The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(5)

She saw his iron-colored eyes. Sooty lashes, black brows, darker than his dark hair. A grim mouth.

Now, if the lady had been honest, she would have admitted that earlier that evening as she’d lain in bed, she’d woken for the length of three heartbeats (she had counted them as they rang loud in her quiet room). She’d seen his hand on her white-covered heart. She had closed her eyes again. The sleep that had reclaimed her had been sweet.

But honesty requires courage. As she cornered the thief in his lair, she found that she wasn’t so sure of herself. She was sure of only one thing. It made her fall back a little. She lifted her chin.

Her heart had an unsteady rhythm they both could hear when she told the thief that he might keep what he had stolen.

Kestrel woke. She’d fallen asleep. The floor of the moving wagon creaked beneath her cheek. She hid her face in her hands. She was glad that her dream had ended where it did. She wouldn’t have wanted to see the rest, the part where the girl’s father discovered that she’d given her heart to a lowly thief, and wished her dead, and cast her out.

The wagon stopped. Its door rattled. Someone set a key into its lock. It grated. Door hinges squealed and hands reached inside. The two guards hauled her out, their grips firm and wary, as if she might fight them.

They had reason to worry. Once, Kestrel had knocked one of the men unconscious by striking his temple with the manacles on her wrists. The second guard caught her before she could run. The last time they’d opened her door, she’d flung the contents of the waste bucket in their faces and pushed past them. She’d sprinted, blind in the sudden daylight. She was weak. Her bad knee gave out and she hit the dirt. After that, the guards stopped opening the door at all, which meant no food or water.

If they had decided to take her outside now, it was because they had arrived at their destination. For once, Kestrel didn’t struggle. Her dream had numbed her. She needed to see the place where her father had condemned her to live.

The work camp was enclosed by a black iron fence the height of three men. Dead volcanoes loomed behind the two blocky stone buildings. The tundra stretched to the east and west: tattered blankets of yellow moss and red grass. It was chilly. The air was thin. Every thing smelled rotten.

This far north, twilight had a greenish cast. A line of prisoners filed into the camp through an open narrow gate. Their backs were to Kestrel, but she caught a glimpse of one woman’s face in the pale green light. The expression frightened Kestrel. It was utterly blank. Although Kestrel had been following her guards quietly, those empty, glassy eyes made her dig in her heels. The guards’ hands tightened. “Keep moving,” one of them said, but the prisoner’s eyes—all of the prisoners’ eyes—were shiny mirrors, and Kestrel, although she’d known her destination in the north and had known that she, too, was a prisoner, only now fully realized that she was going to transform into one of these empty-faced people.

“Don’t be difficult,” said a guard.

She went boneless. She sagged in their grip. Then, as they bent and swore and tried to drag her upright, she abruptly straightened and rammed her head back into one man’s face, threw the other off balance.

It was the least successful of her escape attempts. Stupid, to try anything just outside a camp that held scores of Valorian prison guards. But even as several of them swarmed out to help subdue her, she couldn’t think how she could have done anything else.

Nobody hurt her. This was very Valorian. Kestrel was here to work for the empire. Damaged bodies don’t work well.

After she’d been dragged inside the camp, she was shoved across the muddy yard and right up to a woman who looked Kestrel over with amused, almost friendly scorn. “Pretty princess,” she said, “what did you do to end up here?”

Though now dirty and disheveled, Kestrel’s hair had been braided with aristocratic flair the day she’d been caught. She remembered slipping into the soft blue dress and seeing the spill of it across her lap when she’d sat at the piano on her last night in the imperial palace—when was this? Nearly a week must have passed, she thought. Had it been that long a time since she’d written that reckless, wretched letter? That short a time? How had she fallen so far so fast?

Kestrel plunged again into that icy well of fear. She was drowning in it. She couldn’t even react when the woman drew the dagger from her hip.

“Hold still,” the woman said. With a few rapid slashes, she cut Kestrel’s skirts straight down between the legs. From her belt, the woman unhooked a loop of thin rope that hung next to a coiled whip. She cut the rope into several short lengths that she used to tie the slashed fabric to Kestrel’s legs, fashioning something like trousers. “Can’t have you tripping over yourself in the mines, can we?”

Kestrel touched a knot at her thigh. Her breath evened. She felt a little better.

“Hungry, princess?”

“Yes.”

Kestrel snatched what was offered. The food vanished down her throat before she even registered what it was. She gulped the water.

“Easy,” said the woman. “You’ll get sick.”

Kestrel didn’t listen. Her manacles jangled as she tipped the canteen to drain the last drop.

“I don’t think you need these.” The woman unlocked the manacles. The weight dropped from Kestrel’s wrists. Each wrist, now bare, bore a raised welt. Her hands felt disturbingly light, like they might float away. They didn’t look like they belonged to her. Grimy. Nails jagged. A nasty, infected graze over two knuckles. Had she really once played music with those hands?