The Winner's Crime(48)

Laughter.

“To Lady Kestrel.” The senator raised his cup.

“To Lady Kestrel!”

*

Kestrel had stood to leave the table and find Arin when she heard the cheer.

Had she been recognized?

No one was looking at the maid in the corner. Still, Kestrel grew even more anxious.

She couldn’t see Arin. He was lost in the swarm of people by the bar.

Or had he left the tavern entirely? Had she offended him that much?

Kestrel was reassuring herself that Arin wouldn’t leave their game unfinished, when he emerged from the crowd empty-handed.

He dragged his chair back from the table.

“Arin … what I said earlier, about the wound—”

“I don’t want to talk about that.” He sat, and repositioned his tiles.

“But I need to tell you. Arin, your face—”

“I don’t care about my face!”

Kestrel shut her mouth. Arin refused to look up at her. With a nauseating dread that she didn’t yet understand, she sank into her chair. “Why were those senators drinking to me?”

He didn’t answer.

“Do you know why?”

Arin met her gaze with an unflinching stare. “Play.”

“You’ve no glass after all.” She poured wine into her own. She spilled a few drops. She wiped them away with her thumb, rubbing hard at the glass, and offered it to him. He ignored her.

So Kestrel played, and watched Arin toss down tiles and claim others. She felt the pulse of his fury. It was worse than when he’d left the table. It had grown fierce, practically solid. It was the kind of anger that comes close to trembling. The game slipped from Kestrel’s control.

In the end, she welcomed the loss. She would tell Arin the truth. She swore to herself that she would. Everything could be explained. She was afraid of it, afraid of the anger in him now, and of what he would do with the truth. But she would give it to him. She could no longer bear not to.

Arin said, “Did you tell the general to poison the horses of the eastern plainspeople?”

“What?”

“Did you?”

“Yes,” she said haltingly, “but—”

“Do you realize what you’ve done? Hundreds of people—innocent people—died in the exodus to the queen’s city.”

“I know. It was a horrible thing—”

“Horrible? Children starved while their mothers wept. There are no words for that.”

Guilt swelled in her throat. “I can explain.”

“How do you explain murder?”

“How do you?” she said with a flash of her own anger. “People died because of you, too, Arin. You have killed. Your hands aren’t clean. The Firstwinter Rebellion—”

“This is not the same.”

He seemed to choke on his words, and Kestrel was appalled at how everything she said went so wrong. “I meant that you had your reasons.”

“I can’t even speak of my reasons. I can’t believe that you’d bring them up, that you would compare…” His voice shook, then dropped low. “Kestrel. The empire’s only reason is dominion. And you have helped.”

“I had no choice. My father would’ve—”

“Thought you weak? Disowned you for not being his warrior girl, ready with the perfect plan of attack? Your father.” Arin’s mouth curled. “I know you want his approval. I know that you’d marry the prince to get it. But your father’s hands run with blood. He is a monster. What kind of person feeds a monster? What kind of person loves one?”

“Arin, you’re not listening. You’re not thinking clearly.”

“You’re right. I haven’t been thinking clearly, not for a long time. But I understand now.” Arin pushed his tiles away. His winning hand scattered out of line. “You have changed, Kestrel. I don’t know who you are anymore. And I don’t want to.”

Later, when Kestrel remembered this moment, she said the right things. In her imagination, he understood.

But that was not what happened.

Arin’s anger curdled into disgust. He was sick with it. She could tell. She could tell from the swift way he stood, as if escaping contamination. She saw it in the set of his shoulders when he turned his back, even as she called to him. Arin walked away. He let the tavern door slam behind him.

*

It was silent in the palace gallery. Bones must be silent like this, Kestrel thought, when they lay deep in the earth.

She stood in front of Tensen’s painting longer than she actually looked at it. Finally, she set a moth on its frame. She told herself the kind of lie that knows itself for what it is. Kestrel decided that it was better that Arin think this way of her.

Yes. It had all been for the best.





21

“And what,” said the emperor, “is so urgent that you must return to Herran now?”

“My duty to you, Your Imperial Majesty,” said Arin.

“He speaks so handsomely,” the emperor said to the court, and the senators and lords and ladies hid their smirks in a way that showed them all the more. There was no longer anything handsome about the governor of Herran.

Risha didn’t smile. From across the room, Arin caught the easterner’s gaze: somber and steady.