The Winner's Crime(25)

“No, I’ve heard other riddles,” said a girl, drawing Kestrel back to the conversation. “Ones with different answers: a mirror, a candle, an egg…”

“I like riddles,” said Kestrel. “Tell me one.”


“There is a riddle that I simply cannot figure out,” said the lady sitting next to Maris. “It is: I leap without feet to land, my cloth head is filled with sand. I have no wings, yet try to fly … what am I?”

Kestrel helped herself to some cream. She wasn’t angry anymore. The truth was that she, like her father, knew how good it felt to cut with certain weapons. She took a whitened sip of chocolate, the cream cool and pillowy against her lips. “Maris knows the answer to that riddle,” she said.

“I?” said Maris. “Not at all. I cannot guess it.”

“Can you not? The answer is a fool.”

Maris’s smile wilted. There was a silence broken only by the delicate clink of Kestrel setting her cup on the tray. She gathered her white furs about her and swept away.

She noticed the eastern princess making a move at Borderlands. Her rider hopped over Verex’s pieces to kill an engineer. Verex laughed. The sound surprised Kestrel. He sounded so happy. Kestrel would have gone to their table, to find out once and for all just what kind of player the princess was, and why Verex had laughed as he had. But the emperor caught Kestrel’s eye. He beckoned her toward him.

“We have a problem,” the emperor told Kestrel as she approached. “Come help us.” The senators surrounding him were high-ranking, all with seats in the Quorum. Kestrel joined them, grateful that the Senate leader had his back to his daughter’s coterie.

“Problem?” said Kestrel to the emperor. “Don’t tell me you’ve run out of chocolate already.”

“A more serious matter,” he said. “The barbarian plains.”

Kestrel glanced at the eastern princess, but Risha was engaged in her game with Verex, and the emperor’s voice had been pitched not to carry. Risha possessed a grace perfectly proportioned to her beauty. Her black hair was braided like a Valorian’s. She wore rings when a true easterner would have kept her fingers bare, and the contrast of gold against Risha’s richly dark skin was striking. She was about Kestrel’s age. Maybe Risha didn’t remember much of her life in the east before her kidnapping. Maybe she had grown accustomed to the capital and thought of it as her home. Kestrel couldn’t say what the girl would have thought about the emperor referring to her country as a problem, and to her people as barbarians. Uncomfortably, Kestrel remembered that she’d called them barbarians before, too, just because that’s what people she knew did. Kestrel wouldn’t do that now. This seemed at once a meaningful difference and yet also worth very little.

“Your father writes that the plainspeople prove tricky,” the emperor said. “The eastern tribes at our borders are skilled at stealth attacks. They vanish when the general musters his army against them.”

“Burn the plains,” said a senator, a woman who had served under Kestrel’s father. “They’re dry this time of year.”

“It’s good land,” said the emperor. “I’d like to turn it into farms. A fire would spoil my prize.”

And kill the plainspeople, Kestrel thought, though this was a factor no one raised. The plains were vast, and north enough in Dacra that it didn’t rain much there this time of year. Valorian soliders would set the fire while the plainspeople slept. They would wake, and they would flee to the river, if they could make it. But a fire would rage fast and fierce through the dry grasses, and by the time the plainspeople woke it would likely be too late. They’d be burned alive.

There was some debate about whether a fire might endanger Valorian troops. But if not, it would be a significant victory, argued the Senate leader. The plains lay north of the delta where the eastern queen ruled. If Valoria captured the plains, it would squeeze the savages into the southeastern corner of the continent. “And then it’s only a matter of time,” said the emperor, “before Valoria rules the entire continent.”

“Then burn the grasses,” said the senator who had been in the military. “Fire is good for the earth anyway. Eventually.”

Kestrel watched Risha knock over one of Verex’s pieces, an unimportant one. Risha shivered in her furs. It was never cold in the east. Did this knowledge live in Risha’s memory, or had it been given to her as it had been to Kestrel, as a piece of someone else’s information? The princess was young when she’d been captured, as young as Kestrel when her family had moved from the capital to the newly conquered territory of Herran. Maybe Risha didn’t remember her home at all.

Kestrel saw Herran, and her garden there, and seeds beneath her childhood fingers as her nurse pressed them into the soft earth.

She saw a plain of fire. Flames waving and snapping, horses running wild, tents burned to their frames, then crackling down. Parents would snatch up their children. The air would choke hot and black.

“Kestrel?” said the emperor. “What do you think? Your father wrote that you’ve advised him well on the east before.”

She blinked. The sky was white over the Winter Garden. The trees dripped their deadly berries. “Poison the horses.”

The emperor smiled. “Intriguing. Tell me more.”