The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  It made unexpected sense to Arin. It explained Risha’s claim that she belonged in the palace. It explained her haunted look. But … “She was captured years ago. What is she waiting for?”

  “Revenge, maybe, on a brother and sister who used her. After the first year, we thought that she was waiting for the right opportunity to kill the emperor. More years passed. Now … we think she’s become Valorian. Maybe that’s what happens after someone grows up and understands that she was betrayed by her own family.”

  “You shouldn’t have told me this. Why did you tell me this?”

  “Because I know that what I said about that dagger isn’t true. I knew, that day when they cut my face in your country, that you would never sell yourself. I could see it. You would never sell what’s dear to you. Look at you, Arin. You’re made of so many splendid, stupid limits.”

  Arin saw, in his mind’s eye, the burning gloves, their curling fingers. He smelled that acrid reek. He remembered the Moth’s coded news. “I don’t think Risha is the empire’s friend.”

  In his memory, flames shriveled the knots’ message: Have you secured the eastern alliance?

  Roshar’s eyes were starving for news of his sister. Arin’s people were starving, having run through the hearthnut harvest more quickly than thought. And Arin was starving as he remembered how the gloves had burned. He was hungry. He was hungry for this: to put his trust where it belonged.

  He drew Roshar’s attention to the long metal barrel on the worktable. “Let me tell you what this will do.”

  * * *

  It took time to complete the parts of the miniature cannon. There was a chamber at one closed end for a paper twist of black powder, which rested on an internal pan behind where one placed the little metal ball. Arin cut a short, stiff fuse. He inserted it into the black powder twist.

  He knew how to work leather from his time in the Valorian general’s stables. He wrestled with stiff stuff used for saddles, making a packed leather handle for the end where the barrel would be lifted, leveled, and loaded with explosive. When Arin slid the barrel’s end into the slim, hard leather box, he thought, oddly, of his family gardener. Long before the Herran War, the gardener had bred trees in the orchard, inserting a slip of one tree into the thick stock of another.

  Arin attached his strange stock to the fitted barrel. He set steel pins through punctured holes in the stock and then soldered them to the barrel. Last, he cut a long strip of leather and fashioned a strap. This weapon was meant to be carried.

  Arin slung it over his shoulder like he would a Dacran crossbow. Then he summoned the queen and her brother.

  * * *

  They cleared the castle yard outside the forge. Just before Arin fitted the black powder twist and metal ball into their chamber, he had a vision of the whole device exploding in his hands and taking his head with it. He’d used black powder before. He’d felt a cannon’s burst. He’d heard it: that single, booming heartbeat of the god of war. But it wasn’t fear that he felt when he lit the fuse and set the stock against his shoulder. It was hunger.

  The fuse burned.

  The weapon cracked the air. It slammed into Arin’s shoulder, punched the breath out of him. It seared his palm. He almost dropped it.

  There was a brutalized silence. Shock had changed Roshar’s and the queen’s faces. A wisp of smoke trailed from the broad, blessedly big kitchen door. Arin’s aim had been terrible. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was the little lead ball, buried deep in the door. What mattered was the queen pacing the yard to stand tiptoe before the door. She touched the smoking hole.

  Yes. He willed her to say it. As Arin found his breath again, his mind didn’t think words like alliance or trust or even something more. Just yes. Later, he would consider the weapon fully. Later, he would shrink from what he’d done. But now there was only no or yes, and he’d had to choose. He’d had to find what would give him the word he wanted.

  “That,” Roshar said. “That against the empire.”

  “Think about how much black powder it takes to fire a cannon,” Arin said. “The Valorians don’t care. They have a lot of it. We don’t, but we won’t need much with this, and it can go anywhere. Let them drag their heavy cannon. Let them waste horses and soldiers maneuvering artillery into position. I know”—Arin shook his head—“the device isn’t precise. Not yet. I can make it precise.”

  Roshar and the queen still stared at him.

  “Come with me,” Arin said. “I want to show you something else.”

  He led them into the forge, which was hot from the vat of molten metal Arin had prepared. Arin unslung the weapon. He strode toward the vat. There was a choking gasp from the queen as she realized what he was about to do. He dropped the weapon into the vat.

  He turned back to the queen and her brother. “The Herrani will make more. I’ll tell them how. We’ll supply you with them. We would do that … for our allies.”

  “Did you have to melt it?” Roshar said.

  “I need you to need me. You could have taken it, examined its mechanism, and found a way to reproduce it. Then you wouldn’t need Herran.”

  “Arin, you idiot. What makes you think we won’t torture the design out of you?”

  “You won’t.”

  “I might. I might enjoy it.”

  “You wouldn’t.” He looked at them. “Well? Can we fight together?”

  It was the queen who said the word, but Roshar who made it real. He crossed the short space of the forge and placed one palm on Arin’s cheek. It was the Herrani gesture of kinship. The queen smiled as Arin returned the gesture, and then the word came: beautiful, deadly, as small and hot as the hole in the kitchen door. In that moment, that word was all that Arin wanted.

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  Arin was coming from the baths. His face had been sprayed with black powder. It had been in his hair. Even in his teeth. He looked like he’d survived a fire. He’d cleaned himself, noting the massive bruise that darkened his scarred right shoulder and crept toward his chest. Then he returned to his room to pack.

  The queen was waiting outside his door. She opened it for him to enter. Thinking that she needed to discuss something in private, perhaps a detail of the alliance, he was silent, too, as they walked in. When the queen had shut the door softly behind her, he said, “My people need to hear the news. I’d like to leave.”

  The queen came to him, then came closer. She reached to thread fingers through his damp hair. He froze. Whispering her cheek across his, she brought her warm lips to his ear. “Yes,” she murmured. “But not yet.”

  41

  He kissed her. Her mouth parted beneath his. Her hands were on him, and it was curious, it felt alien. He relaxed—shouldn’t he relax? She seemed to think he should.

  He remembered his hunger. Not for this. But she gave, and he took, and gave back, even while knowing what he really wanted instead. He didn’t want to want it, and the thought of Kestrel, of that monstrous want—so stupid, so wrong—made him stop. He pulled away. He gritted his teeth once, hard, in a held breath, bright fury at himself.

  “Arin?” said the queen.

  He kissed her again, more deeply. This time, he lost himself in it a little. It filled him. It pulled him away from himself. That was good. He was tired with the way he had been. He forgot it all.

  Except … he remembered other kisses, other times. It was impossible not to.

  This was the truth: in his mind, Kestrel touched his scarred face. This was her mouth moving against his. This was the truth: what he imagined was a lie. The truth and the lie held him tight.

  It made him think. The queen leaned into him, brushing his bruised shoulder, and he winced. He recalled his own soot-covered face after firing the weapon. What had Arin thought earlier? That he looked like he’d been in a fire.

  Something in his mind began to burn. Arin saw again that pair of gloves in the flames. He remembered telling Roshar to burn the plains. You’re lucky the general
didn’t do that to begin with.

  Wait, wait. Why hadn’t he?

  Because Kestrel had offered him a different plan. The poisoned horses. I can explain, she’d said to Arin. He’d refused to listen. I had no choice, she’d said. My father would have—

  Tentatively, with a dread that hissed into him along its quick fuse, Arin imagined the disaster that didn’t happen and the one that did. He imagined fire and the plainspeople burning … or dead horses and an exodus south.

  The kiss went cold on his lips. Arin was numb with understanding. He broke away from the queen.

  Arin imagined Kestrel. He saw her considering a choice: fire and annihilation, or poison and survival. He knew what he’d choose. He began to wonder if Kestrel had made the very same choice.

  He grew pale. He felt the blood leave him. His warring heartbeat was loud in his ears.

  The queen was staring. He’d pulled away from her; he remembered doing that as if it were a lifetime ago. Arin couldn’t be sure if she’d touched him again after that. She wasn’t touching him now. She eyed him warily. He saw himself as she must: hunched, seeming suddenly ill. Or as if he’d been assaulted. Cuffed across the head, or knocked back like when the explosion in the kitchen yard had kicked the breath out of him. “Arin,” she said, “what’s wrong?”

  Arin’s shoulder ached, his throat ached. He had been wrong, he had been kissing a lie. It would have sweetened, he would have kept doing it. He would have kept pretending the queen was Kestrel. But who was Kestrel? He’d been so sure, once. And then she’d appeared outside his besieged city walls with the emperor’s treaty in her hand and an engagement mark on her brow, and his certainty became a wretched, crippled thing. He’d been a fool, he had told himself as he stood in the snow outside his city, back to the wall, cold to the bone. He’d been a fool of the worst kind: the one who can’t see things for what they really are.

  Arin raised a sudden flat hand, palm out, as if stopping someone. He remembered again how the siege had ended. But this time, he changed the way he saw it. This time, in his memory, he ignored that mark on Kestrel’s brow. He saw only what she held in her hand: the treaty. It had saved his life and spared his country. In his memory, Kestrel offered him the folded, creamy paper. He took it, he opened it. In his mind, he now saw a meaning in that treaty, and the way she had given it to him, that he hadn’t before. Sudden understanding made Arin’s hand fall, and clench.

  “I need to leave,” Arin told the queen. “I need to leave right now.”

  42

  Kestrel looked like she’d been dipped in blood.

  In the end, she hadn’t actually given any orders for her wedding dress to be altered. The water engineer had already changed her bet, and although Kestrel wasn’t sure if the emperor knew this, or what the consequences might be, she dreaded the malicious attention it would attract if she did anything more to upset the emperor’s plans. He expected her to wear red, so the dress was red after all, in stiff, glossy crimson folds of rich samite. It was heavy. Structured in the bodice—it hurt when Kestrel breathed too deeply—with full skirts whose pintucked shadows created even deeper shades of red, almost black. The train was bustled now, but when Kestrel entered the great hall it would pour in a river behind her.

  The new dressmaker’s hands fluttered over Kestrel. “Is it too tight? Or … perhaps you’d like more embellishment? Crystals sewn onto the hem?”

  “No.” It was the last fitting before the wedding—barely more than a week away. What Kestrel really wanted was for the dress to be burned.

  “Oh, but you haven’t even seen it with the gold yet.” The dressmaker gathered handfuls of golden sugarspun wire and began to weave it through Kestrel’s braids and around her neck, trailing it in chilly patterns over her bare shoulders. The pain in Kestrel’s lungs grew worse. Her eyes burned.

  “Isn’t that better? Isn’t it?” the dressmaker’s voice was high. “You are so beautiful!”

  Kestrel suddenly heard the suppressed panic in the girl’s voice. Kestrel saw her reflection. She wasn’t beautiful. Her face was pinched and white, eyes shocked and wide. She looked ill. Kestrel pressed hands to damp eyes, pressed hard, and looked again. Kestrel didn’t know what the dressmaker saw in her expression, but she realized that whatever it was, the girl read it as her own doom. She was a late-hour replacement for Deliah: a simple seamstress elevated to the role of imperial dressmaker. The girl was afraid. Why wouldn’t she be afraid of Kestrel’s dissatisfaction? The last imperial dressmaker was dead.

  Kestrel turned from the mirror to face the brown-haired girl. Kestrel stepped down from the block, careful of the hem, and gently rested a hand on the girl’s arm.

  The new dressmaker quieted. “Do you like it?” she whispered.

  “It’s perfect,” Kestrel said.

  * * *

  Her father was healed. He would leave the morning after the wedding to resume command of the eastern campaign. He would have left already if it weren’t for the emperor’s orders. Kestrel sometimes thought that the general would have stayed no matter what for her birthday recital and the wedding, but she tended to believe this only when not in his company. The moment he stood before her, his eyes increasingly restless, she knew that she’d been deluding herself.

  He invited her for a walk. The wind was loud and brisk enough to make Kestrel’s ears ache.

  It seemed at first that Kestrel and her father wouldn’t speak. Then he said, “I don’t know what to give you for the wedding.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I wish”—he squinted at a wheeling falcon high above the Spring Garden—“I wish I’d held back something of your mother’s that I could give to you. I’d say that I’d been saving it for this.” On the day she’d come of age, Kestrel had inherited all of her mother’s possessions. He had wanted none of them.

  A few months ago, Kestrel would have found another way—light, negligent, maybe witty—to repeat that it didn’t matter. But now she felt keenly the damage of how they never really said what they meant to each other. Yes, they came close. They had understandings, such as the one that regularly brought the general to the secret space behind the music room’s screen—if not into the music room itself—to hear Kestrel play. This was a kind of honesty, she supposed, but it wasn’t plain, it wasn’t true, and she couldn’t help the hurt that came with the thought that she was just like him. She, too, couldn’t say what she meant. She wanted to. She tried. The words struggled inside her.

  Kestrel said, “Would you give me something if I asked for it?”

  Carefully, he said, “That would depend.”

  “Stay. Don’t go to the east.”

  “Kestrel…”

  “Stay one more week, then,” she pleaded. “Or a day. Stay one more day after the wedding.”

  He kept looking at the sky, but the hunting bird was gone.

  “Please.”

  He finally turned to her. “Very well,” he said. “One more day.”

  * * *

  Events for the court continued. There was the spring tournament. There were masques, dances, feasts. More than once, Kestrel caught Tensen’s gaze from across a room. She averted her eyes. She knew that he wanted to speak with her. He would press her for more information. He would urge her to take more risks, all for a very uncertain gain. But she’d made her decision. She would marry. She would rule. This was how she would change things. Her attempts at skullduggery seemed almost silly now: the games of a child who doesn’t want to grow up. Worse—in her starkest moments, when Kestrel was most honest with herself, and honesty showed itself like a skeleton, bones clean and jutting, she knew that her efforts to be Tensen’s spy had been a way to prove herself to Arin … even as she insisted that he never know.

  It made no sense. Its senselessness was painful. How had Kestrel become someone who didn’t make sense?

  Two days before her birthday recital, which was two days before the wedding, Verex stopped the emperor on the palace grounds after a hors
e race where one of the imperial mounts had taken the prize. The prince had approached his father precisely at the moment when the emperor had his back to Kestrel. The emperor didn’t see how close she was.

  “Should we be concerned that the Herrani governor hasn’t returned for the wedding?” Verex asked. His gaze flickered over his father’s shoulder to light on Kestrel.

  The emperor laughed.

  “There’s only one representative from that territory,” Verex said. “It will look a little strange. Maybe the governor ought to be here.” His eyes asked Kestrel’s wish. She shook her head.

  “Oh, the Herrani.” The emperor chuckled again. “No one cares about the Herrani. Honestly, I had forgotten all about them.”

  * * *

  When Arin arrived in the capital’s harbor, he reined himself in. During the sea journey, he’d let himself pace the ship’s deck, or curse faint winds. The waves didn’t make him sick, not this time. He was too intent on the movements of his thoughts. Arin was incandescent, nervy, sleepless, and possibly mad.

  Sometimes he managed to think of other things than Kestrel. He’d shudder at the memory of his cousin. He’d stopped in Herran to see Sarsine and resupply his ship. A Dacran fleet had sailed with him, as part of the alliance, and were stationed now in his city’s harbor to protect it. Arin had been shocked by the change in Sarsine. She seemed so weak. Everyone did. He hated to leave her … yet he had, so possessed he was by the need to speak with Kestrel.

  He needed to know. On the ship, his heart and brain galloped over what he knew and thought he knew, or hoped he knew, and then his thoughts would run right back over where they’d already been until they dug deep ruts inside him.