The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(62)

He dug his thumb in and peeled it open. Its perfume sprayed the air. He halved it and gave Kestrel her share.

They sat on the grass outside his tent. They’d camped in a meadow not far from the road. He touched the grass, sleek beneath his fingers. He ate. The fruit was vibrant on his tongue. It had been years. “Thank you.”

He thought he saw her mouth curve, and he was washed by a breathless nervousness. He spat a seed into his palm and wondered what little kernel lay in the folds of this moment. Then he told himself to stop thinking. An orange. A rare enough plea sure. Just eat.

After a moment, he asked, “How are you?”

“Better. Before . . . it was like I was trying to navigate a new country where there was no such thing as the ground. At least now I know where I stand.” He heard the sound of her brushing her hands clean, and then the sound of things unsaid, of words weighed and found wanting. Sorrow, radiating from her. The low throb of it.

Gently, he asked, “Are you truly better?”

He heard her breath catch.

“You don’t have to be better.”

The silence expanded.

He said, “I wouldn’t be.”

Her voice was a mere thread. “How would you be?”

He thought of the wrongness of loss, how as a child he’d step right into it, and fall, and then would blame himself not only for every thing he hadn’t done when the soldiers had invaded his home, but also for his fathomless grief. He should see the gaping holes in his life. Avoid them. Step carefully, Arin, why can’t you step carefully? Mother, father, sister. What could you say about someone who walked daily into his grief and lived at the bottom of its hole and didn’t even want to come out?

He remembered how he’d begun to hate himself. The sculpting of his anger. He thought about how certain words mean themselves and also their opposites, like cleave. Come together, split apart. He thought about how sorrow limns the places where parts of you join. Your past and present. Loves and hates. It sets a chisel into the cracks and pries. He wanted to say this, yet worried. He feared saying the wrong thing. He feared that his anger for her father might twist what he wanted to say. And he wasn’t sure, suddenly, if he should answer her question . . . if by answering it he might, without meaning to, push his own loss into the place of hers, or make hers look like his.

He stared at the dark outline of her face. Her question overwhelmed him.

Until it didn’t. Until he seemed to be able to see in the dark. He knew how she must be tightening her jaw, how she was curling her nails into her palms. He knew her. “I think that you try hard to be strong. You don’t have to be.”

“He would want me to be strong.”

This made Arin too angry to trust himself to speak.

She said, “I’ve been trying to tell you something since I’ve come here.”

And he had avoided her, letting her know in more ways than one that she needed to leave. He felt ashamed. His hands were empty; the orange rinds had fallen to the dirt. “I’m sorry. I’ve been unbearable.”

“Just scared. And there weren’t even spiders involved.”

This was like her: the way her voice became light when something was hard.

“Please,” he said, “tell me.”

“I remembered more about my last day in the imperial palace than I said when I first joined your army. I thought that maybe it would hurt you, if I said.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“You came to me in the palace music room.”

“Yes.” He remembered: his palm flat against the music room door. Opening it, seeing her face go white.

“My father heard our conversation. He was listening in a secret room, one built for spying, hidden behind a screen in the shelves.”

Understanding gripped him. It all rushed sickeningly through his brain. The gesture of her slim hand lifted, trembling, to ward him away as he stood on the threshold of the music room. He’d barreled ahead. She had told him to leave. He had come closer.

“I tried to warn you that he was there,” Kestrel said. “Nothing worked.”

She had reached for a pen and paper. A note—he realized now. She’d meant to write what she couldn’t say out loud. He’d wrenched the pen from her hand and dashed it to the floor.

This was how it must feel, he thought, to take a knife to the gut.

Kestrel was talking rapidly now, voice unsteady. “He hadn’t come to spy on me, only to listen to me play. It was hard for us to talk with each other. Easier to have an open secret between us. He would come and listen, and he could pretend that he wasn’t really there. But I was happy to have him hear me. Then you opened the music room door. I felt . . . I remember how I felt. I didn’t mean what I said. I was insulting. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say that. Not to me. I failed you.”

“I never trusted you enough to give you the chance to fail me, or not fail me. I am sorry. I was cruel. Not only to protect you from my father. I wanted to protect myself, too. I couldn’t bear for him to know. But what if I’d given up on all those secret ways to try to tell you he was hiding behind the screen? I could have just told you. I could have admitted to what I’d done and let him hear it. Yes, I agreed to marry the prince so that you could have your independence. Yes, I was Tensen’s spy. Yes, I loved you.” There was a silence. Fireflies lit the distance. “Why didn’t I say that then? I wonder what would have happened if I had.”