The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(81)

Kestrel had always thought that the rooftop garden was her best chance for escape. Yet she couldn’t see how to take it.

She swept her gaze over the four stone walls. Again, she saw nothing. Kestrel stared hard at the door, but what good could that do her? The door led to Arin’s suite, and Arin—

No. Kestrel was thinking that no, she would not go through that door, she could not, when it suddenly struck her that she had her answer.

It was little use considering the door as a way to pass through the wall. The door was a means to get up it.

Kestrel set her right hand on the doorknob and her left toes on the lower hinge. Her left hand braced against the stony line of the doorjamb, and she pushed herself up onto that hinge, balancing on such a small thing, just a strip and nub of metal. Then right foot up to meet her hand on the doorknob. She shifted her weight and stood to grasp the top hinge before she dug her fingers into the crack where the top of the door met stone.

Kestrel climbed up the door and onto the top of the wall that separated her garden from Arin’s. She balanced along it until she reached the roof.

Then she was moving down its slope, running to reach the ground.





38


Arin dreamed of Kestrel. He woke, and the dream faded like perfume. He didn’t remember it, yet it changed the air around him. He blinked against the dark.

When he heard the sound, he realized he had been expecting something of this kind for a long time.

Light feet on the roof.

Arin scrambled out of bed.

*

Kestrel jumped onto the first floor, slid down its roof on her stomach, felt her toes nudge into a hollow. The gutter. She twisted to grasp it, then hung from the stone edge above the ground. She dropped.

The impact jarred and her bad knee twinged, but she caught her balance and sprinted for the stables.

Javelin whickered the instant she entered.

“Shh.” She led him from his stall. “Quietly, now.” There was no need for a lamp that might be seen from the house. Kestrel could feel her way in the dark to grab the tack that she needed. Easy. She had memorized the locations of bridle and bit and everything else on that day in the stables. She saddled Javelin quickly.

When they emerged into the night air, Kestrel glanced at the house. It slumbered. There was no cry of alarm, no soldiers pouring from its doors.

But there was a small light in the west wing.

It was nothing, she told herself. Arin had probably fallen asleep while a lamp burned.

Kestrel breathed in the scent of horse. It was how her father smelled when he came home from a campaign.

She could do this. She could make it to the harbor.

She mounted Javelin and dug her heels in.

*

Kestrel streaked through the Garden District, urging Javelin down horse paths to the city center. It wasn’t until she had almost reached its lights that she heard another rider in the hills behind her.

Ice slid down Kestrel’s spine. Fear, that the rider was Arin.

Fear, at her sudden hope that it was.

She pulled Javelin to a stop and swung to the ground. Better to go on foot through the narrow streets to the harbor. Stealth was more important now than speed.

Beating hooves echoed in the hills. Closer.

She hugged Javelin hard around the neck, then pushed him away while she still could bear to do it. She slapped his rump in an order to head home. Whether he’d go to her villa or Arin’s, she couldn’t say. But he left, and might draw the other rider after him if she was indeed being pursued.

She slipped into the city shadows.

And it was magic. It was as if the Herrani gods had turned on their own people. No one noticed Kestrel skulking along walls or heard her cracking the thin ice of a puddle. No late-night wanderer looked in her face and saw a Valorian. No one saw the general’s daughter. Kestrel made it to the harbor, down to the docks.

Where Arin waited.

His breath heaved white clouds into the air. His hair was black with sweat. It hadn’t mattered that Kestrel had been ahead of him on the horse path. Arin had been able to run openly through the city while she had crept through alleys.

Their eyes met, and Kestrel felt utterly defenseless.

But she had a weapon. He didn’t, not that she could see. Her hand instinctively fell to her knife’s jagged edge.

Arin saw. Kestrel wasn’t sure what came first: his quick hurt, so plain and sharp, or her certainty—equally plain, equally sharp—that she could never draw a weapon on him.

He straightened from his runner’s crouch. His expression changed. Until it did, Kestrel hadn’t perceived the desperate set of his mouth. She hadn’t recognized the wordless plea until it was gone, and his face aged with something sad. Resigned.

Arin glanced away. When he looked back it was as if Kestrel were part of the pier beneath her feet. A sail stitched to a ship. A black current of water.

As if she were not there at all.

He turned away, walked into the illuminated house of the new Herrani harbormaster, and shut the door behind him.

For a moment Kestrel couldn’t move. Then she ran for a fishing boat docked far enough from its fellows that she might cast off from shore unnoticed by any sailors on the other vessels. She leaped onto the deck and took rapid stock of the boat. The tiny cabin was bare of supplies.

As she lifted the anchor and uncoiled the rope tethering the boat to its dock, she knew, even if she couldn’t see, that Arin was talking with the harbormaster, distracting him while Kestrel prepared to set sail.