The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(27)

She couldn’t ask if that was true. She remembered his angry response when she had asked why he had been trained as a blacksmith, and that question had seemed innocent enough. Yet it had hurt him.

She did not want to hurt him.

“How did you learn to play Bite and Sting?” she asked. “It’s Valorian.”

He looked relieved. “There was a time when Herrani enjoyed sailing to your country. We liked your people. And we have always admired the arts. Our sailors brought back Bite and Sting sets a long time ago.”

“Bite and Sting is a game, not an art.”

He folded his arms across his chest, amused. “If you say so.”

“I’m surprised to hear that Herrani liked anything about Valorians. I thought you considered us stupid savages.”

“Wild creatures,” he muttered.

Kestrel was sure she had misheard him. “What?”

“Nothing. Yes, you were completely uncultured. You ate with your hands. Your idea of entertainment was seeing who could kill the other first. But”—his eyes met hers, then glanced away—“you were known for other things, too.”

“What things? What do you mean?”

He shook his head. He made that strange gesture again, lifting his fingers to flick the air by his temple. Then he folded his hands, unfolded them, and began to mix the tiles. “You have asked too many questions. If you want more, you will have to win them.”

He showed no sign of distraction now. As they played, he ignored her attempts to provoke him or make him laugh. “I’ve seen your tricks on others,” he said. “They won’t work with me.”

He won. Kestrel waited, nervous, and wondered if the way she felt was how he felt when he lost.

His voice came haltingly. “Will you play for me?”

“Play for you?”

Arin winced. In a more determined tone, he said, “Yes. Something I choose.”

“I don’t mind. It’s only … people rarely ask.”

He stood from the table, searched the shelves along the wall, and returned with a sheaf of sheet music. She took it. “It’s for the flute,” he said. “It will probably take you time to transpose it for the piano. I can wait. Maybe after our next game—”

She fanned the paper impatiently to silence him. “It’s not that hard.”

He nodded, then sat in the chair farthest away from the piano, by the glass garden doors. Kestrel was glad for his distance. She settled on the piano’s bench, flipping through the sheet music. The title and notations were in Herrani, the pages yellow with age. She propped the paper on the piano’s rack, taking more time than necessary to neaten the sheets. Excitement coursed through her fingers as if she had already plunged her hands into the music, but that feeling was edged with a metallic lace of fear.

She wished that Arin hadn’t chosen music for the flute, of all instruments. The beauty of the flute was in its simplicity, in its resemblance to the human voice. It always sounded clear. It sounded alone. The piano, on the other hand, was a network of parts—a ship, with its strings like rigging, its case a hull, its lifted lid a sail. Kestrel always thought that the piano didn’t sound like a single instrument but a twinned one, with its low and high halves merging together or pulling apart.

Flute music, she thought with frustration, and would not look at Arin.

Her opening notes were awkward. She paused, then gave the melody over to her right hand and began inventing with her left, pulling dark, rich phrases out of her mind. Kestrel felt the counterpoint knit itself into being. Forgetting the difficulty of what she was doing, she simply played.

It was a gentle, haunting music. When it ended, Kestrel was sorry. Her eyes sought Arin across the room.

She didn’t know if he had watched her play. He wasn’t looking at her now. His gaze was unfocused, directed toward the garden without really seeming to see it. The lines of his face had softened. He looked different, Kestrel realized. She couldn’t say why, but he looked different to her now.

Then he glanced at her, and she was startled enough to let one hand fall onto the keys with a very unmusical sound.

Arin smiled. It was a true smile, which let her know that all the others he had given her were not. “Thank you,” he said.

Kestrel felt herself blush. She focused on the keys and played something, anything. A simple pattern to distract herself from the fact that she wasn’t someone who easily blushed, particularly for no clear reason.

But she found that her fingers were sketching an outline of a tenor’s range. “Do you truly not sing?”

“No.”

She considered the timbre of his voice and let her hands drift lower. “Really?”

“No, Kestrel.”

Her hands slid from the keys. “Too bad,” she said.





16


When Kestrel received a message from Ronan inviting her to go riding with him and Jess at their estate, she remembered something her father had said recently about evaluating an enemy.

“Everything in war hinges on what you know of your adversary’s skills and assets,” he had said. “Yes, luck will play some part. The terrain will be crucial. Numbers are important. But how you negotiate the strengths of your opponent is more likely to decide the battle than anything else.”

Arin wasn’t Kestrel’s enemy, but their Bite and Sting games had made her see him as a worthy opponent. So she considered her father’s words. “Your adversary will want to keep his assets hidden until the final moment. Use spies if you can. If not, how might you trick him into revealing the knowledge you seek?” The general had answered his own question: “Nettle his pride.”