The Winner's Crime(50)

How different she was, Arin thought as he walked away. His mouth was tight and tasted metallic, as if he’d bitten his tongue.

How different Risha was from Kestrel.

*

A fish thrashed against the board. Kestrel saw the fishmonger bring the mallet down hard. She flinched, though she knew that a palace maid wouldn’t be bothered by this sight. A maid wouldn’t glance twice at the pink slush of frozen blood at the base of the stalls in the Butcher’s Row. A palace maid wouldn’t stare at the slick organs in the gutter and realize that she’d never seen the inside of a chicken, or paid any thought to it.

Kestrel made herself look hard at the slurry that ran down the Row. When her throat closed up, there was a reason right before her. It was there in the disgusting street. It was on the damp wood of the fishmonger’s mallet. It wasn’t in the Broken Arm tavern last night, or in Arin’s wounded face turning away from her. It wasn’t in what she’d done to deserve it.

She pulled the sailor’s coat tight around her, and lifted the blue-and-white hem of her work dress as she walked down the Row.

A little Valorian girl ran ahead of her, braided ropes of white-blond hair bouncing against her shoulders. The girl gripped a cloth doll by the arm. Something about the doll caught Kestrel’s eye, and she wasn’t sure why until the child caught up to her mother and begged for another toy the woman carried in her basket. It was a boy doll dressed in black. Then Kestrel noticed the golden thread stitched across the girl doll’s brow and realized who these toys were supposed to be.

Kestrel pushed past the girl and her mother. She tried to forget the doll. She looked for Tensen.

She found him inspecting a gutted suckling pig that hung from a hook in a stall. “Oh, good,” he said when he saw Kestrel. “Just in time. I might have had to buy a pig to keep up appearances, and who knows how I would have smuggled that back into my rooms.”


They merged into the crowd of shoppers—servants, mostly, sent to get the morning meat while it was fresh. Kestrel and Tensen worked their way to the end of the line of stalls and up the slope of a hill, where there were few people.

“The Senate leader has been to southern Herran,” Kestrel told him. “I can think of only one reason. The emperor asked him to inspect the hearthnut harvest and gauge how large the crop will be. The emperor must plan to take it all from Herran. He’ll know if you try to hold back any for yourselves.”

Tensen looked older in the outside light, his wrinkles deeper, his eyes nearly lashless. “This will mean famine.”

Slowly, Kestrel said, “I have an idea.”

Tensen waited. When she remained silent, he raised his brows.

“It might not be a good idea,” she said.

“It must be better than nothing.”

“I’m not so sure.” She thought of the horses of the eastern plains. She heard Arin saying murder. That word had raked claws through his voice. It had sunk them deep into her.

Tensen placed one hand on her shoulder. For all that his hand was light while the general’s was heavy, the gesture reminded Kestrel of her father. “You could harvest the crop early and hide it,” she told Tensen, “but leave some hearthnuts on the trees. Then infect them. Choose your favorite pest. Gull wasp, beetles, caterpillars … whatever will breed quickly. When the emperor asks for the crop, it won’t be your fault if you’ve nothing to give him.” Tensen’s smile warmed. Kestrel wondered what her father’s father had been like, or her mother’s, and whether if she had had a grandfather, he would look at her like this. “If the emperor believes you’re lying, he can see the wasted fields for himself. But … it might ruin the trees. You might starve next year when nothing but worms grow in your fields.”

“We’ll worry about next year if we come to it,” said Tensen. He squinted at a few pinpricks of snow. They were just starting to come down. “Arin’s been pressing me to say who provided the information about poor Thrynne.”

Her heart jumped. “What did you tell him? You can’t tell him it was me. You promised.”

“Don’t worry. We both know what it means to lie for the right reasons. I won’t share your secret. I insisted on my informant’s anonymity. I called her the Moth. That doesn’t bother you, does it? Being named after a lowly household pest?”

The corner of Kestrel’s mouth lifted. “I don’t mind being a moth. I would probably start eating silk if it meant that I could fly.”

*

The sleeve’s cuff had finally frayed. Arin pitched the shirt into the trunk. He unstrapped the sheathed dagger, whose almost slight weight made him uneasy. He didn’t like to have Kestrel’s dagger on him. But he also didn’t like the idea of packing it away, or leaving it behind. He glanced back at the openmouthed trunk. The unraveling shirt rested on top of its contents.

Arin set the dagger aside. He reached for the shirt again and tugged on a thread. It spun free, a spider’s line that Arin wrapped around one finger until it cut off the circulation. He gave a sharp yank. The thread broke from the shirt. He stared at it.

It was crazy, the thought that a simple string could help Herran. But Arin left his rooms, sought Deliah, and asked her for spools of thread in many colors.

*

“You smell like fish,” Arin told Tensen when the minister entered the suite.