spring weather, despite the nearing end of spring and the climb of days toward the Firstsummer wedding.
Reality was red. It was hot, hungry, snapping. It ate whatever Kestrel fed it. She burned the letter. Soon there was nothing left of the fire but cold, scaly black wood, lightly furred with ash. The letter lay in flakes. One page curled like a black shell.
Kestrel thought of the emperor. She thought of her father.
There was nothing left to read in the dead fireplace. Still, Kestrel took a poker and raked it through the ash to make sure.
* * *
Kestrel’s eighteenth birthday was fast approaching. Her birthday—and the piano recital the emperor had commanded—was less than a fortnight away. It would be the last official court gathering until her wedding two days following. She played ferociously for hours on end. Sometimes she heard her father’s watch chime: a light sound, as light as a smile. It always soothed her music. When Kestrel played for him, the melody ran sweet, sheer, and strong.
She had a dress fitting for the recital. The gown was a delicate affair of creamy lutestring silk, the lace sleeves short and loose. Kestrel stood still on the dressmaker’s block. Fleetingly, it occurred to her that the block was about the height of an auction block. She remembered Arin standing on one.
Kestrel wondered what it would be like if time could be unsewn, the threads ripped out and redone. She went back to the day of the auction, that first day, that sight of a slave stepping onto the block. She imagined everything differently. This time, she didn’t bid. He wasn’t for sale. Her father had never won the Herran War. Kestrel grew up in the capital instead. Her mother didn’t sicken, didn’t die. Kestrel saw the baby in her father’s arms, the one that she had been. In Kestrel’s reimagining of the world, that baby was exactly as her father had described.
Deliah knelt, floating the hem up. The silk puffed, then fell in scalloped folds. Deliah fussed with it. Kestrel’s maids grew bored and drifted into other rooms.
Then, quickly, quietly, Deliah said, “Do you have any news for me?”
Kestrel sharply glanced down at her. “No.”
“Tensen hopes that you will—soon.”
Kestrel said nothing, but Deliah nodded as if she’d spoken. The dressmaker looked somehow both disappointed and relieved. “Well,” Deliah said, “I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”
Did Kestrel know? She thought of when she sat to play Bite and Sting. When Kestrel turned the tiles, and flipped the blank sides onto their backs, and showed their faces and tallied their value, did she know? Sometimes the game went too quickly for Kestrel to understand exactly what she was doing. All she knew was that in the final play she would win.
Kestrel looked at Deliah. She wasn’t certain of winning anymore, or even of what she could possibly hope to win. She didn’t know what winning would mean.
Smoothly, she told Deliah, “Of course I do.”
* * *
There was a hunt in the mountain forest behind the palace. The hounds bayed. A few courtiers brought slaves to load their crossbows for them, which would have appalled Kestrel’s father, had he seen it. He’d chosen to stay behind.
Verex came, but refused to hunt. The emperor smiled widely. “There’s my milk-blooded boy,” he said.
“Walk with me, Verex,” said Kestrel. “I’ve no interest in hunting either.”
They took the trail ahead of the emperor. Kestrel’s puppy bounded alongside her.
“What a sweet dog,” Kestrel heard Maris say.
The emperor’s cheerful voice floated clear. “Do you like her?”
Verex stiffened beside Kestrel.
“She’s yours,” the emperor told Maris.
Kestrel turned. “No. She’s mine.”
“What do you care if Maris has her?” There was that smile again. “You haven’t even named her.”
“Let her go,” Verex whispered in Kestrel’s ear. “Remember.” He didn’t say what she should remember, but Kestrel did anyway: Arin’s stitched face.
The dog nudged her damp nose against Kestrel’s trousered leg.
“Her name,” Kestrel told the emperor, “is Mine.”
He shrugged and looked careless. Maris, with a courtier’s instinct, had caught the scent of danger and waited to see what would happen next. When nothing did, and nothing more was said, she moved to catch up with her friends.
Later that afternoon, the emperor shot a fox. “For my daughter.” Blood marbled its reddish ruff. Its little black feet looked like dried paintbrushes. The emperor declared that its fur would be made into a stole for Kestrel.
When the court headed down to the castle and Verex was walking alongside Risha, the emperor fell in step with Kestrel.
He wasn’t smiling anymore, but the smile was in his hardened voice, trapped there: an insect in amber. “Don’t be more trouble than you’re worth,” he said.
* * *
“Give the dog away,” Kestrel told Verex. She had held the prince back on the palace lawn, its grass soft and fine, the green brightly pale. The other courtiers had gone ahead. “Find her a home far from the court. Find the right person.”
“You are the right person.”
Kestrel’s eyes stung. The puppy sat and happily chewed her paws.
Verex said, “This is my fault.”
Kestrel said no. She said that she could no longer look at this dog, this warm and perfect gift, without seeing it hurt. It was different to give something up than to see it taken away. The difference, Kestrel said, was choice. A limited freedom, but better than none. Or so she had thought when Arin had given her two keys to his guarded house. She had thought the same when she’d offered him his country, nailed and bound and screwed tight with certain conditions. Better than nothing. She’d thought this before, and thought it again, but she didn’t believe it anymore. Now she knew that to give something up was to have it taken away.
Kestrel said all this silently to herself. The words felt so loud inside her head that she almost forgot that she hadn’t actually spoken them. But then she looked again at Verex and saw him waiting, worried, and remembered what he’d said last. She shook her head: no.
Quietly, Verex said, “My father needs for you to love him best. He needs for you to love what he loves. There’s no room for anything else.”
“I know.”
“I’m not sure you do. Kestrel, your dressmaker is dead.”
The news dropped hard. It sank and hit bottom. Kestrel saw Deliah, the woman’s gray eyes lined with heavy lashes—Arin’s eyes—as she lifted the ivory hem of the dress. The fabric went sheer, then solid as it settled. The skirt had swelled like a lung, then sighed.
Fear came over Kestrel in a nasty, shimmering breathlessness.
“She was seen meeting with the Herrani minister of agriculture,” Verex said. “Later, the captain of the guard came for her. She killed herself with her own shears.”
Kestrel remembered Thrynne’s bloody fingers in the
guttering prison light.
“The meeting with the minister wasn’t why the captain was sent,” Verex said. “That was an excuse. The real reason happened the day your governor left. The reason was the stitches on his face. Neat seams. Kestrel, don’t you remember how perfect they were? My father saw. That dressmaker’s loyalty to Arin was clear on his face.”
The puppy was licking Kestrel’s palm. Warm wet skin, cooling. Breath gently huffed into Kestrel’s hand. The sky was a feather blanket of clouds, save for one blue hole in the fabric. A blue cloud in a white sky.
The hole grew wider, bluer. It pulled itself open. It silently stretched, like Kestrel’s guilt, like the moment when she’d seen Arin’s sewn face, like her father’s gaze, drawn to the moth on the painting’s frame. Kestrel saw satin blue, the color of Jess’s dress. Powdered-sugar clouds, Kestrel thought. In her memory, Ronan handed her a cake. She tasted it. It ate into her tongue like poison.
Verex said, “You need to watch yourself. If you play against my father, you’ll lose. This kind of game isn’t about intelligence, Kestrel. It’s about experience. And you’re conflicted, and so … hurt that…” He shook his head. “Please, just don’t do anything reckless.”
“For how long?”
“You know.”
Kestrel rested her wet palm on the big puppy’s black skull. Mine, she thought. Then she lifted her hand away and told Verex to take the dog by the collar.
How long? Until the emperor was dead.
“Kestrel … one day, we could change things.”
She looked up from the dog and at Verex, at his long, thin frame, the hunched shoulders, the shock of pale hair, the large, liquid eyes.
She wondered what would happen if she took his free hand. She wondered if he would imagine that Risha, not she, held his hand, and if this was how Kestrel’s marriage to him would always be. She saw herself and Verex holding each other. She felt, almost, the kindness of it … and she felt, surely, its cruelty. Its claim on them. Its crime as they each pretended the other was someone else.
“I will never keep you from Risha,” she said.
“I wouldn’t do this to her,” he said. “If—”
There was no need to finish. They both knew what the emperor was capable of doing to the princess if Verex defied him.
“We could remake the world,” Verex said. “Would it be so bad, to rule the empire together?”
It had been a question Kestrel hadn’t allowed herself to ask. Now she did. The question kept asking itself, an echo with no answer.
“We can do this,” Verex said, “if we wait. If we’re careful. Kestrel, can you be careful?”
* * *
In her mind, Kestrel played the tiles.
The emperor.
The water engineer.
The physician.
A favor.
Herran.
Valoria.
She noted the new engravings. She arranged them in different orders. She sought a pattern and came up empty. She mixed the tiles again. But the emperor made it hard to think. She flipped his tile so she wouldn’t have to look at him.
Its other side, however, wasn’t blank. It showed her father’s face.
What game was this?
What did Kestrel think she was doing?
Hadn’t she lost enough? Hadn’t she done enough? She remembered Verex’s advice.
The riddle of the engineer and physician wasn’t hers to solve. She needed to stop.
Yes, stop playing, Kestrel, she told herself. Clear the bets, clear the table. Walk away from the game.
Now.
40
First, Arin made the molds. One, the size and shape of a child’s marble. The other, long and thin and cylindrical. He made two of each kind from fired clay and set the twinned halves aside. He heated lead in the forge’s fire until the metal oozed red.
Arin had been a blacksmith, but blacksmiths rarely work with molds. His clay molds cracked. Hot lead spilled. There was nothing to do but let everything cool into a misbegotten heap and shove it to the side.
It was maddening. And surprising, how Arin realized that he needed those hours in the forge, how work he was once forced to do was now his. He loved that feeling of making something. He smoothed fresh clay, curving it, hollowing it out with a measured tool. He watched new molds bake in the forge’s fire.
When they broke again, he almost didn’t mind. He would make more. One day, they would be right.
* * *
Arin had told the queen and her brother not to enter the forge. Roshar did anyway, his arm still heavily bandaged, the little tiger padding behind him.
“I think”—Roshar surveyed the disarray—“that you should have taken that dagger and been happy with it.”
Arin handed him a list. “Supplies.”
“My, how the lowly have risen. I’m not your messenger boy.” He read the list. “What do you want that for? What are you making?”
“Your queen’s something more.”
Roshar laughed. “She asked you for ‘something more’? I doubt that this”—he flourished the list at Arin’s latest disaster—“was what she had in mind.”
The tiger nipped Arin’s ankle. He gently nudged its face away. “Roshar, why are you here?”
“I’ve named the cub. I named him after you.”
“Roshar.”
“When Arin grows up, you’ll be sentenced to death by tiger in the Dacran arena. Arin will eat you alive.”
Arin looked at Roshar’s feral grin, and at the soft, mazed face of the tiger. The fire caught its eyes.
Roshar said, “I came to tell you that we burned the plains yesterday.”
Arin glanced up. The green paint that lined Roshar’s eyes made them look narrower, bright. Roshar’s smile changed. It dug in deep. “Casualties?” Arin asked.
“Many.”
“Good.”
“Not quite good enough for you, I’m afraid. You gave sound advice, I admit, but that won’t buy your alliance. I don’t see how this will either.” Roshar looked contemptuously at the items littering the forge’s worktable.
Arin was tempted to explain his idea. “Do you remember the weapons in Risha’s dollhouse?”
Roshar’s expression closed. “Do you remember that seal on your pretty dagger? That knife is a lady’s weapon. Don’t think we don’t know whose.” He shoved at a broken mold. Ceramic dust scraped across the table. Yet Roshar saved the real damage for what he said before leaving, the tiger at his heels. “Don’t wonder, Arin, why we won’t ally with you.”
* * *
Another article of clothing arrived for Arin. A pair of trimmed gloves. Tensen’s woven code told him that the Moth had uncovered a connection between the water engineer and the emperor’s physician. Sarsine reported that conditions in Herran had worsened. Had Arin secured an eastern alliance? the knots asked. He should return home.
Tensen, despite Arin’s insistence that Kestrel have no colored thread, managed to work her in anyway. Firstsummer had almost arrived, Tensen said. She was a glowing bride. Be happy for her, Arin, said a knotted line as bumpy as a badly healed scar.
But Tensen didn’t know what Arin knew. Tensen didn’t know how cynically Kestrel had sold herself to the person with the most power. He hadn’t seen her face above the sticky tavern table when she admitted her role in the murder of so many people.
Arin threw the gloves in the forge’s fire. They smelled like burning flesh.
Kestrel would never have his happiness.
* * *
Roshar came again some days later. “It looks like a big, metal reed.” He poked at the cooled object resting on one half of the opened mold. “I think I know what you’re doing, Arin. I think it won’t work.”
“I told you to stay away.”
“And didn’t I? Notice that this time I didn’t bring the tiger with me. Arin makes you nervous. As you see, I am attentive to your every wish, spoken or otherwise.”
“Then leave.”
&nbs
p; “How did you ever survive, little slave, with that mouth of yours? Did you pray to your god of luck?” Roshar studied him, his gaze lingering on the left half of Arin’s face. The scar seemed to prickle under Roshar’s scrutiny. “You are luckier than I.”
Roshar was right, Arin shouldn’t have survived, not with his great skill for saying what he shouldn’t. Arin said, “Were you with Risha when she was taken?”
“No.” But it sounded like “yes.”
“Was that when you were enslaved?”
“I will kill you.”
“Why do you come here, if it’s not because I’ll say what no one else will?”
“What I want,” Roshar said, “is for you to accuse me. That is what no one else will do. Not my people, who think I’m the victim. And never, ever the queen.”
“Accuse you of what? Escaping when your sister didn’t? Surviving?” Gently, Arin said, “If that’s your crime, it’s mine, too.”
“Did you sell your sister?”
Arin recoiled. “What?”
“When the Valorians came for your country, did you trade her for something better? That’s what we did with Risha. Our little girl. So gifted, even that young, with a blade. No river reed dolls for her. No, her bedroom was a fencing salle. Her toy box was an armory. Our older sister saw it. She knew what to do.
“We’re twins, the queen and I. Did you know that? No? Well, if you cut off her nose and ears you’ll find that we look very much alike. But oh, the key difference of four minutes. She was born before me. She got the country. Not that I wanted it. I didn’t know what I wanted. But this is what I was: expendable.
“Tell me, Arin, the solution to this tempting conundrum. If you had a child assassin with lovely, innocent eyes, a princess your enemy was sure to snatch up if given the chance, what would you do? Would an idea cook in the heat of your mind? Maybe your older sister is the cunning one. She’ll tell you the way to topple the empire. You: middle child, only boy, what do you do? You explain things to your little sister. You ride with her into enemy territory. You pretend to be her servant. You make yourselves noticed. You are conspicuous. And when you’re captured, you let her go.” Roshar’s expression grew embittered, sly. “And then you wait. You wait, your queen waits, to see if Risha will put a knife in the emperor’s neck.”
The Winner's Crime Page 25
