The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(11)

And he didn’t like to hear her voice, for she spoke his language too well. She sounded mother-taught. It unnerved him. He focused on the one Valorian word. “Javelin,” he said, rolling the horse’s name around in his mouth.

“It’s a weapon,” she said. “Like a spear.”

“I know,” he said, then regretted it. No one—especially her or the general—should discover he understood anything of the Valorian language.

But she hadn’t noticed. She was too busy rubbing the horse’s neck.

After all, why would she notice anything a slave had said?

The horse leaned against her like an overgrown kitten. “I named him when I was young,” she murmured.

He glanced at her. “You are young.”

“Young enough to want to impress my father.” There was a wistfulness in her face.

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. He replied in a way that showed no awareness that she had shared something that sounded like a secret. “The name suits him,” he said, even though the big beast was far too affectionate with her for that to be entirely true.

She looked away from the horse and straight at him. “Yours doesn’t suit you. Smith.”

Perhaps it was the surprise. Or the trick of her flawless accent. Later, he would tell himself that it was because he was sure her next step would be to rename him, as Valorians sometimes did with their slaves, and if that happened he would surely do or say something stupid, and then all his plans would be in ruin.

But to be honest, he didn’t know why he said it. “Smith is what my first slaver called me,” he told her. “It’s not my name. It’s Arin.”





7


The general was a busy man, but not so busy that he wouldn’t find out if Kestrel flouted his wishes. Since the day of the auction, Kestrel felt watched. She was careful to attend her training sessions with Rax, the captain of her father’s guard.

Not that Rax would mind if she didn’t turn up in the practice room adjoining the guards’ barracks. When she had been a child and ferocious in her need to prove herself, Rax had been, in his own way, kind. He did little more than observe that she had no natural talent for fighting. He smiled at her efforts and saw to it that she was adequate at all weapons a soldier needed to wield.

But as years passed, so did his patience. She became careless. She would drop her guard in fencing. Her eyes wouldn’t stop dreaming, even when he shouted. She let arrows go wide, head tilted as if listening to something he couldn’t hear.

Kestrel remembered his mounting suspicion. The warnings he had given her to stop trying to protect her hands. She held her practice sword too gingerly, shrank back if it seemed possible Rax’s attack could endanger her fingers, and took body blows that would have killed her had his sword been steel and not wood.

One day when she was fifteen, he wrenched her shield away and smashed the flat of his sword against her exposed fingers. She dropped to her knees. She felt her face go white with pain and fear, and knew she shouldn’t have wept, shouldn’t have cradled her fingers to her, shouldn’t have hunched her body to hide her hands from further assault. She should not have confirmed what Rax already knew.

He went to the general and told him that if he wanted a musician, he could buy one at the market.

Kestrel’s father forbade her to play. But one of her few true military skills was going without sleep. In this, she rivaled the general. So when the swelling in her left hand had gone down and Enai had unwound the stiff wrapping that had held her fingers rigid, Kestrel began to play at night.

She was caught.

She remembered running after her father, pulling on his arms, his elbow, his clothes as he strode to the barracks in the middle of the night for a mace. He ignored her begging.

He would have easily destroyed the piano. It was too big, and she too small, for her to stand in the mace’s way. If she had blocked the keys, he would have broken the case. He would have crushed its hammers, snapped its strings.

“I hate you,” she had told him, “and my mother would, too.”

It wasn’t her wretched voice, Kestrel later thought. It wasn’t the tears. He had seen grown men and women weep over worse. That wasn’t what made him drop the mace. But even now, Kestrel didn’t know whether he had spared the instrument for love of her or love of the dead.

“What’s it to be today?” Rax drawled from his bench at the other end of the practice room. He ran a hand over his grizzled head, then over his face as if he could wipe away the obvious boredom.

Kestrel meant to answer him but found herself looking at the paintings along the walls, though she knew them well. They showed girls and boys leaping over the backs of bulls. The paintings were Valorian, just as this particular building was Valorian-built. Blond, reddish, even chestnut hair streamed in banners behind the painted youths as they vaulted over the bulls’ horns, planted palms on the beasts’ backs, and flipped over the hindquarters. This was a rite of passage, and before it had been banned by the same law that forbade dueling, it was something all Valorians had had to do when they turned fourteen. Kestrel had done it. She remembered that day well. Her father had been proud of her. He had offered any birthday gift she desired.

Kestrel wondered if the slave—if Arin—had seen the paintings, and what he might think of them.

Rax sighed. “You don’t need to practice standing and staring. You’re good at that already.”