The Winner's Crime(49)

“I’m not sure what to think about this request for my permission for you to leave,” the emperor said. “Governor, have you been … treated badly here?”

Arin smiled with the cut side of his face. “Not at all.”

The courtiers whispered delightedly. It was as good as a play. The disfigured face. The emperor’s slippery mockery. The pretense that nothing was wrong.

“What if we enjoy having you at court?” said the emperor.

Arin stepped more fully into the light. He saw, as if outside himself, the way he stood before the emperor in this echoing state room. Arin hadn’t slept since he’d left Kestrel in the city the night before, but he felt extremely lucid. He knew how the morning sun caught the dust motes around him. It cast a harsh glare on his slashed face. It picked out the frayed threads of his clothes. And it paused, lingering, over the dagger strapped to his hip, and the way Arin’s hand was curled around the hilt and covered its seal. The blade was unsheathed. It had two cutting edges. The crossguard was short, meant to protect a much smaller hand than Arin’s, and was hooked in the Valorian style. Everything about the dagger was Valorian.

The courtiers buzzed.

His face.

Who did it?

That blade.

Whose is it?

That’s a lady’s dagger. How did he get it?

Stole it, maybe.

Or … could it have been a gift?

Arin almost heard the whispered words.

“Your welcome has been so much more than I could expect,” Arin said. The emperor smiled a little. His eyes didn’t leave Arin’s hand on the dagger’s hilt. Arin was glad. He thought that the emperor was quite pleased with his son’s engagement to the military’s favorite daughter. The marriage would make General Trajan part of the imperial family … and would renew the soldiers’ loyalty to the emperor.

But there were those rumors. Even the minting of an engagement coin hadn’t laid them to rest. It was the first time that Arin thought of the rumors about him and Kestrel coldly. He thought about them as something he could use. Yes, Arin bargained that if he lifted his hand to reveal the hilt and seal of Kestrel’s dagger, it would be recognized. Courtiers would gasp.

Arin could make rumor look real.

A Valorian always wore her dagger, except in the bath or bed. Whether the courtiers judged it a theft or gift, they would think very hard about how close Arin must have been to Kestrel in order to take her blade.

“As much as I would dearly love to stay,” Arin said, “if I’m to govern your territory in a way that will please you, I must return to it.”

“A serious young man, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Arin shifted his grip on the hilt—not so much as to reveal the seal, but to show that he would.

The emperor didn’t like that. Neither would Kestrel if she were here, or Tensen, who had gone to his beloved gallery at dawn and was probably there still. The minister wouldn’t like anything at all about what Arin was doing. Blackmail the emperor? In front of the court?

Arin wasn’t supposed to be in possession of that dagger. He was supposed to be dead, or mutilated beyond recognition. Or both. It felt good to remind the emperor of his mistake. It felt good to threaten him with having to explain to the court why the dagger of his son’s bride was strapped to another man’s hip.

“Am I free to go?” Arin asked.

“My dear governor, what a question! We’ll miss you, of course, but we would not hold you here.”

Arin thought that he was going to leave the state room without any mention made of the prickling red-and-black wound that crawled down his face. But the emperor said sweetly, “Those are very neat seams,” and then Arin was dismissed.

*

“Fair tides to you,” called a voice behind him in the empty hallway outside the state room.

Arin turned and saw Risha. Her words had a warm but stilted quality that suggested that her farewell was an eastern one, translated into Valorian.

“I’m glad to see you go,” Risha said. “You don’t belong here. People who don’t belong pay for it.”

Arin instinctively touched his cut cheek and winced. Then he grit his teeth. His face wasn’t his face anymore, but so what? Maybe it suited him. Maybe Arin had been too soft, too trusting, too baby-skinned, too much like that boy he’d been before the war, the one who had made him turn back to find Kestrel standing by the moonlit canal.

Arin was glad that boy was gone. He was glad to be someone new.

“I don’t know how you bear it,” he told Risha in Valorian. The words came slow and heavy. He hated the feel of that language on his tongue.

Risha frowned. “Bear what? Living in the imperial court?” She shook her head. “My place is here.”

It was dangerous to mention Tensen, or the information Arin’s spymaster had suggested Risha might give them. They were alone for now, but the state room doors could open at any time. Quickly, in his own language, Arin said, “Thank you.”

A look of confusion crossed Risha’s face. “I don’t speak Herrani,” she reminded him in Valorian.

Arin might have said more, but then the state room doors did open. The court began to file out and look at them. He turned away. He left with his unsaid words burning inside him. Thank you, he wanted to say again, with wonder at the thought that Risha would risk herself for a people not her own.