The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(69)

Arin, who had been watching Kestrel’s slight shifts in mood and body and had seen the resentment build, said, “She thinks the plan might work.”

Cheat glanced between the two of them. His gaze lingered on Kestrel, probably trying to see what Arin saw. Then he shrugged in that showy style that had made him such a favorite as an auctioneer. “Well, it’s better than anything I’ve got. I’ll go tell everyone what to do.”

Kestrel shot Arin a furtive glance. He couldn’t read it.

Cheat embraced Arin with one arm and was gone.

Once alone with Kestrel, Arin drew the plant out of his pocket: a handful of green with a wirelike stem and slender-tipped leaves. He set it on the table before her. Her eyes flashed, became jewels of joy. It was treasure, the way she looked at him.

“Thank you,” she breathed.

“I should have searched for it sooner,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to ask.” He touched three fingers to the back of her hand, the Herrani gesture that could acknowledge thanks for a gift, but could also be used to ask forgiveness.

Kestrel’s hand was smooth. Glistening, as if it had been oiled.

She drew it back. She changed. Arin saw her change, saw the happiness bleed out of her. She said, “What do I owe you for this?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly, confused. Didn’t he owe her? Hadn’t she fought for him once? Hadn’t he used her trust to upend her world?

Arin studied Kestrel, and realized that it wasn’t so much that she had changed but that she had slipped back into the same huddled anger that had tightened her shoulders the entire time she had been sitting next to Cheat.

Of course Kestrel was angry, having listened to a plot to destroy her people. But as soon as Arin assumed that this was it, his mind returned to that inscrutable look she had given him. He turned it over the way he might a seashell, wondering what kind of creature had lived inside.

He remembered that glance: the flick of brows, the tense line of her mouth.

“What is the matter?” he asked.

She seemed like she wouldn’t reply. Then she said, “Cheat will claim your ideas for his own.”

Arin had known that. “Do you care?”

A breath of disgust.

“We need a leader,” Arin said. “We need to win. How doesn’t matter.”

“You’ve been studying,” she said, and Arin realized he had quoted from one of her father’s books on warfare. “You’ve been taking texts from my library, reading about Valorian battle formations and methods of attack.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

She flipped an impatient hand.

He said, “It’s high time my people learned something from yours. You have, after all, conquered half of the known world. What do you think, Kestrel? Would I make a good Valorian?”

“No.”

“No? Not even when I have such ingenious strategies that my general would steal them?”

“And what are you, that you would let him?” Kestrel stood, straight-shouldered and slender, like a sword.

“I am a liar,” Arin slowly said the words for her. “Coward. I have no honor.”

There it was again. That look, livid with hidden things.

A secret.

“What is it, Kestrel? Tell me what’s wrong.”

Her face hardened in a way that told Arin he would get no answer. “I want to see Jess.”

The plant lay scraggly and limp on the table.

Arin wondered what, exactly, he had hoped it would make better.

*

Snow sifted onto the walk leading to the carriage. Kestrel was grateful for the plant Sarsine carried with her, but the evening had soured her thoughts, twisted her insides with anxiety. She thought of Cheat. She considered Arin’s plan—a cunning one, horribly likely to work.

It was more urgent than ever that she escape.

Yet how could she, in Arin’s courtyard, surrounded by Herrani who looked increasingly less like ragtag rebels and more like members of an army?

If she did escape, what would happen to Jess?

Sarsine ducked into the carriage. Kestrel was about to follow when she glanced over her shoulder at the house. It shimmered darkly, glazed by the evening snow. Kestrel saw the architectural whorl that was her suite of rooms on the building’s east side. The tall stone rectangle was her rooftop garden, though it seemed double its width.

The door.

Kestrel remembered the locked door in her garden and realized several things.

The door must lead to another garden that mirrored hers. This was why that high wall appeared twice as wide from the outside.

That other garden connected to the west wing, which glowed with windows as large as those in her suite, with the same diamond-pane details.

Most important, the roof of the west wing sloped downward. It ended over a room on the ground floor that might have been the library or parlor.

Kestrel smiled.

Arin wasn’t the only one with a plan.

*

“Only for Jess,” Kestrel told the Herrani healer, and didn’t care that dozens of people were dying at her feet. She dogged the healer, unwilling to risk that one leaf might go to someone else, even though she saw other faces she recognized under the violet mask of the poison.

She chose Jess.

When the drink was prepared and tipped into Jess’s mouth, the girl gagged. Liquid trickled down her chin. The healer calmly caught it with the rim of the bowl and tried again, but the same thing happened.