The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(114)

A gentle feeling flowed into her. She caught his erratic hands and held them between hers. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”



That letter.

She read and reread it, in the high summer grasses on the sides of the road, at night by lamplight. The pen’s ink had aged, gone brownish. She imagined her father reading under the sun during the campaign. Spots of the paper had a waxy transparency. The residue of oil, used to polish a weapon? Her father liked to clean his own dagger. She searched for meaning in the smudges of dirty fingerprints under certain words, but nothing, really, was evidence of anything except the urgent scrawl of her own handwriting. The bottom half of the letter was warped with rusted blood, the final sentences lost. Kestrel couldn’t remember what she’d written there. Like a worn map, the letter folded instantly under the slightest pressure.

The paper looked quiet in her hand, tucked in on itself. Kestrel wanted to reach through time and comfort the girl who’d written it, even if the only comfort she could offer would be understanding. She wanted to imagine a different story, one where her father read the letter and understood it, too, and returned it to his daughter, telling her that she should never have had to write anything like that. I love you. I’d do anything for you, the letter said, and it was hard for Kestrel to keep from crumpling the paper in her fist when she realized that these words were what she had always wanted her father to say to her.



Three days from the city, the army had made camp for the night. Kestrel went to the healers’ tent.

Her father noticed the moment she entered. He flinched, then met her gaze, and she didn’t know what was right to feel—the sort of soft, heavy comfort that touched her at the sight of her father, simply because he was her father, or the rage in her chest, or how she wanted to mourn his maimed arm, and wanted to tell him that he deserved it.

“Why did you keep my letter?” she asked.

He said nothing.

She asked again.

He turned his face from her.

She kept asking until she heard her voice crumbling and thought that Risha had been wrong when she’d said that forgiveness was like mud, as if it could take what ever shape you needed.

It was hard; it was stone.

She walked away from the tent.

Verex said that he and Risha were leaving. They wanted to ride to the eastern plains, and maybe sail from Dacra’s eastern coast to see what lay in the unexplored waters beyond. He had no wish to inherit the empire. He asked that rumors of his death be spread.

He saw Kestrel’s fallen expression. “You think I should go back to the capital instead, and become emperor.”

“Honestly, I don’t want you to go anywhere. I’ll miss you.”

His brown eyes warmed. “I’ll visit. Risha, too. She wants to train you in your weapon of choice until you feel properly dangerous.”

Kestrel opened her mouth to say that’d be a useless effort, but then it struck her that it might not be, and whether it was or wasn’t didn’t matter as much as the happiness the offer gave her. “I like her, too.”

They were leaning against the trunk of a very broad tree near the encampment. White spores from its flowering branches floated down. She wondered if a Herrani would think this the sign of a god, and if so, which one.

“I’m sorry,” she told Verex.

He knew what she meant. “I had no love for my father. He certainly had none for me.”

“Still.”

“I’m not sure what else you could have done. If anything . . .” He slouched against the bark. “I feel worst about being relieved.” A spore landed on the tip of his boot, then floated away. In a low voice, he added, “And a bit of a coward. I worry that if I became emperor, I’d become like him.”

“Not you. Never.”

“And guilty, because I’m abandoning a country that might collapse on itself. It’s not clear who’ll rule now.”

“I bet you have some ideas. I can think of a few senators who’d claw their way to power. Or the captain of the guard. I don’t remember every one at court, though, or who owes whom, or bears a grudge. You could give me a clearer picture, and I could . . . well, keep an eye on the situation in the capital.”

He raised his brows. “A spy again, Kestrel?”

“Spymaster, maybe.”

He picked up a thin, fallen twig and snapped it into tiny sticks.

“I think Arin needs one,” she said.

“You’d be the best. I wish, however, that you didn’t always risk yourself. You’re too fond of a gamble.”

She shrugged helplessly. “I am who I am.”

Affection tinged his smile. Then he sobered and said, “I used to believe I could stomach taking my father’s place. But Risha would be miserable. I would, too.”

Kestrel, suddenly fierce, said, “Then be happy.”

“I will,” he said, “if you will.”

Feathery white fluff came down from the tree as he described the political intricacies of the Valorian court, and then told her about how the puppy he’d given her at court had grown into an enormous, sweet-tempered dog living with a family in the foothills of the Valorian mountains. There were small children who adored her, even when she chewed their shoes. Maris—a young courtier Kestrel had intensely disliked until she found that actually, she didn’t—had married well and was gleefully smug about it. As for Jess, Verex said that she had gone to the southern isles at the start of the war. “I wish I knew more,” he said.