The Winner's Crime(87)

“I need to leave,” Arin told the queen. “I need to leave right now.”





42

Kestrel looked like she’d been dipped in blood.

In the end, she hadn’t actually given any orders for her wedding dress to be altered. The water engineer had already changed her bet, and although Kestrel wasn’t sure if the emperor knew this, or what the consequences might be, she dreaded the malicious attention it would attract if she did anything more to upset the emperor’s plans. He expected her to wear red, so the dress was red after all, in stiff, glossy crimson folds of rich samite. It was heavy. Structured in the bodice—it hurt when Kestrel breathed too deeply—with full skirts whose pintucked shadows created even deeper shades of red, almost black. The train was bustled now, but when Kestrel entered the great hall it would pour in a river behind her.

The new dressmaker’s hands fluttered over Kestrel. “Is it too tight? Or … perhaps you’d like more embellishment? Crystals sewn onto the hem?”

“No.” It was the last fitting before the wedding—barely more than a week away. What Kestrel really wanted was for the dress to be burned.

“Oh, but you haven’t even seen it with the gold yet.” The dressmaker gathered handfuls of golden sugarspun wire and began to weave it through Kestrel’s braids and around her neck, trailing it in chilly patterns over her bare shoulders. The pain in Kestrel’s lungs grew worse. Her eyes burned.

“Isn’t that better? Isn’t it?” the dressmaker’s voice was high. “You are so beautiful!”

Kestrel suddenly heard the suppressed panic in the girl’s voice. Kestrel saw her reflection. She wasn’t beautiful. Her face was pinched and white, eyes shocked and wide. She looked ill. Kestrel pressed hands to damp eyes, pressed hard, and looked again. Kestrel didn’t know what the dressmaker saw in her expression, but she realized that whatever it was, the girl read it as her own doom. She was a late-hour replacement for Deliah: a simple seamstress elevated to the role of imperial dressmaker. The girl was afraid. Why wouldn’t she be afraid of Kestrel’s dissatisfaction? The last imperial dressmaker was dead.

Kestrel turned from the mirror to face the brown-haired girl. Kestrel stepped down from the block, careful of the hem, and gently rested a hand on the girl’s arm.

The new dressmaker quieted. “Do you like it?” she whispered.

“It’s perfect,” Kestrel said.

*

Her father was healed. He would leave the morning after the wedding to resume command of the eastern campaign. He would have left already if it weren’t for the emperor’s orders. Kestrel sometimes thought that the general would have stayed no matter what for her birthday recital and the wedding, but she tended to believe this only when not in his company. The moment he stood before her, his eyes increasingly restless, she knew that she’d been deluding herself.

He invited her for a walk. The wind was loud and brisk enough to make Kestrel’s ears ache.

It seemed at first that Kestrel and her father wouldn’t speak. Then he said, “I don’t know what to give you for the wedding.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I wish”—he squinted at a wheeling falcon high above the Spring Garden—“I wish I’d held back something of your mother’s that I could give to you. I’d say that I’d been saving it for this.” On the day she’d come of age, Kestrel had inherited all of her mother’s possessions. He had wanted none of them.

A few months ago, Kestrel would have found another way—light, negligent, maybe witty—to repeat that it didn’t matter. But now she felt keenly the damage of how they never really said what they meant to each other. Yes, they came close. They had understandings, such as the one that regularly brought the general to the secret space behind the music room’s screen—if not into the music room itself—to hear Kestrel play. This was a kind of honesty, she supposed, but it wasn’t plain, it wasn’t true, and she couldn’t help the hurt that came with the thought that she was just like him. She, too, couldn’t say what she meant. She wanted to. She tried. The words struggled inside her.

Kestrel said, “Would you give me something if I asked for it?”

Carefully, he said, “That would depend.”

“Stay. Don’t go to the east.”

“Kestrel…”

“Stay one more week, then,” she pleaded. “Or a day. Stay one more day after the wedding.”

He kept looking at the sky, but the hunting bird was gone.

“Please.”

He finally turned to her. “Very well,” he said. “One more day.”

*

Events for the court continued. There was the spring tournament. There were masques, dances, feasts. More than once, Kestrel caught Tensen’s gaze from across a room. She averted her eyes. She knew that he wanted to speak with her. He would press her for more information. He would urge her to take more risks, all for a very uncertain gain. But she’d made her decision. She would marry. She would rule. This was how she would change things. Her attempts at skullduggery seemed almost silly now: the games of a child who doesn’t want to grow up. Worse—in her starkest moments, when Kestrel was most honest with herself, and honesty showed itself like a skeleton, bones clean and jutting, she knew that her efforts to be Tensen’s spy had been a way to prove herself to Arin … even as she insisted that he never know.