The Winner's Crime(39)

She hugged her arms to her chest. She had entered a darker quarter of the city. Streetlamps were few. Soon there were none. Kestrel took any street that went down, for that was the way to the sea. The streets became a network of alleys: the Narrows.

She sidestepped a cat that streaked into the shadows. The cold was loud here. It rang off the jam-packed buildings. It shattered with noise tumbling from the flung-open door of a tavern. Kestrel saw its sign, which showed a broken arm, and watched as a man with the looks of a Valorian aristocrat stumbled outside the tavern and was sick in the street. He lifted his head, wiped his mouth, and blearily stared at Kestrel without really seeing her.

Then he squinted. His gaze was fuzzy, but gaining focus. “Do I know you?” he said.

Kestrel hurried away.

*

“You don’t look so good,” the bookkeeper said. She had her hands stuffed in her trouser pockets and her boots up on the table. She studied Arin over the steel-toed tops of them.

It was early for the Broken Arm to be this lively. But a ship had come in, and its sailors were already drunk. In a corner, Valorian soldiers argued over a game of Bite and Sting.

The bookkeeper, however, was calm—tipped back serenely in her chair, surveying the scene, smoking, waiting. People came to her.

“Want to place a bet?” she asked Arin. About his age or a bit older, the bookkeeper was only part Valorian. Her loose hair was a color that turned up sometimes in Valorians, who called it “warrior red,” but her flat black eyes and light brown skin hinted at a northern heritage.

Arin smiled. The smile tugged painfully at his stitches. “What I want,” he said, “is a word.”

“Just that? You strike me as the type to want more than what’s good for him. That mark on your face is fresh.”

“I want to see the bets.”

She exhaled a cloud of smoke. “I was right. You are a mad one. No one sees the bets … unless they ask very nicely.”

“I can be nice.”

She nodded at the empty chair beside her.

Arin sat. “I can share information.”

She shrugged. “I’ve got no call to trust it.”

“I could work for you.”

“What I need you can’t give. I’m a one-woman business. I’ve got thugs, sure, to remind people when they need to pay up. You’d fit that part. But—no offense—that’s not worth what you’re asking.”

Arin hesitated, then reached into his pocket. He opened his hand. On his palm lay an emerald earring, its stone the size of a bird’s egg. It had been his mother’s.

“Would this do?” he said.

*

Kestrel’s delight in the cold wore off around the time she reached the wharf. She’d worn as many layers as would fit under the work dress, but she shivered as she neared the harbormaster’s house. Rocks and oyster shells crunched beneath her boots.

The house’s entrance faced the sea and its torchlit promenade. Kestrel kept to the building’s back and the shadows gathered there. She heard sailors joke as they entered the house to leave their names with the harbormaster, who recorded them in his ledger. He noted everything that entered and left the harbor—sailors, come ashore for leave in the city, and ships that docked. He wrote down the ships’ point of origin and the goods they carried.

In his ledger should be written what Kestrel needed to know about the Senate leader’s ship. He’d brought back no luxuries from his voyage to the southern isles for his daughter. Perhaps he had felt stingy, or angry with Maris … or his ship had brought back no such luxuries at all—which was strange indeed, since usually the sole purpose of a trip to the isles was for their goods.

What if the Senate leader hadn’t been to the isles? He could have traveled elsewhere, to another place where the sun shone hot even in winter, hot enough to tan his skin. What if he’d gone to the very southern tip of the Herran peninsula, where hearthnut trees grew? She remembered Arin’s anxiety over the harvest, and how much of it the emperor would seize. Maybe the Senate leader had been secretly estimating the crop’s worth.

Kestrel waited until the sailors left the house and took the curve of the promenade that led up into the city. Then she reached for a rock encrusted with tiny shells, weighed it in her hand, and broke a back window of the harbormaster’s house.

A thump came from inside the house: a chair, tilted back, had been dropped down on all four legs.

The sound of heavy boots. A sea-weathered door whining on its hinges. Feet on rocks, crunching closer.

Kestrel could be sure his dagger was drawn. Hers was, too. She’d chosen the plainest scabbard she owned and had wrapped the dagger’s jeweled pommel with a scarf, but she still seemed to see the diamonds’ sharp eyes through the cloth.

The harbormaster rounded the back corner of the house. He was large—a former soldier, like all harbormasters. He held a sword, not a dagger. He didn’t see her yet.

If Kestrel played this wrong, she was likely to lose. A fight with this man could mean death … or arrest. She would be brought before the emperor.

She would be asked to explain.

The freezing sea was in Kestrel’s blood. Her veins ran with it.

She grabbed another rock and pitched it into the shadows. It hit farther up the beach.

The harbormaster instinctively turned to see what had made that sound.