The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(22)

Arin understood obedience. After the Valorian invasion, it had been easy for him to obey. He saw what happened to people who didn’t. He’d been a frightened child. Then he grew and changed, resisted. He got what came next. Blood in the mouth. Elsewhere. Sometimes it felt like it was everywhere, in his eyes, too, changing his vision. It coated his thoughts. The taste of things. Once, to prove a point: a horse halter was tightened over his head, an iron bit set between his teeth.

After ten years of slavery, Arin knew obedience in its many forms. The fear of pain, the gritty promise to oneself of vengeance. Hopelessness. A grinding monotony broken just often enough by the strap or fist. The way punishment made his master more his master, and him less himself. He’d been prone to defiance, no matter how stupid it was, because he could insist, at least in that moment, on the integrity of his will: unalterable by anyone. But then pain did alter it. Humiliation did. Obedience became a version of despair.

But he’d never seen the kind of obedience he witnessed when the guards herded the prisoners into a line. They were cows. They weren’t even like people pretending to be animals, which he had seen and had done. There was no question of resistance here on the tundra, no glimmer of hatred.

Arin couldn’t imagine Kestrel obeying like this. He couldn’t imagine her obeying at all.

He strained to see her through the ragged line of prisoners. Was she at the front of the line? Was she so changed that he couldn’t recognize her?

Was she there at all?

A guard reached for Arin’s pickax. Arin’s hands jerked back. He wanted to swing the ax and nail it into the guard’s throat.

The guard peered at him. Arin forced his fingers to relax. He let the ax go.

He lined up like every one else and was led to the camp.

He avoided the food and water served in the yard. He was slowly dribbling soup over his bowl’s lip and down into the mud when he saw her. Her back was to him. Her hair was matted. She was so thin that he had to swallow hard. For a moment he believed that he was wrong, that this could not be her. But it was.

She was being led to a cell block with the other women. Look back. Please. She didn’t, and then he was being led in the opposite direction, his heart shaking inside him, yet he had to do what he was told.

Until, that was, the moment he was inside the men’s cell block.

He came up behind the nearest guard, wrenched the Valorian’s head at an awful angle, and snapped his neck.

There were other guards. They came at him. He stung them with Roshar’s ring and they slumped, unconscious, to the ground. Arin found keys on a fallen guard. He locked up the male prisoners. He stuffed as many as he could into as few cells as possible to save time.

The women’s cell block was quiet. Most of the prisoners were already in their cells: shadows on the ground.

At the end of the hall, a Valorian woman with silver braids saw him. She drew her dagger. Opened her mouth to shout. He rushed at her, dodged the dagger, clamped a hand down on her face, and stung her with the ring. Then the keys were in his grip and Arin was going cell by cell. He called Kestrel’s name in a hoarse whisper. There was no answer. A feeling frothed out of him, an acid mix of dread and hope and desperation.

Then he stopped. He saw her sleeping on the dirt. Again, her back was to him, but he knew the curve of her spine and the spike of her shoulder and the way her ribs rose and fell. He fumbled with the keys.

He kept saying her name. He was begging her to wake up. The same words spilled out of him over and over. He wasn’t even sure what he was saying anymore as he came into her cell and touched her cheek and, when she still didn’t wake, shifted her body up. Her head tipped back. She slept. Some part of Arin warned that he was going to have to slap her, that she must wake up, and then another part recoiled at the thought. He wouldn’t, he never would, he would kill the person who would.

“Kestrel?” He couldn’t even shake her frail shoulders. “Kestrel?”

Her eyes cracked open. He caught his breath. She came awake more fully, and saw him.

He hadn’t allowed himself, before, to consider the possibility that she’d be like the other prisoners, that her mind would be gone, that there’d be no life in her eyes and her face would be drained of every thing that made her who she was.

She wasn’t like that. She wasn’t, and as Arin watched her blink and take him in, and saw the mind behind her gaze, he was grateful. The gratitude came hot and flowing: a prayer of thanks to his gods. He cupped her face between his hands—too rough.

Or he believed he must have been too rough, because she recoiled. He was afraid he’d hurt her. But she narrowed her eyes in the wan light, studying him. He saw her confusion, couldn’t translate it.

She whispered, “Who are you?”

Arin didn’t understand until she asked her question again.

Understanding arrowed into him.

She had no memory of him. She truly had no idea who he was.





Chapter 8

They stumbled over the tundra. He saw how unnaturally drowsy she was. Her ankles sometimes folded beneath her, as if her body was made of stuffed cloth and she was forcing it to move out of sheer will.

“Lean on me,” he said. She did, but he could tell that she didn’t like it.

“Just a bit farther,” he said.

Eventually, he carried her. In the green-cast dark, she slept against his chest.