The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(61)

Eventually, she fell silent.

The next time, also on the road, he noticed her weaving Javelin through the ranks to approach him. He twitched his horse left and found a reason to be somewhere else. At night, he waited until she had pitched her tent. He made sure not to set his nearby.

She continued to glow at the edge of his vision. When camp broke at dawn, he’d catch sight of her bright hair, notice her talking effortlessly with the Herrani, or trying to learn Dacran from the easterners. He watched the soldiers’ wariness dissolve. They began to smile at her arrival, to like her despite themselves and her appearance: the very image of a Valorian warrior girl.

She kept close company with Roshar. Arin saw from afar the way the prince teased her. Heard her laugh. It squeezed a fist inside him. At dusk, the pair of them played cards. Roshar bled the air with a string of eastern curses when he lost.

On an evening when they were about ten leagues from Errilith, Arin came to Roshar’s tent, which was large enough to accommodate a small table, a set of canvas-backed chairs, and a collapsible bed woven in the style and colors of the nomadic plainspeople. The ticking had feathers, not straw, and the table offered roasted fowl, hulled red berries, and a bowl of eastern rice rendered a shocking orange by a spice Arin had tasted before, and found tangy, sweet, and a little bitter. There was a gourd of wine and two pewter cups. Two plates.

“And lo,” Roshar said from where he lounged in his teak chair with its swoop of green cloth. “The rains opened, and the stranger was a stranger no more.”

Arin looked at him.

“Poetry,” Roshar explained, “though it doesn’t scan so well in your tongue.”

“You’re expecting someone.”

“Maybe. You’ll do for now. Sit with me.”

“Kestrel?”

“Pardon me?”

“Are you expecting Kestrel.” The question came out flat.

Roshar coughed. “Nooo,” he drawled, but Arin didn’t like the humor in his voice. He sat anyway and watched Roshar prepare a plate for him, which wasn’t at all expected of an eastern prince and his guest, but Roshar sometimes liked to play the prince and sometimes didn’t. “Kestrel has raised the issue of Valorian scouts. We can’t expect to be wholly unnoticed, tramping along the main southern road.”

“There’s been no attack.” Which was what Arin thought would ensue if the Valorians became aware of their movements.

“She wagers that the general has noticed the concentration of our forces at Lerralen. Whether he knows of this contingent is unclear, but he might be refraining from attacking us because he doesn’t want to position forces north of Errilith when his supply lines run south of it. Or maybe he thinks we’ll choose to defend the wrong estate and he can seize his prize unchallenged. Why confront us now and pay the price in blood if we’ll waste our energies elsewhere while he takes what he wants? Of course, Errilith could be the wrong estate.”

“If Kestrel says that’s the one, she’s right.”

“I agree.” Roshar drank his wine.

Arin tried to eat.

“Have you ever bested her at cards? Borderlands? Anything? She murders me,” Roshar complained.

“You spend a good deal of time with her.”

Roshar’s cup paused in midair. “Arin.”

Swift jealousy. A caged resentment.

“I’m not—shall we say—interested in Kestrel.” The prince’s expression changed slightly, and in the pause that followed, a slow thought occurred to Arin, one that offered an entirely new explanation for why Roshar’s soldiers had done nothing when Arin had pushed him into the shadowed trees. “Women don’t interest me that way,” Roshar said.

It seemed to Arin that he had understood this for a long time without actually realizing that he did. He caught Roshar’s expression, which on another man Arin might have called tentative, but on the prince looked closer to soft curiosity. His black eyes were quiet. Arin felt things shift between them into more intricate patterns than before. “I know,” Arin told him.

“Oh do you?” A wicked grin. “Would you like to know for sure?”

Arin flushed. “Roshar . . .” He floundered for what to say.

The prince laughed at him. He filled Arin’s cup. “Drink fast, little Herrani. As you astutely observed, I have someone else coming to night, and while your company is almost always welcome, his is company I will best enjoy alone.”

Kestrel waited outside Arin’s tent. It was a muzzy sort of night, too warm for a fire. The camp was a dark terrain. He didn’t see her clearly, just the shape of her.

“I brought you something.” She held out her hand and dropped a round object into his.

He knew it instantly. He ran fingers over its firm, lightly pebbled surface. “An orange.”

“I found a tree not far from camp and took as many as I could carry. Most I gave away. This one, I thought we could share.”

He jumped the orange from one hand to the other, marveling at it.

She said, “I didn’t know whether you like them.”

“I do.”

“Did you tell this to me once? Did I forget?”

“I never told you. Actually . . .” He rolled it in the well of one palm. “I love them.”

He could have sworn that she smiled in the dark. “Then what are you waiting for?”