The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(31)

“What?” Sarsine tied the braid with a ribbon.

“Nothing.”

Sarsine met her eyes in the mirror, but said only, “Come, let’s get you dressed.”

“To do what?”

“To look more like yourself.” Sarsine pulled her to her feet.

The dress was too loose. But it fit well in the shoulders and was the perfect length. The fabric. That pattern of sprigged flowers. “This is mine.”

“Yes.”

“But this isn’t my home.”

Sarsine’s fingers paused in their buttoning. “No.”

“Then what am I doing here? Where did you get this?”

Sarsine fastened the last button. “How much do you remember?”

“I don’t know.” She was frustrated. “How am I supposed to know how much? For that, I’d have to know what I’ve forgotten. You tell me.”

“Better if you asked someone else.”

Kestrel knew whom she meant. There it was again: his fingers sliding through her hair. It was true, what she’d suspected on the tundra was true. A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise.

“No,” Kestrel told Sarsine. “I trust you.”

Sarsine knelt to put slippers on her feet. “Why?”

“You don’t want anything from me.”

“Who says I don’t? A maid might seek any number of things from her mistress.”

“You’re not my maid.”

Sarsine glanced up.

“Why are you doing this?” Kestrel asked. “Why are you kind to me?”

Sarsine dropped her hands to her skirted lap. She worried a thumb over the opposite palm. Then she got to her feet and helped Kestrel to a full-length floor mirror. Kestrel, fully tired now, and confused by a number of conflicting things, let herself be led.

“There,” Sarsine said, once Kestrel stood before the reflection. “You look almost like a proper Valorian lady. That’s what you are. When I first saw you, I hated you.”

Kestrel stared at herself. She didn’t see what was worth hating. She didn’t see much of anything. Just a shadow of a girl in a nice dress. She whispered, “Am I despicable?”

Sarsine’s smile was sad. “No.”

There was a silence that Kestrel didn’t want to break, because it seemed, for that moment, that there was a downy safety in not deserving hatred. Maybe she didn’t need to be anything else. Maybe it was all a person needed to be.

Sarsine said, “Almost eleven years ago, your people conquered this country. They enslaved us. You were rich, Kestrel. You had every thing you could want. You were happy.”

Kestrel’s brow furrowed. She recognized some of what Sarsine had said, saw it far off, hazy in the distance. But . . .

It was want, she realized. And happy.

“I don’t know every detail,” Sarsine said. “What I do know is that last summer, you bought Arin in the market.”

“So it’s true.”

“You won him at an auction and brought him to your house. But the auctioneer, a man called Cheat—”

Kestrel felt an ugly pang.

“—wanted you to win. Arin did, too. Your father is the highest-ranking general in the Valorian army. Arin was a spy for the Herrani rebellion. He was crucial. Nothing could have been done without him. Or you. You gave him useful information, though you didn’t mean to. You wouldn’t have done it if you’d understood what Arin was after and what he’d do with what you told him. Valorians were attacked all over the city, taken by surprise, killed. Your friends, too.”

Tears on dead skin. A girl in a green dress. Poisoned purple lips. Kestrel swallowed.

“After the rebellion,” Sarsine said, “you were brought here.”

Kestrel’s voice came out strangled: “A prisoner.”

Sarsine pursed her mouth, but didn’t deny it. “You escaped. I’m not sure how. The next thing we knew, the Valorian army was here and we were under siege. But you came and presented Arin with a treaty.”

Heavy paper beneath her thumb. Snow floating onto her cheeks. White paper, white snow, white heart.

“It offered us our independence as a self-governed territory under the emperor’s rule. It seemed too good to be true. It was. Several months later, people in this city began to fall ill. I did, too. We were being slowly poisoned by tainted water from the aqueducts. The emperor wanted to kill us without risking any of his soldiers’ lives. We know this—and stopped it—because of you. You were passing information to Tensen, Arin’s spymaster in the capital. Arin didn’t know who Tensen’s source was. Tensen refused to name her, and instead called her by a code name: the Moth.

“You were caught. A Herrani groom in the mountains brought news that a woman in a prison wagon bound for the tundra had given him a moth and asked him to give it to Arin. Arin went for you. Here you are.”

Kestrel’s teeth were set, her shoulders stiff. She didn’t remember most of what Sarsine had said, wasn’t sure what to make of the few vague images that pulsed in her mind. She fought fatigue. “That’s crazy.”

“Implausible, I know.”

“A story.” Kestrel groped for the way to say it. “Like something out of books. Why would I do such things?”