The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(6)

Her skin prickled. Her stomach cramped—she had eaten and drunk too quickly. Kestrel tucked her hands under crossed arms and hugged them to her.

“You’ll be fine,” the woman said soothingly. “I hear that you’ve been somewhat of a troublemaker, but I’m sure you’ll settle down in no time. We’re fair here. Do as you’re told and you’ll be treated well enough.”

“Why . . .” Kestrel’s tongue felt thick. “Why did you call me princess? Do you know who I am?”

The woman clucked. “Child, I don’t care who you are. Soon enough, neither will you.”

Kestrel’s scalp was crawling. She had the odd and yet vivid idea that tiny beetles were marching in her veins. She looked down at her hand, half expecting to see moving bumps beneath the skin. She swallowed. She wasn’t frightened anymore. She was . . . what was she? Her thoughts streamed by in a blur: a magician’s trick with colored rags, a long line of them pulled out of the mouth, hand over hand . . .

“What did you put in the food?” she managed to say. “The water?”

“Something to help.”

“You drugged me.” Kestrel’s pulse was so fast she couldn’t feel each heartbeat. They blurred into a solid vibration. The prison yard seemed to shrink. She stared at the woman and tried to focus on her features—the broad mouth, the silvered braids, a slight tilt to the eyes, the two vertical wrinkles between her brows. But the woman’s smile was far away. Her features grew vague, unfinished. They pulled and drifted apart until Kestrel became convinced that if she reached out, her fingers would go right through the woman, whose smile broadened.

“There,” the woman said. “Much better.”

Kestrel didn’t know how she’d gotten inside the cell. She was consumed by an urge to move. Before she realized it, she was pacing the short space, hands opening and closing. She couldn’t stop. Her pulse thrummed in her ears: loud and high and soaring.

The drug wore off. She was spent. She sort of remembered that she’d paced for what might have been hours, but now that she was aware of the size of her cell—her wardrobes in the imperial palace had been larger—the memory didn’t seem possible. But her feet ached, and she saw that she’d worn down the thin soles of her elegant shoes.

Her heart felt like lead. She was cold. She sat in a heap on the dirt floor, looking at bright mold on the stone walls: a host of tiny green starfish. She touched the knots on the ropes that tied the cut-up dress to her legs. The gesture made her feel more like herself.

Most of the escape attempts on the road north to the tundra had prob ably been doomed to fail. Still, Kestrel couldn’t help hoping that her first effort might ultimately be the best. As desperate, perhaps, as the others, but maybe more likely to work. On her first morning in the wagon, the guards had stopped to water the horses. Kestrel had heard the voice of a Herrani. She’d whispered to him, pushing a dead masker moth through the bars of her window. She could still feel the moth between her fingertips, its furred wings. Part of her hadn’t wanted to let it go. Part of her thought that if she kept the moth, she might somehow reverse her mistakes. She would have said different things to Arin as he stood in her music room. It had been only the day before. She’d sat at the piano, smoothing hands over her blue skirts, feeding him lies.

Kestrel held the papery moth. Then she dropped it into the Herrani’s waiting hand. Give this to your governor, she said. Tell Arin that I—

She hadn’t managed more. The guards had seen her reaching out to the Herrani through the bars. They’d let the Herrani go after a rough search seemed to prove that Kestrel had not, in fact, given him anything. Had the moth dropped to the ground? Had it simply been too camouflaged for the guards to notice it? Kestrel hadn’t quite been able to see through the window.

But if that Herrani man went to Arin and reported what had happened, wouldn’t Arin be able to understand what she’d done and where she’d been exiled? She listed the pieces of the story in her mind. A moth: the symbol of Arin’s anonymous spy. A prison wagon headed north. Even if that Herrani man along the road didn’t know who Kestrel was, he’d still be able to describe her to Arin, wouldn’t he? At the very least he could report that a Valorian woman had given him a moth. Arin would figure things out. He was quick, cunning.

And blind.

I would do anything for you, she’d written in the letter her father had found. But that part, despite feeling true when she’d scrawled it on the page, had been a lie. Kestrel had refused Arin. She hadn’t been honest with him, not even when he’d begged. She’d pretended she was empty and careless and cruel.

He’d believed it. She couldn’t believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.

She squashed her sneaking hope that Arin might discover what had happened and come to her rescue. That was a terrible plan. It wasn’t a plan at all. She could do better than that.

All the food was drugged. The water, too. On her first morning in the camp, Kestrel ate in the yard with the other prisoners, who were slack-faced and didn’t speak, even though she’d tried to talk with them. As she filed out of the camp with them in an orderly line, Kestrel felt the drug hit her heart. Her blood roared.

They entered the mining area at the base of the volcanoes. Kestrel couldn’t remember having walked the path to arrive here. She also didn’t care that she didn’t remember. This distant awareness of not caring brought a bump of plea sure.