The Winner's Crime(76)

Then the tiger came down on Arin.

He was shoved onto his back into the mud. He sank down. He was swallowing mud, straining the oar up between him and the tiger, who bared broken teeth. Its breath was hot. Its snarls ripped through Arin’s body as if he were the one making that sound. Claws were in his shoulders. Pain curled in. He tried to push back with the oar and block the jaws, but he knew how this would end. His arms would give out. The oar would splinter. The tiger would finally get the right angle and close in on his neck.

Black nose. Pulsing stripes. Wild amber eyes. The colors of Arin’s death.

But he remembered Roshar’s empty hands.

He remembered a crossbow.

And although he knew that a crossbow was no good (how could he aim it and keep the tiger at bay? Gods, was it even still loaded?), he risked a glance. He looked away from the tiger’s teeth. He looked into the reeds. He saw a snapped crossbow quarrel, its leaden tip sticking out of the mud.

An arm’s length away.

“Roshar,” he choked out.

Arin heard the reeds rattle. He couldn’t see Roshar move, but the prince did, and that was enough.

The tiger’s attention lifted from Arin.

Arin reached out, yanked the quarrel from the mud, and drove it into the tiger’s eye.

He felt the tiger roar. He dug in deeper. Hot liquid spilled between his fingers. He pushed the quarrel in.

The body heaved onto him. Claws slackened.

Somehow that was when fear set in. The tiger was dead, but Arin was struggling against it, half drowning in the mud as he beat against the striped fur and stared, horrified, into one amber eye, and one ruined and leaking.

Then Roshar was there, and they worked together until Arin slid out from under the body.

He lay gasping in the mud. Roshar sat heavily beside him. The prince’s forearm was shredded, held gingerly at an angle. Blood ran from the elbow.

Arin closed his eyes. He saw the tiger’s eyes. He opened his. He saw a labyrinth of reeds, the slick of mud beneath his cheek.

Roshar inhaled. For one bizarre moment, Arin thought that the sound he heard next had come from the prince.

A scratchy cry. A mewl.

No. Arin knew what that was. He screwed his eyes shut. He wouldn’t look.

“A cub,” Roshar said.

And then Arin had to see. A little tiger clambered through the bent reeds. Its forelegs sank into mud. It looked at its slumped mother and cried piteously.

Arin was stricken. He tasted mud in his mouth.

He saw, in his memory, a boy. Begging and weeping. Pulling at his mother’s dead hand. Tugging her long, bloody black hair. Arin’s hands had been small then. But they’d had a terrible strength. They’d clung hard. Then his mother’s murderer had dragged him away.

Arin breathed through the memory. He choked on air as if it were knotted rope. He wiped mud from his face. Spat it out.

“Now, what to do with you,” said Roshar, looking at the cub. It floundered in the mud. It sank in past its haunches.

“Leave it alone.”

Roshar ignored Arin. He slogged through the boggy reeds until he reached the cub. With his good arm, Roshar lifted the tiger free.

*

“Brother, you are mad,” said the queen.

“He loves me,” Roshar protested. The cub was sleeping, huddled against Roshar’s leg.

“And when it has grown, and is large enough to eat a man?”

“Then I’ll make Arin take care of him.”

Arin had had enough. He moved to leave Roshar’s suite.

“Wait,” said the queen.

Arin was sore. His raked shoulders were padded with gauze, and he was tired, achingly tired from the journey back, from the shock of the plainspeople when he and Roshar had stumbled to the camp with a tiger cub, from how easily they had agreed to move camp once they saw the danger of tigers breeding nearby. How they’d fed Arin when he hadn’t wanted to eat. And then there had been Roshar’s fascination with the tiger’s carcass, the way the prince had inspected the slack jaws to pronounce that the broken teeth were an old injury, and thank the goddess for that, he’d said, or they would have had no chance at all. “I would have lost my arm at the very least,” Roshar had said. As it was, his arm was a bloody mess. It had been cleaned, stitched, and dressed in the camp. “Looks like you’ll have to get me and the cub home all by yourself,” Roshar had said cheerfully. So Arin had paddled downstream while Roshar slept, having numbed his arm with a lighter dose of the same drug he’d once used to knock out Arin. The drugged ring was a cunning thing. He’d pricked himself with it, then eyed Arin’s torn shirt and raked shoulders. “Sorry,” he’d said. “None for you. You’ve got to row.”

Arin swore at him.

Roshar smiled. “Watch your mouth,” he’d said, and closed his eyes.

Arin’s shoulders had burned and bled as he paddled. The cub unhappily paced the canoe the entire way to the queen’s city. The boat wobbled as the animal moved, and moved again, and found its uncertain footing, and cried.

“Wait,” the queen said again to Arin. She left Roshar’s side, crossed the room, and offered something. It gleamed on her uplifted palm: Kestrel’s dagger. “Thank you,” said the queen. She tried to give it to him.

“I don’t want it.”

The hand that held the dagger faltered.