The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(36)

“That’s no answer.”

“But you are one of my reasons, Kestrel. You don’t want to hear that. I think you might be pushing me to say something that will make you leave.”

This gave her pause. She thought of how painstakingly she had neatened his bedsheets to erase her presence.

“I don’t—” The words caught in her throat. She let herself sit at the table and studied a symbol carved onto its surface. The symbol of a god, prob ably. The Herrani had many. “I don’t understand why I’ve forgotten so much.”

“You were drugged.” There was something unspoken in his voice.

“You think it’s more than that.”

He took the other chair, but sat at a distance, his body turned from her, directed toward an eastern window, face in profile, scarred side hidden. As he spoke, it occurred to her that maybe he, too, felt like two people, that maybe everybody does, and that it’s not a question of whether one’s damaged, but of how easily or not that damage is seen.

She studied him. Captor, rescuer, culprit.

He kept talking. She began to listen. It was a terrible story, told softly, never stopping. He barely paused for breath. As he described the night of the Valorian invasion and himself as a child, she began to see how natural the reflex of self-blame was for him. Ingrained. Insidious.

You’re the reason I was in that prison.

Yes.

It occurred to her that he might have taken blame he didn’t deserve.

It occurred to her that she had already guessed this even before he’d begun telling his nakedly awful story.

And that maybe she had been cruel.

This thinking was not the same as trust. Still, she listened. After he finished, she listened to his silence.

He spoke again. “Maybe, for you, it’s not just the drugs. Maybe . . . there are things that you can’t bear to remember.” He glanced into her eyes, then away, and she saw that it wasn’t because he was afraid of letting her see how he could or could not bear his memories, but because he was afraid of what her own lost memories might be, and didn’t want to show this fear, for fear of frightening her.

She said, “I didn’t choose to forget.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. It wasn’t a false smile, but only as true as it could be. He spoke lightly, like some joke had been played upon them both. “I don’t choose to remember.” He shifted to face her fully. “May I ask you a question?”

She thought about it. She wasn’t sure.

“I’m not asking for information,” he hastened to say. “I don’t want anything. Or, I suppose I do want something, but it’s to understand. That’s different, isn’t it, from asking for a favor, or . . . an emotion?” He stopped, blocked by the difficulty of holding himself to honesty and finding the way language fails, sometimes, to get honesty right. “Maybe it’s not different. You don’t have to answer.”

“Just say it.”

“You’ve not wanted me to talk about what you can’t remember. Not to ask. Not to tell. You’re . . .” He didn’t say the words. Kestrel thought them anyway. Angry. Terrified. “Is it because you really don’t want to hear it, or . . . because you don’t want it to be me who tells you?”

“I want to ask a question of my own first.”

This took him aback. “Of course.”

“On the tundra, you said that it was your fault that I was in prison.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“How . . . ?”

“Did you tell someone I was spying for Herran?”

He recoiled. “No. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t do that.”

“What exactly did you do?”

“I . . .”

“I have the right to know.”

“You lied,” he burst out. “You lied to me, and I believed you. I didn’t ask you to risk yourself. I never wanted you to do any of what you did. I never would have wanted this.” His mouth was tight, eyes wide: flooded with something hot and rich and hurt. “I had so many chances to see what you were doing. And I didn’t. I didn’t stop you. I didn’t help you. I despised you.”

She said, “I lied.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me my lies.”

“Gods.” He raked a hand through his hair. “You lied about the treaty. You agreed to marry someone else so that I could have a piece of paper. You tried to help the eastern plainspeople, yet let me think that you were responsible for their deaths. The way you acted. Selfish. Horrible. You worked for my spymaster and you lied about that, too, and he lied to me, and it makes me hate him now. I hate myself for not seeing it. He knew. He let you. You committed treason, Kestrel. How could you do that? You should be dead.” His voice lowered, dug in deep. “The worst—I don’t know—the worst is that you lied about—” He stopped himself, drawing a ragged breath. “You lied for a very long time.”

There was a silence. Slowly, Kestrel said, “I did all that for you.”

He flushed. “Maybe you had other reasons.”

“That’s the one you care about.”

“Yes.”

She warred with what to say. It was strange to talk about reckless choices she didn’t remember. It helped to see his anger, the way it blistered the surface of things. It was a relief not to be alone in her anger. It was folly, what her old self had done, but brave, too. She could see that. She could see how he saw it, and how it made things worse for him.