The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(46)

“Cheat. I broke curfew, scaled the general’s wall, and stole through a guarded city to speak with you. Don’t you think we have more important things to discuss than Valorian gossip?”

Cheat cocked one brow.

“The general is leaving to fight in the east. He’s taking the entire regiment. The morning of the Firstwinter ball. It’s the opportunity we’ve been waiting for.”

Cheat dropped the knife to a table. He let out a breath that swelled into laughter. “This is beautiful,” he said. “Perfect.”

Arin saw, in his mind’s eye, Kestrel’s delicate face. He saw her bandaged knee. How her knuckles had whitened. He heard her voice crack.

“The revolution will happen the night of the ball,” Cheat said. “Black powder kegs will be in place. I’ll lead the assault on the general’s estates. He’ll leave his personal guard behind, so we can expect resistance. But it’s nothing we can’t handle, with your weapons, and seizing that property will be an important victory. Meanwhile, those high society Valorians at the ball will find a poisoned surprise in their wine. Arin.” Cheat frowned at him. “Don’t look like that. Even you can’t find a flaw in this plan. It’ll come off nicely. The city will be ours.” Cheat rested a hand on Arin’s shoulder and gripped it. “Freedom will be ours.”

Those words sliced through the knots tangled within Arin. He slowly nodded. He turned toward the window.

“What’re you doing?” Cheat said. “You risked enough coming here, and you’ll risk the same returning to the estate. Stay. I can hide you until the assault.”

Why won’t you look at me? Kestrel had said. The hurt in her voice had hurt him. It hurt him still. It made him remember how his father had given him a blown-glass horse for his eighth nameday. Arin remembered its tapered legs, the arched neck: a thing of starlike clarity. He had fumbled, and it had smashed on the tiles below.

“No,” Arin told Cheat. “I’m going back. I need to be there when it happens.”





25


The walk to the orange grove had helped Kestrel’s knee, if nothing else. The stiffness had eased, and she forced herself to walk more every day. Soon she had only the barest of limps, then none at all. She returned to her music, let her fingers fly, let wild notes riddle her mind until she couldn’t think. It was bliss not to think, not to remember the cold orange grove, and what she had said and done and asked and wanted.

Kestrel played. She forgot everything but the music unfurling around her.

*

The day before Firstwinter, the Valorian housekeeper delivered a muslin-wrapped package to Kestrel. “From the dressmaker’s,” she said.

Kestrel held the package and almost seemed to see a gleam through the muslin.

She set it aside.

That evening, a slave brought a note from her father. There is someone here who wishes to see you.

Ronan, perhaps. The thought didn’t make her glad. It came and went and didn’t touch her, except when she realized that it hadn’t touched her and that it should have.

There was something wrong with her. She should be glad to see her friend. She should hope Ronan was more than that.

We are not friends, Arin had said.

But she would not think of Arin.

She dressed for dinner with care.

*

Kestrel recognized the man’s voice drifting down the hall from the dining room, but couldn’t place it at first. “Thank you for not requisitioning my ship,” he was saying. “I would have lost a great deal of profit—maybe even the ship itself—if the empire had borrowed it for the war effort.”

“Don’t thank me,” said Kestrel’s father. “If I had needed it, I would have taken it.”

“Not big enough for you, Trajan?” the voice teased. Kestrel, hovering outside the door, suddenly knew who it was. She remembered being a little girl, a gray-haired man’s easy smiles, sheaves of sheet music brought to her from far-off territories.

“On the contrary, Captain Wensan,” she said, entering the room. The men rose from their seats. “I believe my father has not taken your ship for the military because it is one of the best, loaded with cannon, and he doesn’t like to leave the harbor unprotected when he leaves tomorrow.”

“Kestrel.” The captain didn’t take her hand in greeting, but rested his briefly on her head, as one did with a beloved child. She felt no disappointment that he, and not Ronan, was their guest. “You overestimate me,” Wensan said. “I’m a simple merchant.”

“Maybe,” Kestrel said as the three sat at the table in their expected places, her father at the head, she at his right, the captain at his left. “But I doubt the two decks’ worth of ten-pound cannon are there for decoration.”

“I carry valuable goods. The cannon keep pirates away.”

“As do your crew. They have quite the reputation.”

“Fine fighters,” her father agreed, “though they don’t have the best memory.”

The captain gave him a keen glance. “You can’t possibly have heard about that.”

“That your crew can’t remember the code of the call to save their lives?”

The code of the call was the password sailors on deck demanded from shipmates in launches far below on the water when it was too dark to see who had rowed up from shore.