The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(6)

“Wait. I’m not sure that’s where I want him.” She spoke to Smith in Herrani: “Do you sing?”

He looked at her then, and Kestrel saw the same expression she had seen earlier in the waiting room. His gray eyes were icy. “No.”

Smith had answered in her language, and his accent was light.

He turned away. Dark hair fell forward. It curtained his profile.

Kestrel’s nails bit into her palms. “See to it that he has a bath,” she told Harman in a voice she hoped was brisk rather than frustrated. “Give him appropriate clothes.”

She started to walk down the hallway, then stopped. The words flashed out of her mouth: “And cut his hair.”

Kestrel felt the chill of Smith’s gaze on her back as she retreated. It was easy, now, to name that expression in his eyes.

Contempt.





3


Kestrel didn’t know what to say.

Her father, fresh from a bath after a hot day of training soldiers, watered his wine. The third course was served: small hens stuffed with spiced raisins and crushed almonds. It tasted dry to her.

“Did you practice?” he asked.

“No.”

His large hands paused in their movements.

“I will,” she said. “Later.” She drank from her cup, then ran a thumb over its surface. The glass was smoky green and finely blown. It had come with the house. “How are the new recruits?”

“Wet behind the ears, but not a bad lot.” He shrugged. “We need them.”

Kestrel nodded. The Valorians had always faced barbarian invasions on the fringes of their territories, and as the empire had grown in the past five years, attacks became more frequent. They didn’t threaten the Herran peninsula, but General Trajan often trained battalions that would be sent to the empire’s outer reaches.

He prodded a glazed carrot with his fork. Kestrel looked at the silver utensil, its tines shining sharply in the candlelight. It was a Herrani invention, one that had been absorbed into her culture so long ago it was easy to forget Valorians had ever eaten with their fingers.

“I thought you were going to the market this afternoon with Jess,” he said. “Why didn’t she join us for dinner?”

“She didn’t accompany me home.”

He set down his fork. “Then who did?”

“Father, I spent fifty keystones today.”

He waved a hand to indicate that the sum was irrelevant. His voice was deceptively calm: “If you walked through the city alone, again—”

“I didn’t.” She told him who had come home with her, and why.

The general rubbed his brow and squeezed his eyes shut. “That was your escort?”

“I don’t need an escort.”

“You certainly wouldn’t, if you enlisted.”

And there they were, pressing the sore spot of an old argument. “I will never be a soldier,” she said.

“You’ve made that clear.”

“If a woman can fight and die for the empire, why can’t a woman walk alone?”

“That’s the point. A woman soldier has proved her strength, and so doesn’t need protection.”

“Neither do I.”

The general flattened his hands against the table. When a girl came to clear away the plates, he barked at her to leave.

“You honestly don’t believe that Jess could offer me any protection,” Kestrel said.

“Women who are not soldiers don’t walk alone. It’s custom.”

“Our customs are absurd. Valorians take pride in being able to survive on little food if we must, but an evening meal is an insult if it’s not at least seven courses. I can fight well enough, but if I’m not a soldier it’s as if years of training don’t exist.”

Her father gave her a level look. “Your military strength has never been in combat.”

Which was another way of saying that she was a poor fighter.

More gently, he said, “You’re a strategist.”

Kestrel shrugged.

Her father said, “Who suggested I draw the Dacran barbarians into the mountains when they attacked the empire’s eastern border?”

All she had done then was point out the obvious. The barbarians’ overreliance on cavalry had been clear. So, too, had been the fact that the dry eastern mountains would starve horses of water. If anyone was a strategist, it was her father. He was strategizing that very moment, using flattery to get what he wanted.

“Imagine how the empire would benefit if you truly worked with me,” he said, “and used that talent to secure its territories, instead of pulling apart the logic of customs that order our society.”

“Our customs are lies.” Kestrel’s fingers clenched the fragile stem of her glass.

Her father’s gaze fell to her tight hand. He reached for it. Quietly, firmly, he said, “These are not my rules. They are the empire’s. Fight for it, and have your independence. Don’t, and accept your constraints. Either way, you live by our laws.” He raised one finger. “And you don’t complain.”

Then she wouldn’t say anything at all, Kestrel decided. She snatched her hand away and stood. She remembered how the slave had used his silence as a weapon. He had been haggled over, pushed, led, peered at. He would be cleaned, shorn, dressed. Yet he had refused to give up everything.