The Winner's Crime(30)

Her father had never feared the emperor, so Kestrel told herself that neither should she. This was why, in full view of a crush of guests milling about the statues and paintings, Kestrel made her way toward Tensen.

A few amused eyebrows were raised—Can’t seem to keep away from the Herrani, can she? Kestrel practically heard—but the emperor’s back was to her for now, and she would need only a few moments. She slipped a hand into her dress pocket.

Tensen stood before a landscape stolen from the southern isles. Arin wasn’t with him. He was late. Perhaps he wouldn’t come at all, given their last conversation.

The painting of Tensen’s choice showed bleachfields, where fabric had been stretched out to whiten in the sun, and crops of indigo flowers grown for dye. “Lady Kestrel,” Tensen began, pleased, but she cut him off.

“I see you appreciate a fine landscape,” she said. “Did you know that these flowers are painted with actual indigo? They represent the thing and are the thing at the same time.” Kestrel began to talk, long and loud, about art. She watched as nearby courtiers, once interested in eavesdropping on this conversation, grew bored and turned away. Kestrel let her voice gradually lower as Tensen waited, green eyes curious—and bright with cautious hope. Even if he’d never seen the note Arin had stolen, it couldn’t be hard for him to guess that Kestrel wanted to discuss more than art.

She removed her hand from her pocket. “Such exquisite detail,” she said, pointing. “Look, you can practically see each petal.” With a brush of her fingers, she set a dead masker moth at the bottom edge of the painting where it met the frame. The moth clung. It deepened to purple. It became part of the painting.

Tensen looked at the moth, then looked at her.

Quietly, she said, “I will find out whatever it was that Thrynne overheard. And when I do, I will leave another moth here for you. Come to the gallery every morning. Develop a fondness for this painting. Look for the moth. That’s how you will know to meet me.”

“Where?”

“Outside the palace.” But her knowledge of the city was meager, and she wasn’t sure how to be more specific.

“There’s a tavern in town that serves Herrani—”

“Then they serve the captain of the guard’s spies, too. The emperor must know what you are, Tensen. He does nothing to get in your way at the moment because he’s waiting to see what you know and what you’ll do with it.” Kestrel glanced again at the emperor. Prince Verex had approached him and was saying something heated, his face flushed. The emperor’s profile showed sardonic boredom.

“Then where?” asked Tensen.

Kestrel watched the emperor take a glass of wine from a servant who then faded into the background as if she, too, were a masker moth. No one looks at a slave, Arin had said. This gave Kestrel an idea. “How is fresh food brought into the palace?”

“The kitchen staff buys it in the city market, from the grocers’ stalls and the Butcher’s Row.”

“Yes. There. We’ll meet in the Row. If you dress as a servant, no one will give you a second glance.”

“The prince’s bride is bound to draw more than a few stares.”

“Let me worry about myself.” She was anxious to sort out the trickier detail of meeting: when. “Look.” She pointed to the bottom edge of the painting’s frame and explained how he was to imagine the line was the rim of a clock’s face straightened, and that time moved along the frame from dawn to dusk. Where the moth rested would indicate the hour of their meeting the following day.

“What if someone else notices the moth?” Tensen asked.

“It’s just a moth. A common pest. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“A servant might find it before I do and sweep it away.”

“Then that’s what I’ll assume has happened, if I don’t see you in the Row at the appointed hour. Really, Tensen. Do you want my help or not?” She understood his doubt, yet it rankled, and bothered her all the more because she had the uneasy feeling of playing a doomed game. The winner knows her whole line of play. But Kestrel saw only one move, and maybe the next.

Verex was getting louder. Kestrel couldn’t hear what he was saying to the emperor, but heads were starting to turn even before Verex stormed from the gallery.

“Rumor has it that the prince doesn’t approve of what’s happening in the east,” Tensen murmured.

Kestrel didn’t want to think about the east.

“Slaves say that the eastern princess is like a sister to Verex,” Tensen added. “They were raised together—at first—after her kidnapping.”

Kestrel’s eyes automatically sought Risha then, and when she saw her, standing at the other end of the long hall, Kestrel’s blood seemed to pale. She felt her pulse quiet. Kestrel imagined the blood it pushed through her body growing pink, then clear. Thin, trickling water.

It wasn’t Risha that made Kestrel go cold, or the tiny eastern painting the princess gazed at as if it were hung on the moon. Kestrel told herself it wasn’t the clear loss on Risha’s face.

But there was nothing else in this gallery that could strike Kestrel with such guilt.

“There’s been a Valorian victory in the eastern plains,” Tensen said. “Have you heard? No? Well, you’ve been ill. Your father poisoned the tribes’ horses and seized the plains. It was swift.”