The Winner's Crime(52)

“Only at myself.” Arin’s hand shifted to pinch the bridge of his nose, his thumb digging into the corner of his closed left eye. He ignored how it made the scratched eyelid smart. He wanted that image of Kestrel to go away. “It’s stupid.” Arin felt worn out. He’d been ill, hadn’t slept. His body was very heavy.

“Gods, Arin, sit down. You look ready to fall asleep on your feet.”

Yes, the tired mind plays tricks. Arin knew that. His hand dropped from his face. He found a chair, sat, and felt better. More focused. “I went into the city last night,” he told Tensen. “I asked the bookkeeper about bets on the wedding dress. The chief palace engineer knows how to play the odds.”

Tensen listened to Arin explain what he had learned from the bookkeeper. “So if the emperor paid the senator for his secret trip to Herran with a golden bet,” Tensen said, “it’s possible that the water engineer is profiting from some similar favor.”

“Look into it.”

“I will, but what would you have me do with what I learn? Sending a message to you in the eastern queen’s city is impossible.”

“There’s the temple island,” Arin said. Dacrans worshipped one god, and since all were free to worship her, foreigners were allowed to dock at a holy island off the country’s southern coast. It was a great center of trade. “You can send a message there.”

“Even so, we’d risk the message falling into unfriendly hands. Messenger hawks can be captured, codes broken—”

“First someone would have to realize he’s looking at a code.” Arin produced the sack of spooled threads. “Do you remember Favor-Keeping?”

The hours lengthened. The time for the midday meal came and went, and Arin and Tensen ignored their gnawing hunger as they sorted out the threaded code, how each color would represent a person, as did the Favor-Keeper’s ball of strings throughout the years of slavery. Arin tied a different number of knots for each letter of the Herrani alphabet. He braided meaning into the way one color would cross another, and in the end he held something that looked like a piece of trim that could be sewn on the cuff of a sleeve and worn openly. A new fashion. To most eyes, it would look like nothing more than decoration.

Black was the emperor. Yellow, the prince. Tensen chose green for himself. “Here.” Arin had handed him the spool of gray. “For your Moth.” He added, “For Risha.”

Tensen smiled.

It wasn’t until they had assigned a color for almost every key courtier that Tensen said slowly in a way Arin would remember, “Don’t you want a thread for Lady Kestrel?”

“No. I don’t.”

*

From Kestrel’s windows that day, she saw banners on the barbican rise and blow toward the sea with a wind that must have been warm. A fine rain—not snow—blurred the view. Firstspring would come sooner than Kestrel wanted. Then Firstsummer, and the wedding.

Alone, she shook dead masker moths from their envelope of paper onto a mosaic marble table. She’d given half of her moths to Tensen in the market, in case he wanted to leave one for her on the painting in the gallery.

Kestrel watched moths change to match the mosaic. Then she pushed one with a delicate finger and watched it change again.

She felt a surge of anger at the moths for hiding so well. She resisted an urge to crush them.

Couldn’t she try to explain herself to Arin? Last night, Kestrel had been ready to tell him everything. She still could.

Uncertain, Kestrel swept the moths back into their packet.

Deliah came. Kestrel had forgotten that she was supposed to be fitted for a day dress. The Herrani woman pinned around her. Kestrel watched the window mist with rain.

Deliah paused in her pinning. “I think you should know that Arin left today. He sailed when the wind rose.”

Kestrel’s gaze flinched away. She looked again toward the window as if she would be able to see the harbor, and beyond that, the waves, and on the waves, a ship. But all Kestrel saw were the battlements of the palace. The rain had stopped. It had lifted its gray veil. The sky was clean now, and brutally clear.





22

Young courtiers were making kites for the city’s war orphans. Waxed black parchment was glued to stick frames and painted with the golden eyes and feathers of birds of prey. Kestrel and Verex would bring them to the orphanage on Firstspring.

In the large solarium, which had been added to the palace after the Herrani invasion as if the emperor had seized the whole history of Herrani architecture along with its country, Kestrel made a paper chain for a kite’s tail. At other tables, courtiers talked quietly. Kestrel sat alone. Her fingers moved quickly, but she felt as if someone else was making them move, and that she was no more than that cloth doll she’d seen carried through the crowd of the Butcher’s Row.

Kestrel thought of visiting the children. She thought of telling them how their parents had brought honor to the empire. She thought of a ship sailing far away from her.

Her fingers stopped. Her throat closed. Kestrel summoned a new set of paints. She began to cover her kites with swirls of green and blue and pink.

Kestrel heard a rustle of silk as a woman claimed a nearby chair.

“Very pretty,” Maris commented. “But not military colors.”

Kestrel dipped her brush in a jar of water, rang it noisily around, and then set it in a pot of violet. “They’re children, not soldiers.”