The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(54)

She passed into a parlor, feeling pushed. The echoes she made here were quieter. This room had a wooden floor, paler in places where furniture had been. Its varnish gleamed.

The house, though abandoned for months (grounds unkept, grass hip-high), was clean. No dust. She went from room to room.

She stopped in one that had windowed double doors facing the garden. Sheet music lined inset shelves built specially with narrow dividers to hold the thin booklets, which were neatly organized. Though not—she realized as she went through them, the music echoing inside her as she traced a marked passage—not exactly as she had organized them.

The Herrani music was arranged by composer (she saw her old self, that elegant ghost, slipping the music into its slots). The Valorian music—little though there was of it—was organized in the same way. But that wasn’t right. She wouldn’t have classed the Valorian music like that. Valorians ordered books by the binding’s color, which was coded by subject. They organized music by kind.

Kestrel went through the music again, recalling how she’d missed these pieces when she was in the capital, but didn’t ask for them, because to ask was to admit that she missed something from her home, and it was too hard to think about what she missed, and too dangerous to reveal that she missed anything at all.

Another person had painstakingly organized these booklets. Not her. Not a Valorian.

She heard the memory of Arin’s voice. I have no interest in the music room.

It hadn’t been true then. It wasn’t true now.

She understood now what had stopped her from leaving the villa. It had been a feathery sort of almost-idea, its fronds still floating in her mind. You know where you’ve smelled that too-clean smell before. Orange, vinegar, lye.

Arin. It had been when she was sore and broken and in between dreams, and he slept in a chair beside her bed in the suite that had belonged to his mother. He had woken. Go back to sleep, he’d murmured. He’d had a strange scent. An alkaline tang. Clean, she’d thought then. Too clean.

Soft gold lamplight. His voice, its low timbre. The gleam of eyes. Slow silence. Then sleep.

Kestrel lifted the lamp higher, though she didn’t need its light like she had when she’d first entered the house. It was easier to see now. This room was just an empty space where things had once been, and the dread of those things no longer overwhelmed her, because she no longer felt alone.

She explored the house.

Night lifted. Shadows dwindled into their corners. Kestrel didn’t notice this—or, if she did, she thought it was because her mind saw better, not her eyes.

She waded through her memory. Her mother. Her nurse, Enai. A love so full that it welled up beneath her breastbone.

Her suite. Painted walls. In the bedchamber, where a curtain had hung: the scratched lines of a name. Jess. They’d done it with a pin when they were little. There was no curve to the scratched letters. Each s was all angles. Kestrel touched the name, and knew she’d find her own on the wall of Jess’s suite. She recalled the pin digging into paint. Her eyes stung.

The lamp burned low. It gave off a hot ceramic odor. She knew, vaguely, that time was running out, but she was so lost in time that she knew it was running out without really knowing what this meant.

She walked quickly now. There was a tug on her heart, like it had been tied with twine and someone had jerked a loose end. Again: the fear of pain. The surety that it would come. A drag forward. She dug in her heels and stopped.

Gray light glowed in the windows.

She remembered her promise to Arin. The worry in his voice: Won’t you wish me well ? She thought of the person who had cleaned her home for no other reason, as far as she could tell, than that this home was hers and he didn’t want it to be dirty. She thought of how he’d feel to leave the city with his question unanswered, his offer disregarded, with not even a wish for his safe return.

The awfulness of it hit her with a cold, fresh slap.

She could make it to him by dawn if she left now.

She strode down a hallway, fast footsteps ringing loud. She reached a landing, ready to race down the stairs and back out into the grass.

But the twine tied inside her cut harder, pulling tight. Before she knew it, she’d crossed the landing and entered a narrow, mirrored gallery, her shadow flitting alongside her. At the end of the gallery was a door. Behind the door was a suite. Dark wainscoting lined the walls, and she remembered silk curtains on the now bare rods. Your mother chose the color, her father had said, looking at the curtains as though he couldn’t say what their color was.

Kestrel was in her father’s rooms.

She groped her way back to the stairs, retreating. She’d lost her lamp. She stumbled past a small ballroom. A dining hall. The parlor. She gripped the knob of a door: the library.

She remembered him better in the library than in his suite, to which she’d rarely been invited. He didn’t brook intrusion. The library was achingly familiar, even with the books missing. There was no sign of violence here. Still, it felt as if violence had been done, as if the books had been gouged out of their inset shelves. There used to be a translucent red paperweight that had sat on a squat marble-topped table. The paperweight had been made from blown glass. She recalled the whorls beneath her fingertips. He’d used it to hold down maps. She didn’t know where it was now.

She sat on the floor where a chair had been. As the pearled dawn touched her wet eyes, searing the room orange and pink and yellow, Kestrel knew that she’d come to this house for only one true reason: to find her father.