The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(87)

Kestrel came to kneel beside him. A face glittered up at her beneath strands of ivy. Startled, she pulled the greenery away.

It was a mosaic. An entire, immense tiled floor stretched out of sight beneath the vegetation. Kestrel palmed away dirt. The face flared in the sun, its tiled features slippery and cool. The man—woman?—had wings fanned wide, a peacock’s colors. Scaled skin. Carnelian claws.

Kestrel tugged more ivy free. Gorgeous, impossible creatures appeared. An enameled snake with six tails. A horse made of water. A woman whose hair appeared to be paper scrolls written in a script close to Herrani, but with so many alien elements Kestrel couldn’t read it. Some of the figures looked only vaguely human. A string of eyes crowned a brow. One long, violet-skinned body had no limbs. Gold spilled in a ribbon from the lips of a god.

They were all gods. They could be nothing else.

“Maybe we should go back,” Arin said, but he didn’t mean it. His mouth was reluctant. He licked his thumb and rubbed a tile clean, not raising his gaze, the sun tumbling in his messy hair. A wide blade of light cut across the bridge of his nose, warming his neck and shoulders. He moved, and the sun caught his face in full.

Her limbs were light, as if with fear. Her blood seemed to float. She said, “Not yet,” and saw his sudden happiness.

She helped him clear the vegetation and expose the entire mosaic to the sky.

Every chip of her being slid into place, into the image of a lost world. The boy discovering it. The girl who sees it spark and flare, and understands, now, what she feels. She realizes that she has felt this for a long time.

Lapis lazuli, kiln-fired glass, onyx and gold and shell and ivory. Jade. Aquamarine. Kestrel barely saw where each tile of the mosaic joined, the taut line of contact. Piece to piece. She pressed her palm to its surface and imagined its image imprinted on her skin.

Later, Kestrel wished she had spoken then, that no time had been lost. She wished that she’d had the courage that very moment to tell Arin what she’d finally known to be true: that she loved him with the whole of her heart.





Chapter 31

Kestrel was unusually quiet on the last day’s ride to Lerralen. At first, at the temple, Arin had thought that some new, delicate thing had grown between them. But since then she had kept her distance in a way he couldn’t explain, could find no cause for. He sifted through his memories of the temple, of her, the hot green leaves, the slick tile, the hidden world of the mosaic, and how Kestrel had wanted to see it, too. He could find nothing wrong. An error lay somewhere, that was sure. Still, each moment of each memory of that day made him want to hold them all in the palm of his hand, to stash them safely and close. In a deep pocket, perhaps. On his person.

He was wary of this impulse. He suspected that he would be revealed as a child with a collection of precious things that were actually nothing valuable. A button, a river rock, a bit of string.

Or a speckled yellow feather. He wished he’d kept it. He wondered if Kestrel had kept it. Most likely it had fallen from her hair as they’d galloped from the temple’s hill to rejoin the vanguard of the army.

Tawny grass rippled on the bluffs. The air was brackish. They’d soon reach the sea.

When the army stopped to water the horses from the barrels among the provisions (there’d been no fresh water in this land for two days), Arin found Kestrel brushing Javelin’s coat. She glanced up at him, then away, her gaze settling on something else that Arin wanted to identify, to understand whether it was him or—what? the white-threaded sky? that gull, tipped up against the wind?—that made her seem suddenly smaller.

Her hair had reddened since coming to the south. Her skin was now the color of toasted bread. Long fingers plucked stray bits of nothing from Javelin’s mane.

It was not the sky. It was not the gull.

Arin tried to set her at ease. “So, strategist. What are our chances? Or do we ride to our dooms?”

The corner of her mouth lifted—an acknowledgment both of his effort to ease her anxiety and also that what he’d asked, however lightheartedly, was an odd sort of way to do it. Yet it worked. She became more present. The skittering movements of her fingers stilled.

Not the battle, then.

Not her horse, nor the slight crunch of sand beneath their boots. Nothing, nowhere.

Him.

“There are three scenarios,” she said. “We arrive late, and my father has seized the beach. Or we arrive as reinforcements for a battle that has already begun. Or we arrive before my father, and wait.” She added, “Of course, there is a fourth: that I am wrong, he won’t land there, and we’ve disastrously shifted our strengths where they shouldn’t be.”

“There is no fourth.”

She shook her head. “I can be wrong.”

“Is that what worries you?”

“Even if I’m not wrong, and we arrive before the Valorians land, it’s a mixed blessing. Him landing late means he’s landing with a larger force. A robust artillery. More people and more cannon take longer to mobilize. They’re also harder to defeat.”

Javelin knocked his nose against her shoulder. Arin saw her smile. A quiet, lost feeling stole over him like sleep or a farewell.

“I told my father I loved him.” Her words were abrupt. “It was the last thing I said to him.”

Arin didn’t look at her. He didn’t want her to see his face just then.