The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(60)

It had changed him. Exposed something running inside him like a vein of soft gold. A slow attraction. Growing, despite himself, into care . . . and more.

That incident last autumn when she’d tricked him, had him locked in a cell while she rode to the duel, loomed in his mind as a little story that told the larger one of how she’d been broken, and he’d been kept safe, and how his safety and her brokenness had broken him.

Now she stared him down. His gaze traced the fall of a single, newly plaited braid over her shoulder, its color obscure in the twilight. He recalled the fold of the dead Valorian girl’s body over his blade. His sister being dragged to the cloakroom.

“You can’t stay,” he told her.

“It’s not your choice.”

“It’s not safe.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I won’t allow it.”

“You don’t command this army.”

Roshar smiled.

“No,” said Arin. “Don’t.”

“What do you propose, my lady?”

“My prince, I wish to enlist. I swear to serve, and rout your enemy, and wash my blade with his blood.”

“How savagely Valorian of you. Is this the traditional military oath? I like it. I accept.”

She nodded slightly and cast Arin an unreadable look—tinged, perhaps, with something like regret, though it was hard to know exactly what had affected her. Maybe it was his expression, or maybe a memory floating invisibly in the darkening summer air, seen only by her.

She left them.

“If you send her into battle,” Arin told Roshar, “ she’ll fall in the first wave.”

“Why, because she’s half your size? I’ll wager she’s had more training than the average foot soldier.”

“She has no talent for it and little experience.”

“She wants this, Arin. I don’t blame her for wanting it, and quite frankly I think her help could be crucial.”

“Her advice. Let her advise, then. Enlist her, rank her, if you must. But keep her out of combat.”

“All right,” Roshar said. “For you.”

Arin turned to leave. His head was brimming, his heart sore.

Roshar touched his shoulder, surprisingly gentle. “I know you want her to be safe forever, but it’s just not that kind of world.”

Arin begged a pair of Herrani officers to share a tent. He shouldered the spare one, loosely bundled. He found a woman about Kestrel’s height and bartered a little boot knife for a set of decent clothes. He rummaged through supply wagons and stared dully at the extra suits of armor: all far too large. Swords: too heavy. He considered a gun among the many rows of them, hidden in a false bottom below bales of horse feed. Unsure, he left the guns where they lay. Finally, he snagged an eastern crossbow. Even if Roshar kept his word and tried to keep Kestrel from any real military action, there was always the possibility of a surprise attack.

He brought every thing to Kestrel. It was full night. Light from a nearby fire flickered in her face. He tried not to look at her. He crouched and began to set the tent’s frame. He drove a stake into the earth. Drier now.

There was a pause after he hammered the first stake in. He straightened.

“I thought . . .” Kestrel’s voice trailed into the dark. She didn’t say what she thought. She touched his wrist, light as a moth.

Arin flinched. He didn’t mean to. He wanted to undo it, yet flitting through his mind was a nightmarish sequence of images: a masker moth, the signed treaty in Kestrel’s wintry hand, the Valorian girl he had killed at sea. His mother’s bloody black hair.

Kestrel drew back. He seemed to feel her echo his hurt. “I can do that.” She took the stone from his hand. “My father taught me how to pitch a tent. I remember.”

What else do you remember? Arin wanted to ask, and was repulsed by himself. He knew how much what she did remember wounded her. He hadn’t thought it’d be possible to hate the general more, yet there it was: a hot jet of hatred. He said, “I won’t spare your father.”

The shadows were too deep between them. He couldn’t read her face. She said, “I don’t want you to.”





Chapter 21

They continued south. Arin kept his distance from her. Once or twice, she rode Javelin alongside his horse. It went badly. He didn’t know how to fix himself. He couldn’t accept this.

The first time she drew her horse up to him, he burst out, “For gods’ sake, you don’t even have armor.”

“I know you’re worried,” she said quietly.

“Your father wanted you to enlist. You fought him. Your music. You loved it more. You told me once that you didn’t want to go to war because you didn’t want to kill.”

“This is important to me.”

“You wouldn’t have done this before.”

“I know. I’ve changed.”

He heard the truth of this in a way he never had. She’d said this many times, even insisted on it: the woman he’d known was gone. He heard again his promise to her in his tent. He felt the absence of hers.

Yet it was wrong to feel hurt in the face of her larger grief, and the wrongness of it made him feel small. He looked at the sun in her hair, the ease of her seat in the saddle. Beyond her: a file of cavalry, an eastern pennant snapping blue and green. Fear choked him. It was hard to hear what she said next. A promise to be careful, to take no risks. It was so impossible and absurd to make any promise like that in war that he couldn’t even reply.