The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(76)

Her fingers paused: thin, strong, and still.

Arin dared to reach for her hand, and Kestrel did not pull away.





37


She had been right. The Herrani quickly took Arin as their leader, either because they had always admired him or because they had liked Cheat’s flair for savagery and assumed that if Arin had killed him he must have been the better monster.

He was certainly the better strategist. Whole swaths of the peninsula began to fall under Herrani control as squadrons were sent to capture farmlands. Food and water were stockpiled, enough for a year of siege—or so Kestrel overheard from guards at the entrances of the house.

“How can you possibly hope to succeed against a siege?” Kestrel asked Arin during one of the rare times he was home and not leading an assault in the countryside. They sat at the dining room table, where Kestrel wasn’t allowed a knife for the meal.

At night, Kestrel treasured the memory of Arin’s song. But by day, she could not ignore basic facts. The missing knife. How any easy way out of Arin’s home was guarded, even ground-floor windows. Guards eyed her warily as she passed. Kestrel possessed two keys that did little more than prove that she remained under a privileged form of house arrest.

Was she to earn her freedom one key at a time?

And when her father returned with the imperial army—as he inevitably would—what then? Kestrel tried to imagine turning traitor and counseling the Herrani through the coming war. She couldn’t. It didn’t matter that Arin’s cause was just, or that Kestrel now allowed herself to see that. She couldn’t fight her own father.

“We can withstand a siege for some time,” Arin said. “The city walls are strong. They’re Valorian-built.”

“Which means that we will know how to bring them down.”

Arin swirled his glass, watching the water’s clear spin. “Care to bet? I have matches. I hear they make very fine stakes.” There was the quirk of a smile.

“We aren’t playing at Bite and Sting.”

“But if we were, and I kept raising the stakes higher to the point where you couldn’t bear to lose, what would you do? Maybe you’d give up the game. Herran’s only hope of winning against the empire is to become too painful to retake. To mire the Valorians in an unending siege when they’d rather be fighting the east. To force them to conquer the countryside again, piece by piece, spending money and lives. Someday, the empire will decide we’re not worth the fight.”

Kestrel shook her head. “Herran will always be worth it.”

Arin looked at her, his hands resting on the table. He, too, had no knife. Kestrel knew that this was to make it less obvious that she wasn’t to be trusted with one. Instead, it became more.

“You’re missing a button,” he said abruptly.

“What?”

He reached across the table and touched the cloth at her wrist, on the spot of an open seam. His fingertip brushed the frayed thread.

Kestrel forgot that she had been troubled. She had been thinking about knives, she remembered, and now they were talking about buttons, but what one had to do with the other, she couldn’t say.

“Why don’t you mend it?” he said.

She recovered herself. “That is a silly question.”

“Kestrel, do you not know how to sew a button?”

She refused to answer.

“Wait here,” he said.

Arin returned with a sewing kit and button. He threaded a needle, bit it between his teeth, and took her wrist with both hands.

Her blood turned to wine.

“This is how you do it,” he said.

He took the needle from his mouth and pierced it through the cloth.

*

“This is how you build a fire.”

“This is how you make tea.”

Small lessons, sprinkled here and there, between days. Through them, Kestrel sensed the silent history of how Arin had come to know what he did. She thought about it during the long stretches of time when she didn’t see him.

Days passed after Arin had sewn the button tight to her sleeve. Then an empty week went by after he’d struck fire to kindling in the library fireplace, then even longer since he’d placed a hot cup of perfectly steeped tea in her hands. He was gone. He was fighting, Sarsine had said. She would not say where.

With her newfound—if limited—freedom, Kestrel often wandered through the wings where people worked. Some doors were barred to her. The kitchens were. They hadn’t been before, on that horrible day with Cheat by the fountain, but they were now that everyone knew that Kestrel could roam the house. The kitchens had too many knives. Too many fires.

But there were fires lit regularly in the library and in her suite, and Kestrel had learned how to make one anywhere. Why not set fire to the house and hope to escape in the confusion?

One day, she studied the fringe on her sitting room curtains and clutched kindling hard enough to get splinters. Then her grip loosened. A fire was too dangerous. It could kill her. She told herself that this was why she returned the small sticks of wood to the hearth, and dropped them back into the kindling box. It wasn’t because she couldn’t bear the thought of destroying Arin’s family home. It wasn’t because a fire might also kill the Herrani who lived here.

If she escaped and sent the imperial army to the city, wasn’t that the same as bringing death to every Herrani in this house? To Arin?