The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(70)

Kestrel took the bowl from the healer. “Drink this,” she told her friend.

Jess moaned.

“Do it,” Kestrel said, “or you’ll be sorry.”

“What a lovely bedside manner you have,” Sarsine said.

“If you don’t drink,” Kestrel said to Jess, “you’ll be sorry, because you’ll never have the chance to tease me again, to see how I want too much and do such foolish things to get it. You’ll never hear me say that I love you. I love you, little sister. Will you please drink?”

A click came from Jess’s throat. Kestrel took it to be assent, and set the cup to her lips.

Jess drank.

Hours passed. The night deepened. Jess gave no hint of recovery, Sarsine fell asleep in a chair, and somewhere Arin was readying for a battle that could come as early as the dawn.

Then Jess inhaled: a thin, watery breath. But better. Her eyes cracked open, and when she saw Kestrel she rasped, “I want my mother.”

It was what Kestrel had whispered to her once, when they were little girls sleeping in the same bed, their feet cold and soft and touching. Kestrel held her friend’s hand now and did what Jess had done for her then, which was to murmur soothing things that were barely words and more like music.

Kestrel felt the feeble pressure of Jess’s fingers against hers.

“Don’t let go,” Kestrel said.

Jess listened. Her eyes focused, and widened, and woke up to the world.

*

“You should tell Arin,” Sarsine said later in the carriage.

Kestrel knew that she wasn’t talking about Jess. “I won’t. Neither will you.” Disdainfully, she said, “You’re afraid of Cheat.”

Kestrel didn’t add that she was, too.

*

That night, Kestrel tried the locked garden door again. She pulled against the knob with all her strength. The door was massive. It didn’t even rattle.

She stood, shivering in the snow. Then she went back into her rooms and returned with a table, which she set against the wall in the far corner. She climbed onto the table, and was still nowhere tall enough to reach the top of the wall. She hoped the corner’s angles would give her hands and feet leverage to push upward.

The wall was too smooth. She slid back down. Even with a chair on top of the table, the wall was too high for her, and putting anything on top of the chair would be precarious. She was likely to fall onto the stones.

Kestrel climbed down and studied the garden in the lamplight thrown from her sunroom. She chewed the inside of her cheek, and was wondering whether books stacked on the chair on top of the table would make a difference when she heard something.

The grate of a heel against pebbles. It came from beyond the door, on the other side of the wall.

Someone had been listening.

Was listening still.

As quietly as she could, Kestrel took the chair down from the table and went inside.

*

Before Arin left for the mountain pass, during the coldest hours of the night, he found time to order that every piece of furniture light enough for Kestrel to move be taken from her suite.





34


As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin thought that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valorians also went to war because of love.

Arin loved those hours of waiting. The silent, brilliant tension, like scribbles of heat lightning. His city far below and behind him, his hand on a cannon’s curve, ears open to the acoustics of the pass. He stared into it, and even though he smelled the reek of fear from men and women around him, he was caught in a kind of wonder. He felt so vibrant. As if his life was a fresh, translucent, thin-skinned fruit. It could be sliced apart and he wouldn’t care. Nothing felt like this.

Nothing except—

And that was another thing war did. It helped Arin forget what he couldn’t have.

There was a skittering sound. It rattled through the pass, growing louder until one of Cheat’s messengers emerged and ran straight for the commander. Arin wasn’t far from Cheat’s side, but even if he had been he probably would have heard the boy’s gasp. “Coming,” he said. “They’re coming.”

After that, it was all buzz and haste. Checking that the cannons were properly packed, then checking again. Cutting fuses from long, thin coils of flammable cord. Huddling under the dun-colored cloth.

Arin peered through a hole cut into the sheet. His eyes burned from not blinking.

But of course he heard them before he saw them. The percussion of thousands of marching feet. Then the Valorian front lines emerged from the pass. Arin waited, and waited, for Cheat’s first shot.

It came. The cannonball ripped through cloth, drove through the air, and smashed into the cavalry. It split horses and people into chunks. Arin heard screaming, but he blocked it out.

The stone-colored sheets were gone—no need for them now—and Arin was heaving a ball into the gut of a cannon, firing, doing it again, hands black with powder, when a woman appeared at his side. She yanked at his sleeve. “Cheat is hurt,” she said.

The Valorians were firing back, arrows and crossbow quarrels piercing the air with terrifying accuracy. Arin sucked in a breath. He ran.

Arrows whistled past him.