The Winner's Crime(54)

When Verex saw Kestrel, he almost looked like an animal himself, cornered and wary. “Don’t say it,” he told her.

“Say what?”

“Whatever you’re going to say.”

She leaned over the barrier of the wooden pen. “Will you show me how to do that?”

The hand holding the rag lifted in surprise. Milk dripped onto the puppy.

Kestrel entered the pen, sat next to Verex on the straw, and held out a cupped hand.

“No.” He brought her left palm up to meet her right and form a bowl. “Like this.” He eased the little animal into her hands. It was a yielding warmth, soft and boneless. Its whole body moved with its breath. Kestrel wondered if she’d been like this, as a baby in her father’s arms, and if he had been quieted and comforted to hold her as she held this creature.

“It’s a runt,” Verex said. “Its mother won’t nurse it.” He showed her how to nudge the milk rag into the puppy’s mouth.

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

The prince fiddled with a bit of straw. “Oh, I figured it out. It’s not hard to guess what my father holds over you.” He caught her startled look. “Not when you know him like I do. He’d have this hound’s neck snapped even if its dam nursed it after all. He doesn’t like weaklings. But he loves to discover a weakness. And now your governor is gone.”

She kept her blurred eyes on the puppy. “That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I wanted to say.”

“But it’s the truth. You love him. That’s your weakness. One way or another, it’s why you agreed to marry me.”

Kestrel smoothed a thumb over the soft flip of one tiny ear. She looked at the puppy, blind and asleep even while sucking at the milk.

Verex said, “No one likes to be used.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to use you.”

“Honestly, I expect to be used. This is the court. I never thought … well, I’m my father’s son, aren’t I? Of course my marriage would be arranged. Of course I wouldn’t get to choose. I know that I’ve been angry. I know that I am, and that it eats at me, but … I would have understood, Kestrel, about the engagement. I understand you now. You could have told me why.”

“Do you think that why really matters?”

“Don’t you?”

“Verex, I’ve done something horrible.” The puppy’s ribs rose and fell as Kestrel told Verex about her plan to poison the horses of the eastern plains, and why she’d suggested it.

He was silent. One hand twitched in the straw. Kestrel thought he meant to take the puppy away from her, but he didn’t.

She said, “I’ve heard that you don’t agree with the war in the east.”

“My father says I’m soft. He’s right.”

“You must blame me all the more.”

“For being hard?” He brushed his fair hair out of his eyes so that he could see her better. “Is that what you think you are?”

“If I hadn’t suggested poison, maybe the plains wouldn’t have been burned after all. Maybe our army would have done nothing.”

He gave a cynical laugh.

She said, “If I’d never talked with your father, at least whatever did happen wouldn’t have been my fault.”

“I’m not sure that not knowing is the same thing as innocence.” He leaned back into the rustling, smelly straw. “I think that you did the best that you could. Risha will think so, too, when I tell her.”

“No. Don’t tell her. Please.”

“I tell her everything,” he said simply.

Kestrel’s gaze fell again to the puppy. She wondered what it would be like to be able to tell someone everything. She stroked the soft creature. “Will it live?”

“I hope so.”

A quick, hot liquid streamed through Kestrel’s fingers. She yelped. The puppy’s urine trickled down her sleeve.

Verex widened his already large eyes. “That was lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“That’s not all puppies do, you know. It could have been worse.”

Kestrel smiled. “That’s true,” she said. “You’re right.” Her smile grew, and became a laugh.

*

Her maids were horrified. They ran a bath and practically stripped the clothes from her. But Kestrel nursed that floating feeling of forgiveness Verex had given her. It buoyed her in the warm bath.

She asked to be alone.

The bath cooled. Her hair, water-dark, lay flat and sleek over her breasts like armor.

Arin had changed her. It was time to admit that.

Kestrel stood in the bath. The water sheeted from her. She wrapped herself, oddly and unreasonably shy with her own nakedness.

What kind of change had Arin wrought?

She thought back to last summer, and how it had felt as if he were thumbing her eyes wide open to see her world. She thought about the puppy, velvety blind, and her wish never to have heard any plan for the eastern plains, so that she wouldn’t bear any responsibility for what had been done.

Kestrel thought that she needed to open her eyes wider.

She looked.

There was the plush robe around her, for the prince’s bride must have comfort. She saw stained glass set in the bathing room windows, for a Valorian must have beauty. Gold rings glimmered wetly on Kestrel’s wrinkled fingers. The general’s wars had won luxury for his daughter.