The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(70)

Arin asked the whereabouts of the prince and was directed to a nearby tree, where Roshar leaned over the bound Valorian scout, hissing a threat too low for Arin to understand. The Valorian girl—just a girl, Arin saw, younger than Kestrel—had her eyes squeezed shut. She strained back against the tree, bare heels digging into the dirt and moss. She wore an eastern tunic and trousers. A bandage on her arm was rusted with blood. She opened her eyes: glazed with fear, darting all over, skittering across Arin’s face as he froze. How wide they were, how dark, how like the eyes of the woman he’d killed on the ship.

Another scream broke the night. It came again from the tent.

Arin strode to the prince. “Roshar. A word?”

“I was wondering when you’d join the fun,” the prince answered in Valorian. He grinned at the girl. “I’ll be back.”

When they were out of earshot of the scout, Roshar dropped his smile. “To be clear, this was Kestrel’s idea.”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Faking a torture.”

Arin thought he understood, and calmed down a little. “Is it working?”

“It might, if you don’t interrupt again.”

“Let me know if you learn something.”

“Of course.”

“Where’s Kestrel?”

“She wants to be alone right now,” Roshar said after a slight pause. “Better let her be.”

But Roshar’s tone made Arin remember how the prince had smiled at him, the reins of two horses in his hands on the grounds of Arin’s home. This made him think of Kestrel’s refusal earlier, before nightfall, to make him any promises. Ever since the sun had gone down, Arin’s nerves had tightened with anxiety even as he’d warned himself not to push things, to be different from how he usually was, to not overreact or feel too much or say too much. Let her be, he’d told himself, exactly as Roshar was telling him now. But another scream rose in the distance, and even though Arin knew that this was a trick, it was Kestrel’s trick. Her tricks tended to be shaped like a nest, each twig and straw in place, hiding a dangerous creature Arin never saw until it was too late.

Arin said, “Where is she?”

Reluctantly, the prince said, “She hasn’t left yet.”

“Left? What? Where?”

“Ask her. She’ll tell you—against my better judgment, I might add.” Roshar nodded in the direction of his tent.

Arin took one rapid stride toward it. The prince’s hand came down hard on his shoulder. “Arin, her plan is a good plan.”

Arin shrugged off his grip and walked away.

He found her sitting on Roshar’s cot, lacing up high Valorian boots. She wore trousers—the scout’s trousers. Kestrel had bound her breasts with tight cloth. Her midriff was bare, her shoulders and arms, too: skin a dark gold fired by the lamplight.

She’d heard him enter, yet kept her head down, ignoring him, her braid hanging heavily over one shoulder. It swayed slightly as she jerked laces over the boots’ hooks and cinched them. When she reached for the Valorian tunic and jacket on the cot beside her, he caught the trace of a mottled line on her shoulder, saw the lash that curled up over her neck. She paused—had she heard the sore thump of his heart? Or the way he’d swallowed, caught in the nightmare of those scars, in the memory of seeing them for the first time, in his awful imagining of how they’d been made?

She stood and turned her back to him. Just before she drew the tunic over her head, he saw almost the full maze of marks, white and raised. She put on the earth-colored jacket. All the scout’s clothing, dyed to match the woods.

“Kestrel.” His voice was rough.

She faced him and told him her plan. When he started to argue (he couldn’t even hear what he said; his pulse was shuddering, the blood draining from him), she said, “Trust me.”

He did, he wanted to say so, then realized that he didn’t, that he could not and would not, if trusting her meant this. “No.”

She was angry now, too. “You can’t keep me in a cage.”

“I’m not—” Yet that was what he meant to do, in a way. Even as he saw the wrongness of that, he couldn’t imagine letting her go. “It’s too dangerous.”

She shrugged.

“Why do you insist on risking yourself? You were caught once. You’re not infallible. Are you trying to prove that you are?”

“No.”

“Are you trying to punish me?”

“No.”

“I deserve it, I know, but—”

“This isn’t about you.”

“You are going to get caught!”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’ll be killed. Worse. I can’t—”

“Yes, you can. You had better.”

“Why?”

“Because this is me.” Her eyes were wet. “This is the sort of person I’ve always been.”

He wanted to tell her that wasn’t true. You remember wrong, he could say, and this time he’d be the one who was a good liar.

Kestrel said, “I want to be like her.”

No, you don’t, he’d persuade, even though he’d never been able to bear the way she thought of herself as two people. Not like her at all. His stomach curled.