The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(26)

There was a musical cry far off, out on the tundra.

Wolves. They sounded lonely. Beautiful, though, as they called to each other.

In the morning, she discovered that she had, at some point, fallen asleep. It was brutal to be awake. He wasn’t in the tent.

A feeling jolted her heart. The movement she made then must have been loud. “I’m here,” he called from outside the tent, and she emerged to see him in front of the fire that she should have smelled and interpreted as meaning he must be there or nearby—or she would have, if she hadn’t been so afraid that he had left her.

She walked to the fire, still stumbling on her feet. She had the frustrated idea that she’d never been especially graceful in her body, but that she’d at least been competent. Before.

She sat across from him. The pale fire leaped between them. Snapped.

He was no longer wearing the heavy ring. She wondered what he’d done with it, then decided that she wouldn’t ask as long as he said nothing about the night before.

They sat and ate in silence.

He kept looking at the injured mare, the one they didn’t ride. She caught him doing it, and knew that he didn’t want her to see him doing it.

When they stopped later in the day to rest, she held his gaze just as it was about to flick back to the mare. “Don’t,” she said.

“I don’t want to.”

“How would you, even?”

He shrugged, and she became conscious of the dagger at his hip, the one he’d taken off a prison guard. She recognized the dagger as the sort of thing that should belong to her and not to him. She had a sudden, intense feeling of difference. She realized that they’d been speaking in his language, not hers.

She imagined him taking the knife and cutting into the horse’s throat. There was no other way to do it. A massive gush of blood. Thrashing body. The slide of hooves.

“She’s slowing us down.”

“I said no.”

Finally, he nodded.

That felt familiar: his obedience. She had commanded him before. But she also thought that he had never obeyed her this way, and that even when he’d appeared to, he hadn’t, really.

Definitely not friends. Something else.

That night was like the one before. He held her. She warmed. Her limbs softened. It seemed to be the only thing that could possibly make her sleep.

He said, “You bought me.”

“What?”

He had murmured the words against the nape of her neck. His voice came again, stronger this time. “You asked how we met. It was in the market. I was for sale. You bought me.”

Instinct told her to turn in his arms and search his face, to see what expression it showed.

She didn’t trust her instincts. She stayed very still. “Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do I still own you?”

The wind pushed against the tent’s canvas.

“Yes.”

Her reply was blunt. “No one would believe the things you say. Do you think having no memory makes me a fool?”

“No.”

“You say that I was your spy, which means that I worked for you. You say that I own you, which means that you work for me. You say that we are friends. Masters and slaves are not friends. And then there is this—” she broke off, unwilling to go any further. She was too aware of his heat next to her. “You say impossible things. I don’t believe you.”

His ribs expanded: hard wings against her back. “If you let me explain—”

“Stop talking. Stop talking. I don’t want to hear your voice.”

He fell silent. She lay rigid against him, wishing that she could make herself pull away.

At an uncertain hour of the night, she felt him draw breath. He was going to try again to explain, she thought. She went stony with panic. Again, she had that sense of falling, hurtling toward what she didn’t remember. The skull-crushing impact.

She didn’t want him to speak, she was suddenly not even sure he meant to speak. It occurred to her, strangely, that he might sing.

“Don’t.” Her command was sharp.

He didn’t.

Later, she woke because she was shaking again. He was gone.

It was still nighttime. He should not be gone.

She pushed out of the tent and saw him standing beneath an imaginary sky. Above the darkness, beyond the needlepoint stars, were swirls of green and pink edged with violet. She was sure she’d never seen anything like it.

He turned to meet her gaze, which had lowered from the sky to him. She didn’t understand how he wasn’t freezing. Then she saw the way his shoulders hunched and realized that he was. He looked back up at the night’s gauzy colors.

“What is that?” she asked.

“The gods.”

“They don’t exist.” She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she knew that she believed it.

“They do. They’ve come to punish me.”

“It was you,” she said, giving voice to her lurking suspicion, and knowing, as his face twisted, that she was right. “You’re the reason I was in that prison.”

He met her eyes. “Yes.”





Chapter 10

Arin wasn’t sure how they made it home.

Kestrel had worsened. She was sick during the day. At night her body became a silently keening thing. He would hold her, worried that it was wrong of him, even (sometimes, especially) when she seemed to welcome it. Then it was as if a wave washed through her and pushed her out into sleep. He felt her go, and became wrenchingly grateful, while knowing that what ever comfort he could offer was something she didn’t actually want.