The Winner's Curse

by Marie Rutkoski

  Suddenly, Arin was a twelve-year-old boy again, hands caked with white dust from quarrying as much rock as he could to prove his strength to this man.

  “I worried we’d miss each other,” Arin said. “I went to your villa first, but was told you had come here.”

  “Where’ve you been?” Cheat was in an ugly mood.

  “Scouting the mountain pass.” When this deepened Cheat’s frown, Arin added, “Since that’s the path the reinforcements will probably take.”

  “Of course. Obviously.”

  “And I know just what to do to them.”

  A glimmer stole into Cheat’s face.

  Arin sent for Sarsine, and when she came, he asked her to bring Kestrel. “I need her opinion.”

  Sarsine hesitated. “But—”

  Cheat wagged a finger at her. “I’m sure you run this house well, but can’t you see that your cousin’s bursting at the seams with a plan that might save our hides? Don’t bore him with domestic details, like who’s squabbling with whom … or whether your special charge isn’t feeling social. Just get the girl.”

  She left.

  Arin fetched a map from his library, then hurried to the dining room, where Cheat waited with Kestrel and Sarsine, who gave Arin an exasperated look that said she washed her hands of all three of them. She walked out the door.

  Arin spread the map on the table and weighted its corners with rocks from his pockets.

  Kestrel sat, armored in stubborn silence.

  “Let’s hear your plan, lad,” Cheat said, and looked only at him.

  Arin felt that surge of excitement he’d had long ago, when they first began plotting to seize the city. “We’ve already taken out the Valorian guards on our side of the mountain.” He touched the map, ran a finger along the ribbon of the pass. “Now we send a small force through the pass to their side. We select men and women who can best pass as Valorian until the final moment. The imperial guards are removed. Some of our people take their place, others hide in the foothills, and a messenger is sent through the pass to alert our fighters, who have kegs of black powder stationed here”—Arin pointed to the middle of the pass—“on either side. We’ll need people who know the mountains and can scramble far up enough to get good height on the Valorians. They’ll also need to be willing to be crushed under any avalanche the explosions trigger. Four people, two for each side, will do.”

  “We don’t have much black powder left,” said Cheat. “We should save it for the real invasion.”

  “We won’t be alive for the invasion if we don’t use the black powder now.” Arin flattened his palms on the table, leaning over the map. “Most of our forces, about two thousand strong, will be flanking our entry to the pass. A Valorian battalion always has roughly the same numbers, so—”

  “Always?” said Cheat.

  Kestrel’s eyes, which had been steadily narrowing as Arin explained his plan, became slits.

  “You’ve learned a lot as the general’s slave,” Cheat said approvingly.

  That wasn’t exactly how Arin knew details of the Valorian military, but all he said was, “The two forces, ours and theirs, will be roughly equal in numbers but not in experience or weaponry. We’ll be the weaker of the two. And the Valorians will have archers and crossbows. They won’t, however, haul heavy cannon when they’re not planning for battle. That’s where we will have the advantage.”

  “Arin, we don’t have cannon either.”

  “We do. We just need to unload them from the ships we seized in the harbor and drag them up the mountainside.”

  Cheat stared, then thumped Arin on the shoulder. “Brilliant.”

  Kestrel sat back in her chair. She folded her arms.

  “Once the entire battalion is in the pass,” Arin said, “and they begin to emerge on our side, our cannons will fire into their front lines. A complete surprise.”

  “Surprise?” Cheat shook his head. “The Valorians will send scouts ahead. Once someone sees the cannons, they’re going to get suspicious fast.”

  “They won’t see the cannons, because our weaponry and forces will be disguised under shrouds of cloth the color of these.” He gestured at the pale rocks. “Hemp and burlap sacks taken from the dockyards will do, and we can strip linen from Valorian beds. We’ll blend into the mountainside.”

  Cheat grinned.

  “So our cannons fire into the first lines,” Arin said, “which will be cavalry. The horses, hopefully, will panic, and if not they’ll still have a hard time keeping their footing on that downward slope. Meanwhile, the black powder kegs go off in the middle of the pass and bring rock down, blocking one half of the battalion from the other. Then our force on the other side of the pass pours in and makes short work of one half of the Valorian battalion, which should be trapped and in chaos. We do the same to the other half. We win.”

  Cheat said nothing at first, though his expression spoke for itself. “Well?” he turned to Kestrel. “What do you think?”

  She wouldn’t look at him.

  “Make her talk, Arin,” Cheat complained. “You said you wanted to know her opinion.”

  Arin, who had been watching Kestrel’s slight shifts in mood and body and had seen the resentment build, said, “She thinks the plan might work.”

  Cheat glanced between the two of them. His gaze lingered on Kestrel, probably trying to see what Arin saw. Then he shrugged in that showy style that had made him such a favorite as an auctioneer. “Well, it’s better than anything I’ve got. I’ll go tell everyone what to do.”

  Kestrel shot Arin a furtive glance. He couldn’t read it.

  Cheat embraced Arin with one arm and was gone.

  Once alone with Kestrel, Arin drew the plant out of his pocket: a handful of green with a wirelike stem and slender-tipped leaves. He set it on the table before her. Her eyes flashed, became jewels of joy. It was treasure, the way she looked at him.

  “Thank you,” she breathed.

  “I should have searched for it sooner,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to ask.” He touched three fingers to the back of her hand, the Herrani gesture that could acknowledge thanks for a gift, but could also be used to ask forgiveness.

  Kestrel’s hand was smooth. Glistening, as if it had been oiled.

  She drew it back. She changed. Arin saw her change, saw the happiness bleed out of her. She said, “What do I owe you for this?”

  “Nothing,” he said quickly, confused. Didn’t he owe her? Hadn’t she fought for him once? Hadn’t he used her trust to upend her world?

  Arin studied Kestrel, and realized that it wasn’t so much that she had changed but that she had slipped back into the same huddled anger that had tightened her shoulders the entire time she had been sitting next to Cheat.

  Of course Kestrel was angry, having listened to a plot to destroy her people. But as soon as Arin assumed that this was it, his mind returned to that inscrutable look she had given him. He turned it over the way he might a seashell, wondering what kind of creature had lived inside.

  He remembered that glance: the flick of brows, the tense line of her mouth.

  “What is the matter?” he asked.

  She seemed like she wouldn’t reply. Then she said, “Cheat will claim your ideas for his own.”

  Arin had known that. “Do you care?”

  A breath of disgust.

  “We need a leader,” Arin said. “We need to win. How doesn’t matter.”

  “You’ve been studying,” she said, and Arin realized he had quoted from one of her father’s books on warfare. “You’ve been taking texts from my library, reading about Valorian battle formations and methods of attack.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  She flipped an impatient hand.

  He said, “It’s high time my people learned something from yours. You have, after all, conquered half of the known world. What do you think, Kestrel? Would I make a good Valorian?”

  “No.”

  “No? Not even when I have such ingenious
strategies that my general would steal them?”

  “And what are you, that you would let him?” Kestrel stood, straight-shouldered and slender, like a sword.

  “I am a liar,” Arin slowly said the words for her. “Coward. I have no honor.”

  There it was again. That look, livid with hidden things.

  A secret.

  “What is it, Kestrel? Tell me what’s wrong.”

  Her face hardened in a way that told Arin he would get no answer. “I want to see Jess.”

  The plant lay scraggly and limp on the table.

  Arin wondered what, exactly, he had hoped it would make better.

  * * *

  Snow sifted onto the walk leading to the carriage. Kestrel was grateful for the plant Sarsine carried with her, but the evening had soured her thoughts, twisted her insides with anxiety. She thought of Cheat. She considered Arin’s plan—a cunning one, horribly likely to work.

  It was more urgent than ever that she escape.

  Yet how could she, in Arin’s courtyard, surrounded by Herrani who looked increasingly less like ragtag rebels and more like members of an army?

  If she did escape, what would happen to Jess?

  Sarsine ducked into the carriage. Kestrel was about to follow when she glanced over her shoulder at the house. It shimmered darkly, glazed by the evening snow. Kestrel saw the architectural whorl that was her suite of rooms on the building’s east side. The tall stone rectangle was her rooftop garden, though it seemed double its width.

  The door.

  Kestrel remembered the locked door in her garden and realized several things.

  The door must lead to another garden that mirrored hers. This was why that high wall appeared twice as wide from the outside.

  That other garden connected to the west wing, which glowed with windows as large as those in her suite, with the same diamond-pane details.

  Most important, the roof of the west wing sloped downward. It ended over a room on the ground floor that might have been the library or parlor.

  Kestrel smiled.

  Arin wasn’t the only one with a plan.

  * * *

  “Only for Jess,” Kestrel told the Herrani healer, and didn’t care that dozens of people were dying at her feet. She dogged the healer, unwilling to risk that one leaf might go to someone else, even though she saw other faces she recognized under the violet mask of the poison.

  She chose Jess.

  When the drink was prepared and tipped into Jess’s mouth, the girl gagged. Liquid trickled down her chin. The healer calmly caught it with the rim of the bowl and tried again, but the same thing happened.

  Kestrel took the bowl from the healer. “Drink this,” she told her friend.

  Jess moaned.

  “Do it,” Kestrel said, “or you’ll be sorry.”

  “What a lovely bedside manner you have,” Sarsine said.

  “If you don’t drink,” Kestrel said to Jess, “you’ll be sorry, because you’ll never have the chance to tease me again, to see how I want too much and do such foolish things to get it. You’ll never hear me say that I love you. I love you, little sister. Will you please drink?”

  A click came from Jess’s throat. Kestrel took it to be assent, and set the cup to her lips.

  Jess drank.

  Hours passed. The night deepened. Jess gave no hint of recovery, Sarsine fell asleep in a chair, and somewhere Arin was readying for a battle that could come as early as the dawn.

  Then Jess inhaled: a thin, watery breath. But better. Her eyes cracked open, and when she saw Kestrel she rasped, “I want my mother.”

  It was what Kestrel had whispered to her once, when they were little girls sleeping in the same bed, their feet cold and soft and touching. Kestrel held her friend’s hand now and did what Jess had done for her then, which was to murmur soothing things that were barely words and more like music.

  Kestrel felt the feeble pressure of Jess’s fingers against hers.

  “Don’t let go,” Kestrel said.

  Jess listened. Her eyes focused, and widened, and woke up to the world.

  * * *

  “You should tell Arin,” Sarsine said later in the carriage.

  Kestrel knew that she wasn’t talking about Jess. “I won’t. Neither will you.” Disdainfully, she said, “You’re afraid of Cheat.”

  Kestrel didn’t add that she was, too.

  * * *

  That night, Kestrel tried the locked garden door again. She pulled against the knob with all her strength. The door was massive. It didn’t even rattle.

  She stood, shivering in the snow. Then she went back into her rooms and returned with a table, which she set against the wall in the far corner. She climbed onto the table, and was still nowhere tall enough to reach the top of the wall. She hoped the corner’s angles would give her hands and feet leverage to push upward.

  The wall was too smooth. She slid back down. Even with a chair on top of the table, the wall was too high for her, and putting anything on top of the chair would be precarious. She was likely to fall onto the stones.

  Kestrel climbed down and studied the garden in the lamplight thrown from her sunroom. She chewed the inside of her cheek, and was wondering whether books stacked on the chair on top of the table would make a difference when she heard something.

  The grate of a heel against pebbles. It came from beyond the door, on the other side of the wall.

  Someone had been listening.

  Was listening still.

  As quietly as she could, Kestrel took the chair down from the table and went inside.

  * * *

  Before Arin left for the mountain pass, during the coldest hours of the night, he found time to order that every piece of furniture light enough for Kestrel to move be taken from her suite.

  34

  As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin thought that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valorians also went to war because of love.

  Arin loved those hours of waiting. The silent, brilliant tension, like scribbles of heat lightning. His city far below and behind him, his hand on a cannon’s curve, ears open to the acoustics of the pass. He stared into it, and even though he smelled the reek of fear from men and women around him, he was caught in a kind of wonder. He felt so vibrant. As if his life was a fresh, translucent, thin-skinned fruit. It could be sliced apart and he wouldn’t care. Nothing felt like this.

  Nothing except—

  And that was another thing war did. It helped Arin forget what he couldn’t have.

  There was a skittering sound. It rattled through the pass, growing louder until one of Cheat’s messengers emerged and ran straight for the commander. Arin wasn’t far from Cheat’s side, but even if he had been he probably would have heard the boy’s gasp. “Coming,” he said. “They’re coming.”

  After that, it was all buzz and haste. Checking that the cannons were properly packed, then checking again. Cutting fuses from long, thin coils of flammable cord. Huddling under the dun-colored cloth.

  Arin peered through a hole cut into the sheet. His eyes burned from not blinking.

  But of course he heard them before he saw them. The percussion of thousands of marching feet. Then the Valorian front lines emerged from the pass. Arin waited, and waited, for Cheat’s first shot.

  It came. The cannonball ripped through cloth, drove through the air, and smashed into the cavalry. It split horses and people into chunks. Arin heard screaming, but he blocked it out.

  The stone-colored sheets were gone—no need for them now—and Arin was heaving a ball into the gut of a cannon, firing, doing it again, hands black with powder, when a woman appeared at his side. She yanked at his sleeve. “Cheat is hurt,” she said.

  The Valorians were firing back, arrows and crossbow quarrels piercing the air with terrifying accuracy. Arin sucked in a breath. He ran.
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  Arrows whistled past him.

  He dove behind the boulders that partially shielded Cheat’s cannon. The man was stretched out on his back, face sprayed with black powder. Herrani clumped around him, staring down with shock.

  “No!” Arin shouted at them. “Eyes on the Valorians, not him!” They startled, then returned to what they were doing, which was blowing as many holes as they could into the Valorian formations.

  “Except you.” Arin grabbed the nearest man by his shirt. “Tell me what happened.” Arin crouched and patted Cheat’s arms, chest, looking for blood. “No wounds. Why are there no wounds?”

  “He just fell back,” said the man. “When the cannon went off, the blast knocked Cheat off his feet. He must have hit his head.”

  Arin’s laugh was wild. The first moment of battle, and the commander had gone unconscious. Hardly a good omen.

  He dragged Cheat more securely behind the boulders and snatched a spyglass from the man’s pocket. It had been taken from the general’s villa. It was of fine quality.

  A little too fine. Through it, Arin saw that the Valorian cavalry kept their seats and horses under control, even on a treacherously steep slope bombarded with cannon. They were advancing.

  Then Arin saw worse. As he watched, some soldiers behind the front lines craned their necks to scan the sides of the pass. There was a bright flash of an arm guard as a Valorian drew an arrow, sighted a target above in the cliffs, and shot.

  One of the four Herrani charged with setting off kegs of black powder fell from the cliff. Arin swore. He watched, and could do nothing, as the other three Herrani were spitted with crossbow quarrels.

  That was it, Arin thought. That was the end of everything. If they couldn’t split the Valorian battalion in two by bringing rocks down the pass, the Herrani would be quickly trampled under an experienced army that was already recovering from surprise.

  But the last Herrani on the mountainside clung to the cliff, somehow still alive.

  She fell. She flipped in the air and caught fire. That was when Arin noticed the small keg clutched in her arms. She hit the ground, and exploded. Fire raged through the Valorian army.