The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(30)

“Oh no,” Sarsine had replied. “Not this time.”

Cut it off. Yes. There had been another time. Then, there’d been a tangle of myriad little braids beneath her fingers, and she’d hated the feel of them . . . because of the ghost of an unexpected plea sure . . . yet what kind of pleasure, and why it had vanished, her mind refused to say.

You might regret cutting your hair, a society lady like you, Sarsine had said in this other, earlier time.

Please. I can’t bear it.

Sarsine unsnarled the dense clumps left by the prison camp. The movement of fingers in Kestrel’s hair made her dizzy. She’d gagged, and was sick all over again.

Now, puzzling through this, Kestrel touched a ribbon of hair on the pillow. She’d lost track of its color in the prison.

Familiar. Dark blonde. A little reddish. It had been a more fiery hue when she was little. Warrior red, her father had said, tweaking a braid. She suspected that he’d been disappointed to see it darken over time.

She sat up—too swiftly. Her sight dimmed. She got light-headed.

“Ah,” said a voice.

Her vision cleared. Sarsine stretched up from a chair (dove-gray wood, upholstery the color of matte pearl. This, too: familiar) and padded to a small table that held a covered tureen. Sarsine ladled steaming broth into a cup and brought it to her. “Hungry?”

Kestrel’s stomach growled. “Yes,” she said, marveling at such a simple thing as normal hunger. She drank, and felt immediately exhausted. The cup hung limp in her hands. “How long?” she managed to say.

“Since you’ve been here? Two days.”

The windows were curtained and glowed with daylight.

“You’ve been fitful,” Sarsine said, “and very ill. But I think”—the woman touched Kestrel’s cheek—“that we’ve turned a corner.”

This woman was good, Kestrel thought. All brisk confidence. Firm, matter-of-fact, with an undercurrent of care. A crease of worry about the eyes. Genuine, maybe.

“You need some solid sleep,” Sarsine said. “Can you try?”

Kestrel liked this, too: how Sarsine knew that something that should be easy wasn’t easy. It was true that wake and sleep in the past days (two, she reminded herself) had been broken and shuffled. She glanced up into Sarsine’s eyes. Then stared. She saw clearly now what she hadn’t noticed before. Her heart thumped.

They were the exact same color. Gray, like fine rain. Heavy black lashes. His eyes.

Her mouth, too. Not quite the same shape. But the cut of the lower lip, the corner lifted in the smallest of smiles . . .

“Well?” Sarsine said gently, taking the empty cup, which had become heavier than stone.

Kestrel reached for Sarsine’s free hand and gripped it. She steadied under the unwavering gray gaze. Not right, part of her insisted. Not right to seek him in this woman’s face. To seek him at all. But Kestrel did, she couldn’t help doing it, and when sleep opened beneath her she wasn’t afraid to fall into it.

It was night when she woke again. The lamp burned low. A large shadow lurked in the chair. Long, trousered legs stretched out, boots still tightly laced. His dark head crooked awkwardly against the carved trim of the chair’s back.

Clean, asleep. Hard lines softer now. Face shaven. That scar.

He was too clean. Close enough that she could smell him. He smelled strange: vinegar and orange and . . . lye?

His eyes cracked open. Hazy for the length of one drawn breath. Then alert in the lamplight. He watched her watch him. He didn’t move.

Her rabbit heart beat fast. She flickered between distrust and trust and an emotion less easy to name.

“Go back to sleep,” he murmured.

She closed her eyes. Her rabbit heart slowed, curled up in its warren, and seemed to become fully itself: warm fur, soft belly. A thrum of breath in the dark.

When she woke again, the curtains were wide open. Midday. Yellow light. The pearl-colored chair was empty.

An unpleasant bolt shot through her. She didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but it made her feel small.

She pushed herself up. A mirror stood on a nearby dressing table. Kestrel slipped from the bed: hollow, unsteady. The dressing table and its chair weren’t so nearby after all. The distance between her and them yawned wide. When she reached the chair, she dropped down into it.

The girl in the reflection looked so shocked that Kestrel’s first instinct was to touch her. To reassure. Fingertips met. The mirror was cool.

“Planning on breaking it?” said a voice.

Kestrel’s hand fell, and her gaze jerked away to find Sarsine standing behind her in the open doorway. Kestrel hadn’t been alone after all. The woman’s expression had the thoughtful cast of someone who’d been watching for a while. She carried a bundle of fabric in her arms.

“That’s not me,” Kestrel said.

Sarsine draped the fabric (a dress) over the back of the pearl-gray chair. She came close and rested a hand on Kestrel’s shoulder—warmly, yet at a careful distance from the raised marks she could prob ably see on Kestrel’s back through her shift.

Kestrel glanced again at the too-thin girl with the sunken eyes. Cracked lips. The knobs of her clavicle.

“Here,” Sarsine said, and gathered Kestrel’s hair. She wove a quick, practical braid.

“He did that,” Kestrel said suddenly. He had braided her hair, before. That (that?) was the unnamed, lost plea sure she had tried to remember. He had taken his time. A sensual slowness. The brush of his thumb against the nape of her neck. Mesmerizing. Then later, the next morning: all those little braids transformed into miserable knots.