The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(112)

Foam dribbled from his locked mouth.

His breath rasped. It became glottal, the sound of bubbles popping.

Then it ended.

Arin struck back.

As they fought, viciously silent words thudded in his blood: Mother, father, sister. Kestrel.

Arin didn’t care that the blows his sword hammered against the man’s metal body were useless, that there was no art to this, that nothing would pierce the armor, that a few smashed buckles where the general’s armor joined was no victory. He could see too little of the man’s flesh, couldn’t reach it, and he desperately wanted to make him bleed. If he couldn’t carve into the general, Arin would bludgeon him. He’d beat until something broke.

The buckles, death said.

Arin shifted the path of his sword in midswipe and curved it down toward the elbow of the general’s sword arm, aiming right for where the broken buckles of the general’s arm guard flapped loose.

Arin sheered the man’s arm off at the elbow.

Blood pumped onto Arin. If the general made a sound, Arin didn’t hear it. He was warm and wet.

The general fell. He lay blinking up at the sun, at Arin, his eyes glazed, mouth moving as if speaking, but Arin heard nothing.

For a moment, Arin faltered.

But there was nothing of her in this man, this enemy at his feet. Arin drew back his sword—more power than necessary for the death blow. He wanted to pour himself into this act.

Vengeance: wine-dark, thick. It flooded Arin’s lungs.

Those light brown eyes, on him.

There was that.

That one thing that Kestrel shared with her father.

Arin heard himself speak. His voice sounded far away, as if some part of him had left this road and was as high as the sun, looking down on the half that he had left on earth.

He said, “Kestrel asked me to do this.”

For she had.

Arin was a boy, a slave, a grown man, free. He was all of this at once . . . and something else, too. He realized it only now, as he plunged his sword down toward the general’s throat.

He hadn’t been blessed by the god of death.

Arin was the god.





Chapter 40

But he stopped.

Regret wasn’t the right word for what he felt later. Disbelief, maybe. Sometimes, even years after the war, he’d tear out of sleep, sweating, still trapped in the nightmare where he had butchered the father of the woman he loved.

But you didn’t, she would tell him.

You didn’t.

Tell me. Say it again. Tell me what you did.

Trembling, he would.

His brain had been a glass ball. Nothing in it but echoes. His mother’s scent. Father’s voice. How Anireh’s gaze had held him from across the room, and her eyes said, Survive. They said, Love, and I’m sorry. They said, Little brother.

And then silence. It became silent in Arin’s head as he stood on the road. He stopped hearing voices. He thought about how it had seemed strange that Risha would plot the emperor’s death, yet refuse to kill him herself. Arin understood now. He knew how it was to have no family: like living in a house with no roof. Even if Kestrel were here, and begged him—Let your sword fall, do it, please, now—Arin wasn’t sure that he could make her an orphan.

And he wasn’t sure that she would beg that if she were gazing down as he did on the graying face of her dying father, the man’s eyes sky-bright as he tried to speak, his remaining hand fumbling against his chest, just above his heart.

A throbbing radiance burned inside Arin; he hadn’t realized the pitch revenge could reach, how murder could come this close to desire.

He felt his eyes sting, because he knew what he was going to do.

He didn’t want to be here. He wondered why we can’t remember when our mothers carried us inside them: the dark and steady heart, how it was the whole of the world, and no one harmed us, and we harmed no one.

Arin thought that if he didn’t kill this man his memory of his mother would fade. It already had, over time. Someday she would be as far away as a star.

But he couldn’t do it.

He had to do it.

Tell me what you did.

Arin dropped his sword, dropped to his knees, yanked the woven baldric from the fallen man’s shoulder, and used it to make a tourniquet to save the person he hated most.

After the battle, and after Roshar had accepted the Valorians’ surrender, when Arin was sick with worry because Kestrel hadn’t yet returned from Sythiah, he went to the healers’ tent.

The general was asleep, his cauterized arm swathed in bandages, his armor removed. A drug had been forced down him. It had been a violent scene. Even now, asleep, the man was under guard and bound in chains at the ankles, his remaining hand strapped tight to his side.

Arin tugged at his hair until his scalp hurt. If Kestrel wasn’t back by noon he was going to ride to Sythiah. His brain was crawling in his skull, his stomach was a shriveled lump.

He hated seeing the general. He hated seeing even Verex (whom he halfway liked) limping around the camp, teeming with worry—for Risha, but also for Kestrel, which made Arin feel absurdly possessive, as if Verex were trying to rob him by feeling in any way similar to Arin. Arin became insufferable, he knew it, but he was constantly having to wrestle down the knowledge that if something had happened to Kestrel his heart would turn to salt.

He didn’t know what to do with his hands as he looked down at the sleeping general. Arin thrust them into his pockets before they went for the throat. He reminded himself why he had come.