The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(57)

Apparently Arin wasn’t half as clever as Kestrel had thought, to discuss such a plan in front of her. Or he thought she could do no harm with the information. Maybe he didn’t care what she heard. Still, it was a decent plan … except for one thing.

“How will we seize Wensan’s ship?” a Herrani asked.

“We’ll climb its hull ladder.”

Kestrel laughed. “You’ll be picked off one at a time by Wensan’s crew as soon as they realize what’s happening.”

The room went still. Spines stiffened. Arin, who had been facing the Herrani, turned to stare at Kestrel. The look he gave her prickled the air between them like static.

“Then we’ll pretend we’re their Valorian sailors who have been on shore,” he said, “and ask for our launches to be winched up to the deck from the water.”

“Pretend to be Valorian? That will be believable.”

“It will be dark. They won’t see our faces, and we have the names of sailors on shore.”

“And your accent?”

Arin didn’t answer.

“I suppose you hope that the wind will blow your accent away,” Kestrel said. “But maybe the sailors will still ask you for the code of the call. Maybe your little plan will be dead in the water, just like all of you.”

There was silence.

“The code of the call,” she repeated. “The password that any sane crew uses and shares with no one but themselves, in order to prevent people from attacking them as you so very foolishly hope to do.”

“Kestrel, what are you doing?”

“Giving you some advice.”

He made an impatient noise. “You want me to burn the ships.”

“Do I? Is that what I want?”

“We’ll be weaker against the empire without them.”

She shrugged. “Even with them, you won’t stand a chance.”

Arin must have felt the mood in the room shift as Kestrel’s words exposed what everyone should have known: that the Herrani revolution was a hopeless endeavor, one that would be crushed once imperial forces marched, as planned, through the mountain pass to replace the regiments sent east. They would lay siege to the city and send messengers for more troops. This time, when the Herrani lost, they would not be enslaved. They would be put to death.

“Start loading the launches with those barrels of pitch,” Arin told the Herrani. “We’ll use them to burn the ships.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Kestrel said. “Not when I know Wensan’s code of the call.”

“You,” Arin said. “You know it.”

“I do.”

She didn’t. She had, however, a good guess. She had a limited range of possibilities—all the birds in “The Song of Death’s Feathers”—and the memory of the way Captain Wensan had looked at the kestrel plate. She would have bet gold on which code he would have chosen for the evening of the ball. Kestrel could read an expression as if looking through shifting water to see the grainy bottom, the silt rising or settling, the dart of a fish. She had seen Wensan making his decision like she could see the suspicion in Arin’s eyes now.

Her certainty wavered.

Arin. Didn’t Arin disprove her ability to read others? For she had thought him truthful in the carriage. She had thought that his lips had moved against hers as if in prayer. But she had been wrong.

Arin tugged Kestrel out of the harbormaster’s house. The door slamming shut behind them, Arin marched her to the far end of an empty pier. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

“I think you have had quite an intimate knowledge of my household. What’s delivered, what letters leave. Who comes, who goes. I think you know that Captain Wensan dined at our house the night before this one.”

“He was your father’s friend,” Arin said slowly.

“Whose ship brought my mother’s piano from the capital when I was a child. He was always kind to me. And now he’s dead. Isn’t he?”

Arin didn’t deny it.

The moonlight was dimming, but Kestrel knew that Arin could see the sorrow seep into her face.

Let him see it. It served her purposes. “I know the password,” she said.

“You would never reveal it.” Clouds blotted the moon, casting Arin’s features into shadow. “You’re taunting me. You want me to hate myself for what I’ve done. You will never forgive me, and you certainly won’t help me.”

“You have something I want.”

The cold dark seemed to pour around them.

“I doubt it,” Arin said.

“I want Jess. I will help you seize the ships, and you will give her to me.”

The truth can deceive as well as a lie. Kestrel did want to barter for the chance to help Jess, or at least be by her side if death came. Yet Kestrel also counted on this truth to be so believable that Arin wouldn’t see that it disguised something else: that she needed at least one fishing boat to remain in the harbor.

“I can’t just give her to you,” Arin said. “Cheat will decide what happens to the survivors.”

“Ah, but you seem to be entitled to special privileges. If you can claim one girl, why not two?”

His mouth twisted in what looked like disgust. “I’ll arrange for you to see her as soon as I can. Will you trust my word?”