The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(15)

“You’re indoors,” he said, “and so don’t need an escort at the moment. I’d like to see a friend.”

“A friend?”

“I do have friends.” He added, “I’ll come back. Do you think I would get far if I tried to run away?”

The law was clear on captured runaways. Their ears and nose were cut off. Such disfigurement didn’t impede a slave’s ability to work.

Kestrel found that she couldn’t bear the sight of Arin’s face. She rather hoped he would run away, that he would succeed and she would never see him again.

“Take this.” She pulled a ring off her finger, one stamped with a bird’s talons. “You’ll be questioned if you walk alone without a brand of freedom, or my seal.”

She dismissed him.

*

Arin wanted to see her bright hair chopped and stuffed under a work scarf. He wanted her in prison. He wanted to hold the key. He could almost feel its cold weight. The fact that she hadn’t claimed his god’s favor somehow didn’t temper his resentment.

A seller in the market cried his wares. The sound cut into Arin’s thoughts, stilling the black spin of them. He had a purpose here. He needed to get to the auction house. And he needed to clear his head.

Nothing should dampen his mood now, not even that bitter taste in the back of his throat. He let the sun bathe his face and inhaled the dust of the market air. It tasted fresher even than that of the general’s citrus grove, because at least he could pretend to be free while he breathed it. He walked, thinking of the things he had learned in the parlor. His mind touched them, considering their shapes and sizes as if they were beads on a string.

He dwelled momentarily on one particular fact: his new mistress had freed a slave. Arin let this information slip along the string in his mind, click against the other beads, and be silent. It had no bearing on his situation.

There was much in the previous hour that he didn’t understand. He had no idea why the girl had looked anxious, clutching those earrings. All he knew was that he had somehow gained the upper hand—if not without cost. She’d be careful, now, with what she said in Valorian within his hearing.

Arin was stopped only once on the way to his destination, and the soldier allowed him to pass. It didn’t take him long to reach the auction house, where he asked to see Cheat, who relished his Valorian nickname to the point that no one knew what he had been called before the war. “Cheat is the perfect name for an auctioneer,” he always said.

Cheat strode into the waiting room. When he saw Arin, he grinned. The wicked flash of teeth reminded Arin of what the auctioneer tried to hide from many people. Cheat was short, and while also thickset, he liked to cultivate an easy-going air, a lazy posture. Few would think that he was a fighter. Until he smiled.

“How did you pull this off?” Cheat sketched a hand in the air to outline Arin standing before him, well dressed and unaccompanied.

“Guilt, I think.”

“Good for you.” The auctioneer beckoned him toward the holding cell. They slipped inside, then opened a narrow door within, one hidden from the view of any Valorian who might linger in the waiting room to collect a purchase. Arin and Cheat stood in the windowless room’s darkness until the auctioneer lit a lamp.

“We can’t count on you getting more opportunities like this,” Cheat said, “so you’d better say everything, and say it fast.”

Arin gave an account of the past two weeks. He described the layout of the general’s villa, drawing a rough map with the scrap of paper and charcoal stub Cheat thrust at him. He sketched the grounds with their outbuildings, and indicated where the land was hilly and where flat. “I’ve only been inside the house once.”

“Think you can change that?”

“Maybe.”

“What have you learned about the general’s movements?”

“Nothing unusual. Training sessions outside the city walls. He’s rarely home, yet never far from it.”

“And the girl?”

“She pays social calls. She gossips.” Arin decided not to say that there had been something too shrewd in her comments about Lady Faris’s baby. Nor did he mention the complete lack of surprise on her face when he had spoken in Valorian.

“Does she talk about her father?”

Did that conversation in the stables count? Not to Cheat, it wouldn’t. Arin shook his head. “She never discusses the military.”

“Doesn’t mean she won’t. If the general has a plan, he might include her. Everyone knows he wants her to enlist.”

Arin hadn’t meant to say it. Yet it slipped out and sounded like an accusation: “You should have told me she was a musician.”

Cheat squinted at him. “It wasn’t relevant.”

“Relevant enough for you to try to sell me as a singer.”

“Thank the god of chance I did. She wasn’t biting at the opportunity for a blacksmith. Do you know how long I’ve tried to place someone at that house? You nearly wrecked everything with your childish defiance. I warned you what it would be like in the pit. All I did was tell you to sing for the crowd. All you had to do was obey.”

“You’re not my master.”

Cheat ruffled Arin’s short hair. “Course not. Look, lad, the next time I set you up as a spy in a high-ranking Valorian’s household, I promise to tell you what the lady likes best.”