The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(33)

She pulled the blade free. It was very Valorian. Save for the straightened point and that unknown symbol, its every element showed the Valorian style, from the hooked cross guard to the double edge to the blade’s beveled shaft. The steel’s faint blue hue showed its quality, but Kestrel would have known it anyway. The dagger felt light in her grip, agile. Beautifully forged. Balanced. Fine in its proportions. Made by a master.

Kestrel touched a thumb to its edge. Blood sprang to the skin. “Gods,” Kestrel said, and sucked at the cut.

Sarsine laughed. “A convert now, are you?”

Kestrel was startled. She’d forgotten about Sarsine. She frowned, unsure why she’d said what she had. It had been the kick of instinct. Or maybe someone else’s instinct, rooted inside her, inhabiting a hidden space that made it feel natural for her to invoke gods she didn’t believe in. She pushed the blade back in, set the whole thing back on the table with a thunk.

“Why are you giving this to me?” The keys she understood. She was not meant to be a prisoner here, but a guest. More than a guest, if she read the gift rightly. Guests don’t have access to their host’s every room.

But the dagger . . .

“I could kill you with this,” she said. “Right now.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Sarsine still looked amused. “You’re hardly in fighting form.”

“That’s not the point.” It was starting to upset her a little, the keys and the dagger together. The way each gift, in its own way, showed a trust absolute.

“The thinking,” Sarsine said carefully, “was that you shouldn’t feel defenseless.”

Kestrel opened her mouth, then shut it, not realizing until then that this was how she had felt, and that the first emotion that had claimed her after falling under the visual spell of the dagger was a sense of security.

Sarsine said, “We—”

Kestrel looked at her sharply.

“I’m not worried that you’ll hurt someone else,” Sarsine said. The phrasing of the words indicated exactly what the worry had been—or maybe still was.

“I see.” Her mouth thinned. “I don’t need a dagger for suicide. But I wouldn’t do it. I’m no coward.”

“No one,” Sarsine said, “thinks that you are a coward.”

Kestrel took the sheathed dagger onto her lap, gripped it with both hands. It felt irrevocably hers. It would pain her to give it back. She thought from the way Sarsine looked at her that the other woman understood this. Kestrel relaxed her hold. The dagger was hers, and it was all right. She was trusted with a weapon, and that was right, too.

Sarsine drank her milk.

Kestrel said, “Is this dagger like the dresses?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“It was made for me. Do you have other things of mine from before, like the dresses? Like this?”

Sarsine hesitated, as if she wanted to speak but the words lodged in her throat. Finally, she said, “Your piano.”

The instrument rose before her eyes: black, massive, too large for her heart, which suddenly strained with desire. “Where?” she managed.

“Downstairs, in the salon.”

The surge of remembered music. The arch of her fingers. Glittering notes.

“I want it,” Kestrel said. “Now.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure you’d make it down the stairs.”

“But—”

“You could be carried, though not by me.”

“Oh.”

“You’re not that light.”

Kestrel was silent.

“Shall I arrange for it?”

She knew whom Sarsine would ask. “No.”

“Then eat your breakfast.”

She did, without another word.

Sometimes she’d step gingerly out onto her memory and it would creak and sway beneath her like a bridge that couldn’t bear her weight. She’d retreat into what she knew best: the prison. There, she’d learned to love the earth beneath her cheek. Dry, cool. The sunless smell of it. The way it heralded sleep. She’d drink the nighttime drug. She’d swallow and swallow. Then she’d drift, and love the guard who led her, and love the moment right before sleep, because it was only a moment, and in one mere moment she wouldn’t have to think about how she’d given in—and given up. She’d never had any other kind of life. This was all there was.

Sleep was there. It shoved her down. Pressed her lungs. The drug crept soft fingers across her mouth and shaped it into a loose smile.

No one stayed with her anymore at night. Not Sarsine. Not him. And she didn’t need company, she was no child. She wasn’t frightened by nightmares, or by the way she couldn’t remember them after she woke, like now.

Her fingers trembled as they reached for the low-burning lamp on the bedside table. She took the lamp. The keys. She pulled on a robe and made her way through the suite, through the sunroom, and out onto the rooftop garden. Her feet were bare on the egg-shaped pebbles. The darkness was velvety, and warm enough that Kestrel knew that she shouldn’t be cold.

She should know whether it was cold or warm.

She should know whether it was normal to be nervous. Would her pulse race like this if she were still the same person she used to be?

She tried the heavy keys on the ring until she found the one that fit into the door set into the opposite wall of the garden. Opened it. Saw another garden, just like hers. She tried to walk on the pebbles without making noise. Failed. It occurred to her that the pebbles were there for the very purpose of making noise. She thought about this, about why someone might want to hear another person coming, and this distracted her from the forgotten nightmare that seemed to have snapped her in two.