The Winner's Crime(69)

The easterners were always well armed. They favored small weapons. Their crossbows were smaller than Arin had ever seen. From Roshar, he learned that they weren’t as powerful as a western crossbow, but more accurate and easier to load quickly.

The eastern love for the miniature was everywhere within the castle. Paintings no larger than a handspan adorned the walls. Basins collecting rainwater that funneled down from the roofs were decorated with tiny mosaics of dragonflies. Shelves in rooms meant for smoking held clocks the size of watches, and porcelain eggs that, when opened, showed coiled snakes made from jointed green glass. Some eggs hatched tiny tigers that gnashed their mechanical teeth.

Once, Arin strayed far into the recesses of the castle and found a model of the castle on a pedestal. Inside, suites had details that made Arin wish for a magnifying lens. With a fingernail, he turned a faucet in a bathing room. Water filled the teacup-size bathtub. It all made Arin feel too large: thuggish and fumbling.

“I was told that you were here,” said a voice behind him. It was Roshar.

Arin turned off the bathtub’s water.

“That was my sister’s.” Roshar’s tone made clear which sister he meant. He stared at a suite of rooms that looked fit for a little princess. A chest sat at the foot of a canopied bed. Arin moved to open it. He expected Roshar to snarl an objection, but Roshar simply looked at him, black eyes curious and narrow, like the eyes of the snakes in the porcelain eggs. With one finger, Arin reached inside the chest.

He snatched his hand back. Blood speckled his finger. It felt as if he’d been bitten by a host of tiny fangs.

Roshar took the chest from the small room. He tipped its contents onto his palm, which he held out for Arin to see.

Miniature weapons. Swords the size of matchsticks. Daggers like sharp, steel filings. Roshar squeezed his hand around them, then flung the bloody little weapons into Risha’s dollhouse suite.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

*

“A beheading would be spectacular,” Roshar said as Arin steered up the canal. It was a clear day. “Don’t you think? You’re too heavy for a good hanging. Your neck would break the moment you dropped.”

“Beheading’s quick, too.”

“Not if the ax is dull.”

It was a typical conversation between Arin and Roshar, who had very helpfully taught Arin his country’s words for various deaths by execution and reminded Arin on a daily basis that his life was in the prince’s hands. Usually, this kind of talk cheered Roshar, who lay settled into his end of the canoe, his arms crossed over his chest. One leg draped over the side of the boat. His eyes were on the blue sky. But the lazy posture looked like a lie today. Roshar’s body was set with hard lines.

Then his gaze lowered and cast out over the city. Something caught his attention. It changed his face. It stole all the pretending from it, and left nothing but the same naked anger that had made him clench a fist around Risha’s toy weapons.

Arin saw what he saw.

A woman wandered near the edge of the canal. She wore the tapered trousers of the plainspeople. Nestled in her arms was a cloth bundle of blue, the color worn by Dacran children. She held the bundle like a baby. But it had no face. It had no hands. It was nothing more than a rag wrapped around itself. She touched it tenderly.

Arin stopped rowing. The water swirled away from his still oar.

Sometimes, Arin almost understood what Kestrel had done. Even now, as he felt the drift of the boat and didn’t fight its pull, Arin remembered the yearning in Kestrel’s face whenever she’d mentioned her father. Like a homesickness. Arin had wanted to shake it out of her. Especially during those early months when she had owned him. He had wanted to force her to see her father for what he was. He had wanted her to acknowledge what she was, how she was wrong, how she shouldn’t long for her father’s love. It was soaked in blood. Didn’t she see that? How could she not? Once, he’d hated her for it.

Then it had somehow touched him. He knew it himself. He, too, wanted what he shouldn’t. He, too, felt how the heart chooses its own home and refuses reason. Not here, he’d tried to say. Not this. Not mine. Never. But he had felt the same sickness.

In retrospect, Kestrel’s role in the taking of the eastern plains was predictable. Sometimes he damned her for currying favor with the emperor, or blamed her for playing war like a game just because she could. Yet he thought he knew the truth of her reasons. She’d done it for her father.

It almost made sense. At least, it did when he was near sleep and his mind was quiet, and it was harder to help what entered it. Right before sleep, he came close to understanding.

But he was awake now. He was staring as the glassy-eyed woman cradled her cloth baby. He saw her caress the blue folds. He saw the end of understanding.

Arin wished that Kestrel could see what he saw. He wished that he could make her pay for what she had done.





33

Spring pinched the world open. Tight buds split along their seams and spilled out their colors.

Kestrel stayed indoors. It didn’t help. Thoughts, too, have their seasons, and she couldn’t stop what worked its way up through the underground of her mind. And what were her thoughts? What did she gather in secret, in guilt? What did she hold, and lift to the light to see better, and what did she drop as quickly as she could, as if it were hot to the touch?