The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(53)

“I’ll be there,” she told him. “I promise.”





Chapter 18

She couldn’t sleep. she roamed the dreaming house, saw copper pots gleaming in the dark kitchen like a row of hung moons. Her feet made mouse sounds on the staircases. She found the library, remembered touching the spines of the books when she’d lived here before. She touched them again. She remembered and touched them, touched and remembered. Her piano was a large shadow in the parlor. Arin had brought it from her home. This was before the prison, before the imperial palace. He’d asked her to stay and share his life. She’d left him, had gone down to the harbor and stolen a fishing boat. The stormy sea. The emperor. A choice.

The capital: stiff lace, sugar, snow. Thick blood, skinned fingers. A white knuckle joint.

Choose, the emperor had said when she’d stood before him for the first time and saw his cold cunning. She’d chosen to marry his son. Her father had been proud.

Memory crept over her skin in a prickling rash. Through a silvered window, Kestrel saw the harbor. The bay was a bucket of light. Although she wasn’t cold, she chafed her bare shoulders in the habit of someone who’d once been cold for a long time. Her hands paused in their movements when she realized what she was doing. Again she wondered at it: the way the mind and the body have different sets of memories that aren’t necessarily always aware of each other.

She was not cold, yet she felt cold. There was a lump of ice in her heart.

She didn’t know what she would say to Arin when dawn came. The choice he’d offered became so large that she couldn’t clearly see either stay or go, only choice.

She was afraid of choices. She had paid dearly for them.

She looked at the harbor and remembered standing there last winter, her breath a fog—Arin’s, too. Her hand on a jagged shard of pottery, sharp as a knife. The fishing boat rocking at its dock. He’d let her escape, had chosen her freedom and his probable ruin simply because he couldn’t bear the thought of forcing her to stay.

Arin wasn’t the ice in her heart. He didn’t cause the fear that kept her from knowing who she was and what she’d done and what had been done to her.

Who was Kestrel? She turned over what she knew, studied the pieces of her old self. Honorable, Arin had said. Brave, she’d thought before. She imagined this Kestrel, a creature straight out of stories, and wished that she could be like her.

Her feet were moving. They were heading to Sarsine’s rooms. They stole over the floorboards as she opened doors, opened a wardrobe, fastened clothes. She pulled on boots.

The soldiers would ride south at dawn. She had several hours. The moonlight was strong. Bright enough.

She left the house by a back door for servants. She quickened her pace over flagstones, through the garden, and across the grounds to the stables.

The high dark grass rippled around the villa in the warm wind. She let Javelin walk toward the house. Somewhere on the grounds must be a pond or creek she couldn’t see. Frogs sang. The full moon shone overhead, its light diminishing the stars.

The house was grand in its silence, its windows shut tight. A shudder shook her, and she understood the nature of her fear a little better than she had before. It wasn’t formless. It was sharply specific. It was the fear of pain.

She swung a leg off Javelin and dropped down into the grass. It itched. She pushed through it, let it tickle, annoy. Look at the grass, she thought. It is grass. The house is a house. The moon, a moon. They are themselves and nothing else.

Her feet found a flagstone path hidden beneath the grass. She pushed forward, holding a dead lantern she’d taken from the saddlebag. She longed to light it yet dreaded what it might show. The house—the house, the second-floor windows, those eaves, that portico, all so clearly and sickeningly hers—held a secret she must understand.

She felt naked when she came out of the grass. She looked back over her shoulder, saw the dark arch of Javelin’s neck. Then she met the blank black eyes of the villa’s windows.

Nothing’s there, Arin had said. It’s empty.

No, it wasn’t.

Something was in there. She felt it swell against the walls.

I’d be with you, Arin had said that day on the horse paths. She knew that she could turn around this very moment, return, wake him. He wouldn’t question her. He wouldn’t say wait.

Some horror, she’d tell him and then stop, unable to say more.

I’ ll come with you, he’d answer. You won’t be alone.

A door whined open at her unsteady touch.

The smell was an assault. She gagged on the familiarity of it. Redolent. Orange-scented wood oil. Windows washed with vinegar. A clean house, her clean house, the cleanliness of every day of almost all her life. The childhood smell she didn’t realize was from her childhood until she had forgotten it and encountered it again.

It stripped away what ever strength she’d had. She almost stumbled from the entry way and back out into the night.

Then a thought brushed her panicked consciousness. It was gentle, and gave her pause. It said that the smell’s familiarity wasn’t just the fermented memory of many years. She’d also encountered this smell (orange, vinegar, lye) recently. In some small way, one difficult to determine.

She lit the lamp. The house burst into being.

It was empty. Jagged shadows. Glittering tiles.