The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(59)

“You’re none of ours,” a voice floated down from the main deck.

“I’m a friend of Captain Wensan’s: Kestrel, General Trajan’s daughter. The captain sent me along with your crew for my protection.”

“Where’s the captain?”

“I don’t know. We were separated in the city.”

“Who’s there with you?”

“Terex,” called Arin, careful to roll the r. One by one, the Herrani in the launch shouted names given by the harbormaster of the ship’s missing sailors. They said them quickly, some swallowing syllables, but each gave a passable version of the pronunciations Kestrel had drilled into them when they had first left shore.

The sailor spoke again: “What’s the code of the call?”

“I am,” Kestrel said with all the confidence she didn’t feel. “My name: Kestrel.”

A pause. A few sharp seconds during which Kestrel hoped she was right, hoped she was wrong, and hated herself for what she was doing.

A clank. A metallic unwinding.

Hooked pulleys were being lowered from the main deck. There was an eager clatter as Herrani attached them to the launch.

Arin, however, did not move. He stared at Kestrel. Perhaps he hadn’t been convinced that she had known the password. Or perhaps he couldn’t believe she would betray her own kind.

Kestrel looked at him as if looking through a window. What he thought didn’t matter. Not anymore.

The roped pulleys creaked. The launch was lifted dripping out of the water. It jerked and swayed as sailors on board hauled on the ropes. Then it began to climb.

Kestrel couldn’t see the hull ladder along the stern or the Herrani in the other launches on the water below. They were vague, night-colored shadows. But she noticed a ripple of movement up the hull. Herrani were scaling the ladder.

It wasn’t too late for her to cry warning to the sailors on board.

She could choose not to betray them. She didn’t understand how her father could do this again and again: make decisions that fed lives into the jaws of a higher purpose.

Yet would it be worth it, if Kestrel secured an escape route to alert the capital?

That, she supposed, might depend on how many Valorians died on Wensan’s ship.

Kestrel’s cool calculation appalled her. This was part of what had made her resist the military: the fact that she could make decisions like this, that she did have a mind for strategy, that people could so easily become pieces in a game she was determined to win.

The launch swayed higher.

Kestrel pressed her lips shut.

Arin glanced at the black cloth that had covered her hair, then at her. He must have considered gagging Kestrel with it, now that she had completed her role in the plan. That’s what she would have done in his place. But he didn’t, which made her feel worse than if he had. It was pure hypocrisy for him not to live up to a ruthlessness she now knew him to be capable of.

As was she.

The launch drew level with the main deck. Kestrel had just enough time to register the shock on the sailors’ faces before the Herrani in the launch leaped onto the deck, weapons raised. The small boat rocked wildly, empty save for Kestrel.

Arin ducked the slice of a sailor’s knife, beat it away with his own, and punched the man’s throat. The sailor staggered back. Arin hooked the legs out from under him at the same moment he delivered another blow. The sailor was down.

It was like that all over the deck. Herrani hammered at Valorians, many of whom had had no time to draw weapons. As the sailors dealt with the sudden threat they had brought aboard, they didn’t see the second one: more Herrani climbing onto the deck from the hull ladder. As Kestrel had planned, this second wave attacked the Valorians from the back. Trapped, the sailors quickly surrendered. Even though more sailors were pouring up from the decks below, they did so through narrow hatches, like mice emerging from tunnels. The Herrani attacked them one by one.

Blood stained the planks. Many of the fallen sailors didn’t move. From the swaying launch, Kestrel could hear the man Arin had attacked first. He was clutching his throat. The noises he made were horrible, something between gasping and choking. And there was Arin, shouldering through the fray and landing blows that might not kill, but would still hurt and bruise and bleed.

Kestrel had seen this in him on the day that she had bought him. A brutality. She had let herself forget it because his mind had been so finely tuned. Because his touch had been gentle. Yet this was what he had become.

This was what he was.

And what of her, orchestrating the fall of a Valorian ship into enemy hands? Kestrel couldn’t quite believe it. She couldn’t believe it had been so relatively easy. Valorians were never ambushed. They never surrendered. They were brave, they were fierce, they would rather die than be taken.

Her launch swayed to a stop. She stood and faced the water far below. Earlier that night, when she had threatened to kill herself, she had said it without considering whether she could. Making the threat had been the right move. So she had made it.

Then Cheat had set his boot on Kestrel’s fingers.

There was no music after death.

She had chosen to live.

Now she stood in the launch, knowing that if she hit the water’s surface from this height, something was likely to break and she would sink quickly without the use of her bound hands.

What would Kestrel’s father choose for her? An honorable death, or life as Arin’s prize? She closed her eyes, imagining the general’s face if he had seen her surrender to Cheat, if he could see her now.