The Winner's Crime(14)

‘No’ doesn’t exist, Kestrel. Only ‘yes.’

The view had clouded over.

She left the window. There was nothing to see anyway.

*

The days wore on.

There was a performance for the court. A Herrani singer. His voice was acceptable. But higher than Arin’s. Thinner. Kestrel became angry at the way this unknown man’s voice scraped the bottom of his register. This music was inferior, thready stuff. It had none of Arin’s strength, his lithe resilience.

Kestrel hoarded the memory of Arin’s song. It was honey in the hive of her heart. As the performance continued, Kestrel began to worry that the music she was hearing now was going to replace what she remembered of Arin’s voice. He would never sing for her again. What if she could no longer even remember how he had sung for her once? She curled her fingers under the edge of her chair and gripped hard.

Finally the performance came to an end. The audience met the singer’s silence with a dull silence of their own. No one clapped—not because everyone else had been able to judge the music’s quality and found it wanting, but because they saw no point in applauding a slave, even after remembering that he no longer was one. And Kestrel, who had never forgotten what this man was and was not, certainly had no intention of applauding either.

*

Her music, too, was a problem. The piano brought little comfort—and what comfort it gave turned out to be false. Kestrel began to craft something that she thought was an impromptu, as difficult as she could make it. Then the notes nudged aside, twined together, and left spaces that she couldn’t fill.

This was no impromptu. Impromptus were for soloists. This was a duet.

No, not quite a duet … only half of one.

Kestrel brought the lid down on the keys.

*

She invented a solitaire version of Bite and Sting. She played against a ghost. She played against herself. The boneyard—the stock of tiles left on the table after players drew their hands—dwindled until all the pieces were faceup like a final truth that she should have been able to decode. The tiger bared its teeth. The spider wove its web. Mouse, stonefish, viper, wasp … the black engravings on the ivory tiles became suddenly sharp in definition, then blurred before her eyes.

Kestrel mixed the tiles and tried again.

*

She invited Jess to the ball. Her letter practically begged Jess to come. Jess’s reply arrived: she would be there, of course she would. She promised to stay with Kestrel for at least a week. Kestrel felt a terrible relief.

It didn’t last.

*

She took tea in the palace salons with the daughters and sons of high-ranking military officers. She ate canapés on fashionable white bread that tasted awful because its color came from powdered chalk. Kestrel pretended to herself that the dry, tight quality of her throat had everything to do with the bread and nothing with the increasing disappointment of each day that did not bring Arin.

*

On the last morning before the ball, when the weather watchers in the palace predicted that a storm building above the mountains would close the pass to Herran with snow before the day was out, Kestrel stood on a block while the dressmaker pinned a panel of silver-threaded lace to her ball gown.

It was the final touch. Kestrel stared down at the layered fabric. The color of its satin base was uncertain. Sometimes it resembled pearl scraped from the inside of shells. Then light from the window would dim and the dress became dark, full of shadows.

Kestrel was tired of the long hours on the dressmaker’s block, tired to think of all the eyes that would watch her enter the ballroom, of all the gossip that swirled through the palace about details so minute as her choice of dress. Bets had been laid, she’d heard. Entire fortunes might be won or lost based on what she wore.

She lifted her gaze from the dress to watch the snow-heavy clouds build in the sky. She watched as if the window were her last exit, each cloud a stone laid to wall it off.

The dressmaker was Herrani. She’d been freed with the rest of her people when the emperor had issued his edict almost two months ago. Why Deliah stayed in the capital instead of returning to Herran, Kestrel didn’t know. She didn’t ask, and Deliah rarely spoke. She didn’t say anything that day, either—not at first. She pinned in silent precision. But her gray eyes glanced up once to peer at Kestrel.

Kestrel saw a certain curiosity in the way they lingered. A waiting, a wondering.

“Deliah, what is it?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

Deliah fussed with the hem. “The Herrani representative has arrived.”

“What?”

“He arrived this morning on horseback. He came through the pass in the nick of time.”

“Take this dress off.”

“But I’m not finished, my lady.”

“Off.”

“Just a few more—”

Kestrel tugged the fabric from her shoulders. She ignored Deliah’s small cry, the pricks of pins, the thin chime of them scattering onto the stone floor. Kestrel stepped out of the dress, pulled on her day clothes, and rushed out the door.





7

He was waiting in the reception hall, a lone figure lost in the vast, vaulted chamber. The Herrani representative was an elderly man whose thin frame leaned heavily on his walking stick.