The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  She raised one brow. “That’s a dramatic change indeed.”

  He was silent.

  Kestrel’s fear, which she had briefly managed to squeeze shut, opened again. It spread.

  She was afraid of failing in this lie. She was afraid of succeeding. And she was, she realized with a horrible clench of the heart, very afraid of her father.

  Arin faced Kestrel fully: unblinking, eyes gray as a wind-torn sky, the scar livid against his drawn cheek. “It was a dramatic change,” he said, “but you made it. I know you did.”

  Kestrel closed the lid over the keys. Something was coming that she couldn’t control. The game was changing, and her best option now was to leave. She rose.

  Arin stopped her. “I’m not nothing to you. I heard what you were playing.”

  She tried to laugh. “I don’t even remember what I was playing.” Arin’s hand was on her arm. She stepped away from his touch. What must her father think? She glanced at the screen. She stared at the door. It didn’t open.

  “Why are you doing this?” Arin demanded. “Stop lying. I heard your music. And I know. You bargained with the emperor for the treaty.”

  She heard a faint, scratching sound. Had she imagined it? It was the sound of a sword drawn from its sheath in a hidden room. “I didn’t.”

  Arin blocked her path.

  “Let me go.” Her voice sounded like it was falling apart.

  “This is what I think: that there is no change more dramatic than you agreeing to marry when you have never—never—wanted to marry anyone.”

  “We’ve already discussed the many incentives to my marrying the prince.”

  “Have we discussed them all?” He dragged a hand through his dirty hair. “Kestrel, I feel like I’m going mad. That I’m seeing things—or not seeing things. Just tell me. Did you … are you … marrying the prince because of me? Was it … part of some kind of deal you made with the emperor?”

  The silence wasn’t just Kestrel’s. It was her father’s, too.

  She sucked in a sharp breath. She could say this. She could do it, she promised herself, because she would make it better later. She would take it all back very, very soon.

  Gently, Kestrel told him, “That sounds like a story.”

  Arin hung back, eyes uncertain, and despite his insistence that he knew what she had done, Kestrel sensed how new his belief was. How fragile. Yes, it could break. With just the right amount of pressure in the right place, it would crack like a mirror. Kestrel saw something in Arin that she’d never seen in him before, something unbearably young. She saw, for a moment, the boy Arin must have been. Right around the eyes. A softness. A yearning. There, in the lines of his sensitive mouth. There, to show her how to strike hardest.

  “This isn’t one of your Herrani tales with gods and villains and heroes and great sacrifices,” she said. “I loved those stories when I was little. I’m sure you did, too. They’re better than real life, where a person makes decisions in her best interests. Reality isn’t very poetic, I know.” She shrugged. “Neither is the sort of arrogance that encourages someone to think that so much revolves around him.”

  Arin looked away. He stared at the piano, its strung insides exposed under the propped-open lid.

  She walked around him in a slow circle, sizing him up. “I wonder what you believe could compel me to go to such epic lengths for your sake. Is it your charm? Your breeding?”

  His eyes cut to her. She paused, letting her gaze trace his scar. He tensed. She made her mouth curl. “Not your looks, surely.”

  His jaw tightened.

  Thorns pricked her throat, she ached with self-disgust. Yet she forced her smile to grow. “I don’t mean to be cruel. But these ideas of yours are so unbelievable. And frankly, a little desperate. Like a fantasy. Hasn’t it occurred to you that you’re just seeing what you want to see?”

  “No.”

  But she’d seen him waver. “You must realize that you’ve been telling yourself a story. Arin, we’re too old for stories.”

  His voice came low. “Are we?”

  “I am. Stop being a child. It’s time you grew up.”

  “Yes.” The word was slow. His tone was unexpectedly filled with something Kestrel recognized as wonder at the same moment that the recognition cramped her stomach. She knew that sound. It was the voice of someone for whom a cloud of confusion has been lifted. It was clarity, and the strength that returns with it.

  “You’re right,” Arin said. When he faced her again she saw no shadow of that boy. It was as if she’d dreamed him. “I misunderstood,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

  Formally, even clinically, Arin touched three fingers to the back of Kestrel’s hand. Then he left, and closed the door behind him.

  44

  The door’s thud echoed loud. A toxic fear ate at Kestrel. Even as doubt grew, and hinted that her strategy was the wrong one, or that no strategy could mend what she’d just done, Kestrel clung to the most important rule her father had taught her: Deal with danger before it deals with you.

  “Father?” Kestrel called. Her voice rose higher. “Father?”

  There was no answer. Had he been too shocked by what he had heard … suspicious? Was he refusing already to speak with her?

  She rushed to the door and fumbled it open. The hallway was empty. Arin had vanished. An overturned bucket had spilled its foaming water. It was soaking Kestrel’s shoes. She stood in the puddle for a moment, her feet wet and cold. Then she felt wildly along the corridor’s carvings until she found the wooden button in the center of a blown flower. The panel slid aside, and light from the hallway illuminated the hidden room. It was empty.

  What did this mean? Kestrel wondered whether her father could have left sometime after his watch had struck the hour, but before Arin had arrived. Had everything she’d said to Arin been for nothing?

  She pressed fingertips to her temples. Her mind teemed with possibilities, her pulse soared, and she wasn’t thinking so much as scrambling from one thought to the next.

  Kestrel returned to the music room and picked up the fallen pen. She wrote Arin a letter. She wrote it on the sheet music, running words right over the notes. The ink flowed and smeared as Kestrel told Arin the truth, from the treaty to her engagement, from the Moth to her love, from the eastern horses to the poison that was killing his people. She wrote feelingly, fiercely, the nib of the pen sometimes puncturing the page.

  The words came easily. In a bare minute, the letter was done.

  * * *

  It burned in her skirt pocket like a hot coal. Kestrel went to her father’s suite—he wasn’t there, his valet didn’t know where he was—and then finally to her own, where two maids were so perfectly normal that their ordinariness was dizzying to Kestrel. She made an excuse and ducked into her dressing room. Alone, she tucked a masker moth into her sleeve. The buttoned fastening at the wrist kept the moth safely inside, and she wished fervently that she had done this earlier. If only she’d had a moth in the music room. She could have slipped it to Arin. A sign. She would have been subtle—a sleight of hand was all it would have taken, an absentminded rub of her wrists, and then the reveal.

  Kestrel had a three-tiered plan of what to do when she found Arin. If she found him alone, and trusted their privacy, she would speak. Yet … would he listen? She remembered that clarity in his voice as he had finally and fully given up on her, the coolness of his touch … a lightness. That light, cool quality had been relief. She knew that. If she tried to speak with him again, he might very well just walk away.

  Please, read this letter, she’d say, and place it in his hands. If all else failed, or they weren’t alone: the moth.

  There was a tap at the dressing room door.

  Kestrel opened it to see one of the maids: a very young girl. Quiet, softly plain. “My lady,” the maid said, “forgive me, but you seem upset.”

  “I’m fine.” But Kestrel’s voice was strained.

  “Should I send for the prince?
”

  So this was the maid in Verex’s employ. Kestrel realized that regardless of why the arrangement had begun, at some point Verex had asked the maid to watch over her, and to tell him if Kestrel needed help.

  How like Verex. How like her friend.

  It gave her courage. “No,” she told the maid. “Truly, I’m fine. Everything will be fine.”

  * * *

  At first, Kestrel felt better. She left the imperial wing behind her, clinging to her plan as if it were a guiding hand. But as she took a tightly wound marble staircase down, careful not to rush, careful to smile at a passing courtier and to ignore imperial guards stationed at the landings of each floor, that guiding hand grew cold. When she reached the wing that held suites for the lesser sort of guests, that hand felt like a fistful of bones. If she let go, they would scatter and roll.

  Kestrel stole a glance behind her. No one seemed to be following her.

  She turned down one last hall. The day’s last light seeped in from a lone window. It cast the hallway into lurid orange.

  Kestrel stood before the door. Could it really have been this easy? But then, the hidden room behind the screen had been empty. And the general was her father. He had taught her how to ride. He loved her. She knew it. Wasn’t it a betrayal of him to fear that he had reported the conversation in the music room … if, indeed, he’d even witnessed it?

  You have been betraying him all along, whispered a voice inside her. You are betraying him now.

  Yet she knocked at Tensen’s door. With a jittery gratitude, she heard someone stirring inside. Footsteps neared. The handle clicked. The door widened, and so did Tensen’s eyes when he saw who stood before him.

  She didn’t wait for him to speak. She slipped inside.

  45

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Tensen said.

  Kestrel ignored him. She threaded through the small suite, ignoring the very existence of privacy as Tensen trailed after her, protesting. She even entered his dressing room.

  She rounded on Tensen. “Where’s Arin?”

  “I told you,” Tensen said warily, “no one knows where he is, and I assure you that I haven’t hidden him in the wardrobe.”

  “Well, he’s closer than you’d think, and he hasn’t been in Herran’s city, or he would be dying.” She explained what she knew about the poison flowing through Herran’s aqueducts. The news made Tensen grow still. Stony. Telling the news had the opposite effect on her, because beneath her own words she heard the murmurs of everything Arin had said to her in the music room, and what she’d said back.

  Tensen caught her wild hands. “Kestrel, be calm. Lower your voice.”

  Had she been shouting? Her breath felt shallow, as if she’d been running. “Where can I find him?”

  “I need for you to calm down.”

  She pulled away. “The city’s water supply is tainted. I have to tell him.”

  “It can’t be you.” His small green eyes were worried. “There are places in the palace you can’t go without raising suspicion. Arin might even have left already. Your emperor’s punishment for treason is death. Do you want to be caught?”

  “It must be me,” she insisted. “I have to explain … other things.”

  “Ah.” Tensen covered his mouth and rubbed at his cheek. “He risked a great deal meeting with you alone. Would you have him risk that again?”

  “No, but…” She felt desperate. The pieces of her were coming apart, jumbling out of order. She took the letter from her pocket. She could no longer believe that Arin might accept it. Not from her. Not after the things that she had said. “Find him. Give this to him. It explains.”

  He took the folded page gingerly. The black and white of the sonata’s score looked up at them. “What does it explain?”

  “Everything.”

  “Kestrel, what exactly do you hope giving him this will do?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. I—”

  “You’re not yourself. You’re not thinking clearly.”

  “I don’t want to think clearly! I am tired of thinking clearly. Arin should know about me. He should have always known.”

  “It was better for him that he didn’t. You believed that. I did, too.”

  “We were wrong.”

  “So after he learns the truth, you’ll end your engagement.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll run away with Arin to live in a dying country for a few short days before the hammer of another invasion falls.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Tensen said. “You love him.”

  Helplessly, she said, “I love my father, too.”

  Tensen looked down at the letter. He turned it over in his hands.

  “If you don’t give that to Arin,” Kestrel said, “I will.”

  Tensen grimaced. Then he opened his jacket and placed the letter in an internal breast pocket. He refastened the jacket and patted his chest once, just above the heart. Kestrel heard the faint crackle of paper.

  “You’ll do it?” she said.

  “I promise.”

  * * *

  Kestrel’s father was waiting in her suite. He must have sent the maids away. He was alone, sitting in a chair in the outermost receiving room. During daylight hours, the chair had a view of the barbican through which the general had entered months ago on his bloodied horse. He kept his gaze to the window well after Kestrel had entered. Night had fallen and the window was black. There was nothing for him to see.

  She stopped wondering whether he had been in the hidden room for some—all?—of her conversation with Arin. She knew. She saw it in his face. Her father had heard more than enough.

  A crisis of words rose within her. She wanted to say so many things—to ask what he believed, to plead her innocence, to confess her guilt, to ask if he had reported Arin’s presence to the imperial guard, and if yes, what would happen, and if no, please don’t, Father, don’t. She wanted to say, Love me anyway, even with what I’ve done, even with my mistakes, will you, would you, please?

  And what she wanted most was to be small again, to be allowed to call him papa, to reach only his knee, because she remembered, in a flash like light from a curtain yanked open wide, how she used to run and topple against his legs when she was that young, and hug him, and she could swear that he would laugh.

  Kestrel slowly crossed the room to him. She knelt beside his chair. She rested her brow against his knee and closed her eyes. Heart in mouth, she whispered, “Do you trust me?”

  There was no answer. Then she felt his heavy hand on her hair. “Yes,” he said.

  46

  Arin hid in the coal room near the furnaces that boiled water to be forced through palace pipes. He had asked a Herrani servant to find Tensen and bring him there, and thought that in the meanwhile he’d dirty himself beyond recognition, but after his first few minutes alone in the room, lit by a lamp set cautiously high on the wall on the far side of the coal pile, Arin realized that simply pacing and breathing was enough to deposit charcoal on him. He rubbed at his scar. His fingers came away grimy. Burnt-tasting dust coated his throat. He coughed, then choked, and somehow that choking turned into a black laugh.

  The door unlocked and opened, and Tensen stepped inside. His face was furious. “The god of fools wants you for his own, Arin. What were you thinking, coming to the capital?”

  Arin felt unreal, unstrung, bewilderingly light, like a workhorse stripped of his gear and let to wander. He drew breath to speak.

  “Don’t bother explaining,” Tensen said. “I know what you’ve been up to.”

  Arin frowned. “How?”

  “The servants told me. Arin, you are an idiot.”

  “I am.” There was that dusty laugh again. “I really am.”

  “You’re lucky that the whole palace doesn’t know you’re here—and blessedly lucky that the servants are keeping quiet. So far. Everything in the palace is too quiet. It’s eerie. I don’t like it, I don’t like you here, and you are going to
take my news and leave straight for Herran and never return.” Tensen gripped his shoulder. “Swear it. Swear by the gods.”

  Arin did. It felt good to make that promise.

  Tensen let go. “The treaty was a lie. Every minute we’ve spent here has been part of the emperor’s charade, a distraction to make us believe that our independence was a serious thing, serious enough to demand attendance at court. The emperor wants Herran back. He wants it emptied of Herrani.”

  Arin listened as Tensen told him about the poison that had been seeping into Herran’s water supply. Arin felt blood leach from his face. Coal dust caked his lungs. Air rattled in his chest. It was hard to breathe.

  “You’ll have to shut off the city’s water,” Tensen said. “Evacuate everyone to the countryside if you have to. Just go. It’s nightfall. You might make it to the harbor with no one noticing.”

  “Come with me.”

  Tensen shook his head.

  “If Sarsine’s sick—if everyone’s sick … Tensen, I need you.”

  “You need me here.”

  “It’s too dangerous. You must be under scrutiny. Deliah can get word to us, your Moth could use the knotted code.”

  Tensen’s face changed. “Deliah and the Moth can’t help us anymore. They’ve done as much as they can.”

  “Then so have you.”

  “There might be one last thing to learn. What if I’ve missed something?” Tensen’s expression softened. “Don’t you remember when I asked whether you’d choose to help Herran, or yourself? You said you’d put our country first. Haven’t I respected that choice? Can’t you respect mine?” Tensen lifted a hand to Arin’s face and ran a thumb across his cheek. The old man’s thumb came away black. “My boy. You’ve been a little lost, haven’t you?”

  Arin wanted to protest that he hadn’t been, then to admit that he had, then to prove that he wasn’t anymore. “I didn’t fail you.”

  “I never said you did.”

  “I secured the eastern alliance. I made something, Tensen, a new thing, something that might check the imperial army. The emperor isn’t as secure as he thinks. He—”