The Winner's Crime(24)

The entire scene looked pretty and fun … and fake. Who knew if that flirty young man even liked the lady—or if he liked ladies at all. Kestrel wasn’t the only person at court who planned to marry someone she didn’t want.

Kestrel could see the emperor seated in the patio’s center next to the largest brazier, surrounded by senators. At the far end of the patio, near the hedge maze, Verex hunched over a Borderlands table. His back was to Kestrel. The eastern princess sat across from him, her expression gentle as she executed a merciless move.

The Herrani hadn’t been invited to this exclusive event. Kestrel needn’t worry about meeting Arin’s gaze … or not meeting his gaze.

Then again, he might come anyway. It would be like him to turn up uninvited.

Wouldn’t it?

Kestrel found that she had come close to a tree. Her hands were on its bark. It was silver; smooth and papery in places, rough in others. She had been running fingers over the bark’s striations and knots the way she’d seen blind people come to understand an object. When she thought of this, she realized that she was trying to understand whether she wanted to see Arin here in the Winter Garden or not. And that was a fool’s question. It was pure, punishing foolishness, the mere consideration of either possibility, when she had already decided that neither should matter.

So it did not matter that her short nails had found a split in the bark. It did not matter that she was nervous as she peeled away a strip of bark in one long curl. Or that she was unhappy, unrolling the strip like a scroll with a blank message she couldn’t read.

Then she looked at the bark and thought of Thrynne’s stripped skin. She dropped the bark. It fluttered to the ground. Kestrel lifted her eyes and saw the emperor again.

She emerged from the poison trees. Her footfalls were quiet on the path. The first group of courtiers, clustered around a brazier, didn’t notice her arrival.

Lady Maris, the Senate leader’s daughter, was murmuring something that unleashed flurries of breathless giggling from her friends.

“—they all looked like that, I’d free them, too,” Maris was saying. “Or make him my slave.”

Kestrel deliberately stepped on a fallen twig. It snapped.

Maris glanced up. Her friends went pale and their laughter died, but Maris’s eyes were defiant. “Chocolate, Lady Kestrel?” she offered. “It’s hot.”

“Yes, thank you.” Kestrel joined the ladies. They made room, edging away.

Maris lifted the chocolate pot from its stand over the brazier and poured for Kestrel, who accepted the tiny cup and sipped. It wasn’t until the chocolate scalded her tongue that Kestrel knew the exact degree of her anger. It simmered: dark and bitter and somehow even sweet. Kestrel smiled. “Lady Maris, your father is looking very well. He’s so tan. Has your family been somewhere sunny?”

“Oh, don’t talk to me about it!” Maris gave a little dramatic mew. “It is too, too horrible!”

The other ladies relaxed, relieved that Kestrel seemed to have no interest in being vengeful. And why should she? their expressions seemed to say. It had been a bit of harmless gossip. In fact, Lady Kestrel ought to be pleased to hear compliments about the Herrani governor. It couldn’t have been so bad being his captive, now could it? The ladies saw quite another side to that Jadis coin.

Kestrel watched them think this through, and shrug their furred shoulders, and drink their chocolate.

“Can you believe that my father sailed to the southern isles without me?” Maris said. “A luxury trip to blue skies while his only child languishes here in winter. Though you can be sure that if I had gone, I would never have let the sun darken my skin. It makes one look so coarse! Like a dockworker! Really, what was my father thinking?”

Kestrel shouldn’t have asked Maris about the Senate leader. She should steer clear of everything to do with him. She had sworn not to embroil herself any further in Herran’s affairs.

And yet, she had gotten angry. She was angry still.

And yet, the Senate leader was tan.

And yet, this was unusual.

Her mind kept returning to this detail, like a thumb rubbing a flaw in a bolt of silk, or that papery bark of the poison berry trees.

But so what if the Senate leader was tan? A trip to the southern isles explained it. She told herself once more to leave the matter alone.

Yet she didn’t.

“The southern isles have many delights,” Kestrel said. “Surely your father brought you gifts?”

“No,” said Maris. “The wretch. Oh, I love him, I do, but couldn’t he have spared one little thought for me? One little present?”

“He brought you nothing? But the southern isles have linen, perfume, sugar, silver-tipped tea…”

“Stop! Don’t remind me! I can’t bear it!”

“Poor thing,” one of her friends said soothingly. “But just think, Maris. Now your many suitors have more choice in gifts to please you.”

“They do, don’t they? And they should please me.”

“Is that what fashionable young men do in the capital?” Kestrel asked. “Give gifts?”

“Oh, yes … though they often ask for something in return.”

“A kiss!” cried a lady.

“Or an answer to a riddle,” said another. “Riddles are very popular. And the answer is always love.” Which made sense, given that the court was full of young people who had chosen to marry rather than serve in the military. By the time they turned twenty, every Valorian had to fight for the empire or begin giving it babies. Future soldiers, her father would say. The empire must grow, he’d add, and Kestrel would wonder if this was the working of every general’s mind, or only her father’s: to see something as soft as a baby and imagine it grown hard enough to kill. And then Kestrel would shrink from the thought of becoming like her father, and he would know that he had said the wrong thing, and then they would both say nothing.