The Winner's Crime(29)

Kestrel had risen from her seat.

“Then I will be silent,” Arin said, “and you will stir your tea. You will drink and I will drink. There. Is that how it will be?”

Kestrel was light-headed. “Go away,” she whispered, though she was the one standing. Arin didn’t move from the table. He stared up at her, jawline tight, and she didn’t understand how it could still be there in his face: that hard expectation, that angry faith. Don’t fail me, his eyes said. Don’t fail yourself.

She quit the table.

“You’re better than this,” he called after her. A librarian stepped from the stacks to shush him. Kestrel walked away.

He said, “How can the inconsequence of your life not shame you?”

He said, “How do you not feel empty?”

I do, she thought as she pushed through the library doors and let them thud behind her. I do.

*

Kestrel was shaking when she sat down in front of her dressing table. Curse Tensen. Curse him for not collecting his own letters, or for sleeping in late while Arin had riffled through them. She’d been discreet in what she had written—this was the imperial court, and the only secrets put down on paper were meant to become gossip—but what if she hadn’t been?

She’d better reconsider her plan. Tensen couldn’t be trusted to keep Arin in check. She was a fool even to consider becoming the minister of agriculture’s new spy. What kind of spymaster allows his letters to be read?

Then again, what kind of would-be spy stamps a letter with her own seal? What a stupid mistake.

Kestrel looked at the bottles on her dressing table and imagined how it would sound if she sent the whole lot of them crashing to the stone floor. A great, glorious smash. But a moment passed, then another, and she calmed, reaching carefully for a pot set back behind the others.

Kestrel seemed to see the pot in her hand as if it were far away.

You’re better than this, Arin had said.

Her fingers tightened around the pot. She brought it close. She smiled a hard smile, one as thin as the glass beneath her nails.

The masker moth larvae had cocooned. There were bulging, pellet-like cases all over the silk.

Kestrel returned the pot to its place. She would wait for the moths to hatch. It wouldn’t take long. Then she would make her move.

*

She pled a minor illness: a cold caught from sitting too long in the Winter Garden after the ball. Verex didn’t visit, but sent a kind note along with a vial of medicine.

The emperor sent no word.

Kestrel wrote to Jess: a teasing letter filled with merry turns of phrase that chided Jess for abandoning her in her hour of need. There were too many parties, too many boring people. Jess had left her defenseless.

I need my friend, Kestrel wrote. Then she saw the anxiety in her spiky cursive. Kestrel felt the nibbling fear that she had been abandoned, that she had unknowingly offended Jess.

I saw him, Jess had said. She had seen Arin at the ball.

But then she’d clung to Kestrel’s hand in the dark. Jess wouldn’t have done that, surely, had she guessed what Arin and Kestrel had been doing while the dancers danced?

Maybe the sight of Arin had frightened Jess. Kestrel couldn’t blame her. Jess had witnessed things Kestrel hadn’t the night of the Firstwinter Rebellion. And Jess knew they were Arin’s doing.

Kestrel blacked out her last line of writing.

I miss you, little sister, she wrote instead.

Jess’s reply was slow in coming. It was short. Jess was tired, the letter explained, her health worse than thought. By the time you receive this, we will have left for the south again, Jess wrote. The entire family would go. Jess was sorry.

It was an explanation of sorts. But Kestrel found herself rereading the letter in her empty receiving room, searching for signs of love as if it could be captured in a double-dotted i, or in the decorative slash through the last word of Jess’s last sentence. The paper in Kestrel’s hand felt thin.

Uneasy, Kestrel crumbled the letter’s wax seal between her fingers. She tried not to think about how she hadn’t even been able to see Jess one more time. She tried not to think about how the empty room felt suddenly emptier.

*

Kestrel kept to parts of her suite that were unquestionably private: her bedchamber and dressing room. And one day, even though she couldn’t have possibly heard the flutter of such small wings, Kestrel lifted her head, came quickly to the dressing table, and cleared a path through the bottles to see masker moths hatching in their pot. Some were struggling out of cocoons. Others clung to the glass, their wings clear, or they clustered upside down on the bottom of the cork and turned a stippled light brown.

Kestrel lit a candle. When the moths had all hatched and the candle had burned down, Kestrel poured molten wax over the stopper of the moths’ pot. She sealed it thoroughly, so that no air would leak into the pot.

It took a day for the moths to die. Afterward, Kestrel announced to her maids that she felt much better.





12

There was a reception in the palace gallery. Everyone was invited to admire the emperor’s collection of stolen art. Kestrel’s father had once told her that the military had a standing order to spare art during the sack of a city. “He didn’t like that I razed the Herrani palace when we invaded.” The general had shrugged. “But it had been the right military move.”