The Winner's Crime(13)

Arin had stood behind Kestrel during that card game. He’d seen her high hand.

He saw her honesty with him. She offered it like a cup of clear water that he drank deep.

Her tears, glinting in the dark.

Her fierce creature of a mind: sleek and sharp-clawed and utterly unwilling to be caught.

Arin saw Kestrel step between him and punishment as if it meant nothing, instead of everything.

“Arin?” Tensen called through the memories.

Arin remembered the sunken days after he’d seen her last, after she’d handed him her emperor’s decree of Herrani freedom and told him about her engagement. “Congratulate me,” she’d said. He hadn’t believed it. He had begged. She hadn’t listened. “Oh, Arin,” Sarsine said to him during the time when he wouldn’t leave the rooms Kestrel had lived in. “What did you expect?”

Grief. It had all come to this.

“Arin,” Tensen said to him again, and Arin could no longer ignore him. “For the last time, are you going to the capital or not?”





6

Officials and aristocrats began to arrive in the capital in preparation for the ball. Every day more sets of fine horses were brought into the imperial stables, limping from the bitter ride down winter roads. Although Kestrel had pointed out the difficulties of bad travel conditions for their guests, the emperor apparently thought this was unimportant. He had invited them; they must come. Fires were laid to warm palace guest suites that would be lived in for quite some time: after the ball, there would be parties and events right up until the wedding.

One afternoon, Kestrel took a carriage down through the city to the harbor, a maid shivering beside her. There was no reason why this girl couldn’t be the one in Verex’s employ, but Kestrel heaped furs on their laps and encouraged the maid to nudge her toes closer to the hot brick on the carriage floor.

Their progress through the city was slow. The roads were steep and narrow, made less for the convenience of society and more for the purpose of slowing an enemy’s progress up the slopes to the palace.

No new ships had arrived. Kestrel shouldn’t have expected to see one Herrani-made anyway. It was green storm season. No sane person would sail between the Herran peninsula and the capital.

The harbor wind chapped Kestrel’s lips.

“What are we doing here?” said the maid through chattering teeth.

Kestrel could hardly say that she was looking for a boat that had brought Arin. Time was running out for him to make the longer but safer trek through the mountain pass, which had been cleared after the treaty with Herran had been signed. The ball loomed at the end of the week. Most guests had already arrived. But not him.

“Nothing,” Kestrel said. “I wanted the view.” The girl blinked: her only sign of annoyance to have been dragged down to the harbor. But Kestrel wasn’t allowed to travel without an escort. She had hundreds of engagement gifts—a pen made from the ivory of a horned whale, ruby dice from a colonial lord who had heard of Kestrel’s love of games, even a clever collapsible tiara for traveling … The list of pretty presents was long, but Kestrel would have gladly traded them all for one hour of privacy outside the palace.

“Let’s go,” she said, and didn’t return to the harbor.

*

She dined with senators. Over the rim of her wineglass, Kestrel watched the Senate leader, who looked oddly tan for winter, murmur something to the emperor.

What were you doing, she remembered the captain asking Thrynne in the prison, eavesdropping outside the doors of a private meeting between the emperor and the Senate leader?

It suddenly seemed that Kestrel’s cup wasn’t filled with wine but blood.

The emperor glanced up and caught Kestrel staring at him and the Senate leader. He lifted one brow.

Kestrel glanced away. She drank her wine to the bottom.

*

Her father sent his apologies. He couldn’t come to the ball. He was mired in fighting near the border with the eastern plains. I’m sorry, General Trajan wrote, but I have my orders.

Kestrel stopped rereading the scant black lines of writing. Instead, she stared at all the blank space left on that one sheet of paper. The white of it hurt her eyes. She let the letter fall.

She’d never even considered it a possibility that her father would come—not until the moment that she had held his letter in her hands and ripped it open.

That blinding hope. That drop into disappointment. She should have known better.

She remembered the letter’s last word: orders. Kestrel wondered how far her father’s obedience to the emperor would go. What would the general have done in Thrynne’s prison cell? Would his knife have cut as easily as the captain’s, or worse, or not at all?

But when she thought of her father and imagined him in the captain’s role, Thrynne wasn’t there in the prison in her mind. She was the one in chains. What were you doing, the general asked, bargaining with the emperor for a slave’s life?

Kestrel shook her head, and no longer saw the prison or her father. She was looking out a window in one of her rooms high above the palace’s inner ward, facing the barbican, where visitors would enter.

She palmed away the window’s frost. The barbican’s gate was shut.

Come away from the window, she heard her father order.

She stayed where she was. The glass fogged.