The Winner's Crime(74)

Maybe it was because his mind was full of the Moth, and the way the gray thread that represented her wove throughout the entire trim. Arin looked at the queen and saw Risha instead. The queen had those straight brows, the same shape of the mouth, and the same—he began to suspect it, the idea grew—generosity.

“I am sending my brother outside the city,” she said. “You will go with him.” She paused, then added, “You are good for him. He is restless.”

“Was he with your sister when she was captured by the empire?”

The queen’s face closed.

Arin said, “I think he blames himself.”

“He blames me.”

“I don’t understand.”

The queen went to the kaleidoscopic windows and watched the rainfall. She pretended his words had meant something else. “It can’t be easy to learn another language so quickly. Do you have a gift for it?”

He wasn’t sure. Even now, he didn’t recognize every word she used. His mind darted meaning into the blank moments and made sense of what he didn’t know, crafted whole sentences from understood parts. It felt like a game …

As this last thought occurred to him, he saw its danger. He felt the kick in his gut that told his mind to stop, and he snatched at that half thought about words and meaning and games. He tried to drag the thought back. It spun away. It began to think for itself, about Bite and Sting, and about how he could beat someone without knowing each tile in play. Yes, he had won, even when playing against Kestrel made it feel like all the tiles were blind on both sides.

He slammed that thought down. Because the truth was that guessing at what he hadn’t known about Kestrel had served him badly. He had believed in things that weren’t there … or weren’t there anymore.

“No,” he bluntly told the queen. “No gift.”

“Perhaps Dacra and Herran shared some common ancestor, thousands of years ago,” she mused, “and that is why our languages are close. But no. We are too different.”

“We don’t have to be.”

She turned to face him. “Stop asking for an alliance.”

“I won’t.”

“Fool.”

“I prefer to think of myself as an optimist.”

She clicked her teeth: a Dacran way to say no. It was an impatient noise. Arin had heard it used with children. “Herran has nothing to offer us but lives,” the queen told him. “I would pack your people into the front lines. When we win, I would take your country and make it mine. The word we want for you is not optimist. Nor, I think”—she appraised him—“fool. It is desperate.”

The rain must have stopped. The pipes hushed.

She said, “I would be, too. I would ask what you ask. But I would offer more. Then I would negotiate better terms of an alliance.”

He thought of that emerald earring he’d paid into the bookkeeper’s hand. He thought not about what it was, but what it had meant. He held the value in his mind, its pricelessness, and he cast about for an idea of what could match it. “Tell me what I can give you.”

She lifted one shoulder in a delicate shrug. “Something more.”

“Tell me what that is.”

“I will know,” she said, “when you give it to me.”

*

Arin and Roshar rowed up the river. Soft dawn hardened into bright day. The castle was at their backs, then gone. Reeds on the banks tapped a light tattoo against each other, and swarms of enormous dragonflies rippled like flags alongside the canoe.

Roshar steered. When they’d set off from the city, Arin had noted the crossbow slung across Roshar’s back, and a set of throwing knives at his hips. Arin had asked if Roshar expected resistance from the plainspeople who had made camp upstream. Roshar had blithely said, “Oh, this is for river beasties,” and looked coy. Then, though Arin hadn’t pressed him, Roshar added, “If you must know, I’m going to hunt a nice poisonous snake and make you eat it. You do like to ruin a surprise.”

The canoe slowed. Roshar had paused, so Arin lifted his oar, too, and glanced behind him. Roshar was looking into the reeds. His mutilated nose made his profile jarringly flat.

The current started to push them downstream. They took up their oars again.

There was something about the day—the tempo of the reeds, the dipping of the oars, the dragonflies’ brrr, and even Roshar’s stunted profile—that opened something inside Arin. If he had had to put what he felt into words, he would have perhaps said that it was a kinship with the moment.

He began to sing. For himself, for the day, for the way it made him feel. It had been a while. It felt good to push that music up and into the world, to feel how the initial heft of it lightened on his tongue. The song floated out of him.

He wasn’t thinking. He wasn’t thinking about her. But then he thought about how he wasn’t thinking about her. The song became lead. He shut his mouth.

There was a silence.

Finally, behind him, Roshar spoke. “Don’t let my sister hear you do that, or she won’t let me kill you.”


Arin didn’t look back. Then he said, “When I was leaving the capital, I saw Risha.”

The canoe angled its direction. Roshar had stopped rowing again. “Does everyone there call her that, or just you?” When Arin glanced questioningly over his shoulder at the prince, Roshar said, “Her name is Rishanaway. That’s what strangers should call her. Risha is her little name.”