The Winner's Crime(57)

Arin rubbed at his cheek, felt the raised and tender scar. He was no stranger to pain. The Valorians had shown him the ways a body can betray you.

When Arin was a slave in the quarries, Cheat had tried to teach him about it, too. It was for Arin’s own good, he’d said. Arin should learn to resist it. Cheat had cut Arin’s inner arm with a sharp stone. Arin had gasped at the blood. He’d dragged at Cheat’s grip. “Stop,” he’d said. “Please.”


“All right, all right.” Cheat finally let go. “I don’t want to do this, either. What can I say? I’m too fond of you.”

And Arin, who had been twelve years old, felt ashamed and grateful.

There were various ends to the story of this eastern prison cell, this window. Most of them weren’t good. Arin didn’t know how he would do under torture.

He remembered telling his plan to Tensen. He’d travel to the east. He’d gain the queen’s sympathy and help. Easy. In his memory, Arin’s own voice sounded almost blithe.

No, not quite.

Arin had been eager to leave the capital. Desperate. He had needed to escape, and he knew whom he was fleeing. How could Arin ever trust his instincts, when Kestrel had proven him so grievously wrong? Arin should have known that sailing to the east was a bad idea. He swore that from now on, he would doubt everything he was tempted to believe.

There were footsteps, multiple ones, approaching the other side of his solid cell door.

Logic is a game, came the memory of his father’s voice. Let’s see how you play.

There was a window in his cell.

A prisoner would be drawn to it, like an insect to light. Like he had been.

Whoever was coming would expect to see him near it.

Arin moved away.

He positioned himself in the path the door’s swing would take. When it opened, and someone began to step forward, Arin slammed the door back against him. Arin hauled the man close and choked an arm around his neck.

The guard cried out in his language.

“Let me go,” Arin said, even though it was he who held the man tight. “Get me out of here.”

The Dacran wheezed. He scratched Arin’s arms, his face. He spoke again, and Arin remembered only then that he’d heard more than one set of footsteps.

The other set belonged to a man standing in the doorway.

“Do something!” Arin thought the guard in his grasp must be trying to say. Because the second Dacran was oddly still. Arin peered, not understanding what kept him back from the fray, or from bargaining for the safety of his friend.

The silent man took one step into the cell. The light caught his face. Arin’s grip on the guard tightened.

The man in the doorway had a skull’s face. The tip of his nose was gone, the nostrils unnaturally wide slits. A scar that grazed the upper lip showed that the knife had gone downward to cut off the nose. The man’s ears were nothing but holes.

“You,” the man said to Arin in Herrani. “I remember you.”





25

The day before Kestrel had bought him.

The eastern slave who had tried to run away.

The emperor will get what he deserves, he had told Arin.

“I see that you, too, have earned your marks,” said the Dacran as he stood in the cell’s doorway. “But you still aren’t as good-looking as me.”

“Who are you?”

“Your translator. Are you going to let him go?” He nodded at the guard, who had gone unconscious in Arin’s grip.

“What will happen to me if I do?”

“Something nicer than if you don’t. Come, youngling. Do you think my queen would have bothered to send someone who speaks your language if she meant you harm?”

Arin let the guard slide to the floor.

“Good boy,” said the skull-faced man, and lifted a hand. Arin thought it was to touch his scar, or maybe to place a palm to his cheek as Herrani men did. That gesture wasn’t appropriate with a stranger, let alone someone from another country, yet Arin decided to allow it.

The man wore a heavy ring, and the hand went not to Arin’s face but his neck.

The ring stung Arin. It drove in a little needle that fuzzed the blood.

Arin’s limbs became lead. Darkness climbed up his body, opened its wide mouth, and swallowed him whole.

*

Someone was weeping. Her tears fell warm on his brow, his lashes, his mouth.

Don’t cry, he tried to say.

Please listen, she said.

He would, of course he would. How could she think that he wouldn’t? But when Arin tried to answer her, there was only a rustling of air in his throat. He thought of leaves. He remembered the punishment of the god of music, how he had been cast into the body of a tree for one cycle of the pantheon: one hundred years of silence. Arin felt his skin splitting into bark. Twigs burst from him. Leaves grew. They stuffed his mouth with green. The wind swayed his branches.

Arin opened his eyes. Water dropped in. He blinked, and realized that no one had been weeping over him after all. He was on a boat beneath the rain. He was trussed up and flat on his back in a slow-moving, narrow vessel not very different from a canoe.

The rain stopped. A dragonfly with wings as large as a bird’s swept over him. It shimmered red against the suddenly blue sky.

Arin strained against his bonds.

The boat shifted, and a face leaned over him. The eastern man’s mutilations were starker in open daylight. He tsked. “Didn’t it occur to you, little Herrani, that the queen might have sent me to translate an interrogation of a not-so-friendly nature? You’re too trusting.”