The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(58)

“Well, well, look at you.” Roshar stood in front of him, hands on his hips, armor unbuckled but still on. “So industrious. Cold, too, I bet.”

Arin ignored him.

“While you’re at it,” Roshar said, “want to dry my things, too?”

Arin paused, looked up, and made a gesture he’d learned in the east.

Roshar laughed. He squished his way toward his tent. Arin heard him call for one of his underlings. Then Arin stopped paying attention.

After a while, though, a prickle crept up his neck. At first Arin thought it was the cold. But he wasn’t finished with his task, and so didn’t pull the mostly dry shirt over his head, which was what he longed to do. He kept at what he was doing.

Slowly, he became aware of a surprised quiet stealing over the camp. The sodden thuds of a lone horse’s hooves, approaching. Then someone—a Dacran—said, “Stay where you are!” Arin heard the crank of a crossbow.

He looked up just as the rider stopped.

There—high up on her stallion, hair plastered to her head, expression bleak—was Kestrel.





Chapter 20

He went to her, yanking his clammy tunic off the tree as he passed, shrugging into it.

Her hands clenched the reins, body stiff. She’d been riding for a long time. She had a stunned look that reminded him badly of the tundra. Every thing about her was rigid and wrong.

He took her by the waist and lifted her down. Vivid with confusion and worry, he said, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t keep my promise to you.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I gave you my word. A Valorian honors her word.” She swayed slightly.

He flipped open Javelin’s saddlebag. No food. No clothes. Not a match, not a bit of tinder. Not even a canteen. Just a burned-out lamp. “Kestrel, you’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry.”

He got her to his tent, ignoring the curious stares, and was grateful—without quite knowing why—that Roshar was nowhere to be seen. Arin grabbed his dry shirt from where he’d let it fall to the ground and dug his clean trousers out of a saddlebag. His canteen. Some hardtack, gone sticky with the damp. “Here.” He pressed it all into her hands. “Change. Eat. I’ll be outside.”

She nodded. He was shakily relieved to get a response that seemed, small as it was, normal. Then she dis appeared into his tent and he became anxious again.

Moments passed. There was a rustle from inside the tent. It subsided. He asked if she was all right. No answer. Finally, he was too concerned not to come inside.

She was sitting, staring into her lap, holding the unopened canteen. She’d changed into his shirt, then appeared to have reached the limit of what she could do. She still wore her wet trousers, the riding boots, her dagger. The hardtack lay to the side, untouched.

He knelt and took her freezing hands. “Please tell me what’s wrong.”

She opened her mouth but choked on the words. She looked brittle. He began to feel the way she looked. He tried a different question. “How did you know where we’d be?”

“I guessed.”

Arin stared.

“I thought—maybe Lerralen—but my father, he . . . I know what he’s like. So I thought—” She halted. He didn’t like the way her voice collapsed when she mentioned the general. “The Errilith estate. Livestock, meadows, trees. Water. It’d make sense. To him. I worried. Maybe you wouldn’t think of Errilith. Or you would and ignore it. But I hoped.”

He felt a flash of wild fear. To wander vaguely south . . . unsupplied, alone, practically unarmed . . . on a gamble. A guess. It shook him. “You don’t even have a map.” He tried to say nothing else. He worried that she’d see the extremity of what he felt and recoil from it.

“I’ve seen the right maps, before. I remembered. I—” Her face contorted.

“You don’t have to say.”

“Let me. I want to. I went to the villa. My house. After I left your suite. I didn’t mean to stay there so long. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve nothing to apologize for.”

“Yes. I was so sure. On the tundra, I blamed you. The blame: rotten inside me. But when I went home, I remembered. The prison wasn’t your fault. It was mine. It was his.”

Arin went cold. His suspicion took its final shape. “Your father.”

“Yes.”

“Your father betrayed you.”

“I wrote a letter to you when I was in the capital. So stupid, to put it all in writing. Every thing I’d done. The information I passed to Tensen. The way I worked against the empire. What I felt. My father read it. He gave it to the emperor.” She was weeping. “And I know, I know that it hurt him, that I broke something, that he felt it break. Maybe I wasn’t me anymore, to him. Do you understand? Not his daughter. Not anyone he knew. Just a lying stranger. But how could he? Why couldn’t he love me most? Or enough. Why couldn’t he love me enough to choose me over his rules?”

Arin pulled her onto his lap. He held her shaking form, tucked his face into the crook of her cold neck as she sobbed against him. He murmured that he loved her more than he could say. He promised that he would always choose her first.

She was exhausted, and she fell asleep quickly. Arin sat beside her for a few long moments after. Murder rose in his heart.