The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(48)

Four days later, Kestrel was in the kitchen gardens on the grounds. She weeded. She liked it. She enjoyed knowing what belonged and what didn’t. There’d been a few mistakes at first, particularly with cooking herbs, but she knew what she was doing now. There was a plea sure in snapping pea pods from their stems and dropping them into her basket. She liked the bitter, ashy scent of the stunted plants that bore striped erasti, a fruit that grew only on this peninsula and only in this month. It was used in savory dishes. Kestrel picked them carefully. The cook, who’d been amusedly gentle with Kestrel’s gardening and her mistakes, had sucked in his breath when she’d first brought in a basket of erasti. They’d been unripe. “You must wait.” His tone was as close to chastisement as it ever got. “Leave them on the vine until they look like they’ll explode if you touch them.”

Her skin had burned on the first day of gardening, then peeled. She tanned. At first, she’d used a little knife to scrape out the dirt beneath her nails. Now she didn’t bother.

Today the wind was high. The earth was soft. She didn’t hear Arin approach.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

Kestrel glanced up at him. The wind swirled her hair into her face. She couldn’t see his expression and wanted to hide her own. She didn’t like what she felt. Relief, that he was safe. And a very different emotion: simmering, awful.

He said, “I need to speak with you.”

She knew from his tone what this was about. Knew that she had been right. She turned back to the plants. “I’m busy,” she told him. Green juice trickled down her wrist. The fruit went into the basket.

He crouched next to her between the plants. Gently, he pushed the stray, windborn strands of hair from her face. His thumb touched her cheek. She looked at him then. He was unwashed, hair knotted, clothes rimed white with salt, his jaw green and yellow from an old bruise. His boots were Valorian, high and hooked.

She didn’t want to see how the sun jeweled his eyes, or for her skin to feel suddenly alive simply because he had touched her. She didn’t want him to look at her as if there were a door inside her he wanted to open and enter.

She said, “You should marry the queen.”

He dropped his hand. “No.”

“Then you’re a fool.”

“I’ve asked Inisha to move into the governor’s palace.”

“Twice a fool. Beg her back.”

“Listen, please. When I was in the east, I thought all the wrong things of you. And you were engaged. You wouldn’t change your mind. I asked you . . .” Arin stopped.

She heard the memory of his voice: Marry him. But be mine in secret.

She ached at the memory of it, saw her hurt mirrored in his eyes as he remembered it, too, saw the echo of his expression last winter, in a tavern. He had begged for scraps. Hated himself for it. Asked anyway.

“It was a kiss,” Arin said. “Nothing more. There are no promises between me and the queen.”

“You have no sense of self-preservation.” Her heart was pounding hard. “If you’ve made no promises, you had better make them now. Why do you think she has allied with you?”

“Why doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does.” She leaped to her feet. He followed her, caught the hand that held the basket. “Was it a ploy?” she demanded. Her heart was beating in a double rhythm now. Fear and anger, fear and anger. “Did you kiss her so that she’d believe your alliance would be permanent?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Because I wanted to!” The words burst from him. “Because she wanted me, and it felt too good to be wanted.”

Kestrel took a shuddering breath. How was it possible to be wounded by someone she didn’t even love? The wind rode high. It whipped hair across her mouth. She waited until she could speak evenly. “I think that you don’t understand the politics of this situation. Did you expect the queen to come to Herran?”

“No.”

“Did Roshar?” But she knew the answer.

“Yes.”

“Yet your friend didn’t tell you.”

Arin paused. “No.”

“Why is she here?”

“To take command of the city.”

“Arin. Why is she here?”

He was silent, and she saw from his expression that he guessed what she was going to say.

“She’s here,” Kestrel told him, “to show her soldiers that this land is as good as hers. The Dacrans don’t like the alliance. They don’t see what they get out of it. But they will begin to see, once she establishes herself in this city. It’s not just for your new weapon, or for the sake of keeping the empire at bay that she agreed to help a small country with a weakened population. It’s because if you win this war, she can annex Herran and make it part of the east.”

He didn’t deny it. “She doesn’t need me to do that,” he said finally. “She could take it by force. Using me wouldn’t help much.”

She saw what he meant. It was true: Arin’s people loved him—she’d seen it, it was plain and powerful, the love flared up every time he smiled at someone, said a brief word—but he was no governor. No resurrected member of the massacred royal family. His political power was uncertain. Kestrel didn’t think she was wrong about the queen’s designs on this country, but her stomach clenched as she recognized how unavoidably, obviously true it was that the queen had wanted Arin for himself alone. “She must enjoy you, then. Maybe marriage isn’t exactly what she wants from you. Still, you should give her what she wants. You might get a nice future out of it. At the very least, you should ask.”