The Winner's Crime(62)

“This is the part where I translate,” the Dacran told Arin, “and you hope that I tell the truth.”

The queen said, “You’ve broken three of our laws”—here, her brother stopped his translation to hold up four fingers—“what keeps you alive is our curiosity. Satisfy it.”

Arin said, “I have a proprosal—”

“No,” the man told him. “Don’t start there. We don’t even know your name.”

So Arin gave it, and his rank.

“Governor is a Valorian title,” said the queen. “You are Valorian.”

The insult went bone deep.

“You cannot deny it,” said the queen. “We have heard of you. Arin of the Herrani, who once bit his masters’ heels, is a tame dog once more. Did you not swear an oath of loyalty to the emperor?”

“I’m breaking it now.”

“Do you so easily break your oaths?”

“Wouldn’t you, for your people?”

“I’m not translating that,” the skull-faced man told him. “It’s insulting. You’re a little self-destructive, aren’t you?”

Impatient, the queen interrupted. She told Arin to explain his possession of the Valorian dagger.

“It’s a reminder,” he said.

“Of?”

“What I despise.”

The queen considered this. Her face was leaner than Risha’s, but much like her younger sister’s. It was easy, looking at the queen, to feel again his admiration for Risha, the way it had grown from the first moment Tensen had revealed her to be his Moth. Arin said to the queen, “I know that your country has suffered. I know that my own is too small to stand alone against the empire. If I had a choice, the empire or the east, I’d choose you. Let Herran be your ally.”

She cocked her head. “What exactly would we do with you?”

“Let us fight for you.”

“In exchange for our protection of your little peninsula, no doubt. As you have pointed out, Herran is small. Your soldiers would hardly swell our ranks. Do you want your people to be our cannon fodder? Even if you did, how would that work? We do not even speak the same language.”

“We’ll learn yours.”

The queen raised a skeptical brow.

“I’ll prove it to you,” Arin said.

“I would like to see you try.”

“Good,” Arin said, using the one Dacran word he knew, the one that the skull-faced man had said to him on the pier.

The queen’s surprise was clear. But she didn’t smile, and what she said next made Arin wonder if he hadn’t just somehow deeply offended her.

“Let us turn,” she said, “to the subject of your punishment.”

*

For bearing an enemy’s weapon, Arin was forbidden to carry any at all.

For entering Dacran territory, Arin was not allowed to leave it.

For his crimes against Roshar, the queen’s brother, the injured party was given permission to exact his choice of punishment.

“I’ll have you killed later,” Roshar told Arin after bringing him to the room where he would stay. “I need time to decide the very best method.”

Arin looked at him. The mutilations made it hard to see any resemblance to Risha or the queen. Roshar must have caught the quality of Arin’s gaze. The way it examined. Roshar sneered. “Or maybe I’ll find a punishment better than death.”

Arin glanced away.

Roshar began unpacking Arin’s things—with the exception of the dagger—from the satchel onto a table. Food, water, clothes. “What’s this?” Roshar held up the packet that contained spools of thread.

“Sewing kit.”


Roshar tossed it on the table. Then he stared down at all of Arin’s things as if they could add up to the answer to a hard question. “You’ve come a long way.”

“Yes.”

“All the way from the imperial capital.” Quietly, Roshar said, “Is my little sister well?”

“Yes. She—”

“I don’t want to talk about her. I just wanted to know how she is.”

“Did you discuss her with the queen when we first entered that room?”

Roshar looked at Arin as if he were insane. “Of course not.”

“Then what took so long to tell the queen?”

“Your crimes. In loving detail.”

“No,” Arin said, “it sounded like a story.”

Roshar prodded a flask of water. “Clearly you didn’t know anything about our country, if you bothered to bring this.”

“Why won’t you tell me what you said?”

Roshar kept poking at the flask, making it rock against the table. Slowly, he said, “Maybe I did tell a story. Maybe it was about two slaves in a faraway land, and how one helped the other.”

“But I didn’t.” Arin remembered it again. He tasted the dirt in his mouth, felt the gravel under his cheek. He heard the cries. He felt his shame.

“You saved me,” Roshar said.

Arin was confused. At first he thought this was sarcasm. But there had been something open in Roshar’s voice, like yearning. Was Roshar reinventing what had really happened? Maybe he was imagining a version of the world where the Valorian’s knife had never cut his face. A fiction. A story with a happy ending.