The Winner's Crime(8)

It had seemed such a curious thing to say. Kestrel had asked for an explanation. “You Valorians mark the years by numbers,” Enai had said, “but we mark them by our gods. We cycle through the pantheon, one god of the hundred for each year. The god of stars rules this year, so you must mind your feet and gaze. This god loves accidents. Beauty, too. Sometimes when the god is vexed or simply bored, she decides that the most beautiful thing is disaster.”

Kestrel should have found this silly. Valorians had no gods. There was no afterlife, or any of the other Herrani superstitions. If the Valorians worshipped anything, it was glory. Kestrel’s father laughed at the idea of fate. He was the imperial general; if he had believed in fate, he said, he would have sat in his tent and waited for the country of Herran to be handed to him in a pretty crystal cup. Instead he’d seized it. His victories, he said, were his own.

But as a child, Kestrel had been charmed by the idea of gods. They made for good stories. She had asked Enai to teach her the names of the hundred and what they ruled. One evening at dinner, when her father cracked a fragile dish under his knife, she’d said jokingly, “Careful, Father. This is the year of stars.” He had gone still. Kestrel became frightened. Maybe the gods were real after all. This moment was a disaster. She saw disaster in her father’s furious eyes. She saw it on Enai’s arm the next day, in the form of a bruise: a purple, broad bracelet made by a large hand.

Kestrel stopped asking about the gods. She forgot them. Probably there was a god of money. Perhaps this was the year. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t understand what the phrase had meant to Thrynne.

Tell him, Thrynne had said. He needs to know. The captain had assumed that Thrynne had meant himself. Maybe that was it. But Kestrel recalled the prisoner’s gray eyes and how he’d appeared to know her. Of course, he was a servant in the palace. Servants knew who she was without her knowing all their names or faces. But he was Herrani.

Say that he was new to the palace. Say that he recognized her from her life in Herran, when everything had been a series of dinners and dances and teas, when her greatest worry was how to navigate her father’s desire for her to join the military, and his hatred of her music.

Or maybe Thrynne recognized her from when everything had changed. After the Firstwinter Rebellion. When the Herrani had seized the capital and Arin had claimed her for his own.

He needs to know, Thrynne had said.

Slowly, as if moving tiny parts of a dangerous machine, Kestrel substituted one word with a name.

Arin needs to know.

But know what?

*

Kestrel had questions of her own for Thrynne. She would seek a way to help him, and to understand what he had said—but this meant seeing Thrynne alone … and that required the permission of the emperor.

“I’m ashamed of myself,” she told the emperor the next morning. They were in his private treasury. His note accepting her request to see him, and naming this room for the meeting, seemed to have been made with good grace. But he was silent now, inspecting a drawer pulled out of a wall honeycombed from floor to ceiling with them. He was intent on the drawer’s contents, which Kestrel couldn’t see.

“I behaved badly in the prison,” Kestrel said. “The torture—”

“Interrogation,” he said to the drawer.

“It reminded me of the Firstwinter Rebellion. Of … what I experienced.”

“What you experienced.” The emperor looked up from the drawer.

“Yes.”

“We have never fully discussed what you experienced, Kestrel. I should think that whatever it was, it would make you encourage the captain in his proceedings instead of jeopardizing his line of inquiry. Or do we have a different understanding of what you suffered at the hands of the Herrani rebels? Do I need to reevaluate the story of the general’s daughter, who escaped captivity and sailed through a storm to alert me to the rebellion?”

“No.”

“Do you think that an empire can survive without a few dirty methods? Do you think that an empress will keep herself clean of them?”

“No.”

He slid the drawer shut. Its click was as loud as a bang. “Then what have we left to address but my disappointment? My grievous disappointment? I had thought better of you.”

“Let me redeem myself. Please. I speak Herrani very well, and my presence made the prisoner ready to talk. If I were to question him—”

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Dead, and whatever information he had with him.”

“How?”

The emperor waved an irritated hand. “Infection. Fever. A waste bucket.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The prison is designed to prevent suicide. But this man—Thrynne—was clever. Committed. Desperate. Any number of qualities that might make someone decide to infect open wounds by plunging them into a waste bucket.”

Kestrel’s nausea threatened to return. And guilt: a bad taste at the back of her throat.

The emperor sighed. He settled into a chair and gestured for Kestrel to sit in the one across from him. She sank into it. “You know his kind, Kestrel. Do you think that someone like him would resort to such measures to protect a Valorian senator who had paid him to learn which ways he should vote?”

“No,” she said. Any other answer would seem false.