The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(24)

His gray eyes flashed to hers.

She should remember him. She went over the lines of his face again. Distrust coiled within her. It didn’t seem possible that she would have seen a person like this and not remember him.

Something was wrong with the awkward claim he’d made after their escape that they were friends. If the tentative way he’d said it hadn’t alerted her to its not being wholly true, the way he’d just let her evaluate him and now waited, breath held, for some judgment, suggested his nervousness. If they were really friends, she wouldn’t make him nervous. She felt herself harden.

Now he looked hurt, and like he was trying to hide it, as if he’d guessed her thoughts.

This, too, she didn’t like: how easily he read her.



They rode separately. She was on Javelin. He rode a mare. The next time they stopped to rest the horses, she came closer to the fire, even though this meant coming closer to him. She was achingly cold.

He offered her bread and dried meat. He apologized for it. “I know you’re used to better.”

Which was a stupid thing to say, given that he’d just rescued her from a prison.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was a stupid thing to say.”

When she took the canteen, she couldn’t stop herself from doing what she’d done in the morning, which was to sniff the water.

“It’s not drugged,” he told her.

“I know,” she replied, and thought from the way his face changed that he’d seen her disappointment.

He kept apologizing. He kept trying to tell her something that she wouldn’t let him finish, and when she cut him off he didn’t look remotely like the person who had pulled her across the prison yard and attacked anyone who stood in their way, using that odd, heavy ring on his finger, and then disarming a fallen guard, wielding the stolen dagger as his own, burying it in the next guard’s belly.

“Please let me explain,” he said as they rode.

Fear flickered in her lungs. Her mind felt sore. Though it was dizzying to not know so much, a shrinking thing inside her warned that it’d be much worse to remember. “Leave me alone.”

“Don’t you want to know what happened? Why you were there?”

She saw his naked misery. She suspected that any explanation he could provide was more for his sake than hers.

She wanted to shove him off his horse. Make him feel how it was to fall. She was falling, she was plunging through the black nothingness of why and how, she was terrified of what she had forgotten. She blamed him for not seeing her fear even as she was determined to hide it. “All right,” she said. “Go ahead. Tell me why.”

For all his earlier persistence, he now didn’t seem to know where to begin. “You were a spy. You were caught.”

“Your spy?”

“Not exactly.”

“Close enough. So that’s why you came for me. That’s why you want me to remember. That’s what you want from me: information.”

“No. Kestrel, we—”

“If we’re friends, how did we meet?”

His mare tossed her head. He was drawing the reins too tight. “In the market.”

“That’s where, not how.”

He swallowed. “You—”

But she glimpsed the market, the dusty heat of it. She heard a crowd roar and remembered seeing his unscarred face looking at her, his features taut with hatred.

“Where are you taking me?” she whispered.

Now he saw the fear. She saw him see it. He stopped his horse. Her horse stopped, too. He reached to touch her. She flinched away. “Kestrel.” There it was again: his inexplicable hurt. “I’m taking you home.”

“You know what I think? I think that you could be taking me anywhere. I think that you do want something from me. I think that you are a liar.”

She spurred Javelin ahead.

He let her go. He knew that she needed him to survive on the tundra. She couldn’t go far.

She glanced down at the horse moving beneath her. Javelin. This horse was hers. His name felt right. Little else did.

The pink sun lowered in the sky. Mosquitoes rose from the mud. As she rode alongside him, her horse seemed to grow larger and higher. She wasn’t doing well.

He asked if she was hurt. After she said that she wasn’t, he asked again. “Maybe your memory . . .” he trailed off, and she couldn’t stand how hopeful he looked, as if some head injury was the desired cause of every thing. His searching gaze made her want to snarl like an animal.

By sunset, her body had become almost uncontrollable. The need had been building all day, shuddering inside her. Her stomach cramped. She had the faint certainty that she must have been trained to ride well or she would have already dropped off her horse.

He saw it. He kept slowing the pace even though she could tell that he wanted to push farther. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

She didn’t want to admit that she craved a drug that she’d been forced to take. He guessed it anyway. He nodded, and said, “They gave it to me, too, yesterday.” Then she really hated him, for guessing, and for thinking he understood the clawing desire for something he’d only tasted once.

She kept going until she couldn’t see straight and her stomach was wobbling, heaving. Finally, he grabbed her horse’s bridle and dragged them both to a stop.