The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(86)

Kestrel’s father had made clear that there would be no slave children on his property. If babies were born, they were soon sold. None were purchased.

Each little house on each farm was a horror. Before—for years—she had let her mind close seamlessly, like an egg, around this wrong and other wrongs. They happened every day. It was life. But not her life.

Hers, an inner voice—sinister, upsetting—had sometimes disagreed.

Not hers.

Hers.

The words echoed now with the rhythm of Javelin’s hooves.

Kestrel could say that she’d learned that one’s life is also the lives of others. A wrong is not an egg, separate unto itself and sealed. She could say that she understood the wrong in ignoring a wrong. She could say this, but the truth was that she should have learned it long before.



The sky was frosted with stars. Kestrel found Arin seated near a fire, squinting as he retooled someone else’s leather armor. A buckle had come off.

“Can you see well enough?” She remained standing.

“No.” He pushed an awl through a strip of leather. “But there’s no time for this by day.” The army pressed as rapidly west as it could, though not as quickly as Kestrel would have liked. Roshar had warned against a forced march. Weary soldiers make for lost wars. Her father had often said the same.

Kestrel tipped her head back. The night glowed. “How do you make a mirror?”

Surprise tinged Arin’s voice. “Do you want a mirror?”

“No. I just wondered how.”

“You silver glass. It’s not something I’ve done.”

She turned in a half circle to look toward the western constellations. Her boots released the scent of bruised grass. “Before, people must have used polished metal.”

“Prob ably.”

“Or bowls of dark water. The sky looks like a mirror, if a mirror was a bowl of black water.”

There was a silence. Kestrel took her eyes off the stars and looked at him. He’d set aside the armor and was turning the awl in his fingers. He flickered orange and red in the light of the low fire. Quietly, he said, “What are you thinking?”

She was hesitant to say.

He came to stand next to her.

“Arin, after the conquest, what was it like for you?”

“I’m not sure you want to know.”

“I want to know every thing about you.”

So he told her.

The stars, too, seemed to listen.

They left the wheatlands. The soil became loose. Fresh water, seldom. On the fifth day out of Errilith, however, they reached a stream and replenished the water barrels stowed in the supply wagons.

Kestrel watched Roshar approach Arin as he curried his horse. “Here.” The prince thrust something at him. “Do us all a favor. You’re filthy.” Roshar looked him over. “I think there’s still dried blood behind your ears.”

It was a cake of soap. Arin appeared faintly startled, as if he lived in a world where soap hadn’t been invented. He broke the round between his hands and offered Kestrel half.

It crumbled a little in her grasp. Its scent was sweetly smoky. She stood there longer than necessary, inhaling the gift of a gift. It occurred to her that if she used it, and Arin used it, her skin would smell like his.

She tucked it carefully in her saddlebag, wrapping spare clothes around it so that it wouldn’t be broken.

“Come with me.” Arin. Eyes illuminated. “I want to show you something.”

Kestrel followed without question, though the army’s midday rest was nearly over. They took their horses.

She kept stealing glances at Arin as they rode toward a grassy hill. He caught her at it. “A secret,” he said, and smiled.

It felt as if his smile became hers. His secret, too. The day itself: the satin sky, a speckled yellow feather that spiraled down on a breeze to catch in Javelin’s mane. She held all this inside her the way a jewel holds light.

They dismounted at the foot of the hill. Kestrel noticed stone steps, overgrown with green, leading up the slope. It occurred to her that the entire hill, rare for this terrain, might have been man-made.

“What is this?” she asked. The stairs, as far as she could tell, led to nothing. The hilltop seemed bare.

Arin plucked the yellow feather from Javelin’s mane and tucked it behind her ear. “A temple. At least, it used to be.”

She touched the feather’s ticklish plume, the slight scratch of the quill. She explored it, trying to ignore her plea sure at his unexpected gesture. “Is that your secret?”

“You wouldn’t ask”—Arin’s grin was mischievous—“if you didn’t guess that it is not. Come see.”

The steps were broken in places and wobbled beneath Kestrel’s feet. When they reached the hilltop, she could see the jumble of marble that had been the temple’s foundation. Perhaps it had been destroyed after the conquest; the Valorians had razed all Herrani temples to their gods. But these ruins looked ancient. The marble was bleached bone white. The carvings, polished smooth by time, were blurred and mostly indecipherable, like a dream after one has woken.

“It’s greener here, isn’t it?” Arin’s voice was hushed. “Than the rest of this region.”

“Yes.”

There were birds’ nests in the nooks of broken marble. A lizard darted over a fallen pillar. The place appeared at once ghostly and yet full of life. When Arin stepped into the center of the ruined temple and knelt, Kestrel thought it was to pray, but he was clearing away vegetation. “I recognize some of this.” He was eager; his words tripped over each other. He seemed unaware that she wouldn’t understand what he meant. “But other parts . . . I thought I knew all the stories.”