The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(88)

“I saw a basket when we were in the wheatlands,” she said. “It had lost its shape entirely. You couldn’t hold anything in it. You couldn’t hold it.”

“Kestrel, you are not a basket.”

“I think—” She stopped.

He wondered if something can be so hard to say that it becomes hard even to say that it is hard. “You can’t tell me what you think?”

“No.”

“Why?”

She whispered, “I’m terrified.”

“Of the battle?”

“No.”

“Your father?”

Her voice was flat. “He should fear me.”

Arin didn’t want to relax his sinewy need for the general’s death. It clenched inside him. But if it was this . . . if there’d been no error at the temple, if Arin had done nothing that he needed to undo and instead what had made her seem to try to hide from him in plain sight was dread of Arin’s vengeance or her own . . . “Kestrel.” He put it bluntly. He couldn’t think of any other way. “Do you want his death?”

Her eyes flashed.

“I won’t do it,” he said, “if you don’t want it.”

“Kill him if you can. I don’t care. He left me for dead. Worse.”

Arin’s hatred knotted within him. “If I did, would you forgive me?”

“You talk as if his life or death was your choice.”

“It’s been promised.”

She squinted at him. “By your god?”

“Not in so many words, exactly.”

She shook her head.

“Please answer my question.”

“Maybe it will be my hand,” she said. “My sword.”

“I need to know your choice.”

“Do it.” Her eyes were wet. “Swear that you will.”

The knot released. “Yes, of course.”

“He changed us both.” She seemed to struggle for words. “I think of you, all that you lost, who you were, what you were forced to be, and might have been, and I—I have become this, this person, unable to—” She shut her mouth.

“Kestrel,” he said softly, “I love this person.”

But her slim mouth tightened. Her face shone again with fear.

Arin curled his fingers into Javelin’s mane. “I am what troubles you.”

“No, Arin.” But she had hesitated.

He thought about what it meant that Kestrel’s father had had her love, and had cast it aside. He wanted to tell her about the jolt of recognition that had rattled through him when he’d ripped the ivy from the face of his god, how it had been like looking into the black-water mirror Kestrel had described as they’d gazed into the clear night sky. He wanted to explain his hard joy, his relief of feeling fated for something, and how mattering to his god was akin to becoming a son again, or a brother. He wanted to warn her, to say that she couldn’t know, not fully, what it was to no longer be someone’s child.

Kestrel asked, “Are you afraid of the battle?”

This, at least, was easy to say. His smile was free. “No.”

The beach was quiet.

Which wasn’t true, of course, not with an entire Dacran regiment camped on its sands. But it quieted Arin to see that the Valorian ships hadn’t landed, that there were no sails on the horizon, and even if Kestrel had warned that this could translate to an overwhelming onslaught, he was glad to see the empty stretch of rain-darkened sand from the tents to the shore, to see the low tide, the muck of green-plastered rocks, the gulls squabbling over crabs as they picked through tide pools. The wind was dead. The sky, a flat slate. It had stormed the night before. The briny air smelled raw.

Roshar’s people were so glad to see the arrival of their prince that Arin doubted the way Roshar styled himself as someone with no political ambition. The queen had her people’s fealty. Roshar, their love.

“This is a safe time of day,” Kestrel said, then kneed her horse in the direction of the pale grass on higher ground, beyond which, they’d been told, was a stream that watered the army and its horses.

Arin followed, drawing his horse up alongside hers. “Yes, the Valorians will land at high tide,” he said.

Kestrel looked slightly startled, not at what he’d said but that he’d spoken at all, which made him think that her words hadn’t been a start of a conversation but rather just a moment in her mind that had somehow slipped out, and that she’d been deep in her own thoughts. She didn’t bother to ask how he knew what she’d meant, prob ably because she assumed that the advantages of high tide for an invading force were obvious.

The sea will carry them swiftly to shore, murmured death. It will froth white. Bear the weight of countless black-throated cannons.

Arin glanced at Kestrel. This battle would be very different from the ambush along the southern road. There would be no safe place, only the open arena of the beach.

Don’t look at her, Arin. Look at me. You will embrace them. Your heart will rise, high and glad. What is an enemy? It is the stick and pull and slash of your sword. It is the clean path you cut between you and what you want. It is the path to me.

The human stench of the camp had lifted. Kestrel and Arin had ridden far enough away. There was only the swampy saline of low tide, the exposed underbelly of the sea. It smelled good.