The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(66)

There was the rocking motion of being carried upstairs. She was settled onto something soft. Shoes were pulled from her feet. A thick blanket drew up to her chin, and someone murmured the Herrani blessing for dreams. Enai? Kestrel frowned. No, the voice was all wrong for Enai, but who would say those words, if not her nurse?

Then the palm on her forehead was gone. Kestrel decided she would solve the puzzle later.

She slept.

*

The horse slipped on a scree of small rocks. Arin kept his seat as the animal floundered, then splayed its hooves and caught its balance.

Things would be even worse, Arin thought grimly, when he had to ride down instead of up the path. He had been searching for almost a full day. The little hope he’d had of finding the plant dwindled.

Finally, he dismounted. The mountain was a barren gray-brown, no trees, and he could see, up ahead, the treacherous gash the Valorians had poured through ten years ago. He saw a shimmer of metal. The weapon of a Herrani, clothes camouflaged as he or she—along with several others—guarded the pass.

Arin slipped behind an outcropping of rock, pulling his horse after him. He wedged the reins in a crack between two boulders. Arin shouldn’t be seen—and neither should his horse.

He ought to be up there, guarding the pass, or at least striving in some way to keep his country.

His. The thought never failed to thrill him. It was worth death. Worth almost anything to become again the person he had been before the Herran War. Yet here he was, gambling the frail odds of success.

Looking for a plant.

He imagined Cheat’s reaction if he could see him now, scouring the ground for a wrinkle of faded green. There would be mockery, which Arin could shrug off, and rage, which Arin could withstand—even understand. But he couldn’t bear what he saw in his mind.

Cheat’s eyes cutting to Kestrel. Targeting her, stoking his hatred with one more reason.

And the more Arin tried to shield her, the more Cheat’s dislike grew.

Arin’s hands clenched in the cold. He blew on them, tucked his fingers under his arms, and began to walk.

He should let her go. Let her slip into the countryside, to the isolated farmlands that had no idea of the revolution.

If so, what then? Kestrel would alert her father. She’d find a way. Then the full force of the empire’s military would fall on the peninsula, when Arin doubted that the Herrani could deal even with the battalion that would come through the pass in less than two days.

If he let Kestrel go, it was the same as murdering his people.

Arin nudged a rock with his boot and wanted to kick it.

He didn’t. He walked.

Thoughts chipped at his sanity, proposing solutions only to reveal problems, taunting him with the certainty that he would lose everything he sought to keep.

Until he found it.

Arin found the herb threading up through a patch of dirt. It was a pitiful amount, and withered, but he tore it from the ground with a fierce hope.

He lifted his eyes from his dirty hands to see that he had again come into view of the mountain pass. An idea robbed his breath.

The idea was as small as the leaves in Arin’s hand. But it grew, put down roots, and Arin began to see how the Valorian reinforcements might be beaten.

He saw how he might win.





32


When Kestrel awoke in the bed, she didn’t want to think about how she had gotten there.

Then the day was swallowed whole. Cold crept into the house, the dusk seemed to weigh on Kestrel’s shoulders, and her mind filled with Arin, and Jess.

She heard a key turn in a lock. Kestrel sprang to her feet, realizing only then that she had been sitting and staring at nothing. She wound through the rooms of the suite until she was before the last door, and it opened.

Sarsine. “Where is Arin?” she said.

Better to reveal nothing. “I don’t know.”

“That’s a problem.”

Silence.

“It’s a problem for you,” Sarsine clarified, “because Cheat’s here, demanding to see Arin, and since my feckless cousin is nowhere to be found, Cheat wants to speak with you instead.”

Kestrel’s pulse slowed, the way it used to when Rax was readying some kind of swift assault, or when her father asked a question and she didn’t know the answer. “Tell him no.”

Sarsine laughed.

“This is your family home,” Kestrel said. “He is your guest. Who is he to command you?”

Sarsine shook her head, though the rueful set of her mouth said that she didn’t blame Kestrel for trying. When she spoke, her words weren’t meant as a threat, but Kestrel heard the echo of one—whatever Cheat had originally said. “If you don’t come with me to see him, he will come here to see you.”

Kestrel glanced at the walls, thinking of the suite’s pattern of rooms, how they turned inward like a snail shell, giving the impression that one was secreted away from the world, tucked into an intimate, lovely space.

Or trapped.

“I’ll go,” she said.

*

Sarsine brought her to the atrium, where Cheat sat on a marble bench before the fountain. Torchlight cast itself around the room, and the fountain’s water tumbled with red and orange streaks.

“I want to speak with her alone,” Cheat told Sarsine.

She said, “Arin—”