The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(22)

Something flickered in Arin’s eyes. Kestrel wondered if he was trying, as she often did when she looked in the mirror, to see her as a child, to see whatever it was in her that the doctor had decided to save. “And your mother?” he said.

“My father tried to cut her in the same way the doctor had cut me. I remember that. There was a lot of blood. She died.”

In the silence, Kestrel heard a falling leaf scratch the glass of the window, opened out toward the dimming sky. It was warm, but summer was almost over.

“Play your tiles,” Arin said roughly.

Kestrel turned them over, taking no joy in the fact that she had surely won. She had four scorpions.

Arin flipped his. The sound of ivory clacking against the wooden table was unnaturally loud.

Four vipers.

“I win,” he said, and swept the matches into his hand.

Kestrel stared at the tiles, feeling a numbness creep along her limbs. “Well,” she said. She cleared her throat. “Well played.”

He gave her a humorless smile. “I did warn you.”

“Yes. You did.”

He stood. “I think I’ll take my leave while I have the advantage.”

“Until next time.” Kestrel realized she had offered him her hand. He looked at it, then took it in his own. She felt the numbness ebb, only to be replaced by a different kind of surprise.

He dropped her hand. “I have things to do.”

“Like what?” She tried for a lighthearted tone.

He answered in kind. “Like contemplate what I am going to do with my sudden windfall of matches.” He widened his eyes in pretend glee, and Kestrel smiled.

“I’ll walk you out,” she said.

“Do you think I will lose my way? Or steal something as I go?”

She felt her expression turn haughty. “I am leaving the villa anyway,” she said, though she had had no such plans until the words left her mouth.

They walked in silence through the house until they had reached the ground floor. Kestrel saw his stride pause, almost imperceptibly, as they passed the closed doors that hid her piano.

She stopped. “What is your interest in that room?”

The look he gave her was cutting. “I have no interest in the music room.”

Her eyes narrowed as she watched him walk away.





13


Kestrel’s first lesson with her father took place in their library, a dark room with inset shelves jammed end-to-end with beautifully bound volumes. Only some were in her language; the empire had little literary tradition. The majority of the books were in Herrani, and if few Valorians spoke that language well, fewer still could read it, for the alphabet was in a different script. Yet all Valorian colonizers had kept their conquered libraries intact. They looked nicer that way.

Her father stood, looking out the window. He didn’t like to sit. Kestrel settled into a reading chair as a deliberate gesture of difference.

He said, “The project of the Valorian empire began twenty-four years ago when we took the northern tundra.”

“An easy territory to conquer.” Kestrel couldn’t prove herself to the general with a sword, but at least she could show him that she knew her history. “Its people were few, scattered into distant tribes who lived in tents. We invaded in the summer, with little life lost on either side. It was a trial, to see if Valoria’s neighbors would object to our expansion. It was also a symbolic victory, meant to encourage our people. But the tundra offers no agriculture, little meat, and few slaves. It’s mostly worthless.”

“Worthless?” The general opened one of the drawers lining the walls below the bookshelves and pulled out a scrolled map, which he unfurled and pinned to a table with glass weights. Kestrel stood and came close to study the outline of the continent and the empire’s reaches.

“Perhaps not worthless,” she conceded. She pointed to the tundra, which maintained a thin strip of land over much of the empire’s north—until the frozen territory stretched east and widened, dipping south to curve around the northeastern corner of the empire. “It provides Valoria with a natural barrier against a barbarian invasion. The tundra isn’t a friendly land for war, particularly now that it’s defended by us.”

“Yes. But the tundra has another value to us, one that you can’t see by looking at this map. It’s a state secret, Kestrel. I’m trusting you to keep it.”

“Of course.” She couldn’t help a thrill of intrigue as well as happiness to be brought into her father’s confidence, though she knew that this was exactly what he wanted her to feel.

“Spies were sent into the tundra well before we attacked. We do this with every territory we want to acquire; the tundra wasn’t special in this. But what the spies found there was: mineral deposits. Some silver, which has been mined and helps fund our wars. More important, there is a vast amount of sulfur, a key ingredient in making black powder.”

He smiled when he saw her eyes widen. Then he described in great detail the preparations for invasion, the initial skirmishes, and how the tundra was won by General Daran, who had seen promise in Kestrel’s father when he was a young officer and tutored him in the ways of war.

When her father finished, Kestrel touched the Herran peninsula. “Tell me about the Herran War.”

“We wanted this territory long before I took it. Once I did, Valorian colonists were eager for a piece of the prize. For decades before the war, the Herrani flaunted their country’s wealth, its goods, its beauty, its rich land—its near perfection, not least because it might as well have been an island.” The general swept a finger around the peninsula, bordered on almost all sides by the southern sea except where a mountain range separated it from the rest of the continent. “The Herrani considered us nothing more than stupid, bloody savages. They liked us enough to send ships to our mainland with luxuries for sale. They didn’t seem to think that every alabaster bowl or sack of spice was a temptation to the emperor.”