The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(91)

She shoved. The body didn’t budge. She tried harder, felt the weight press her chest. Finally, she screamed.

Something slammed into Arin. He kept his seat, wheeled to see his attacker, saw the Valorian’s grin—and then, too late, the serrated steel along the length of the man’s boot. Arin noticed it right before the Valorian used his foot like a knife and slashed the exposed ribs of Arin’s horse.

The animal’s cry pierced Arin’s ears. He was pitched to the ground.

In war, her father sometimes said, you might live, you might die. But if you panic, death is the only outcome.

She hated him for his coolness. His rules.

But.

The body crushed her.

But . . . the sand.

She tried to see if she could turn onto her belly. Wriggling, she shifted beneath the body. As she strained to turn, she waited for someone to notice her, and attack. She waited for hooves to crush her skull. But Javelin stood solidly, right where he’d been the moment she’d fallen. Cavalry maneuvered around the harmless horse. No one was looking at the ground.

Worming into the sand, she flipped onto her front and began to dig, sweeping the sand away from her as if swimming. She dug her elbows into the trough she’d made and pulled.

She slipped free.

Arin scrambled to his feet. Dodged—just in time—the kick of the serrated boot to his head. With both hands (where was his sword?), he seized the Valorian’s ankle and hauled the man off his horse.

Kestrel’s shaking hands sifted through the sand for her dagger. Her dagger. She must find it. She could not lose it.

When she found the ridge of it beneath a veil of red sand, tears pricked her eyes. She seized its hilt.

Javelin was steady, waiting for her. She wanted to lean against him and press her face into his hide. She wanted to become a horse so that she could thank him in a way he would understand.

She went to mount him—then saw, over the rise of her saddle, Arin.

From the beach, Arin snatched a sword—his? didn’t matter—and was already swiping it down through the air toward the fallen Valorian’s neck when the man surged to his feet, struck Arin’s blade aside with his own, and drove its point toward Arin.

Arin countered, heard the skittering of steel against steel, and felt the vibration, the pressure. He felt the pressure give. The man’s blade sank for an instant.

But it was a trick. In that moment of seeming weakness, the Valorian’s other hand went for his dagger, which he stabbed into a gap where Arin’s armor joined.

Kestrel was stumbling forward on the sand, her legs too sluggish; she couldn’t move fast enough. The Valorian’s back was to her. She could see Arin’s face, the crease between his brows, the inward quality of his expression. And then something shifting: a flare, a recognition.

The Valorian stabbed. Arin cried out.

The dagger bit into his ribs. Pain laced up his side. He struck back, sword dancing harmlessly down the Valorian’s armor, doing no more damage than to cut the laces of the man’s right boot.

“You’re mine,” said the Valorian.

Which was what death always said. Arin, surprised to hear the god’s words come from a human mouth, faltered. He felt strange. He thought, Ah. He thought, Grateful. He welcomed the god’s warning, realized that he’d always wanted to know before it happened. He wouldn’t want to blink too suddenly out of this life.

But he loved this life. He loved the girl in it.

His heart punched hard, rebelled.

Too late. The base of the Valorian’s blade was coming at his head, angled for his neck.

Arin tried to duck. The hilt slammed into his temple.

Darkness bled across his vision. He couldn’t feel his legs. He tried to hear his god, but he heard only silence, and then he heard nothing at all.





Chapter 33

She saw Arin go down. She skidded in the sand as she ran, her ears roaring. Her mind closed over. A shaking dread.

A few paces away. Her dagger was tight in her hand. The Valorian’s back was an armored wall. The man raised his sword again. He didn’t hear her come at him.

But where, where? She had a dagger, but there was nowhere to stab—not the back of the neck, which she couldn’t reach, not the torso or even the legs. He was armored from shoulders to boots. A dagger wants flesh, her father would say. Find it.

A great pressure in her chest. Desperation as she came up behind. She didn’t know what to do, couldn’t think, and then it was as if someone else noticed the looseness at the top of one of the man’s boots and dropped her to her knees in the sand. She seized the boot’s top, yanked it back, and slashed the ropy tendon at the ankle.

He screamed. She seemed to feel him feel the excruciating pain of the cut tendon curling up into his calf. His collapse. The pumping agony. How a girl climbed onto him—feral, foxlike. But: a girl? But: her hair, her skin, her eyes, her armor. Not the enemy. The enemy?

Then the dagger found his throat and he knew exactly what she was.

Her hand, her arm: bright red. She couldn’t let go of the dagger. She made herself sheathe it. She needed her hands, she needed Arin.

The sprawl of him. She was weeping, crouched in the sand, empty fingers wild when she reached him, searched him, found the dagger in his side, his blackened brow, purple cheek, split skin. She touched his face and felt his head loll. A pulse? Or just her own pulse? Her body vibrated with it, she couldn’t keep her fingers steady against the hollow under his jaw.