The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(37)

Easier, though, for her: to know she hadn’t always been this husk of a vanished person. Then harder, to glimpse who she’d been. She saw the great difference between that person and the one sitting in a chair because she was too weak to stand. Emotions whirl pooled inside her. “Your question.”

“Never mind.”

“I’ll tell you.”

He shook his head. “Not necessary.”

“It is you. It’s true, I haven’t wanted it to be you who tells me things I can’t recall. Not you.” She saw his flinch, and the effort to hide it. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Who are you, that you get to know so much about me that even I don’t know? Why do you get to tell me who I am? How did you get so much power? I have none. It’s not fair. You are unfair.” Her voice broke. “I am unfair.”

His expression changed. “Kestrel.”

She held her breath until her lungs ached. She couldn’t speak. Here was the truth, it peeled itself open: she was the reason she was in that prison. She had made some fatal, unknown mistake. Arin looked like a good culprit, but he wasn’t the right one.

She was. It had been her fault, hers alone.

He reached across the table. His warm hand dwarfed hers. She saw it through her swimming vision. Those black-rimmed nails.

Blacksmith.

A sudden understanding held her still. She became aware of the weight of the dagger at her hip. Her sight cleared. She looked at Arin. He looked young. And too careful, and worried, and uncertain, and . . . something new was emerging, she saw it. It changed the quality of his expression the way light changes every thing. A small sort of hope.

“Maybe,” he said, “we could try being honest with each other.”

She wondered what was in her expression that hope would grow in his. She wondered what he saw. “Arin,” she said, “I like the dagger.”

He smiled.





Chapter 13

“They have a foothold in the south now,” Roshar said.

“I know,” said Arin.

“I doubt you know anything that doesn’t have to do with that wraith of yours.”

“Enough.”

They had been talking like this for some time, Roshar gradually dropping his veneer of needling humor to vent real frustration, Arin growing quiet, entrenched. They were in an office adjacent to the library, the table between them blanketed with maps and papers. The room had been chosen for privacy. Prob ably no one could hear them beyond the locked door. Or if people did, down the first floor’s north hallway, they heard not words but muffled tones. Despite the hot day, the diamond-paned windows remained shut because Roshar had complained of a chill. In truth, the prince hadn’t wanted their conversation to carry into the garden. But this meeting, which was supposed to develop tactics to keep the Valorian general off the peninsula’s shores, was deteriorating to the point that Arin wouldn’t have been surprised if Roshar broke something, possibly one of the windows, if only because they’d make the loudest noise.

“We lost that island, and you . . . where are you?” Roshar’s tight hands opened and spread wide. “Are you even here? No, you’re not. You’re upstairs, roaming her halls, roaming her head. Arin, this needs to end.”

But Arin said nothing.

Roshar swore at him in Dacran, the curse so intricate and colorful that Arin didn’t even try to make sense of the grammar.

In the silence that followed, Arin thought about how the god of death had deserted him. He had strained to hear his god. He’d also prayed to the god of war—confederate of death, drinker of blood—but the prayers had found no favor. Ithrya Island had been lost. It was now occupied as a Valorian base, south of Herran. It wouldn’t be long before the general’s army tried to land again on the peninsula—though where was uncertain.

Roshar said, “My sister is going to have some hard questions for you.”

Arin couldn’t avoid remembering the queen’s kiss last spring. He’d pressed her against the shut door. She had wanted him. Kestrel had said that she didn’t. He hadn’t wanted Kestrel either, not then. Or so he’d thought. His gut twisted with shame.

“Arin, you will do me the courtesy of responding when I speak.”

“Your sister is none of my concern.”

The prince pressed palms to his face so that his hands made a mask that showed only his disbelieving eyes. Then his fingertips crept up and rubbed against squeezed-shut eyelids.

But what could Arin say? He couldn’t explain how it felt, mere days after Kestrel had come to his rooms and said that she liked the dagger, to hear the rich cascade of the piano played in a far-off room. To hold his breath as he heard the initial stammer of notes. Then: mistakes worked through. Rhythms made right. He’d felt this new thing, giddy and bright. It spun inside him, soft and warm and summery.

“We have used this city as a base.” Roshar dropped his hands. He’d switched to Arin’s language. He was speaking with the kind of bell-like tone one uses with children. “It’s been a convenient point of return. We’re here now because the bay provides a good base to attack or defend anywhere along the eastern coast between here and Ithrya. And the city, as the general’s greatest prize, must be protected. But the general’s not likely to bite at it, not yet. Not when we’ve avalanched again the mountain pass he used for the first invasion. Not when our fleet is in this bay. He can seize the easy fruits of your countryside and march north, inland to the city, where he’ll breach the wall and take what he wants that way.”