The Winner's Crime(66)

If the emperor had rewarded the engineer, could it have been for a favor she had done in the east? Maybe it had nothing to do with Herran.

The southern isle slave refilled the engineer’s cup. Kestrel watched her. She was a young girl, younger than Kestrel. The southern islands—the Cayn Saratu, as their people had once called them—had been one of the first territories Valoria had conquered. Kestrel’s father had been a lieutenant then. This girl was young enough to have been born into slavery. She’d never known another life. She might not have ever known her mother tongue—or even her mother.

Suddenly Kestrel no longer cared whether the emperor’s secret was about Herran, or the east, or some other territory. She wanted the empire to be that long table that haunted her mind. She wanted to flip it over and send all those empty plates crashing to the floor.

The slave stirred uneasily. Kestrel realized that she was staring at the girl, who said, “More, my lady?”

“No, thank you.”

The engineer said to Kestrel, “I suppose you don’t remember me. You were a little girl when I saw you last. It was just after the colonization of Herran.”

Kestrel looked at Elinor again, at the solid, intelligent way of her. Kestrel had a faint memory of kneeling by the fountain in her Herran villa and tipping red dye filched from the slaves’ workroom into the fountain. She’d been curious. She had overheard a word at dinner the night before, while her father talked with his guest. Dilution. It was a word she didn’t know.

“I dyed our fountain pink because of you,” Kestrel told the engineer.

“Really?”

“I was trying for red, but I didn’t have enough dye.” Kestrel pressed her thumb into the pattern cut into her crystal glass and said, “Why were you in Herran then? Did you live there?”

“No, I designed the city aqueducts. The Herrani system of running water was too primitive.”

“Have you been to Herran recently?”

“No,” said the engineer, but she was looking away. “Why would I?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I wish that you had, and that we could talk about it. Sometimes I’m homesick.”

Elinor frowned. “Herran is a colony. This is your home.”

“Herran was a colony. Now it’s an independent territory.”

“By the grace of our emperor.”

Quietly, and helplessly, the way one reaches for a lost thing that had always been there before, Kestrel said, “I miss the birds that sing there this time of the year. They carried straw in their beaks and built nests under the eaves. I miss the flickering light of the horse paths.” The engineer was staring with disapproval. Kestrel didn’t care. The words were said to Arin, who wasn’t there, and Jess, who wouldn’t listen, and Ronan, who was leaving, and her father, who had shared her home. She spoke to the southern isle slave, who had probably been born and sold and raised in the capital, and had never known her home, and so had been robbed, along with everything else, of homesickness. “There was a hill in the orange grove,” Kestrel said. “When I was little, I would lie there in summer and look at the fruit hanging in the trees like party lanterns. Then I was old enough to go to parties, and my friends and I would stay up until even the fireflies went to sleep.”

“How nice.” Yet the engineer’s voice was cold.

“Herran is beautiful.”

“The problem has never been Herran. It’s the Herrani.”

Then, as if neither of them noticed the great fault line that had opened up with their words to split the ground between them, Elinor said, “Do try the berries, my lady. They are very sweet.”

*

When the general was well enough to leave his rooms, the emperor insisted on a celebration. A mock sea battle was staged at night on the man-made pond in the Spring Garden. Two small boats were painted to look like ships of war and loaded with courtiers who shot off fireworks.

“You don’t like it?” the emperor said when General Trajan remained silent during the applause.

“Fireworks are a waste of black powder.”

“Valoria has more than enough. Our enemies will never be able to compete with our cannons. Our stores of black powder are vast.”

“Every resource has its limits.”

“He’s always like this in the capital,” the emperor told Kestrel cheerfully. “He’s never happy unless he’s in the field.”

Kestrel wanted to say that he had been happy in their home in Herran. In truth, though, he’d rarely been there, and she’d never dared to ask after his happiness.

The general shifted in his wrought-iron chair. The walk to the garden had exhausted him, Kestrel could tell. Though the court physicians packed his wound with less gauze every day, it hadn’t yet closed.

“Where’s Verex?” Kestrel wished he were there.

The emperor shrugged.

A firework popped into a shower of gold. It illuminated the crowd gathered around the pond. Its light glimmered on Risha’s face, and on Verex, who sat next to her on the other side of the pond.

The emperor saw them, too. Kestrel was coming to understand that the emperor’s anger tended to coil itself tightly. It was the kind that could seem to sleep. Inevitably, though, it lashed out.

“I hear that you paid a call to my water engineer,” he said to Kestrel.