The Winner's Crime(81)

“And I?”

“You, even more so.”

“I was glad that you listened to me play.”

He sighed. “That watch.”

“I like your watch. You must continue to wear it. It’ll keep you honest.”

“Listening like that was beneath me.”

“What if I had invited you?” Kestrel asked.

“You didn’t.”

“I did, over and over, for years.”

He was silent.

“It was always an open invitation,” Kestrel said. “It still is.”

Her father gave her a small smile. “Would you show me your favorites?” He gestured at the gallery.

Kestrel had almost forgotten why she was here. She’d pushed thoughts of Tensen, the water engineer, and the palace physician away. Now they came back. She felt a stitch of fear, a thread of guilt pulled tight.

She couldn’t really see the painting she now thought of as Tensen’s. It was farther down the gallery. From the entrance, it was a mere square of purple.

She kept her father from it. She showed him an alabaster bowl she admired, and a bronze fisherman lifting a fish scaled with lapis lazuli. There was an eastern porcelain egg that opened to show an armed girl.

But her father noticed the painting. “I remember that,” he said. “I took it for the emperor.”

He approached it. Kestrel, silent with dread, had no choice but to go with him. If she tried to turn him away from the painting, she would only call more attention to it.

A masker moth lay on the painting’s frame. Kestrel’s pulse leaped.

Her father studied the landscape. “It looks different here than it did in that southern mansion.” He didn’t appear to notice the camouflaged moth. If he did, what would he make of it? Nothing? It seemed impossible that something that meant a great deal to her could mean nothing to him. Carefully casual, she said, “Do you like the painting?”

He shrugged. “The emperor does.” His gaze lifted from the canvas. Kestrel felt a terrible relief. Then her father spoke again, and as she listened, that relief shriveled into shame. “I know that you don’t want me to return to the east. I won’t lie, Kestrel. I need to fight. But the need … has been different over the years. It hasn’t been just for honor.” His light brown eyes were fixed on hers. “You were born a few months after Verex. I wouldn’t have made you marry him. But I hoped. On the battlefield, I hoped you’d inherit the empire. When you chose Verex, it felt like fate.”

“You don’t believe in fate.”

“I believe that the land I won was for you. You are my fate.”

Guilt swelled in her throat. It made it hard to breathe, and she couldn’t hold his gaze any longer. But the instant her eyes fell from his, they darted quickly, helplessly, toward the moth.

Her father saw. He blinked. He peered at the painting’s frame. He frowned.

It was just a moth, Kestrel tried to tell herself. He couldn’t possibly guess what it meant.

She thought her father might say something. She readied herself to answer him. But in the end, all he did was silently flick the moth to the floor.

*

“The water engineer changed her bet,” Tensen said. “She and the emperor’s physician are working together.”

“I can’t meet with you again like this,” Kestrel said. “I’m going to be caught.”


Tensen was instantly worried. He asked for her reasons, but it wasn’t so simple as her father seeing the moth on the painting’s frame, which Tensen dismissed. It was that feeling of skating close to ruin. She’d felt this before, or something like it, when she had first begun playing Bite and Sting and didn’t know when to leave the table, or stayed because she needed to know what would happen next. She needed to see all the tiles turned, the play played, the final measurement of who had what and who had come short. She’d lost easily at first, especially against her father. Then she had learned.

“I just can’t,” she told Tensen.

He tried to flatter her. He appealed to her sense of good. He questioned her courage. He did everything but mention Arin, which he seemed to sense would end everything.

Tensen was a skilled player, too.

“Well,” he sighed, “you could keep your ears open, couldn’t you? If there’s something I need to know, tell your dressmaker.”

Kestrel was eager to leave the Butcher’s Row. She agreed to pass anything of note on to Deliah. She hurried away, the hem of her maid’s dress catching on her boothooks.





39

Temptation was the color white.

It was black ink, quivering at the point of a pen’s nib.

It was Kestrel, writing in her study. She wrote a letter to Arin. She wrote her reasons. She wrote her heart. Everything was inked in quick and heavy lines. Nothing was crossed out. It looked up at her: bare, black-and-white honesty.

That was temptation. But this was reality: the fire that burned low on the grate, despite the high spring weather, despite the nearing end of spring and the climb of days toward the Firstsummer wedding.

Reality was red. It was hot, hungry, snapping. It ate whatever Kestrel fed it. She burned the letter. Soon there was nothing left of the fire but cold, scaly black wood, lightly furred with ash. The letter lay in flakes. One page curled like a black shell.