The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(11)
Kestrel strained against her bonds, terrified.
“Princess,” said the guard behind her.
Kestrel’s muscles went tight. Her shoulders hunched. She couldn’t breathe.
“Every new prisoner shines with a little light,” the guard said. “Your light happens to shine brighter. It’s best for everyone if it goes out.”
Kestrel pressed her forehead against the bars. She stared at the tundra. Her breath was coming again now. Hard and fast.
There was a sharp, whistling sound like a bird taking off.
The whip came down. It carved into her. Something wet ran down her ribs.
She wasn’t brave. She could hear herself as it continued. She wasn’t anything she recognized.
It used to be that Kestrel would treasure the memory of Arin singing to her. She’d worry that she’d somehow forget it. The sliding low notes. The sweet intervals, or the way he’d sustain a long line, and how she loved the sound of him taking a breath as much as she did the way he could hold a musical phrase aloft until it ended exactly where it should.
But after the guards untied her from the gate, when her back was on fire and she couldn’t walk and her bones were a trembling liquid, she looked at the cup in the woman’s hand. Kestrel reached for it. She begged to drink.
The cup was set to her lips. She caught the silvery scent of the nighttime drug. The thought of becoming just like the other prisoners no longer seemed so bad.
It would be a blessing to forget.
After all, what was there to remember?
Someone she never could have had. Friends dead or gone. A father who did not love her.
The cup tipped. Water ran over her tongue, cool and delicious. She forgot the pain, forgot where she was, forgot who she’d been, forgot that she had ever been afraid of forgetting.
Chapter 3
Arin added the captured Valorian vessels to his fleet.
Some of the Dacran sailors who had been sent to scour the aqueducts found the source of the poison that had been flowing into the city’s water supply. It was a large vat lodged in a mountain tunnel that connected the water’s path to arcades that came down the mountainside in a series of tiered arches. The vat was cleverly designed; it leaked a thick, brownish liquid in a dose measured by internal weights and counterweights.
When Arin saw it, brought forth from one of the old mountain trenches that had been used ten years ago by Herrani slaves to construct the tunnel, he had wanted to pitch the vat off the cliff and watch it shatter on the rocks below. Instead, he helped carry it carefully down the mountain and stored it in the city’s arsenal to be used against the Valorians in case of a siege.
Every one in the city drank rainwater collected in barrels or brought in from the countryside. They all went a little thirsty until Arin, having waited a few days for the aqueduct to flush itself clean, drank some of its water and felt no different than he had before.
“Do you really think it could work?” Sarsine asked. Arin’s cousin lay in her bed in his family home, still pallid. Her movements were slow and she slept most of the day, but her eyes had grown brighter in the past few days.
“It does work.” Arin described the different parts of the miniature cannon he had designed in the Dacran castle forge. “It’s what made the eastern queen agree to ally with us,” he added, though with an uncomfortable sense that this perhaps had not been the whole explanation for the queen’s decision. “This weapon might give us the edge we need against the empire, but we must make more. Sarsine, I need you.” He brushed lank hair from her forehead and looked into the face that reminded him of his father, for whom she’d been named—an unfashionable, solid-sounding name she’d hated as a girl. He cupped her cheek. “I can’t do this alone.”
She reached for his hand and held it. She no longer looked so weak. Sarsine smiled. “You’re not alone,” she told him.
Eastern reinforcements came by ship roughly a week after the sea battle, and Arin was hugely relieved to see the new sloops drop anchor in his harbor. The Valorian counterattack would come soon—possibly somewhere along the western coast, he suspected.
One of the new arrivals in the harbor created quite a commotion. A cage was lowered from the largest sloop into a launch and rowed slowly to the piers. As the launch approached, Arin saw that the Dacrans at the oars were stiff and silent, edged as far away as possible from the cage. One figure, though, leaned against the bars, crooning to the pacing animal inside. Arin immediately recognized the young man. He felt a surge of gladness. He hadn’t expected Roshar to come.
The eastern prince looked up to see Arin standing on the pier. A grin split his face. Arin used to think that Roshar had a skull’s face; the nose and ears had been cut off. But Roshar looked so ferociously alive, his black eyes shining and lined with green paint, his teeth white and even, that although Arin remembered what he’d thought when he’d had his first shocking glimpse of Roshar’s mutilations, that memory felt distant now.
Roshar, ignoring the startled cries of his crewman, leaped from the launch onto the pier. The launch rocked in the water. The small tiger growled.
Arms folded across his chest, Arin walked to the end of the pier. “Did you have to bring the tiger?”
“I kept him hungry during the journey here, just for you,” Roshar said. “Go give him a nice snuggle, won’t you? He’s come all this way to see you. The least you could do is give him one of your arms to eat. Too much? What about a hand? At least some fingers. Arin, where’s your hospitality?”