The Winner's Crime(12)

She had turned away from the thick library doors.

Now she huddled in her velvet chair, trying to concentrate on the actual words of her conversation with Verex instead of on their emotional undertow. She flipped the coin, flipped it again. Emperor. Jadis. Emperor. Jadis. He’s two-faced, Verex had said of his father. Kestrel thought about that phrase as she considered each side of the coin. Two-faced: the word dangled a hook into the dark well of her memory. It snagged on something.

The Herrani believed that a god ruled not just one thing, but a whole domain of associated ideas, actions, objects. The god of stars was the god of stars, yes, but also of accidents, beauty, and disasters. The god of souls … Kestrel’s throat closed as she remembered Arin invoking that god, who ruled love. My soul is yours, he had said. You know that it is. His expression had been so open, so true. Frightened, even, of what he was saying. And she had been frightened, too, by how he had spoken what she felt. It frightened her still.

The coin. Kestrel forced her attention again to the coin.

There was nothing honest about the god of money. She recalled that now. This god was two-faced, like this piece of gold. Sometimes male, sometimes female. He rules buying and selling, Enai had said, which means she rules negotiation. And hidden things. You can’t see both sides of one coin at once, can you, child? The god of money always keeps a secret.

The god of money was also the god of spies.





5

Arin remembered.

It had been easy at first, the promise to be Cheat’s spy. “I trust you most,” the leader of the rebellion had murmured in Arin’s ear after his sale to the general’s daughter. “You are my second-in-command, lad, and between you and me we will have the Valorians on their knees.”

Everything had slid and locked into place along well-oiled grooves.

Except …

Except.

The general’s daughter had taken an interest in Arin. It was a gods-given opportunity, yet even in those early days as her slave, Arin had had the misgiving—uncomfortable, low, electric, like sparks rubbed off clothes in winter—that her interest would lead to his undoing.

And Arin was Arin: he pushed his luck, as he always did.

His habit was worse with her. He said things he shouldn’t. He broke rules, and she watched him do it, and said little of the breaking.

It was, he decided, because she didn’t care what he did.

Then came an impulse whose danger he should have seen—would have seen, if he had been able to admit to himself what it was that made him want to shake her awake even though her eyes were open.

Why should she care what a slave did?

Arin would make her care.

*

Arin remembered.

How he couldn’t sleep at night in the slaves’ quarters for the music that needled its way through the dark, across the general’s grounds from the villa, where the girl played and played and didn’t care that he was tired, because she didn’t know that he was tired, because she gave no thought to him at all.

He was whipped barebacked by her Valorian steward for some slight offense. The next day she had ordered him to escort her to a tea party. Pride had kept him from wincing as he moved. The fiery stripes on his back split and bled. She wouldn’t see, he would not let her see, he would not give her the satisfaction.

Nonetheless, he searched for a sign that she’d even heard of the flogging. His gaze raked her face, finding nothing there but a discomfort to be so scrutinized.

She didn’t know. He was certain he would have been able to tell. Guilt was an emotion she was bad at hiding.

Across the distance, where she was sitting on a brocade divan, teacup and saucer in hand, she dropped his gaze, turned to a lord, and laughed at something he had said.

Her innocence was maddening.

She should know. She should know what her steward had done. She should know it to be her fault whether she’d given the order or not—and whether she knew or not. Innocent? Her? Never.

He pulled the high collar of his shirt higher to hide a lash that had snaked up his neck.

He did not want her to know.

He did not want her to see.

But:

Look at me, he found himself thinking furiously at her. Look at me.

She lifted her eyes, and did.

*

The memories were strange, they were a network of lashes, laid one on top of the other, burning traces that might have resembled a pattern if it wasn’t clear that they had been left by a wild hand with no restraint. The lashes were lit with feeling.

He was stinging, stinging.

“Arin,” Tensen said during their meeting with the Herrani treasurer, who was even grimmer than usual, “where is your head? You’ve heard nothing I’ve said.”

“Say it again.”

“The emperor has had a new coin minted to celebrate the engagement.”

Arin didn’t want to hear about the engagement.

“I think that you should see it,” Tensen said.

Arin took the coin, and didn’t see whatever it was that Tensen thought he should see.

Tensen told him the story of Jadis.

Arin dropped the coin.

He remembered.

He remembered changing.

He saw Kestrel give a flower to a baby everyone else ignored. He watched her lose cheerfully at cards to an old Valorian woman whom society giggled about, not even bothering to hush their words, for she was too senile, they said, to understand.