The Winner's Crime(72)

This one had a screen. A cunningly painted screen, with realistic knots of wood and darker grain.

Kestrel came close. She stood on her toes and shifted a barometer out of her way. She tapped the metal screen.

Echo.

There was some kind of chamber on the other side of the wall. Behind the painted screen was a place where someone could see what Kestrel did, could hear what she played, could hear anything she said to someone else in this room.

This room, which had been Verex’s, and which the emperor had given to her.

Kestrel came down on her heels.

The emperor loved his games.

Kestrel frantically revisted every moment she’d spent in the music room. Had she ever made a mistake? Let slip something she shouldn’t have? She didn’t think so. No, no one could have seen anything wrong.

Deviant.

Treasonous.

Kestrel backed away. Someone could be watching her even now.

She left the room. She scoured the hallway outside for a way inside the hidden space. She ran fingers over the hallway’s carvings until the center of a wooden flower gave way under her touch, and a panel slid aside.

The secret room was empty and small and dark and cold. The screen gave a view of her piano and most of the brightly lit room, but not the door. Kestrel stared at where she had been sitting.

She turned once more to face the hidden room. It looked almost ordinary. Plain, clean. Not dusty. But it smelled airless and dank. Like a prison.





34

Kestrel stayed close to her father. He could walk well enough but tired easily, so she challenged him to Borderlands games played in his suite, though most of the court spent whole days out of doors in the blue weather, opening parasols against the sun. There had never been such a spring, the courtiers exclaimed. The Firstsummer wedding was sure to be glorious.

When Kestrel played Borderlands with her father in his suite, they usually moved their pieces in silence. But one day, not long after she had seen Jess, her father shifted his infantry forward in reckless fashion.

“Why are you exposing your soldiers?” Kestrel asked.

His brows lifted. “Are you criticizing my line of play?”

“You should use your cannon.”

He had the beginnings of a smile. “Have I foiled some strategy of yours?”

“I could decimate your front lines. I could do it right now.”

“Well, if you must.”

Kestrel was growing angry. She made no move.

Her father said, “Are we arguing?”

“No.”

“What are we arguing about?”

Kestrel thought of Ronan, fighting in the east. She thought about how she’d crushed the necklace Jess had given her because it had been expendable. It was the kind of choice her father had raised her to be able to make. She thought about how when they were little girls, she and Jess had walked hand in hand, Jess’s palm fresh against hers. Kestrel thought about Arin, in Herran’s city, and what he must think of her now. And finally, Kestrel thought about herself as if she were two people, and one self stood behind the screen in the music room, watching her other self, and judging.

“You are sacrificing them,” she told her father.

“It’s just a game.”

Kestrel said nothing.

“You worry about my methods,” said the general. “You think I don’t know how to go to war.”

“You’re wasting lives.”

“I protect my soldiers as best as I can. And I do use cannon. The Valorian army is well-gunned. We have significant stores of black powder. Our arsenal outstrips anything an enemy can offer. I rarely even need much cannon.”

She imagined Ronan at the very front of an army. “So you let our people fight hand to hand instead.”


“That’s what we do. It’s who we are. If we can’t take what we want with our own hands, we don’t deserve to win it.”

Kestrel leaned away from the gaming table. She sat back in her chair.

He said, “Would you rather I line up my cannon barrel to barrel and raze the eastern forces?”

No, of course not. That wasn’t what she’d meant.

“You accuse me of wasting lives. I could, Kestrel. I could waste them in the thousands, the tens of thousands. I don’t. I try to minimize enemy casualties.”

“Only so that you can enslave people afterward.”

His mouth thinned. “I think we should finish our game.”

He won.

*

Verex stopped her in the hallway. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Maybe you bribed the wrong lady-in-waiting. You should choose one who keeps a closer eye on my whereabouts.”

He laughed. “Or maybe you should bribe one of my valets, so that we’d be even. Then again”—he shrugged good-naturedly—“my whereabouts aren’t very interesting.” He tugged her hand. “Come. I have something to show you. Give you, actually.”

“A gift?”

“A wedding present.”

The word wedding stopped her heart. “It’s too early for that.”

“It’s never too early for presents.”

“I don’t have anything for you.”

“Oh, just come. You’ll like it, I promise.”

It was a good-size puppy. A black, squirming creature with folded ears and a tail that had been docked for hunting. It was chewing the leg of one of the ornate chairs in Verex’s sitting room. It had left a yellow puddle on the wooden floor.