The Winner's Crime(42)

*

A water engineer. Arin took a skinny set of stairs that led up out of the Narrows. At the top, he turned to look down at the city. Lamplights scattered over the darkness: jewels across a black velvet lap.

To Arin, the bets about the wedding dress were clear. Though Tensen had doubted him, Arin had been right: the Senate leader was being paid with lucrative information. He had done the emperor a favor. But what?

And if the water engineer had been paid in kind, what had she done?

Arin heard the sound of rushing water. The river.

There was a canal, he remembered, where the river thinned and gentled. A series of locks, crafted by the water engineer herself.

Arin found the river and followed it.

*

Kestrel stopped at the sight of the locks. At first, she marveled at their design, at the way a series of gates could open or close to raise or lower the water level so that a barge could deliver its goods.

Such an invention. What a sharp mind had made these.

*

When Arin came to the locks, someone else was there. A palace maid, her back to him. She was Valorian; through the faint light of a far-off lamp, he could see the white-trimmed hem of her blue skirt peeking out from beneath a large coat. Her hair was covered with a work scarf. She was all shadow, a small huddle of it.

Somehow his heart caught at the sight. The boy he had been, the one that Arin caught glimpses of sometimes in the mirror, spoke up shyly within him to say lonely. He said beautiful.

But this was not a painting. This was a person. This was a Valorian stranger he wanted no part of, with her palace dress that reminded Arin of everything the empire had cost him.

He told that boy to go away.

Arin kept walking. He followed the canal until it curved. Even if he looked back, he would no longer be able to see the maid.

*

The more Kestrel stared at the locks, the more she began to feel like that river. She sensed her staggered self. The things pent up behind the floodgates. The iron lies she herself had swung into place and locked tight.

Kestrel heard footsteps: another late-night wanderer. They slowed, but didn’t stop. They carried on, became faraway echoes, then gone.

She, too, should leave. Kestrel couldn’t avoid the palace forever.

*

Something made Arin turn back. The hand of a god? He couldn’t say. But his feet were retracing their steps before he even realized it. His body was alight, alive, insistent.

Arin’s mind buzzed with the puzzle of it even as he quickened his pace. Why did he feel the urge to return? There was no great mystery in a palace maid standing alone by the canal. There was nothing more to see.

But:

Hurry, said his feet.

Hurry, said his heart.

The maid, however, had gone.

*

He kept searching. As the canal expanded into the river and a bridge arched its back in the gloom, he remembered the maid’s shoes: black dueling boots. Why would a maid wear boots that were part of the ceremonial garb for a Valorian duel?

Unless she had nothing more practical to wear. Arin had a very strange image of a faceless maid sorting through piles of glamorous shoes for a comfortable pair.

Why would he think that?

Her dagger, too, hadn’t been quite right. It wasn’t unusual for a maid to wear one—all Valorians did—but they didn’t wrap their hilts with cloth. That changed the grip. Arin couldn’t think of any reason that someone would cover a hilt like this … unless it needed to be hidden.

He was running now. Sweat stung the cut on his face.

Although he hadn’t seen the maid’s hands, he kept imagining a memory of them.

He saw pale, lithe fingers. He remembered them reaching for his own. He felt them slide under his shirt, over his skin. He saw them strike music from black and white keys, storm down, then quiet the melody, lull it, and trick it into dreams.

When Arin truly did see the girl’s hand in the darkness, resting on a railing near the bridge, he thought it was a phantom of his imagination. The maid’s fingers rippled along the railing. They played an unheard song.

He knew that gesture.

He knew that hand.

Arin slowed. She was lost in thought. She didn’t hear him coming, or if she did it didn’t matter to her. The river mattered. The music in her head mattered. She stared into the dark.

Arin was quiet as he came close, quiet when he said her name, and quiet when he touched her cold, bare hand. He touched her little black star of a birthmark, near the base of her thumb.

He didn’t want to startle her. At first, he thought he hadn’t. He felt the stillness in her before she turned to look at him. He felt the recognition. But when Kestrel finally glanced up at Arin, she recoiled as if she didn’t know him. She snatched her hand from his and lifted it—to ward him off, he thought. To block the very sight of him.

He’d frightened her after all. There was a cry on her lips. Horror in her eyes.

A monster stood before her. Arin remembered that now.

The monster was him.





19

Kestrel saw Arin flinch away, hard, from the hand she’d lifted to touch him. It fell as if burned.

She seemed to feel the knife that had done this to him. It went into her. It hit something vital, and she hunched inside herself. Shock made it impossible to speak. Pain scooped the air from her throat.

Arin’s fingers touched the two seams that cut a long broken slash down the left side of his face.