The Winner's Curse

by Marie Rutkoski

  He pressed it. “Doesn’t your father’s theory of war include winning over the other side by offering sweets? No? An oversight, I think. I wonder … might I bribe you?”

  Kestrel’s fingers clenched. It probably looked like anger. It wasn’t. It was the instinctive gesture of someone dangerously tempted.

  “Open your hands, Little Fists,” said Arin. “Open your eyes. I haven’t stolen his love for you. Look.” It was true that in the course of their conversation, Javelin had turned away from Arin, disappointed by the empty pocket. The horse nosed Kestrel’s shoulder. “See?” Arin said. “He knows the difference between an easy mark and his mistress.”

  Arin was an easy mark. He had offered to bring her to the stables, and here was the result: from where Kestrel stood, she could see the open tack room, how it was organized, and everything she would need to saddle Javelin quickly. Speed would matter when she escaped. And she would, she must, it was just a matter of getting out of the house at the right time, the right way. Javelin would be the fastest means to reach the harbor and a boat.

  When Arin and Kestrel left the stables, the snow had stopped and everything was crystalline. Kestrel wasn’t sure if it had grown colder or only seemed that way. She shivered inside Arin’s coat. It smelled like him. Like dark, summer earth. She would be glad to give the coat back. To see him slip it on in preparation for whatever mission would carry him away from here. He clouded her head.

  She inhaled the cold air and willed herself to be like that breath … a relentless, icy purity.

  * * *

  What would Kestrel’s father think, to know how she wavered, how close she came sometimes to wanting to remain a favored prisoner? He would disown her. No child of his would choose surrender.

  She went, under guard, to see Jess.

  The girl’s face was gray, but she could sit up and eat on her own. “Have you heard anything about my parents?” Jess asked.

  Kestrel shook her head. A few Valorians—civilians, socialites—had returned unexpectedly early from their stay in the capital for the winter season. They had been stopped in the mountain pass and imprisoned. Jess’s parents hadn’t been among them.

  “And Ronan?”

  “I’m not allowed to see him,” Kestrel said.

  “You’re allowed to see me.”

  Kestrel remembered Arin’s one-word note. Carefully, she said, “I think that Arin doesn’t consider you to be a threat.”

  “I wish I were,” Jess muttered, and fell silent. Her face seemed to sink in on itself. It was unbelievable to Kestrel that Jess—Jess—could look so withered.

  “Have you been sleeping?” Kestrel asked.

  “Too many nightmares.”

  Kestrel had them, too. They began with Cheat’s hand on the back of her neck and ended with her gasping awake in the dark, reminding herself that the man was dead. She dreamed about Irex’s baby, dark eyes fixed on her, and sometimes he would speak like an adult. He accused her of making him an orphan. It was her fault, he said, for having been blind to Arin. You cannot trust him, the baby said.

  “Forget your dreams,” Kestrel told Jess, even though she couldn’t follow her own advice. “I have something to cheer you up.” She handed her friend a folded pile of dresses. Once, her clothes would have been too tight for Jess. Now they would hang on her. Kestrel thought about that. She thought about Ronan, in prison, and Benix and Captain Wensan and that dark-eyed baby.

  “How do you have these?” Jess ran a hand over silk. “Never mind. I know. Arin.” Her mouth twisted as if drinking the poison again. “Kestrel, tell me it isn’t true what they say, that you are truly his, that you are on their side.”

  “It isn’t.”

  With a glance to make certain no one overheard, Jess leaned forward and whispered, “Promise that you will make them pay.”

  It was what Kestrel had hoped Jess would say. It was why she had come. She looked into the eyes of her friend, who had come so close to death.

  “I will,” Kestrel said.

  * * *

  Yet when she returned to the house, Sarsine had a smile on her face. “Go into the salon,” she said.

  Her piano. Its surface gleamed like wet ink. An emotion flooded through Kestrel, but she didn’t want to name it. It wasn’t right that she should feel it, simply because Arin had given back to her something that he had more or less taken.

  Kestrel shouldn’t play. She shouldn’t sit on that familiar velvet bench or think about how transporting a piano across the city was no mean feat. It meant people. Pulleys. Horses straining to haul a cart. She shouldn’t wonder how Arin had found the time and begged his people’s goodwill to bring her piano here.

  She shouldn’t touch the cool keys, or feel that delicious tension between silence and sound.

  She remembered that Arin had refused to sing for who knows how long.

  Kestrel didn’t have that particular kind of strength.

  She sat and played.

  * * *

  In the end, it wasn’t hard to guess which rooms had been Arin’s before the war. They were silent and dusty. Any children’s furniture had been removed, and the suite was fairly ordinary, its windows hung with deeply purple curtains. It looked as if for the past ten years it had served as a guest suite for the lesser sort of visitors. Its only unusual qualities were that its outer door was made of a different, lighter wood than those in the rest of the house … and that the sitting room had instruments mounted on the walls.

  Decoration. Perhaps Irex’s family had found the child-size instruments quaint. A wooden flute was tilted at an angle over the mantelpiece. On the far wall was a row of small violins, growing larger until the last, which was half the size of an adult violin.

  Kestrel came often. One day, when she knew from Sarsine that Arin had returned home but she had not yet seen him, she went to the suite. She touched one of his violins, reaching furtively to pluck the highest string of the largest instrument. The sound was sour. The violin was ruined—no doubt all of them were. That is what happens when an instrument is left strung and uncased for ten years.

  A floorboard creaked somewhere in one of the outer chambers.

  Arin. He entered the room, and she realized that she had expected him. Why else had she come here so frequently, almost every day, if she hadn’t hoped that someone would notice and tell him to find her there? But even though she admitted to wanting to be here with him in his old rooms, she hadn’t imagined it would be like this.

  With her caught touching his things.

  Her gaze dropped. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind.” He lifted the violin off its nails and set it in her hands. It was light, but Kestrel’s arms lowered as if the violin’s hollowness were terribly heavy.

  She cleared her throat. “Do you still play?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve mostly forgotten how. I wasn’t good at it anyway. I loved to sing. Before the war, I worried that gift would leave me, the way it often does with boys. We grow, we change, our voices break. It doesn’t matter how well you sing when you’re nine years old, you know. Not when you’re a boy. When the change comes you just have to hope for the best … that your voice settles into something you can love again. My voice broke two years after the invasion. Gods, how I squeaked. And when my voice finally settled, it seemed like a cruel joke. It was too good. I hardly knew what to do with it. I felt so grateful to have this gift … and so angry, for it to mean so little. And now…” He shrugged, a self-deprecating gesture. “Well, I know I’m rusty.”

  “No,” Kestrel said. “You’re not. Your voice is beautiful.”

  The silence after that was soft.

  Her fingers curled around the violin. She wanted to ask Arin a question yet couldn’t bear to do it, couldn’t say that she didn’t understand what had happened to him the night of the invasion. It didn’t make sense. The death of his family was what her father would call a “waste of resources.” The Valorian
force had had no pity for the Herrani military, but it had tried to minimize civilian casualties. You can’t make a dead body work.

  “What is it, Kestrel?”

  She shook her head. She set the violin back on the wall.

  “Ask me.”

  She remembered standing outside the governor’s palace and refusing to hear his story, and was ashamed once more.

  “You can ask me anything,” he said.

  Each question seemed the wrong one. Finally, she said, “How did you survive the invasion?”

  He didn’t speak at first. Then he said, “My parents and sister fought. I didn’t.”

  Words were useless, pitifully useless—criminal, even, in how they could not account for Arin’s grief, and could not excuse how her people had lived on the ruin of his. Yet again Kestrel said, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  It felt as if it was.

  Arin led the way out of his old suite. When they came to the last room, the greeting room, he paused before the outermost door. It was the slightest of hesitations, no longer than if the second hand of a clock stayed a beat longer on its mark than it should. But in that fraction of time, Kestrel understood that the last door was not paler than the others because it had been made from a different wood.

  It was newer.

  Kestrel took Arin’s battered hand in hers, the rough heat of it, the fingernails still ringed with carbon from the smith’s coal fire. His skin was raw-looking: scrubbed clean and scrubbed often. But the black grime was too ingrained.

  She twined her fingers with his. Kestrel and Arin walked together through the passageway and the ghost of its old door, which her people had smashed through ten years before.

  * * *

  After that, Kestrel sought him out. She used the excuse of those lessons he had given her. She said that she wanted more. She acquired a number of menial skills, like how to blacken boots.

  Arin was easy to find. Although raids on the countryside continued, he increasingly relied on lieutenants to lead the sorties. He spent more time at home.

  “I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,” Sarsine said.

  “He’s giving officers under his command the chance to prove their worth,” Kestrel said. “He’s showing his trust in them and letting them build their confidence. It’s sound military strategy.”

  Sarsine gave her a hard look.

  “He’s delegating,” Kestrel said.

  “He’s shirking. And for what, I’m sure you know.”

  This struck a bright match of pleasure within Kestrel.

  Like a match, it burned out quickly. She recalled her promise to Jess to make the Herrani pay.

  But she did not want to think about that.

  It occurred to her that she had never thanked Arin for bringing her piano here. She found him in the library and meant to say what she had come to say, yet when she saw him studying a map near the fire, lit by an upward shower of sparks as one log fell on another, she remembered her promise precisely because of how she longed to forget it.

  She blurted something that had nothing to do with anything. “Do you know how to make honeyed half-moons?”

  “Do I…?” He lowered the map. “Kestrel, I hate to disappoint you, but I was never a cook.”

  “You know how to make tea.”

  He laughed. “You do realize that boiling water is within the capabilities of anybody?”

  “Oh.” Kestrel moved to leave, feeling foolish. What had possessed her to ask such a ridiculous question anyway?

  “I mean, yes,” Arin said. “Yes, I know how to make half-moons.”

  “Really?”

  “Ah … no. But we can try.”

  They went into the kitchens. A glance from Arin cleared the room, and then it was only the two of them, dumping flour onto the wooden worktable, Arin palming a jar of honey out of a cabinet.

  Kestrel cracked an egg into a bowl and knew why she had asked for this.

  So that she could pretend that there had been no war, there were no sides, and that this was her life.

  The half-moons came out as hard as rocks.

  “Hmm.” Arin inspected one. “I could use these as weapons.”

  She laughed before she could tell herself it wasn’t funny.

  “Actually, they’re about the size of your weapon of choice,” he said. “Which reminds me that you’ve never said how you dueled at Needles against the city’s finest fighter and won.”

  It would be a mistake to tell him. It would defy the simplest rule of warfare: to hide one’s strengths and weaknesses for as long as possible. Yet Kestrel told Arin the story of how she had beaten Irex.

  Arin covered his face with one floured hand and peeked at her between his fingers. “You are terrifying. Gods help me if I cross you, Kestrel.”

  “You already have,” she pointed out.

  “But am I your enemy?” Arin crossed the space between them. Softly, he repeated, “Am I?”

  She didn’t answer. She concentrated on the feel of the table’s edge pressing into the small of her back. The table was simple and real, joined wood and nails and right corners. No wobble. No give.

  “You’re not mine,” Arin said.

  And kissed her.

  Kestrel’s lips parted. This was real, yet not simple at all. He smelled of woodsmoke and sugar. Sweet beneath the burn. He tasted like the honey he’d licked off his fingers minutes before. Her heartbeat skidded, and it was she who leaned greedily into the kiss, she who slid one knee between his legs. Then his breath went ragged and the kiss grew dark and deep. He lifted her up onto the table so that her face was level with his, and as they kissed it seemed that words were hiding in the air around them, that they were invisible creatures that feathered against her and Arin, then nudged, and buzzed, and tugged.

  Speak, they said.

  Speak, the kiss answered.

  Love was on the tip of Kestrel’s tongue. But she couldn’t say that. How could she ever say that, after everything between them, after fifty keystones paid into the auctioneer’s hand, after hours of Kestrel secretly wondering what it would sound like if Arin sang while she played, after wrists bound together and the crack of her knee under a boot and Arin confessing in the carriage on Firstwinter night.

  It had felt like a confession. But it wasn’t. He had said nothing of the plot. Even if he had, it still would have been too late, with everything to his advantage.

  Kestrel remembered again her promise to Jess.

  If she didn’t leave this house now, she would betray herself. She would give herself to someone whose Firstwinter kiss had led her to believe she was all that he wanted, when he had hoped to flip the world so that he was at its top and she was at its bottom.

  Kestrel pulled away.

  Arin was apologizing. He was asking what he had done wrong. His face was flushed, mouth swollen. He was saying something about how maybe it was too soon, but that they could have a life here. Together.

  “My soul is yours,” he said. “You know that it is.”

  She lifted a hand, as much to block his face from her sight as to stop those words.

  She walked out of the kitchen.

  It took all of her pride not to run.

  * * *

  She went to her rooms, yanked on her black dueling clothes and boots, and reeled in her makeshift knife out of the ivy. She bound the strip of cloth that held it around her waist. She went into the garden and waited for nightfall.

  Kestrel had always thought that the rooftop garden was her best chance for escape. Yet she couldn’t see how to take it.

  She swept her gaze over the four stone walls. Again, she saw nothing. Kestrel stared hard at the door, but what good could that do her? The door led to Arin’s suite, and Arin—

  No. Kestrel was thinking that no, she would not go through that door, she could not, when it suddenly struck her that she had her answer.

  It was little use considering the door as a way to pass through the wall
. The door was a means to get up it.

  Kestrel set her right hand on the doorknob and her left toes on the lower hinge. Her left hand braced against the stony line of the doorjamb, and she pushed herself up onto that hinge, balancing on such a small thing, just a strip and nub of metal. Then right foot up to meet her hand on the doorknob. She shifted her weight and stood to grasp the top hinge before she dug her fingers into the crack where the top of the door met stone.

  Kestrel climbed up the door and onto the top of the wall that separated her garden from Arin’s. She balanced along it until she reached the roof.

  Then she was moving down its slope, running to reach the ground.

  38

  Arin dreamed of Kestrel. He woke, and the dream faded like perfume. He didn’t remember it, yet it changed the air around him. He blinked against the dark.

  When he heard the sound, he realized he had been expecting something of this kind for a long time.

  Light feet on the roof.

  Arin scrambled out of bed.

  * * *

  Kestrel jumped onto the first floor, slid down its roof on her stomach, felt her toes nudge into a hollow. The gutter. She twisted to grasp it, then hung from the stone edge above the ground. She dropped.

  The impact jarred and her bad knee twinged, but she caught her balance and sprinted for the stables.

  Javelin whickered the instant she entered.

  “Shh.” She led him from his stall. “Quietly, now.” There was no need for a lamp that might be seen from the house. Kestrel could feel her way in the dark to grab the tack that she needed. Easy. She had memorized the locations of bridle and bit and everything else on that day in the stables. She saddled Javelin quickly.

  When they emerged into the night air, Kestrel glanced at the house. It slumbered. There was no cry of alarm, no soldiers pouring from its doors.

  But there was a small light in the west wing.

  It was nothing, she told herself. Arin had probably fallen asleep while a lamp burned.

  Kestrel breathed in the scent of horse. It was how her father smelled when he came home from a campaign.

  She could do this. She could make it to the harbor.

  She mounted Javelin and dug her heels in.