The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(17)

Benix groaned.

“She’s a fiend,” Ronan agreed cheerfully.

“Then why do you play with her?”

“I enjoy losing to Kestrel. I will give anything she will take.”

“While I live in hope to one day win,” Benix said, and gave Kestrel’s hand a friendly pat.

“Yes, yes,” Kestrel said. “You are both fine flatterers. Now ante up.”

“We lack a fourth player,” Benix pointed out. Bite and Sting was played in pairs or fours.

Despite herself, Kestrel looked at Arin standing not too far away, considering the garden or the house beyond it. From his position he would have had a view of Irex’s tiles, and Ronan’s. He would not, however, have been able to see hers. She wondered what he had made of the game—if he had bothered to follow it.

Perhaps feeling her gaze on him, Arin glanced her way. His eyes were calm, uninterested. She could read nothing in them.

“I suppose our game is over then,” she told the two lords in a bright voice. “Shall we join the others?”

Ronan poured the gold into her purse and slipped its velvet strap over her wrist, unnecessarily fiddling with the broad ribbon until it lay flat against Kestrel’s skin without a wrinkle. He offered his arm and she took it, resting her palm on the cool silk of his sleeve. Benix fell in step, and the three walked toward the heart of the murmuring party. Kestrel knew, rather than saw, that Arin shifted position and followed, like the shadow line of a sundial.

This was precisely what he was supposed to do as her attendant at Lady Faris’s picnic, yet she had the uncomfortable impression of being tracked.

She brushed aside this thought. It was due to the lingering unpleasantness of playing Bite and Sting with Irex. Well, that young lord’s behavior was not her fault. He had pressed where he was not invited. And he seemed consoled, now, sitting at the feet of Senator Nicon’s pretty daughters and Jess. Pinks, reds, and oranges were this season’s fashion, and the women’s skirts were filled with tulle. Lady Faris’s lawn looked as if the grass had lured sunset clouds to earth and tethered them there.

Kestrel led Ronan to where their hostess sat, sipping lemon water while her baby crawled on the grass beside her under the watchful guard of a slave. Several young men lounged around Faris, and as Kestrel grew near she compared the chubby baby’s face with each of the lady’s favorites, trying to find a match.

“… of course it is the most shocking scandal,” Faris was saying.

Kestrel’s curiosity sharpened. A scandal? If it was of a romantic nature, her estimation of Faris was about to rise. Only a steel-nerved woman would gossip about other people’s follies while her own giggled and clutched at the grass with tiny fists.

“I love scandals,” Ronan said as he, Kestrel, and Benix sat.

“You should,” said Benix. “You’re always causing them.”

“Not the ones I most want.” Ronan smiled at Kestrel.

Faris rapped his shoulder with her fan, a gesture that appeared to chastise him, but which everyone in the circle knew was an encouragement to continue the witty, flirty banter that would make a success of this party—provided that the compliments were turned toward its hostess.

Ronan immediately praised Faris’s low-cut dress with its slashed sleeves. He admired the jewel-encrusted hilt of her dagger, strapped over her sash as all ladies wore their weapons.

Kestrel listened. She saw, yet again, that her friend’s compliments were just bits of art and artifice. They were paper swans, cunningly folded so that they could float on the air for a few moments. Nothing more. Kestrel felt something within her lessen. She didn’t know, however, whether that something was tension, easing into relief, or expectation, dwindling into disappointment.

She plucked a wildflower from the grass and offered it to the baby. He grabbed it, staring with dark-eyed awe at the petals as they crumpled in his grasp. He smiled, and one dimple sank into his left cheek.

Ronan’s flattery had triggered the competition of the other young men present, so Kestrel had to wait some time before the conversation could be brought back to the meat of the matter: the scandal.

“But you gentlemen are distracting me!” Faris said. “Don’t you want my news?”

“I do,” said Kestrel, passing the baby another flower.

“As you should. Your father won’t be pleased.”

Kestrel glanced up from the child, and when she did, she saw Arin within earshot, his expression keen.

“What has my father to do with it?” She found it impossible to believe that he had romantically entangled himself. “He’s not even in the city. He’s leading a training session a day’s ride from here.”

“That may be. But when General Trajan returns, Senator Andrax will pay an even greater price.”

“For what?”

“Why, for selling kegs of black powder to the eastern savages.”

There was a stunned silence.

“Andrax has sold weapons to the empire’s enemies?” Benix said.

“He claims the kegs were stolen. But I ask you, how could they be? They were under his guard. Now they’re missing. Everyone knows Andrax likes to line his pockets with bribes. What’s to stop him from trading illegally with the barbarians?”

“You’re right,” Kestrel said, “my father will be furious.”