The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(52)

“It’s not, ah, a hardship.” He gave a rueful smile. “It’s not that I don’t want—” She’d never heard him stammer. Even with her untrustworthy memory, she knew this. You’re easy to know, she wanted to say. Memories of him came quickly. It didn’t hurt, not as much as she’d feared before, on the tundra, or in his empty bed. At least, it didn’t hurt anymore. It was better. Better than . . . other things.

A faceless horror. A monster. Inside her. It thickened, grew into a featureless, blunt shape. She wouldn’t touch it. She’d go nowhere near it.

Arin had been right, that day when he’d suggested that there was something too horrible for her to remember.

“It’s not enough,” he said. It took her a moment to realize he was continuing his refusal and not responding to her thoughts, which were so loud in her head that she felt as if she’d shouted them.

She said, “What would be enough?”

Color mounted in his face.

“You can tell me,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “Well. Me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I want . . . you to want me.”

“I do.”

He pushed a hand through his rough hair. “I don’t mean this.” He gestured between them, his hand flipping from her to him. “I . . .” He struggled, knuckled his eyes, and let the words come. “I want you to be mine, wholly mine, your heart, too. I want you to feel the same way.”

Her stomach sank. She’d sworn to herself not to lie to him.

He read her answer in her eyes. He dimmed, and said nothing either. But he brushed hair from her face, lifting away strands that had caught in her eyelashes and between her lips. His fingertip painted a slow line over her lower lip. She felt it down her spine, in her belly. Then his hand fell away, and she felt alone.

“I leave tomorrow morning with Roshar,” he said. “It’ll be some time before I return.”

An ember of hurt. An old feeling, as old as her whole life. She was always being left. War always won. She saw herself: a little girl, holding up a level, sheathed sword nearly as long as she was tall. Her arms ached. She must not drop it. The man on the horse would take it soon. He glanced down, and she wondered if he was waiting to see how long she could hold the blade steady. He smiled, and her twinned heart—the girl, the woman, her past, her present—burst with pride and sorrow and rage.

“Take me with you,” she told Arin.

A shadow crossed his face. “No. Absolutely not.”

“I can help. I know my father’s system of running scouts, his tactics, codes, formations—”

“No.”

“You don’t have the right to choose for me.”

“It won’t happen.” He caught his anger, became aware of it as well as hers, and said more gently, “It’s too dangerous.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“I can’t lose you.” Grief slashed through his voice. “Not you, too.”

The story he had told her about the night of the invasion flickered in his eyes, darkening them.

Her father had done this to him. She remembered her father, felt the memory squeeze her—a crunch, a creak of bone—and then seemed to feel how Arin guessed where her mind had gone. She felt what the direction of her thoughts did to him.

She had begged her father to let her go to war with him. He’d promised that one day she would, but then she had grown and no longer wanted what he wanted, and wanted him to stay instead, and he wouldn’t.

Arin’s story and hers twisted together into patterns she couldn’t follow. Their silence grew.

Quietly, Arin said, “I’ll stay.”

Her eyes flew to him. It was so unexpected that she was shaken out of her thoughts.

“If you want,” he said. “I could stay. We’d be together.”

“If you stay here while the Dacrans march south to fight your war, the alliance will crumble.”

He studied his hands.

“Unless you do it for the queen.”

He gave Kestrel a reproachful look.

“Then you can’t,” she said.

“Do you want me to stay?”

Kestrel wondered if every question is a way of putting yourself at the mercy of someone else. “It would cost you too much.”

“Think about it. Will you think about it? We’re to leave at dawn. Meet me then at the brook, the one near the horse paths, to tell me what you’ve decided.”

Her answer should be no, yet she couldn’t make herself say it.

“Meet me anyway,” he said, “even if it’s to say goodbye. Will you wish me well?”

Kestrel saw the ripped grass of the battlefield, stained with gore. Him: broken, bloody. Skin ashen. His blank gaze fixed on something she couldn’t see. His light gone.

Stay, she almost said. Then an invisible hand clamped down over her mouth and warned again about the political consequences. Either way, Kestrel read his doom. Death in battle, or the slower death of the alliance collapsing and the empire’s victory.

Tears welled in her eyes. She turned so that he wouldn’t see them.

“Won’t you wish me well?” Arin asked.

“I will. I do.”

He seemed uncertain. “If I don’t see you at dawn, I’ll take it to mean that you want me to go.”