The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(38)

Arin didn’t disagree.

“I’m heading south soon, little Herrani. I don’t plan on returning to your lovely home with its new and fascinating guest. Will you see fit to join me in defending your very own country, or will you waste away here with your Valorian ghost until her people break down your doors and murder you both?”

“I’m coming with you,” Arin said . . . but not immediately, and with the prick of offense that comes when an accusation hits home.

“My prince. ‘I’m coming with you, my prince.’ ”

But Arin wouldn’t say it, not even in the same mean mock-play of Roshar’s tone. He swallowed, throat tight. His mouth had the same taste it had years ago when a Valorian had shoved a horse bit into it.

“I do hope,” Roshar said, “that what you lack in grace and self-preservation will be recompensed by a return to your usual brutal and uncanny gift for battle. I want you to kill them all. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes.”

“What about your gun?”

Roshar’s word for Arin’s invention was accurate in the vaguest sense, since the term had long been used to refer to any shape and style of cannon.

“Our supply has increased,” Arin said, “but I’m worried about the device’s accuracy.” He shuffled through the papers on the table until he found the sketches for the weapon. He selected a particular page and traced the sketch of a barrel and matchlock. “If we use what we have now, we’ll risk hitting our soldiers when we fire. We can surprise the Valorians with this weapon only once, and—”

A slender hand reached between them to take the sketch.

Roshar spun around. Arin didn’t move.

Kestrel stood there, ignoring the prince, who had sucked in his breath and hardened his expression into a death’s-head mask. She glanced up at Roshar once, coolly, then continued to study the design. She hadn’t looked at Arin at all. Her slippered feet sank into the plush, vividly patterned carpet as she stepped quietly away from them and closer to a window. A shaft of light hit her cheekbone, made the paper glow. It set her hair on fire. Arin’s stomach twinged. His throat tightened. Her eyes were still too shadowed. But she’d gained weight and looked less frail. Once again, Arin dared to hope.

He had forgotten what she was looking at until she spoke. “The ordnance is wrong.”

“What?” Roshar was just barely keeping his composure.

“It’s round. You’re planning on shooting a ball like a cannon does. But this is not a cannon. Cannons aren’t intended to be especially accurate. They’re designed to do the most amount of destruction in a generalized space. This thing—a gun, you said?”

Only now did Arin wonder when she’d entered the room, and how much she’d heard. He didn’t think she understood the eastern language, but he and Roshar had been speaking in Herrani for some time now.

“This seems designed for specific harm to a person or that person’s parts,” Kestrel said. “In that sense, it’s like a bow and arrow. An arrowhead is not round. It’s tipped. That makes the arrow fly true. It drives into the flesh. If you want greater accuracy, that little cannonball should not be a ball. It should be conical, perhaps. Tipped.”

She returned the sketch to Arin. Then she left as silently as she had come, closing the door behind her.

“Arin.” Roshar’s voice was menacing. “That door was locked.”

“I gave her the keys.”

Roshar exploded.



Kestrel was on the grounds at the edge of the orchard when he found her. The eastern prince kept his distance, but he was unmistakably there to speak with her. Ripe ilea hung heavily from the trees. Some of the purple fruit had fallen to the grass. Wasps climbed over it. They didn’t bother her, but the sun made her tired.

“What do you want?” she said when he approached.

“I’d like to know how much you know.” Roshar saw her expression. What he saw changed his. A little more gently, he said, “It’s a matter of safety.”

“Mine, or yours?”

“I care about as much for my safety as I think you do for yours.”

“His, then.”

“This is war. The safety of many people is at stake.”

“If you play war safely, you’ll lose,” she said, then was uneasy. Those words hadn’t felt like hers. They belonged to someone else, a person who knew war well and enjoyed discussing it with her.

She shook her head. She didn’t want to think about that. It made her dizzy, pricked by invisible pins. She focused on the prince: his mutilations, his finely drawn black eyes. “How do you speak my language so well?”

Roshar raised his brows.

“I mean, his.” She knew that Herrani wasn’t her first language. Still, it often felt that way.

“I was enslaved by your people. Then I was sold into this country.”

She looked again at the missing nose. The slitted, reptilian nostrils. “Did they do that to you?”

He smiled with his teeth.

Testing the truth of it as she spoke, Kestrel said, “I knew that they did that to runaways. I don’t remember seeing it happen.”

“You might not have. You were a lady. Part of privilege is not having to look at ugly things.”