The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(85)

Once, when Arin let his horse fall back to ride with the Herrani, Kestrel caught Roshar’s sliding gaze. Pensive. Murky. A strange mixture of satisfaction and dis plea sure.

Kestrel said, “I thought you wanted them to love him.”

Roshar glanced over his shoulder at Arin in the middle ranks.

They rode in silence beneath the hard blue sky. Then Kestrel said, “On the tundra, Arin had a ring with a stone in it. Did you give it to him?”

“Never lend that boy anything. Careless. He lost it.”

“It could put people to sleep.”

“Yes.”

“And that white salve, the numbing one—is that eastern, too? Is it made from the same thing?”

“What an observant ghost you are. Yes, Kestrel. The liquid in that ring and the salve contain different quantities of a poisonous worm from our plains. A very little bit, mixed with ointment, will numb the skin. More will send you to sleep. More still? You take the goddess’s hand and live with her forever.”

“Why don’t you dip crossbow quarrels in it? I remember my father complaining about the poisoned arrows of the eastern plainspeople.”

“Alas, we’re far from the plains and my supply is limited.” He squinted at the sun. “Why do you ask?”

She was quiet.

He said, “You’re not thinking about crossbow quarrels.”

“Sometimes I have trouble sleeping.”

“In case I wasn’t clear, that part about taking the goddess’s hand means dead. As in, you die. In its highest concentration, you can die from simply touching the poison, even when the liquid dries.”

“I’d be careful.”

Roshar swiveled his horse in front of Kestrel’s, blocking her path. Javelin snorted and stopped.

The prince said, “My answer is no.”

He said, “You’re not the only one who suffers.”

He said, “You could do what the rest of us do.”

Roshar spurred his horse ahead.

Kestrel looked down the open road. A lone black bird cut across the sky like a crack in blue paint. She thought about the white salve in her saddlebag, the missing ring, and how much she longed to sleep easily, without dreams. Nothing in dreams can hurt you, her father had said—which was another way of saying that life can. But she hadn’t understood that as a child. Kestrel recalled the old comfort of her father’s words, and had a sense of herself as she had been.

That night, alone in her tent, she thought about the cruel cold of the tundra. Sulfur crumbling in her grip. The panic when her memory had begun to slip. The nighttime drug: soft, dense. The fear of dying far from home. No one would have mourned her. Sorrow: like marrow in the hollow of a bone.

It had been real. It still was.

But it wasn’t the whole of who she was.

Kestrel blew out the little lamp. In the dark, she recalled the road she’d traveled that day with its cloud of dirt.

You could do what the rest of us do.

She would keep going.

That night, she slept deeply. Afterward, she sometimes still wished for the nighttime drug, but it no longer held her in its power.

In this region, a variety of wheat flourished. Dull gold fields rattled softly. The grain, fully flowered, bent the stalks.

In the distance, Herrani harvested the fields. They were too old or too young for war. Other fields had been abandoned. Kestrel saw farms where chicken coops stood empty, smelling of sour straw. The animals had been slaughtered or carried away. A woven basket, left outside for months, had disintegrated into a spiky nest. When grasped, the handle came off.

The farms unnerved her. She would have preferred to say that it was because of the waste. Most of the wheat would rot on its stalks. But it wasn’t that. It was the buildings. The rare Herrani villa, with a columned portico and fluted arches. The wink of an atrium’s glass roof. More common: a splendid and newish Valorian manse, sprawling, flat-faced.

The slave quarters blistered in the sun. Paint peeled in long curls like an apple’s skin. Kestrel noticed, with queasy misgiving, that a little house lay near the slave quarters on each farm. At first, when she went with soldiers to forage for provisions to fatten the army’s supplies, she hadn’t known what the little houses were for. There had been no such house on her father’s property in Herran.

One day, she saw Arin see a small house. His eyes tightened. His expression went bleak.

She knew then that the houses had been for children. The memory came unwillingly, sticky and slow. She had to drag it out. When she did she understood that the knowledge had been the sort of thing she had once tried to unknow.

It had been the practice to take a baby from its enslaved mother once it was weaned and sell it to a neighboring farm. The mother would be distracted from her work, went the Valorian wisdom. Meanwhile, her master would purchase other children from other farms. These children forgot that anyone but their owners could lay claim to them, and were raised in small houses by an elderly slave. By now, such a child could be as old as ten years.

It had been commonly done in the countryside. In the city, not always. Some owners prided themselves on allowing their slaves to keep their children. Kestrel had once seen a Valorian lady coo over a Herrani child. The tiny girl had wobbled where she stood in the center of the parlor. Kestrel, who had come for tea, hadn’t noticed the girl’s mother at first, then had followed the toddler’s gaze to see a uniformed woman waiting in a shadowed alcove.