The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(40)

Kestrel took the reins and spurred the horse to follow the bird.

She rode away from the house, taking a path that led to another path. She didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t long until she was surrounded by trees in full leaf. The path stretched out into a green tunnel. She rode for some time. She saw a day owl with her owlets. There was little wind. It wasn’t too hot. Good weather for war.

She’d heard enough of the conversation between Arin and Roshar a few days earlier. They were biding their time here. If she were them, she wouldn’t stay long.

Her stomach swayed. It matched the horse’s movement. She loosened the reins, letting Javelin go as he pleased.

But she found that he was surging forward, hooves clopping. Arin’s house lay far behind. The path forked. The horse went left. He was stepping surely. He was, she realized, going somewhere he recognized and she didn’t.

She jerked his head around and ground him to a halt. He snorted, hooves shifting.

Kestrel was sweating. Her dress stuck to her skin. She made Javelin go back the way they’d come—fast, then faster, his hooves beating the rhythm of her terrified heart.

She somehow wasn’t surprised to find Arin waiting alongside a stream close to his house, but she was surprised that she was grateful. Her heart still stammered inside her chest.

Arin had no horse, though a bit of stable straw stuck to the sole of a boot. He was crouched by the water, fingertips sunk only past the first knuckles. Barely in the water at all. Just feeling the slight current, she thought. He hadn’t glanced over his shoulder. Still, he was aware that she was there. He listened to the slowing thump of Javelin’s hooves. Arin’s hair hung in his eyes.

She had wanted to sweep it aside. She remembered this. It had been on the first day. When she had bought him. She had wanted to see him clearly.

She stopped her horse.

Arin straightened, water dripping from his hand. He came close, put his fingers into Javelin’s mane, and met her eyes. She was held in the palm of that memory: curiosity, hesitation, a sense of wrong, a violation. Yet still the compulsion to see. This person. She remembered his rigid shoulders, hard mouth. He had avoided her gaze. His whole body: a silent snarl.

He wasn’t like that now. He looked up at her, his expression was unguarded, growing worried. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Javelin shifted beneath her.

Arin frowned. “Do I frighten you?”

“No.”

“Your face is bloodless.” He touched her hand. She saw that she was clenching the reins and let them slacken.

“It’s not because of you,” she said. Then, because she had decided to be honest, she said, “Yes, you, a little.” She stopped, confused, unable to explain to him or herself the difference between the fear that had sent her tearing back down the horse path and the bright stitch of nervousness that traveled up her skin now as she looked down at him. “In the woods, Javelin wanted to take a path. I didn’t. It upset me.”

His eyes went crystalline. “Where was this?”

“Is there something dangerous in the woods?”

He grabbed the pommel and mounted the horse behind her. “Show me.”

She kept the reins. He drew his sword. It was a different sword than the one he’d had on the tundra. She thought about that, which kept her from thinking about how dread mounted in her throat as they rode, how her breath was again too fast. The damp dress still clung to her, and as she strained to be alert to every thing around them, each little life that moved in the woods, it was hard not to be aware of him, too.

But there was no telltale snap of a twig. No enemy shadow in the trees. Kestrel almost wished there were. It would explain the terror that had seized her . . . and seized her again as they stopped at the fork in the path. The stallion stamped.

Arin sheathed his blade.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s the way to your house.” She felt his voice travel up her back. There was a long pause. “We could go.”

“No.”

“Nothing’s there. It’s empty. I’d be with you.”

“I don’t want to.”

He took the reins from her frozen hands. He turned back Javelin, who showed more reluctance this time. Arin kept the pace slow, at a walk.

They were silent as they rode. Then Kestrel heard herself say, voice low, “I feel foolish.”

“No, Kestrel, you’re not.”

“There was no reason to be afraid.”

“Maybe we just don’t know what your reason is.”

Javelin, whose ears flicked crankily to have been thwarted twice in his plans to take the fork in the road, whuffed and shook his head. “Shh,” Arin told the horse, and hummed a few low notes. Then he stopped and was quiet before saying, “Even if you had no reason at all, fear isn’t foolish. I get frightened, too.”

She remembered how he’d held his sword earlier. “You thought there were Valorians in the woods. You weren’t frightened then.”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

“Spiders,” he said gravely.

She elbowed him.

“Ow.”

She snorted. “Spiders.”

“Or those things with a thousand legs.” He shuddered. “Gods.”