The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(13)

It was coming from the villa. Arin’s feet moved after the music before his mind could tell them to stop, and by the time his mind understood what was happening, it was enchanted, too.

The notes were quick, limpid. They struggled with each other in gorgeous ways, like crosscurrents at sea. Then they stopped.

Arin looked up. He had reached a clearing in the trees. The sky grayed into purple.

Curfew was coming.

He had almost regained his senses, had almost turned back, when a few low notes stole into the air. The music now came in slow strokes, in a different key. A nocturne. Arin moved toward the garden. Past it, ground-floor glass doors burned with light.

Curfew had come and gone, and he didn’t care.

He saw who was playing. The lines of her face were illuminated. She frowned slightly, leaned into a surging passage, and dappled a few high notes over the troubled sound.

Night had truly fallen. Arin wondered if she would lift her eyes, but wasn’t worried he would be seen in the garden’s shadows.

He knew the law of such things: people in brightly lit places cannot see into the dark.





9


Yet again, the steward stopped Kestrel before she could leave the villa. “Going into the city?” he said, blocking the garden door. “Don’t forget, my lady, that you need—”

“An escort.”

“The general gave me orders.”

Kestrel decided to irritate Harman as much as he did her. “Then send for the blacksmith.”

“Why?”

“To serve as my escort.”

He started to smile, then realized she was serious. “He is unsuitable.”

She knew that.

“He’s sullen,” Harman said. “Unruly. I understand he broke curfew last night.”

She did not care.

“He simply does not look the part.”

“See to it that he does,” she said.

“Lady Kestrel, he is trouble. You are too inexperienced to see it. You don’t see what’s right in front of you.”

“Do I not? I see you. I see someone who has ordered our blacksmith to make hundreds of horseshoes over the two weeks he has been here, when his primary value to us is weapons making, and when only a fraction of the horseshoes made can be found in the stables. What I do not see is where those surplus shoes have gone. I imagine I might find them on the market, sold for a nice profit. I might find them transformed into what is no doubt a lovely watch.”

Harman’s hand went to the gold watch chain that trailed out of his pocket.

“Do as I say, Harman, or you will regret it.”

*

Kestrel could have sent Arin to the kitchens upon their arrival at Jess’s house. Once indoors, she had no official need of an escort. But she told him to remain in the parlor while she and Jess sat, drinking chilled osmanth tea and eating hibiscus cakes with peeled oranges. Arin stood stiffly against the far wall, the dark blue of his clothes blending with a curtain. Yet she found him hard to ignore.

He had been dressed to society’s expectations. The collar of his shirt was high, the mark of Herrani aristocratic fashion before the war. All male house slaves wore them. But they did not, if they were wise, also wear expressions of obvious resentment.

At least his long sleeves hid the muscle and scars that showed a decade’s worth of labor. This was a relief. Kestrel thought, however, that the slave was hiding more than that. She watched him out of the corner of her eye. She had a theory.

“The Trenex cousins are at it again,” said Jess, and began describing their latest feud.

Arin looked bored. Of course he would, as someone with no understanding of the Valorian conversation. Yet Kestrel suspected he would look the same way even if he were following everything said.

And she thought that he was.

“I swear,” Jess continued, fiddling with the earrings Kestrel had bought that day in the market. “It’s only a matter of time before one of the cousins is dead and the other must pay the death-price.”

Kestrel remembered Arin’s one word of Valorian to her: no. How light his accent had been. He had also recognized Javelin’s name. Perhaps this was not so unusual; Arin was a blacksmith and probably had made javelins for Valorians. Still, it struck her as an odd word for him to know.

Really, it was the ease with which he had recognized it that had given her pause.

“I can’t believe Lady Faris’s picnic is in only a few days!” Jess chattered on. “You’ll stop here an hour before, won’t you, and come in our carriage? Ronan told me to ask you.”

Kestrel imagined sharing the close quarters of a carriage with Ronan. “I think it’s best if I go separately.”

“Only because you have no sense of fun!” Jess hesitated, then said, “Kestrel, could you try to be more … normal at the party?”

“Normal?”

“Well, you know, everyone thinks you’re a bit eccentric.”

Kestrel did know.

“Of course, people love you, they do. But when you freed that nurse of yours, there was talk. It would have been forgotten, except that you always do something else. Your music is an open secret—not that it’s wrong, exactly.”

They’d had this conversation before. The problem was Kestrel’s devotion. If she had played occasionally, like her mother, it would have escaped notice. If the Herrani hadn’t prized music so highly before the war, that, too, might have changed things. But in the eyes of Valorian society, music was a pleasure to be taken, not made, and it didn’t occur to many that the making and the taking could be the same.