The Winner's Crime(22)

Kestrel handed Tensen his cane. “Good night, Minister. Enjoy the remainder of the ball.”

*

Verex found Kestrel in a corner of the ballroom pouring a glass of iced lemon water with floating sprigs of mint. “Where have you been? And why are you serving yourself? Here.” He took the cut-crystal dipper from her and poured.

But Kestrel wasn’t really watching him. Her mind was a curtained balcony. It was filled with the memory of warm movement. Of almost coming undone. Coming close, pushing away, letting go …

Verex set the cold cup in her hand. The lemon-mint water tasted alien: piercingly sweet and clear.

He took his time pouring a cup for himself. His movements were tense. He seemed constantly on the point of saying something.

“Thank you,” he finally murmured.

“For what?” Kestrel’s heart was made of treason. Didn’t Verex sense that? Couldn’t he tell? Why would he ever thank her?

“For the Borderlands game. You helped me win.”

She’d forgotten about that. “Oh. It was nothing.”

“I’m sure to you it was,” he said bitterly. His eyes roamed the ballroom, then settled on the emperor. Verex drank. “I couldn’t find you earlier. I looked everywhere.”

Kestrel’s cup was cold and sweating in her hand. She ran a quick thumb through the condensation. She was aware that some courtiers lingered nearby, as close as politeness would allow. They were drawing closer.

“Did a senator corner you?” Verex asked. “They’ll do that. They’ll try to worm their way into your good graces for a chance to influence my father. Well, Kestrel? Where were you? And what…” He frowned, peering closely at her. “Your mark has faded.”

“Oh,” she said. “I have a headache.” As the courtiers watched, she rubbed at her forehead, smudging the mark. She hoped the gesture seemed casual, absentminded, as if she had been doing it all evening.

*

Arin rambled around the palace suite he was to share with Tensen. It was not small or large, neither luxurious nor spare. Arin had thought that the palace steward would assign the Herrani contingent an insulting set of rooms, but this suite seemed chosen to send the message that the Herrani didn’t matter one way or the other.

He shrugged off his shirt. It was early in the evening, not yet midnight. The ball was still whirling on its giddy axis. Tensen hadn’t returned.

Arin could smell Kestrel’s perfume on him. It exhaled faintly from his shirt, mingled with the scent of the sea. Folding the fabric—or not really folding it, more smoothing it out over the back of a dressing room chair, as if the cloth were a living thing that needed soothing—Arin found a hole in the seam where the shoulder met the body. He worked a finger through the rip and swore.

Well, it was an old shirt. He had worn his finest clothes. He’d torn them out of the trunk upon his arrival in the palace and flung them on, fumbling with the cuffs, knowing he was late for the ball. Maybe the hole had happened then, in his haste.

It would have happened sooner or later. All of his best garments were ten years old. They had been his father’s.

They fit Arin badly. Even after alterations, it seemed that there wasn’t enough room anywhere. His father had been an elegant man, his proportions artistic. If he stood here now next to Arin, a stranger would never guess they were related.

Arin pressed a hand to his face. He felt the bones that made him look so different. There was the prickle of a beard.

How ridiculous he must have looked next to those polished courtiers, with his ill-fitting clothes and unshaven face.

How rough, how thuggish.

How wrong.

Arin flicked open a straight razor, filled the washbasin, and lathered soap. He tried to shave without looking too closely at his face in the washbasin mirror.

A nick pinkened the lather with blood.

He kept at it, more attentive this time, until he had finished, wiped off the lather, and poured water over his bowed head. He looked up again, dripping. His face was clear.

Sometimes Arin could see the boy he had been before the war. When he did, he usually felt a tenderness for that child as if he were wholly other than Arin, not part of himself at all. That boy didn’t blame Arin, exactly, for existing when he did not, but when Arin caught a glimpse of the child, usually lingering about the eyes, Arin always looked away. He would feel a small sharpness, like the nick of the razor.

Arin’s face was wet, his hair black with water. He shivered, suddenly aware of the winter. He searched for something to wear, and pulled on a nightshirt and robe.

Arin felt again his nervousness as he’d stood outside the balcony curtain. The curtain had swung after Kestrel had closed it behind her, and he’d gingerly touched its sway. He remembered that hunted expression she had thrown over her shoulder before disappearing behind the velvet.

And then there, in the dark, with her … it made Arin’s throat tighten as if he were thirsty. Prove it, he’d told her, words thick with desire, full of a traitorous kind of confidence, one that came and then abandoned him and then returned and left in such rapid tides that he couldn’t keep his footing. Prove that you want him. Kestrel had pushed him away.

He could have sworn that he had sensed in her the same wish that was in him. It had been on her skin like a scent. Hadn’t it? But then Arin remembered how she’d escaped his house in Herran. He saw her again on the harbor: her hand on a weapon, that flash in her eyes. It had wrecked him. He had done this, he had made this, had lied to her, tricked her, killed her people, killed whatever it was that had made Kestrel open up to him on Firstwinter night … before she knew his treachery.