“… of course it is the most shocking scandal,” Faris was saying.
Kestrel’s curiosity sharpened. A scandal? If it was of a romantic nature, her estimation of Faris was about to rise. Only a steel-nerved woman would gossip about other people’s follies while her own giggled and clutched at the grass with tiny fists.
“I love scandals,” Ronan said as he, Kestrel, and Benix sat.
“You should,” said Benix. “You’re always causing them.”
“Not the ones I most want.” Ronan smiled at Kestrel.
Faris rapped his shoulder with her fan, a gesture that appeared to chastise him, but which everyone in the circle knew was an encouragement to continue the witty, flirty banter that would make a success of this party—provided that the compliments were turned toward its hostess.
Ronan immediately praised Faris’s low-cut dress with its slashed sleeves. He admired the jewel-encrusted hilt of her dagger, strapped over her sash as all ladies wore their weapons.
Kestrel listened. She saw, yet again, that her friend’s compliments were just bits of art and artifice. They were paper swans, cunningly folded so that they could float on the air for a few moments. Nothing more. Kestrel felt something within her lessen. She didn’t know, however, whether that something was tension, easing into relief, or expectation, dwindling into disappointment.
She plucked a wildflower from the grass and offered it to the baby. He grabbed it, staring with dark-eyed awe at the petals as they crumpled in his grasp. He smiled, and one dimple sank into his left cheek.
Ronan’s flattery had triggered the competition of the other young men present, so Kestrel had to wait some time before the conversation could be brought back to the meat of the matter: the scandal.
“But you gentlemen are distracting me!” Faris said. “Don’t you want my news?”
“I do,” said Kestrel, passing the baby another flower.
“As you should. Your father won’t be pleased.”
Kestrel glanced up from the child, and when she did, she saw Arin within earshot, his expression keen.
“What has my father to do with it?” She found it impossible to believe that he had romantically entangled himself. “He’s not even in the city. He’s leading a training session a day’s ride from here.”
“That may be. But when General Trajan returns, Senator Andrax will pay an even greater price.”
“For what?”
“Why, for selling kegs of black powder to the eastern savages.”
There was a stunned silence.
“Andrax has sold weapons to the empire’s enemies?” Benix said.
“He claims the kegs were stolen. But I ask you, how could they be? They were under his guard. Now they’re missing. Everyone knows Andrax likes to line his pockets with bribes. What’s to stop him from trading illegally with the barbarians?”
“You’re right,” Kestrel said, “my father will be furious.”
Lady Faris began listing in thrilled tones the possible punishments for the senator, who had been imprisoned until the capital could be reached for instructions. “My husband himself has gone to discuss the matter with the emperor. Oh, what shall happen to Andrax? An execution, do you think? Banishment to the northern tundra at the very least!” Faris’s circle of admirers joined in, concocting punishments so wildly cruel they became morbid jokes. Only Ronan was silent, watching Faris’s baby clamber onto Kestrel’s lap and drool on her sleeve.
Kestrel held the child, her eyes trained on but not really seeing his fine white hair, stirring in the faint wind like dandelion fluff. She dreaded her father’s return. She knew what this news would bring. He would be appalled at the senator’s betrayal and would use the news to urge Kestrel to see the necessity of adding loyal soldiers to the empire’s ranks. His pressure on her would increase. She could not breathe.
“You’re good at this,” said Ronan.
“What?”
He leaned to touch the baby’s head. “Being a mother.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Ronan looked awkward. Then he said glibly, “Nothing, if you don’t like it.” He glanced at Benix, Faris, and the others, but they were discussing thumbscrews and nooses. “It didn’t mean anything. I take it back.”
Kestrel set the baby on the grass next to Faris. “You cannot take it back.”
“Just this once,” he said, echoing her earlier words during the game.
She stood and walked away.
He followed. “Come, Kestrel. I spoke only the truth.”
They had entered the shade of thickly grown laran trees, whose leaves were a bloody color. They would soon fall.
“It’s not that I wouldn’t want to have a child someday,” Kestrel told Ronan.
Visibly relieved, he said, “Good. The empire needs new life.”
It did. She knew this. As the Valorian empire stretched across the continent, it faced the problem of keeping what it had won. The solutions were military prowess and boosting the Valorian population, so the emperor prohibited any activities that unnecessarily endangered Valorian lives—like dueling and the bull-jumping games that used to mark coming-of-age ceremonies. Marriage became mandatory by the age of twenty for anyone who was not a soldier.
“It’s just—” Kestrel tried again: “Ronan, I feel trapped. Between what my father wants and—”
He held up his hands in flat-palmed defense. “I am not trying to trap you. I am your friend.”
“I know. But when you are faced with only two choices—the military or marriage—don’t you wonder if there is a third, or a fourth, or more, even, than that?”
“You have many choices. The law says that in three years you must marry, but not whom. Anyway, there is time.” His shoulder grazed hers in the teasing push of children starting a mock fight. “Time enough for me to convince you of the right choice.”
“Benix, of course.” She laughed.
“Benix.” Ronan made a fist and shook it at the sky. “Benix!” he shouted. “I challenge you to a duel! Where are you, you great oaf?” Ronan stormed from the laran trees with all the flair of a comic actor.
Kestrel smiled, watching him go. Maybe his silly flirtations disguised something real. People’s feelings were hard to know for certain. A conversation with Ronan resembled a Bite and Sting game where Kestrel couldn’t tell if the truth looked like a lie, or a lie like the truth.
If it was true, what then?
She paused, nursing that glow of a laugh that remained inside her, the question she had posed to herself unanswered.
Someone—a man—came up behind her and snaked an arm around her waist.
Not flirtation. Aggression.
Kestrel sidestepped and spun, pulling her dagger from its sheath.
Irex. His dagger was drawn, too.
“A fight, dear Kestrel?” His stance was easy. He didn’t know how to play Bite and Sting, but his skill at weapons outmatched hers.
“Not here,” she said stiffly.
“No, not here.” His voice was soft. “But anywhere, if you want it.”
“Exactly what do you think you are doing, Irex?”
“You mean, a moment ago? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I was trying to pick your pocket.” His tone hinted at a coarse double meaning.
Kestrel slid her dagger into its sheath. “Theft is the only way you will get my gold.” She walked from the cover of trees and saw, with shaky gratitude, that the party was still there, that the sound of porcelain and spoons still tinkled over low talk, and that no one had noticed anything.
No one, except perhaps Arin. He was waiting for her. She felt a flash of something unpleasant—embarrassment, perhaps, as she wondered how much of this afternoon he had overheard. Dismay to think that he might have witnessed that last exchange with Irex, and misunderstood it. Or was she troubled by something else? Maybe it was the thought that Arin knew perfectly well what had been taking place behind the trees and had made no move to interfere, to help.
; It was not his place to interfere, she reminded herself. She had not needed his help.
“We are leaving,” she told him.
* * *
She let her bad mood seethe into the silence of the carriage. Finally, she couldn’t bear the vicious cycle of her thoughts, the way they kept returning to Irex and her stupid decision to humiliate him at Bite and Sting. “Well?” she asked Arin.
He sat across from her in the carriage, but didn’t lift his eyes to meet hers. He studied his hands. “Well, what?”
“What do you think?”
“About?”
“About the party. About anything. About the bargain we made that you could at least pretend to uphold.”
“You want to gossip about the party.” He seemed tired.
“I want you to speak to me.”
He looked at her then. She found that she had clenched her silk skirts in a fist. She let go. “For example, I know you overheard about Senator Andrax. Do you think he merits torture? Death?”
“He deserves what he gets,” he said, and went quiet again.
Kestrel gave up. She sank into her anger.
“That isn’t what’s bothering you.” Arin sounded reluctant, almost incredulous, as if he couldn’t believe the words coming from his mouth.
Kestrel waited.
He said, “That man is an ass.”
It was clear whom he meant. It was clear that no slave should ever say that of any Valorian. But it was magic to hear the words out loud. Kestrel breathed a laugh. “And I am a fool.” She pressed chilly hands to her forehead. “I knew what he’s like. I should have never played Bite and Sting with him. Or I should have let him win.”
The corner of Arin’s mouth twitched. “I enjoyed watching him lose.”
There was a silence, and Kestrel, though she felt comforted, knew that Arin’s understanding of the afternoon had been fairly complete. He had waited beyond the laran trees, listening to her and Irex. Would he have continued to do nothing, had something else happened?
“Do you know how to play Bite and Sting?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
“Either you do or you don’t.”
“Whether I know or don’t doesn’t matter.”
She made an impatient noise. “Because?”
His teeth flashed in the late, shifting light. “Because you would not want to play against me.”
11
When the general returned home and heard the news about Senator Andrax, he didn’t wait even to wash off the dirt of the previous days. He climbed back on his horse and spurred it in the direction of the prison.
It was afternoon when he strode back into the villa, and Kestrel, who had heard his horse coming from where she sat in one of her rooms, came down the stairs and saw him crouching by the pool in the entryway. He splashed water on his face and palmed it over his hair, which was spiky with sweat.
“What will happen to the senator?” asked Kestrel.
“The emperor doesn’t like to punish by death, but in this case I think he will make an exception.”
“Perhaps the kegs of black powder were stolen, as Andrax claims.”
“He was the only one besides myself with a key to that particular armory, and there was no sign of forced entry. I had my key with me and have been away for three days.”
“The kegs could still be in the city. I assume that someone has ordered the ships to be kept at port and searched?”
Her father winced. “Trust you to think of what the governor should have done two days ago.” He paused, then said, “Kestrel—”
“I know what you’re going to say.” This was why she had come to her father and broached the subject of the senator’s betrayal: she hadn’t wanted to wait for the general to turn it into a tool to use on her. “The empire needs people like me.”
His brows rose. “So you’ll do it? You’ll enlist?”
“No. I have a suggestion. You claim that I have a mind for war.”
Slowly, he said, “You have a way of getting what you want.”
“Yet for years now my military training has focused on the physical, and all it has done is shape me into a barely competent fighter.” Kestrel had an image of Irex standing before her, the dagger held so naturally that it seemed to have grown out of his hand. “It’s not enough. You should be teaching me history. We should be inventing battle scenarios, discussing the benefits and drawbacks of battalion order. Meanwhile, I will keep an open mind about fighting for the empire.”
His light brown eyes were crinkling at the corners, but he made his mouth stern. “Hmph.”
“You don’t like my suggestion?”
“I am wondering what it will cost me.”
Kestrel readied herself. This was the hard part. “My sessions with Rax stop. He knows as well as I do that I have come as far as I can. We are wasting his time.”
The general shook his head. “Kestrel—”
“And you will stop pressuring me to enlist. Whether I become a soldier is my choice.”
The general rubbed his wet palms together, his hands still dirty. The water that dripped from them was brown. “Here is my counteroffer. You will study strategy with me as my schedule allows. Your sessions with Rax will continue, but only on a weekly basis. And you will make your decision by spring.”
“I don’t have to decide until I am twenty.”
“It’s better for us both, Kestrel, if we know soon on what ground we stand.”
She was ready to agree, but he lifted one finger. “If you don’t choose my life,” he said, “you will marry in the spring.”
“That’s a trap.”
“No, it’s a bet. A bet that you like your independence too much not to fight alongside me.”
“I hope you see the irony in what you have just said.”
He smiled.
Kestrel said, “You will stop trying to persuade me? No more lectures?”
“None.”
“I will play the piano whenever I like. You won’t say a word about it.”
His smile shrank. “Fine.”
“And”—her voice faltered—“if I marry, it will be to whom I choose.”
“Of course. Any Valorian of our society will do.”
This was fair, she decided. “I agree.”
The general patted her cheek with a damp hand. “Good girl.”
* * *
Kestrel walked down the hall. The night before her father’s return she had lain awake, seeing the three bee tiles behind her closed eyes, and Irex’s knife, and her own. She had thought about how powerful she had felt in one situation, and how helpless in the other. She studied her life like a draw of Bite and Sting pieces. She believed she saw a clear line of play.
But she had forgotten that it was her father who had taught her that game.
Kestrel had the feeling that she had just made a very bad bargain.
She passed by the library, then stopped and returned to its open door. Two house slaves were inside, dusting. They paused at the sound of her feet on the threshold and looked at her—no, peered, as if they could see all her mistakes imprinted on her face.
Lirah, a lovely girl with greenish eyes, said, “My lady—”
“Do you know where Smith is?” Kestrel wasn’t sure what had made her use Arin’s other name. It wasn’t until that moment that she realized she hadn’t shared his true one with anybody.
“At the forge,” Lirah said promptly. “But—”
Kestrel turned and walked toward the garden doors.
* * *
She thought that she had been seeking a light distraction. But when she heard the clang of metal on metal and saw Arin scraping a shaft of steel across the anvil with one set of tools and beating at it with another, Kestrel knew she had come to the wrong place.
“Yes?” he said, keeping his back to her. His workshirt was soaked through with sweat. His hands were sooty. He left the blade of the sword to cool on the anvil and moved to place another, shorter length of metal on th
e fire, which lined his profile with unsteady light.
She willed her voice to be her own. “I thought we could play a game.”
His dark brows drew together.
“Of Bite and Sting,” Kestrel said. More firmly, she added, “You implied you know how to play.”
He used tongs to stoke the fire. “I did.”
“You implied that you could beat me.”
“I implied that there was no reason a Valorian would want to play with a Herrani.”
“No, you worded things carefully so that what you said could be interpreted that way. But that isn’t what you meant.”
He faced her then, arms folded across his chest. “I have no time for games.” The tips of his fingers had black rings of charcoal dust buried under the nail and into the cuticle. “I have work to do.”
“Not if I say you don’t.”
He turned away. “I like to finish what I start.”
She meant to leave. She meant to leave him to the noise and heat. She meant to say nothing more. Instead, Kestrel found herself issuing a challenge. “You are no match for me anyway.”
He gave her the look she recognized well, the one of measured disdain. But this time, he also laughed. “Where do you propose we play?” He swept a hand around the forge. “Here?”
“My rooms.”
“Your rooms.” Arin shook his head disbelievingly.
“My sitting room,” she said. “Or the parlor,” she added, though it bothered her to think of playing Bite and Sting with him in a place so public to the household.
He leaned against the anvil, considering. “Your sitting room will do. I’ll come when I’ve finished this sword. After all, I have house privileges now. Might as well use them.” Arin started to say something else, then stopped, his gaze roving over her face. She grew uneasy.
He was staring, she realized. He was staring at her.
“You have dirt on your face,” he said shortly.
He returned to his work.
Later, in her bathing room, Kestrel saw it. The moment she tilted the mirror to catch the low, amber light of late afternoon, she saw what he had seen, as had Lirah, who had tried to tell her. A faint smudge traced the slope of her high cheekbone, darkened her cheek, and skimmed the line of her jaw. It was a handprint. It was the shadow left from her father’s gritty hand, from when he had touched her face to seal the bargain between them.
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