The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(105)

The ground oozed. Mud splattered Arin’s trousers as he helped load a supply wagon. He was worried, he kept thinking about the Bite and Sting set in Kestrel’s saddlebag, and the mud made his work sluggish. He grew frustrated.

Oh, I don’t know, said death, slightly smug. I like the mud.

Arin stopped what he was doing. You do?

There was no reply other than the rain.

Arin considered his army. He considered the general’s. A strategy slowly formed, one that released an emotion close to plea sure. It was, he realized, the promise of revenge: right at the tips of his fingers.

In the prince’s tent, the rain loudly percussive against the canvas, Roshar studied the map marked by Arin.

“Your people will fight better in the rain,” Arin said.

“The rain might end by the time our army is in position.”

“But the mud will remain. Think of that heavy Valorian armor the higher ranks wear. We wear leather. Most of them will flounder.”

“Not on a paved road.” Roshar wasn’t challenging Arin’s strategy, just prodding it to test its solidity. “Their cavalry is superior. The general will take into account the soggy terrain on either side of the road. Armed infantry fares worse than horses in mud. They’ll try to flank us with cavalry.”

“Yes.” Arin tapped the map where he’d made notches on the even ground that bordered the road and ran open and smooth to the forest on either side. “Exactly.”

“What is it like,” Kestrel asked Risha as they rode, “to be gifted with weapons?”

Coolly, the princess said, “You’ve no proof that I am.”

But Kestrel remembered an archery contest on the palace lawn, and how Risha aimed arrows with studied mediocrity until one final arrow punched so hard into the target’s center that it drove through the canvas halfway up its shaft. “I used to wish I were talented that way. Then I didn’t. Now I do again.”

Risha shrugged. “It’s gained me little.”

“Roshar was even younger than we are when he brought you into Valorian territory. When you were captured.”

“Betrayed.”

“You didn’t agree to go with him?”

The princess shifted in her saddle. “I was a mere child, and eager to prove myself. Children seek to please. They try so hard. My brother and sister used that against me.”

“Roshar has suffered for it.”

“And so?” Risha twisted in the saddle to meet Kestrel’s gaze. The princess’s eyes burned, her brown skin was sleek with rain, her full mouth pinched.

“You could speak with him.”

Risha snorted. “You mean forgive. Forgiveness is so . . . squishy. Like all this mud.”

Kestrel thought of her father’s fire-lit face on Lerralen beach.

“It drags you down,” Risha said. “You know this.”

She had an uneasy feeling of not knowing what Risha would say next, but already not wanting to hear it.

“You, who seek your own father’s death.”

The bodies lay tumbled in a ditch not far from the Sythiah vineyards.

The rain had washed away any tracks. Still, Kestrel understood the story.

It leached into her: how the emperor’s company had seized the manor and dragged the Herrani who lived there out onto the grounds. Forced them forward. A girl in the ditch had lost her shoe. Her little foot was black with mud. The shoe . . . Kestrel searched for it in the rain, feeling a growing panic and need, as if finding a lost shoe could blot away the image of ashen corpses, the way a dead woman still gripped the child’s hand. The inching insects. A shoe could take away the smell, the rot of it strong in the rain. A shoe could keep down the bile that rushed up Kestrel’s throat.

But when she found the shoe, stuck in the root of a tree, the inner leather sole still held the shape of the girl’s foot. Kestrel could feel its imprint.

The shoe took away none of the horror. It planted it deep in the bottom of Kestrel’s belly, as solid as a grown man’s kick.



They crouched in the stubby vineyards with the other five Dacran soldiers. Risha eyed the manor’s kitchen yard, the house’s weakest entry point. Several of the house’s windows glowed through the night rain.

Kestrel licked her sour lips and gripped the satchel. She imagined the game tiles rattling inside their velvet bag.

She remembered dining with the emperor. A dessert served with a disintegrating sugar fork. How encounters with him had always felt like that: as though every tool at her disposal was crumbling in her grasp. She remembered how, on the imperial palace grounds, after a hunt, she’d realized that the emperor would steal or maim her dog simply because she loved it. My father needs for you to love him best, Verex had said.

You need to watch yourself, he’d said.

If you play against my father, you’ ll lose.

A light hand touched her arm. “I don’t know you well,” Risha’s voice was low. “But I know what Verex has told me about you, and what I see for myself. You don’t need to be gifted with a blade. You are your own best weapon.”

Kestrel stared back at Risha, who was almost pure shadow—a mere glint of eyes. Kestrel felt a slow, slight throb, a shimmer in the blood. She knew it well.

Her worst trait. Her best trait.

The desire to come out on top, to set her opponent under her thumb.