The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(29)

He reached the forge and swung off the saddle, dropped his boots to the ground. He loosened the stallion’s girth and let him go. The grass was high and good. A horse’s heaven.

Arin’s boots were loud on the flagstones. There were smithies in the city he could have used, but this one—perversely—felt like his. Things were as Arin had left them last winter. Inside, tools hung where they should. The anvil had a skin of dust. The hearth was long dead. The coal scuttle full.

He built a fire in the forge, worked the bellows, and watched flames snap to life. When it was going strong, he left the fire to burn. He’d be back. The fire would have to burn a while for what he wanted. In the meantime—he forced himself to think it—he should go see the house.

The general’s villa—Kestrel’s—had stood empty since Arin had killed Cheat last winter. As the leader of the Herrani rebellion, Cheat had claimed the house as his and lived there because it was the best, and because it was the general’s. Maybe even because it was Kestrel’s. Arin didn’t know when Cheat’s malevolent fascination with her had begun. Arin swallowed hard to remember it.

His hand was tight on the sword’s hilt. He looked at his clenched knuckles, looked again at his father’s sword, pulling out an inch of it to see the gleam of finely tempered steel in the sun. Then he dropped it back home into the scabbard and he went inside the house.

Past the portico, the entry way’s fountain was silent and scummed over. Bugs walked the water’s green surface. Painted gods stared down at Arin from the walls. Other creatures, too: fawns, a leaping stag, birds. He caught a glimpse of one frescoed bird arrested in midflight and remembered seeing it for the first time over Kestrel’s shoulder, on the day that she’d bought him.

Inside, the house was mostly bare. He’d thought it would be, but had never thought that it would look like this.

After Arin had signed the imperial treaty that seemed to promise Herran freedom, the Valorian colonists surrendered their homes in this territory. Ships came to empty the houses of Valorian possessions. There were disputes over whose was what. Arin had waded in, brokered the negotiations, but had ignored Kestrel’s house. The Herrani family who’d owned it was long dead. When a Valorian ship entered the harbor to empty the general’s villa, Arin pretended that the ship and house didn’t exist. He’d assumed that every thing had been taken. He was almost right.

He hadn’t been here since the Firstwinter Rebellion. He hadn’t wanted to be drawn to Kestrel’s rooms, or to see the kitchens where his people had been forced to work, or to find the place where the steward accused him of touching something he shouldn’t have. A flogging had followed, set far back on the grounds so that no one in the house would be bothered by unpleasant sounds. Arin hadn’t wanted to remember the music room ringing with Kestrel’s playing, or to see the library where he’d once shut himself inside with her. He’d wanted nothing of this place at all. Even when he’d come with men and a cart and draft horses to bring the piano to his house, Arin hadn’t gone inside. He’d waited outside, rigging a system of pulleys he used to help haul the instrument up and onto the cart after it had been wheeled out the wide doors of the music room.

So he wasn’t prepared for the filth he saw and smelled.

Cheat had been vengeful. The corners reeked of piss. There were stains on the walls, the windows. Several panes were shattered.

Arin’s feet carried him swiftly to the music room. Things were odd there: leaves of sheet music scattered on the floor, some of it burned, but only a little, as if Cheat had started and then had had a better idea, prob ably the same idea that had kept him from ruining the piano. Maybe Cheat hadn’t been sure whether to force Kestrel to do what he wanted, or bribe her . . .

Arin’s stomach seized. His lungs blazed. He flung open a window.

He stared into the garden, remembering this view. He’d watched flowers dip and float in a breeze while Kestrel played a melody written for the flute. His mother used to sing along to it, in the evenings, for guests.

He wondered if this was what it meant to have been born in the year of the god of death: to see every thing defiled.

But the air cleared his head. He made his way to the kitchens. There he started yet another fire, this time to boil water. He found a harsh-smelling block of lye. Rags. Buckets. Orange-scented wood oil. Vinegar for the windows and walls. Arin began to clean the house from top to bottom.

As he wrung out a cloth, he felt his god sneer. Cleaning? Ah, Arin. This is not why I made you. This is not our agreement.

Arin had no sense of having agreed to anything, only of having been claimed, and liking it.

He couldn’t dishonor his god. But he also couldn’t dishonor himself. He pushed the voice from his head and kept at his task.

When he returned to the forge, the fire was long dead. He restarted it and stoked the flames. Then he set his father’s sword into the fire, heated it to the point of flexibility, and held it against the anvil. He chopped the blade. His mind was quiet as he trimmed it down and something new formed beneath his hands. Folded steel, layer upon layer. Forge-welded. Shorter, thinner. Strong and sprung. He reformed the hilt. Shaped and ground the blade. He did all that he could to make Kestrel’s dagger his finest work.





Chapter 12

She swam out of the murk.

She was sore—shoulders and ribs and stomach especially. But the spasms that had racked her body were gone. Every thing was impossibly soft. The feather bed. Her thin shift. Clean skin. The tender give of the pillow beneath her cheek. She blinked, heard the short sweep of her eyelashes against the pillow’s fabric. Her hair lay loose, smooth. It had been disgusting when she’d arrived here. She remembered Sarsine working oiled fingers through it. “Cut it off,” Kestrel had said. She’d felt disjointed and eerie as the words left her dry lips, like she wasn’t really speaking but echoing something she’d already said.