The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(102)

Arin’s gray eyes went flat. “It’d be the Valorian general.”

Roshar shrugged. “Unless we eliminate him as well. Knock down all the principal pieces in Borderlands, and what’s left for your opponent? Surrender.”

“You forget an important piece in this game,” Risha said. “Me.”

Roshar’s shoulders tensed. Kestrel felt a growing disquiet.

“Verex and I would marry,” said the princess.

“An alliance between east and west,” Roshar said slowly.

Kestrel sought Arin’s gaze. When he met her eyes she couldn’t read them.

“Not so good for you, little Herrani,” Roshar told Arin. “Your peninsula would get lost in the middle.”

The risk had always been there, even if they won the war: that Herran would be retaken by the west, or dwindle into the east. But now Kestrel saw it as if seeing the future: how a marriage between the empire and Dacra could lead to one power ruling the entire continent. Herran would vanish.

“Decide,” Risha said, “or I leave. My information for Verex’s safety. Yes or no.”

Arin met Kestrel’s gaze. Grim mouth, hooded eyes asking whether this was worth it.

She thought about the emperor’s hand on her father’s shoulder.

The key Verex had sent to the northern prison.

A friend. A good heart.

But Roshar wasn’t wrong.

Kestrel knew what her father would choose, in her place. She realized that she’d come to rely on his voice in her head, that it had saved her on the battlefield. Even now, the very thought of his advice was soothing . . . even as being so soothed repulsed her.

It didn’t matter what her father would choose. She was not her father.

“Yes,” Kestrel said. “I agree.”

“Then I do, too,” said Arin.

Roshar gazed at his hands. “No one can promise anyone’s safety. Never. Much less in war.”

“We can promise to try,” Arin told him. “And you can shield him from the Dacran queen.”

Roshar nodded, but distractedly, with a disbelieving wince, as if someone had presented him with a portrait where his features were whole, his mutilations erased, and he had no words to express how wrong this vision of him was.

“I overheard the senate leader say that if Valoria succeeded in seizing the beach, the emperor would move inland with a small contingent and take the Sythiah estate,” Risha said.

“The manor there is luxurious,” Arin said, “but it has nothing strategically interesting for the emperor or the army. Vineyards. The grapes won’t even be ripe this time of year. There’s little to be gained in terms of supplies. The estate is north of the road to the city; not convenient as a base for attack.”

Kestrel, however, knew the emperor. “But the manor is beautiful?”

Arin lifted one shoulder. “The stained-glass windows were well known, before the war. There are rooms that seem to be made of colored light. Or so it was said. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen it.”

“The emperor enjoys beauty.”

Arin’s hand twitched, as if he’d meant to touch, compulsively, the scar that ran deep into his left cheek, but had stopped himself in time. It wrenched Kestrel’s heart to see him remember how he’d been attacked by the emperor’s minion, his face sliced open.

She hadn’t been there when it happened. Still, she saw it now as if she’d been a bystander: paralyzed, robbed of sound, her throat raw. Bones like lead.

And she saw herself in her suite in the imperial palace, dressed in red, her shoulders laced with golden wire. Kestrel had forgotten this. It came to her: the tight, gorgeous bodice. Folds of crimson samite. The emperor had selected her wedding dress. He had selected her, had cut her from the cloth of her home, then stitched her into place beside his son. He had embroidered how she’d look and who she’d become. I have chosen you, Kestrel, and will make you into every thing my son cannot be. Someone fit to take my place.

It was difficult for Kestrel to move, as if she had indeed become a cloth doll, the stitches drawn tight. She touched Arin’s arm, felt how the muscles had hardened. “You think that he seeks only to destroy.”

“Yes,” he muttered.

“Beauty moves him. He destroys it only when he can’t possess it.”

I asked myself, the emperor whispered in her ear, whether it was really possible that you might betray your country so easily, especially when it had been practically given to you.

“He loves to shape things.” A remembered helplessness shrouded her. The prince and his sister faded in her vision, were present but unimportant. She felt strange; her blood prickled as if something were growing inside her. “Every piece in place, arranged to his satisfaction. It’s why he enjoys games. You know, don’t you, how a game with a perfect line of play becomes beautiful?”

Yes. A growing thing. Thorny. A briar.

Arin’s expression changed. She saw how he read her stillness. She wondered if she’d gone pale. Anxiety stole over his features. “Kestrel, can I have a word with you?”

Outside the tent, night had come.

He cupped her face in his hands. “You don’t look right.”

“I’m fine.”

“No. You look like a part of you has dis appeared. Like you’re not really here. Like”—his hands fell away—“you do when you’re plotting something.”