The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(76)

“Are you aware”—Arin’s voice hardened—“of what he would have done to you?”

“If he’d tried to kill me, he would have succeeded. He didn’t want to. That’s the only reason I was able—”

“He didn’t want to kill you because he wanted to capture you.”

“I know. I can know that and still feel sorry.”

“Don’t ask me to share your sentiment.”

“I’m not.”

“If he’d taken you . . .” Arin stopped, then said, “They’re murderers. Slavers. Thieves. I am not sorry. I will never be sorry.”

“So you’ve never questioned a kill.”

His eyes flashed, then looked haunted. “I won’t.”

Kestrel searched his face, her anger fading with the reminder that their difficulties were different, and Arin’s own damage ran deep. Whether she meant to or not, she was probing into raw places. “I’ve upset you.”

“Yes, I’m upset. It’s upsetting to hear that you feel guilty for defending yourself against someone who would have hurt you.”

“There’s more to it than that.”

He looked down at his hands, spotted with her blood. “You can change your mind. It’s all right if you do. You don’t have to be part of this war.”

“Yes, I do. My mind isn’t changed.”

“It was him or you,” he said softly. “You had to choose.”

Her gaze fell to the wet grass beneath her, the wrapped bandage. She thought of her past. Her whole life. “I want better choices.”

“Then we must make a world that has them.”

When Roshar saw her ripped, one-legged trousers and Arin at her side as they stood outside the prince’s tent, his eyes glinted with mirth and Kestrel felt quite sure that the prince was going to say it was about time Arin tore her clothes off. Then Roshar might comment coyly on Arin’s inability to reach a full conclusion (Only one trouser leg? she imagined Roshar saying. How lazy of you, Arin), or on the quaint quality of Arin’s modesty (What a little lamb you are). Perhaps he’d offer condolences to Kestrel on the partial death of her trousers. He’d ask whether she’d gotten injured on purpose.

Kestrel flushed. “Things at the scout station didn’t go according to plan,” she said, stating the obvious in order to shunt the conversation to where it should be. Not, absolutely not, about what had happened or didn’t happen in Arin’s tent.

“She’s wounded,” said Arin—who, although he didn’t look it, must have also been flustered if he, too, felt he had to state the obvious.

“Barely,” Roshar said. “A mere scratch, or she wouldn’t be standing.”

“You could offer her a seat,” Arin said.

“Ah, but I have only two chairs in my tent, little Herrani, and we are three. I suppose she could always sit on your lap.”

Arin shot him a look of deep annoyance and pushed inside the tent.

“But I could have said something so much worse,” Roshar protested.

“Say nothing at all,” Kestrel told him.

“That would be very unlike me.”

She ignored him. When the three of them were inside the prince’s tent (Arin chose to stand), she explained in detail what had happened. “I wrote the letter to the general,” she finished, “and launched the hawk.”

“How many sets of codes do Valorian scout runners use?” Roshar asked.

Kestrel dug her thumbnail into the teak arm of her chair. “Many. I’m not sure exactly. I might not remember all of what my father taught me, or he could have chosen to teach me only some of them. New ones could have been created and put into use since then.”

“So the chances that the letter you wrote is the correct code, and will be the one the general expects to see, are slim.”

“Yes.”

“How did you choose which code to use?” Arin asked.

“The officer had counters in his tent, which was unusual, unless he was in charge of accounting for the army’s supplies, and that’d be done at the main camp where supplies are kept. I remembered a numeric code. He could have been using counters to help him write in it.”

“Or,” said Roshar, “your father will read the note, see one code when he expects another, and will send someone to the station, where there’s a dead body.”

“If so,” Arin said, “then we’re no worse off than we were before.”

“Oh yes, we are. The general will know the letter’s a ploy, and will do the opposite of what we want. He’ll ignore the main road. He’ll take back roads through the forests where our guns would be of dubious use and we wouldn’t have the advantage of height. You know this.”

Arin shut his mouth, glancing uneasily at Kestrel. Yes. He had known this, as had she. She felt worse for his effort to make her mistake seem smaller. He knew its true size.

Roshar leaned back in his creaking chair. His eyes slid from Arin to Kestrel, black as lacquer, the green lines around them fresh. “Can you tell me anything more cheerful than all this?”

“My letter mentioned nothing about a plan to use plague bodies as a defensive attack during a siege. I had to say that to the officer, to make him keep his distance. But once he was dead that lie wasn’t necessary. Now the manor can seem to be an even easier and more appealing target.”