The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(28)

He caught the plural form. “More than one kind?” Though he’d already suspected this from his own experience with the exhilarating power of the drug he’d been given in the mines, and the way Kestrel longed for something to make her sleep. Had begged for it, sometimes.

“Yes.”

“She told you this.” Hurt pinched his heart. He looked away from his cousin so that she wouldn’t see how it felt that Kestrel had so easily told her what he’d been forced to guess. He was in the tent again, on the tundra, listening to the wind buckle the canvas. The chill oozing up from the ground, Kestrel in his arms, his pulse wild, the awful shudder of her limbs, the curve of her neck in the dim green dark. The relief to hear, finally, her breath slow and quiet. The way his own breath stayed uneven for a long time after that.

He said, “How did you get her to fall asleep?”

“She’s not asleep.”

“What?”

“She’s calm enough for now.”

“You left her alone, awake?” He remembered how she’d stood in a small boat high over black water on the night of the Firstwinter Rebellion, ready to jump. He heard her asking for Roshar’s numbing ring. “You can’t. Go back. Sarsine, you can’t leave her alone.”

His cousin’s hands slid down from her hips. Her stance loosened, her expression growing soft and tired. “Kestrel’s too strong to do what you’re thinking.”

“Look at her.” Arin spoke as if Kestrel were in the hallway with them. Look at what I’ve done, he almost said, then bit back the words. Sarsine would only say that none of this was his fault.

He knew the truth.

Sarsine sat on the floor across from him, knees drawn up under neath her muslin skirts. “I have looked at her. I’ve bathed and dressed her and put her to bed, and she’s malnourished and sick, but she’s alive. She’s fought hard to live. If you don’t think she’s strong, you’re mistaken.”

“I’ll stay with her.”

Sarsine slowly shook her head. “She doesn’t want you.”

“I don’t care.”

“She won’t hurt herself.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Arin, I’ll care for her, of course, but we can’t be with her every moment of the day.”

“I damned well can.”

“She would hate it. She doesn’t even know who she is anymore. How can she find out if she’s never alone with herself?”

Arin tunneled his fingers through his dirty hair and pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes until they flashed white under the lids. “I know who she is.” Proud girl. Hard, noble heart. And a liar, a liar. “I should have known.” Every moment with her in the capital rushed through him, freezing his veins. He’d swallowed her lies. The way she’d mocked him. Set him aside, made him insignificant. It had been easy to believe. It had made sense.

He cursed himself. He saw the opportunities he’d had, over many months before her arrest, to seize the truth of things. But none of what he’d seen or suspected in the capital had made sense. It had been senseless, so apparently wrong, the way he’d seen her eyes slim with longing when he’d found her by a canal. The waters had swelled below. She’d worn a maid’s dress. Senseless: that she would gamble her safety to help someone else’s people. Senseless: that she’d smuggle information to Arin’s spymaster. A traitor to her country. The Valorian punishment for treason was death.

And Arin had accused her of selfishness. In the capital, he’d thought words like power hungry, and shallow, and cruel. He’d said as much to her face. He’d blamed her for the deaths of the eastern plainspeople.

Her stricken expression, clear in the rushlights of that filthy tavern. The white line of her mouth.

He had ignored it. Misread it.

He’d missed every thing that had mattered.

Sarsine grabbed his wrists and tugged the hands from his eyes. He looked at her, but didn’t see her. He saw Kestrel’s wasted face. He saw himself as a child, the night of the invasion, soldiers in his home, how he had done nothing.

Later, he’d told Sarsine when the messenger had come to see him.

No, I won’t, he’d promised Roshar when the prince had listed reasons not to rescue the nameless spy from the tundra’s prison.

“I was wrong,” Arin said. “I should have—”

“Your should haves are gone. They belong to the god of the lost. What I want to know is what you are going to do now.”

He had long avoided the general’s estate.

Sarsine’s words ringing through his head, Arin rode Javelin through the unlocked gate.

A yellow-throated thrush called from a low bough. The uncut grass of the meadow reached up to the horse’s hocks. Arin walked Javelin through the green hiss of it, away from the villa, which he wasn’t yet ready to see, and up a hill, through a grove daubed with small, ripening oranges. They’d be hard and dry if he plucked and peeled them. Not ready yet. But their scent made him want them now.

He made a clicking sound with his teeth and tongue, nudged the horse with his heels. Javelin flicked an ear and picked up the pace, gusting a short breath through his nostrils, pleased to go more quickly.

Arin kept clear of the larger outbuildings. The thatched cottage that had belonged to Kestrel’s nurse, just west of the overgrown garden. The empty stables. The empty slaves’ quarters. The windowless barnlike shape of it, the paint white and flaking in the sun. Arin kept Javelin on his determined path, but turned a little in the saddle for a backward glance at the last building, his sword shifting against his hip as he did so.