The Winner's Crime(82)

Kestrel thought of the emperor. She thought of her father.

There was nothing left to read in the dead fireplace. Still, Kestrel took a poker and raked it through the ash to make sure.

*

Kestrel’s eighteenth birthday was fast approaching. Her birthday—and the piano recital the emperor had commanded—was less than a fortnight away. It would be the last official court gathering until her wedding two days following. She played ferociously for hours on end. Sometimes she heard her father’s watch chime: a light sound, as light as a smile. It always soothed her music. When Kestrel played for him, the melody ran sweet, sheer, and strong.

She had a dress fitting for the recital. The gown was a delicate affair of creamy lutestring silk, the lace sleeves short and loose. Kestrel stood still on the dressmaker’s block. Fleetingly, it occurred to her that the block was about the height of an auction block. She remembered Arin standing on one.

Kestrel wondered what it would be like if time could be unsewn, the threads ripped out and redone. She went back to the day of the auction, that first day, that sight of a slave stepping onto the block. She imagined everything differently. This time, she didn’t bid. He wasn’t for sale. Her father had never won the Herran War. Kestrel grew up in the capital instead. Her mother didn’t sicken, didn’t die. Kestrel saw the baby in her father’s arms, the one that she had been. In Kestrel’s reimagining of the world, that baby was exactly as her father had described.

Deliah knelt, floating the hem up. The silk puffed, then fell in scalloped folds. Deliah fussed with it. Kestrel’s maids grew bored and drifted into other rooms.

Then, quickly, quietly, Deliah said, “Do you have any news for me?”

Kestrel sharply glanced down at her. “No.”

“Tensen hopes that you will—soon.”

Kestrel said nothing, but Deliah nodded as if she’d spoken. The dressmaker looked somehow both disappointed and relieved. “Well,” Deliah said, “I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”

Did Kestrel know? She thought of when she sat to play Bite and Sting. When Kestrel turned the tiles, and flipped the blank sides onto their backs, and showed their faces and tallied their value, did she know? Sometimes the game went too quickly for Kestrel to understand exactly what she was doing. All she knew was that in the final play she would win.

Kestrel looked at Deliah. She wasn’t certain of winning anymore, or even of what she could possibly hope to win. She didn’t know what winning would mean.

Smoothly, she told Deliah, “Of course I do.”

*

There was a hunt in the mountain forest behind the palace. The hounds bayed. A few courtiers brought slaves to load their crossbows for them, which would have appalled Kestrel’s father, had he seen it. He’d chosen to stay behind.

Verex came, but refused to hunt. The emperor smiled widely. “There’s my milk-blooded boy,” he said.

“Walk with me, Verex,” said Kestrel. “I’ve no interest in hunting either.”

They took the trail ahead of the emperor. Kestrel’s puppy bounded alongside her.

“What a sweet dog,” Kestrel heard Maris say.

The emperor’s cheerful voice floated clear. “Do you like her?”

Verex stiffened beside Kestrel.

“She’s yours,” the emperor told Maris.

Kestrel turned. “No. She’s mine.”

“What do you care if Maris has her?” There was that smile again. “You haven’t even named her.”

“Let her go,” Verex whispered in Kestrel’s ear. “Remember.” He didn’t say what she should remember, but Kestrel did anyway: Arin’s stitched face.

The dog nudged her damp nose against Kestrel’s trousered leg.

“Her name,” Kestrel told the emperor, “is Mine.”

He shrugged and looked careless. Maris, with a courtier’s instinct, had caught the scent of danger and waited to see what would happen next. When nothing did, and nothing more was said, she moved to catch up with her friends.

Later that afternoon, the emperor shot a fox. “For my daughter.” Blood marbled its reddish ruff. Its little black feet looked like dried paintbrushes. The emperor declared that its fur would be made into a stole for Kestrel.

When the court headed down to the castle and Verex was walking alongside Risha, the emperor fell in step with Kestrel.

He wasn’t smiling anymore, but the smile was in his hardened voice, trapped there: an insect in amber. “Don’t be more trouble than you’re worth,” he said.

*

“Give the dog away,” Kestrel told Verex. She had held the prince back on the palace lawn, its grass soft and fine, the green brightly pale. The other courtiers had gone ahead. “Find her a home far from the court. Find the right person.”

“You are the right person.”

Kestrel’s eyes stung. The puppy sat and happily chewed her paws.

Verex said, “This is my fault.”

Kestrel said no. She said that she could no longer look at this dog, this warm and perfect gift, without seeing it hurt. It was different to give something up than to see it taken away. The difference, Kestrel said, was choice. A limited freedom, but better than none. Or so she had thought when Arin had given her two keys to his guarded house. She had thought the same when she’d offered him his country, nailed and bound and screwed tight with certain conditions. Better than nothing. She’d thought this before, and thought it again, but she didn’t believe it anymore. Now she knew that to give something up was to have it taken away.