The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)(82)

In winter. With no water or food, and surely very little sleep if she was to make a voyage that would take, at best, three days.

At least there was a strong wind.

She was lucky, Kestrel told herself. Lucky.

She cast off for the capital.

*

Once she’d sailed from the bay and the city lights had dimmed, then disappeared, Kestrel couldn’t see the shore. But she knew her constellations, and the stars were as pure and bright as notes struck from high, white piano keys.

She sailed west. Kestrel moved constantly over the small deck, tacking the lines, letting the wind furl out the mainsail. There was no rest, and that was good. If she rested she would grow cold. She would allow herself to think. She might even fall asleep, and then risked dreaming of how Arin had let her go.

She memorized what she would say when she reached the capital’s harbor. I am Lady Kestrel, General Trajan’s daughter. Herrani have taken the peninsula. You must recall my father from the east and send him to stamp out the rebellion.

You must.

*

A bright, brittle dawn. Its colors were hallucinatory, and Kestrel found herself thinking that pink was colder than orange, and yellow not much better. Then she realized that this wasn’t a rational thought and that she was shivering in her thin jacket. She forced herself to move.

Her hands chapped and bled in the freezing wind, ripped against the ropes. Her mouth became a dry cave. Thirst and cold were far more painful than hunger or fatigue. She knew that a few days without water could kill a person, even in the best conditions.

Yet hadn’t Kestrel learned to steel herself against need?

She remembered Arin’s face when she had reached for her knife.

She forced herself to forget it. She focused on the waves’ swell and slam, steered past a bare, rocky island, and recited what she would say in two days’ time if the wind held.

*

It didn’t. The sails slackened during her second night. Her boat drifted. She tried not to look at the sky, because sometimes she saw glitter even though she knew the stars were hidden beneath clouds.

A dangerous sign. She was weakening.

Her body raged with thirst. She tore the cabin apart, thinking that a flask of fresh water must be somewhere. All she found was a tin cup and spoon.

Sleep, then. She’d sleep until the wind picked up. Kestrel tied the sails in the direction of the capital, then cut two pieces of twine. She rigged a chime out of the cup and spoon to wake her if the wind rose.

Kestrel slipped back into the cabin. Everything was still. No wind. No waves. No tilt and roll of the boat.

She focused on that nothingness, imagined it as ink spilling over everything she could possibly think or feel.

She slept.

*

It was a jagged, haunted sleep where her mind whirred through the words she was supposed to say when she reached the capital.

She struggled against images of Arin holding a plant, a bloody sword, her hand. She tried to wring the life out of the memory of her skin against his. Instead it beaded bright in her dark mind, strung itself out like liquid jewels, distilled down the way alcohol does, or a volatile chemical, growing stronger when forced to reduce.

Her half-asleep self said: Arin let you go because a Valorian invasion was inevitable. At least this way, he knows when to expect it.

Kestrel heard music, and it called her a liar.

Liar, the bell rang.

And kept ringing, and ringing, until Kestrel wrenched awake and out of the cabin to see the cup and spoon clanging.

Against a vicious green sky.

Green storm.

*

Waves vomited over the deck. Kestrel had lashed herself to the tiller and could do little more than hang on, watch the wind shred the sails, and hope she was still pointed west as the boat sheered off crests of water and pitched down, and sideways, and down.

Arin let you go so that you would die, just like this.

But even dizzy, her mind saw no sense in that.

Kestrel worked again through the words she was supposed to say, spun them out from her like knitting she had seen slaves do. She tested the words’ fabric, their fiber, and knew she couldn’t speak them.

She would not.

Kestrel swore by Arin’s gods that she would not.

*

No wind. She couldn’t see much. Salt water had bleared her eyes. But she heard the boat scrape against something. Then came voices.

Valorian voices.

She stumbled off the boat. Hands caught her, and people were asking questions she didn’t fully comprehend. Then one made sense: “Who are you?”

“I am Lady Kestrel,” she croaked. Unbidden—wretched, wrong—all the words she had memorized poured out before she could shut her mouth. “General Trajan’s daughter. Herrani have taken the peninsula…”





39


She woke when someone dribbled water past her lips. She came instantly alive, begging for more as it was doled out in excruciatingly small sips. Kestrel drank, and thought of things whose beauty was raw and cool.

Rain on silver bowls. Lilies in snow. Gray eyes.

She had done something, she remembered. Something cruel. Unforgivable.

Kestrel forced herself up on her elbows. She lay on a large bed. She still saw badly, but well enough to observe that the softness cushioning her body was a fur so rare and valuable its animal had been hunted nearly to extinction, and that the man who held a cup of water wore the robes of the Valorian emperor’s physician.