The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(119)

Although Arin was eager to see Kestrel, he would have to wait. He caught threads of music from far away. As he came across the grass, the piano’s melody strengthened. It opened within him a happiness that gathered and gleamed . . . glossy, but the way water is, with weight.

A lovely fatigue claimed him. He lay down on the grass and listened. He thought about how Kestrel had slept on the palace lawn and dreamed of him. When she had told him this, he’d wished that it had been real. He tried to imagine the dream, then found himself dreaming. Every thing made sense in his dream yet he felt the tenuousness of this perfect reason. The arch of Kestrel’s bare foot. An old tale about the god of death and the seamstress. Arin would lose, upon waking, his understanding of why touching Kestrel would arouse the memory of a story he’d not thought about in a long time.

He dreamed: one stocking balled in his fist, and the stray question of how it had been made, who had sewn this? He saw his hands—though they did not look like his hands—measuring and cutting fabric, sewing invisible stitches. A dark-haired boy tumbled from a room, a god-mark upon his brow. When a guest entered and said, Weave me the cloth of yourself, Arin thought that he was the forbidding guest and the child and the sewing girl all at once. She said, I’m going to miss you when I wake up.

Don’t wake up, he answered.

But he did.

Kestrel, beside him on the grass, said, “Did I wake you? I didn’t mean to.”

It took him a velvety moment to understand that this was real. The air was quiet. An insect beat its clear wings. She brushed hair from his brow. Now he was very awake.

“You were sleeping so sweetly,” she said.

“Dreaming.” He touched her tender mouth.

“About what?”

“Come closer, and I’ll tell you.”

But he forgot. He kissed her, and became lost in the exquisite sensation of his skin becoming too tight for his body. He murmured other things instead. A secret, a want, a promise. A story, in its own way.

She curled her fingers into the green earth.





Chapter 44

The night was fresh and foretold summer’s end. The slow, hot day gave way to a breeze as cool as laundered sheets.

Kestrel, in the stables, fed Javelin a carrot. She promised him apples. “Soon,” she said, and wondered if horses notice how the seasons change. Do they see apples swell on the trees? Have they any way to mark the passage of time, or is it always now for them, with no sense of then? Maybe soon had no meaning either.

She’d meant to visit her father. She’d wanted to ask him about her childhood. Her memory was still a tattered thing sometimes, and Arin couldn’t tell her what he himself didn’t know. She wanted to ask her father: How was it when you gave me Javelin? What was my first word? Did you save my milk teeth, or did my nurse plant them in the ground as the Herrani do? What was I like, and how were you with me, and with my mother?

She wouldn’t have known some of the answers even if her memory hadn’t been damaged. Every one loses pieces of the past. But then it occurred to her that her father might not know either, or that he would, and say nothing. Or he would, and try to bargain his memories for the use of her dagger. Kestrel’s courage failed her. She didn’t go to the prison.

“You will when you can,” Arin had said when she’d told him.

“I should be able to now.”

“This isn’t a wound in the flesh. No one can say how long it takes to heal.”

Then she had noticed that Arin’s fingernails were blackened, and how he kept reaching into his pocket as if to reassure himself that something was there.

She had told herself not to guess. But she could never help guessing. A smile warmed her face.

He shut his eyes in mock chagrin. “Gods, can I keep nothing from you?”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Devious thing. I won’t give it to you yet. It’s for Ninarrith.”

Time seemed strange; it was as if the ring were already on her smallest finger, the most vulnerable one.

“It’s simple,” Arin had hastened to say.

“I will love it.”

“Will you wear it?”

“Yes.”

“Always?”

“Yes,” she had said, “if you show me how to make one for you, too.”

Kestrel gave her horse a final caress. It was full night. She left the stables. Fireflies spangled the black lawn.

She thought about Arin’s expression when she’d asked if he would teach her how to forge a ring for him, and the whole conversation glowed within her like one of those fireflies. Watching them, you’d almost think that a firefly winks out of existence, then comes to life, vanishes again, returns. That when it’s not lit, it’s not there at all.

But it is.

A night breeze ruffled a curtain. Arin’s bedroom—she realized with soft surprise—had come to feel like her own. He was lazily tracing circles on her belly. It hypnotized her into a rare, pure unthinking.

He settled back on the bed, propped on one elbow. “It occurs to me that there is something we have never done.”

Her thoughts rushed back. She arched one brow.

He moved to whisper in her ear.

“Yes,” she laughed. “Let’s.”

“Now?”

“Now.”