The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(12)

“Needles.” She pushed thoughts of the slave from her mind. “Let’s work on Needles.”

“What a surprise.” He didn’t say that they had done that yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Needles was the one technique he could reasonably bear to see her try to hone.

Rax hefted a broadsword as she strapped the small knives to her calves, waist, and forearms. Each blunted practice blade could fit easily in her palm. Needles were the only weapons that let her forget they were weapons.

Rax lazily blocked the first one that spun from her fingers across the room. His blade knocked hers out of the air. But she had more. And when it came to close hand-to-hand fighting, as Rax always made sure it did, she might actually be able to beat him.

*

She didn’t. Kestrel limped across the grass to Enai’s house.

On her fourteenth birthday, Kestrel had asked her father for the woman’s freedom. By law slaves belonged to the head of a household. Enai was Kestrel’s nurse, but she was the general’s property.

He had not been pleased at the request. Yet he had promised Kestrel anything.

And although Kestrel was now grateful Enai had chosen to remain at the villa, that she would be there today when Kestrel knocked on her door, sweaty and disheartened, she remembered how her happiness had dissolved when she had told Enai about her birthday gift, and the Herrani had stared at her.

“Free?” Enai had touched her own wrist, where the brand would be.

“Yes. Aren’t you … glad? I thought you would want this.”

Enai’s hands fell to her lap. “Where would I go?”

Kestrel saw, then, what Enai did: the difficulties of an old Herrani woman alone—however free—in her occupied country. Where would she sleep? How would she earn enough to eat, and who would employ her when Herrani couldn’t employ anyone and Valorians had slaves?

Kestrel used some of the inheritance settled on her after her mother’s death to have the cottage built.

Today, Enai scowled when she opened the door. “Where have you been? I must be nothing to you, that you should ignore me for so long.”

“I’m sorry.”

Enai softened, tucking a scraggly lock of Kestrel’s hair back into place. “You certainly are a sorry sight. Come inside, child.”

A small cooking fire chittered on the hearth. Kestrel sank into a chair before it, and when Enai asked if she was hungry and was told no, the Herrani gave Kestrel a searching look. “What’s wrong? Surely by now you’re used to being beaten by Rax.”

“There is something I am afraid to tell you.”

Enai waved this away as nonsense. “Haven’t I always kept your secrets?”

“It’s not a secret. Practically everyone knows.” What she said next sounded small for something that felt so big. “I went to the market with Jess more than a week ago. I went to an auction.”

Enai’s expression grew wary.

“Oh, Enai,” Kestrel said. “I’ve made a mistake.”





8


Arin was satisfied. He was given more orders for weapons and repair, and took the absence of complaints from the guard to mean his work was valued. Though the steward frequently demanded more horseshoes than could possibly be necessary, even for stables so large as the general’s, Arin didn’t mind that rote and easy labor. It was mind numbing. He imagined his head was filled with snow.

As his newness to the general’s slaves wore away, they spoke more with him during meals, grew less cautious with their words. He became such a common feature in the stables that he was soon ignored by the soldiers. He overheard accounts of training sessions outside the city walls. He listened, knuckles whitened as they gripped a horse’s bridle, to awed tales of ten years ago, of how the general, then a lieutenant, had razed a path of destruction from this peninsula’s mountains to its port city and brought an end to the Herran war.

Arin unclenched his fingers, one by one, and went about his business.

Once, at dinner, Lirah sat next to him. She was shy, sending sidelong looks of curiosity his way well before she asked, “What were you, before the war?”

He lifted a brow. “What were you?”

Lirah’s face clouded. “I don’t remember.”

Arin lied, too. “Neither do I.”

*

He broke no rules.

Other slaves might have been tempted, during the walk through the orange grove that stood between the forge and the slaves’ quarters, to pluck a fruit from the tree. To peel it hurriedly, bury the bright rind in the soil, and eat. Sometimes as Arin ate his meals of bread and stew he thought about it. When he walked under the trees, it was almost unbearable. The scent of citrus made his throat dry. But he didn’t touch the fruit. He looked away and kept walking.

Arin wasn’t sure which god he had offended. The god of laughter, maybe. One with an idle, cruel spirit who looked at Arin’s unprecedented streak of good behavior, smiled, and said it couldn’t last forever.

It was almost dusk and Arin was returning from the stables to the slaves’ quarters when he heard it.

Music. He went still. His first thought was that the dreams he had almost every night were spooling out of his head. Then, as notes continued to pierce through wavering trees and dart over the whir of cicadas, he realized that this was real.