The Winner's Crime(7)

“I don’t remember,” Thrynne said.

“Tell me or I’ll strip you bare.”

“Captain,” said Kestrel. “He’s confused. Give him a moment—”

“You are confused if you think to interfere with my interrogation. You’re here to listen. Thrynne, I asked you a question. Stop looking at her. She isn’t important. I am.”

Thrynne’s gaze jumped between them. He made a guttural sound, urgent and rough, with the slight whine of tamped-down pain. He focused on Kestrel. “Please,” he said hoarsely, “he needs to know.”

The captain peeled off a piece of skin and flicked it into the bucket.

Thrynne screamed. The scream broken by sucked breaths, it rang through Kestrel’s head.

She reached for the captain. She tried to snag the hand that held his blade. He shoved her back easily, without even looking, and she fell.

“Don’t refuse me, Thrynne,” said the captain. “‘No’ doesn’t exist anymore. Only ‘yes.’ Do you understand?”

The scream was bitten off. “Yes.”

Kestrel got to her feet. “Captain—”

“Quiet. You’re only making this worse.” To Thrynne he said, “What were you doing eavesdropping outside the doors of a private meeting between the emperor and the Senate leader?”

“Nothing! Cleaning. I clean.”

“That sounds like a ‘no’ to me.”

“No! I mean, yes, yes, I was sweeping the floor. I clean. I’m a servant.”

“You’re a slave,” the captain corrected, though the emperor had issued a decree that emancipated the Herrani. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes. I am.”

Kestrel had quietly drawn her dagger. If the captain kept his back to her, she might be able to do something. It didn’t matter that her combat skills were pitiful. She could stop him.

Maybe.

“And why,” the captain said to Thrynne in a gentle voice, “why were you listening outside that door?”

The dagger in Kestrel’s hand shook. She smelled the emperor’s perfumed oil on the captain. She forced herself close. The breakfast milk swam up her throat.

Thrynne tore his gaze from the captain to glance at her. “Money,” he said. “This is the year of money.”

“Ah,” said the captain. “Now we come to it. You were paid to listen, weren’t you?”

“No—”

The captain’s knife came down. Kestrel vomited, her dagger falling into the shadows. The sound of it hitting stone was lost in Thrynne’s shriek. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve; she was not looking, she was pressing hands to her ears. She barely heard the captain say, “Who? Who paid you?”

But there was no answer. Thrynne had fainted.

*

Kestrel took to her rooms like someone sick. Infected. She bathed until she felt boiled. She left her ruined dress where it lay, balled up on the bathing room floor. Then she climbed into bed, hair loose and damp, and thought.

Or tried to think. She tried to think about what she should do. Then she noticed that the feather blanket, thick yet light, quivered like a living thing. She was shaking.

She remembered Cheat, the Herrani leader. Arin had answered to him, followed him. Loved him. Yes, she knew that Arin had loved him.

Cheat had always threatened Kestrel’s hands. To break them, cut off fingers, crush them with his own. He had seemed obsessed with them, until he became obsessed with her in a different way. She felt it again: that cold roll of horror as she began to understand what he wanted and what he would do to get it.

He was dead now. Arin had gutted him. Kestrel had seen it. She’d seen Cheat die, and she reassured herself that he could not hurt her. Kestrel stared at her hands, whole and undamaged. They were not peeled and bloody meat. They were slim, nails kept short for the piano. Skin soft. A small birthmark near the base of the thumb.

Her hands were pretty, she supposed. Spread against the blanket, they seemed the height of uselessness.

What could she do?

Help the prisoner escape? That would require a strategy hinged upon enlisting the help of others. Kestrel didn’t have enough leverage over the captain. No one in the capital owed her favors. She didn’t know the court’s secrets. She was new to the palace and had no one’s loyalty here, not for help with such an insane plan.

And if she were caught? What would the emperor do to her?

And if she did nothing?

She couldn’t do nothing. Having done nothing in the prison had already cost too much.

This is the year of money, Thrynne had said. He had spoken the words as if they were meant for her. It was an odd phrase. Yet familiar. Perhaps it was as the captain had assumed: Thrynne was revealing that he had been paid to gather information. The emperor had many enemies, not all of them foreign. A rival in the Senate might have employed Thrynne.

But as the feather blanket stilled, transforming into a peaked field of snow over Kestrel’s tucked-in knees, she remembered her Herrani nurse saying, “This is the year of stars.”

Kestrel had been little. Enai was tending to her skinned knee. Kestrel hadn’t been a clumsy girl, but she had always tried too hard, with predictable bruised and bloodied results. “Be careful,” Enai had said, wrapping the gauze. “This is the year of stars.”