The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(21)

Arin said, “There is something you can do for me.”

“I dread to ask.”

“Can I borrow your ring?”





Chapter 7

The tundra air was white with mist. Through his spyglass as he crouched behind a stunted bush, boots seeping into cold mud, Arin saw the dark line of prisoners emerge from behind rocks at the base of the volcanoes. He scanned each prisoner that passed within view. He couldn’t see her face. The mist was too thick. They filed through the work camp’s open gate. It shut behind them.

He waited for nightfall. The temperature plummeted. A wolf howled in the distance.

Ilyan, the messenger, had warned him about the wolves. He’d shown Arin a way into the tundra that kept them out of sight of the Valorian road to the work camp. They’d slept by day and traveled by night. Ilyan was waiting for Arin where they’d stopped to unload their gear and rest the three horses near a shallow lake. Arin remembered the way Javelin’s head had lifted to see him go.

Arin went quiet inside. He stared at the shut gate. He was filled with a tense, solid stillness, the kind that wouldn’t let him think about anything other than what he needed to do. It stopped the emotions that had claimed him ever since Roshar’s news. It spread like a cold mist over the tarry grief, the elated hope. It kept at bay the feeling that had gutted him, had made it impossible to breathe: remorse.

Another wolf called. It was now as dark as it was going to get.

He left his cover and made for the volcanoes.

At the base of a volcano, whose top dis appeared into the greenish half dark, Arin scrubbed loose sulfur into his hair. He rubbed the yellow, crumbly, stinking stuff into his face, smudging it along the line of his scar. He caked his hands with it. He rubbed it over Roshar’s ring.

Arin’s plain clothes were streaked with mud from days of travel. If he could have seen himself, he would have seen a blur of yellow and brown. A man of uncertain age and origin, unless someone looked closely.

He prayed that no one would. He went down into the mines. His heartbeat seemed to echo in the tunnel like a drum.

He waited for morning.

At dawn, when the prisoners came down into the tunnel with pickaxes, Arin stepped out of the shadows to mingle with them, become one of them. Furtively, he searched their faces. When he didn’t see her, he grew terrified that he was too late. A month. He hated himself for it. As he went deeper into the mines he couldn’t bear his thoughts: that she was sick, hurt. That she’d been transferred to some other kind of prison. Maybe he was wasting yet more time here while she suffered elsewhere.

He couldn’t let himself think the worst thought.

Kestrel was strong. She could survive this. She could survive anything. But when he saw the slack faces of the other prisoners—their blank stares, their shuffling gait—he wasn’t so sure. Fear slid down his spine.

There were two Valorian guards down in the mines with him, but they paid little attention. They didn’t notice when Arin took a pickax right out of a prisoner’s hands. The guards broke their conversation with each other only when the empty-handed prisoner, wandering like a sleepwalker, tried to dig sulfur out of the rocky walls with his fingers, which bled, nails broken. Out of the corner of his eye, Arin watched the man’s mechanical determination. Arin kept his head down, his shoulders slumped, and his face as blank as the guards neared the prisoner and conferred. Then they shrugged. They found the man a pickax.

Arin worked. He thought of Kestrel doing this. He drove his ax into the wall, swallowed the bile in his throat. He could not get sick, could not draw attention to himself. But the nausea didn’t leave him.

Hours might have gone by like this. He couldn’t count time passing. The grayish light that filtered down from the tunnel’s mouth hadn’t changed.

But the prisoners did. They went suddenly still. Arin snatched his ax back in midswing. He, too, made himself into a statue. He wondered what they were waiting for.

It was water. The guards distributed it. The prisoners’ bodies went taut, and they eagerly drank.

Arin imitated them. He swallowed the water.

Moments later, his pulse shot up to the sky.

He felt too big for his body. He knew, as if from a distance, that he’d been tampered with. The water.

He struck the rock with an energy resembling delight. This wasn’t right. He told himself that this wasn’t right, that this wasn’t what he really felt. Yet he lovingly filled his double basket with sulfur.

He was going to fail. He’d had a plan, he had come here with a plan . . . sweat soaked his shirt, the pieces of the plan scattered, and he became certain only of his failure.

Because of you.

Arin’s hands slowed. He heard Kestrel’s voice again, felt the sway of a carriage. Firstwinter. If he put his palm to the carriage window, he’d melt its feathered frost.

Because of you, Kestrel had said. Her mouth had opened beneath his.

The knowledge of what Arin was here to do drove into him and turned like a screw.

He became himself again. He wouldn’t fail her, not again.

The drug faded. It was still there—it grasshoppered in his blood—but his body was almost quiet now. Tired. His bones felt loose in their sockets. The guards led him to the surface, where other yellow-coated prisoners waited, too many to count at a glance, enough that they could have overwhelmed the guards even without weapons. And they did have weapons. Axes, some of them. Other prisoners could have grabbed the rocks at their feet.