The Winner's Crime(90)

Her options dwindled.

She shuffled her sheet music, then stopped when she saw that her hands were unsteady. “Don’t be so dramatic, Arin. I’m busy. Go away, won’t you? You’ve interrupted my practice.” She reached for her pen. We’re being observed, she planned to scrawl on the sheet music. I’ll explain everything later.

Arin grabbed the pen from her hand and threw it across the room. It clattered on the stone floor. “Stop it. Stop pretending that I don’t matter.”

She stared at the pen. She couldn’t fetch it now. Her father was no fool; he might guess what she wanted to do with it. Even her attempt a moment ago had been a risk.

And then Arin asked his question. “What did you do for that treaty?” he demanded.

She wanted to drop her face into her hands. She wanted to laugh—or weep, she wasn’t sure. Something was churning inside her that felt frighteningly like panic. She would have moved to leave if she didn’t think that Arin might physically stop her—and that, if nothing else, would bring her father into the room.

She tried to speak coolly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told Arin. “I’m sure I haven’t done anything for any treaty. I’ve had a wedding to plan. I’ll have plenty of time for politics when I’m empress.”


“You know exactly which treaty I mean. You placed it in my hand. And I swear that it has the traces of you all over it.”

“Arin—”

“It gave me my country’s freedom. It saved my life.” His face was pale, his gray eyes urgent. He towered over her as she remained sitting. The piano bench felt like a raft at sea. “What did you do to make the emperor sign it?” Arin’s anxious voice rang loud. It didn’t matter that he had spoken in Herrani. Her father knew Herrani. Kestrel knitted her hands. She thought of how her father had told the deserter to kill himself rather than live with his shame. Would he do that to her if she answered Arin truthfully? What would the general do to him?

“Arin, please. I did nothing for that treaty. I don’t have time for your delusions.”

“But you have time to meet with Tensen. Don’t you?”

Innocently, she said, “Who?”

His mouth went hard.

Don’t say it, Kestrel told him. Please, please. She didn’t know if Tensen had somehow told Arin, or if Arin had guessed, but if he said the word Moth out loud … she remembered her father brushing the moth from Tensen’s painting to the floor. The general’s eyes had questioned the sight of a masker moth—infamous eater of fabrics, denizen of wardrobes—in such an odd place. It wouldn’t take much for her father to guess what that moth was doing there, and why.

Especially if Arin asked her if she was Tensen’s Moth.

Don’t. She wanted to shake him. Don’t.

Frustration rippled across Arin’s face. She saw him war with himself.

Yes, Kestrel told him. That’s right. You can’t tell the emperor’s future daughter the code name of your spy, or admit the part Tensen plays for you at court. No, don’t say it. What if you’re wrong? You’d risk people’s lives. Arin, you can’t.

With forced calm, Arin said, “If I’ve been deluded, it’s because you have been pretending. You’re pretending even now. You are not so cold. You tried to help the plainspeople. When we were together in the city tavern—”

Kestrel felt a sinking sickness.

“—I blamed you for the exodus. But poisoning the horses was better than setting fire to the plains. Isn’t that why you chose it? Your father—”

“I love my father.”

Arin drew slightly back. “I know.”

“If I’d given him anything less than the best military advice I could, I would have put him in danger.” She only now realized this, and was appalled anew at herself. “The east burned the plains we took.”

“Yes.” It seemed like Arin would say more, but he didn’t.

“If my father had been there then … many Valorians died in the fire.” She thought of Ronan. Her throat closed. She couldn’t say his name. “If I did what you think I did, those deaths would be my fault.”

“They deserved it,” he said flatly. “All those soldiers cared about was feeding the empire’s appetite. The empire eats everything. Everyone in Herran is weak. We’ve been taxed too much. There’s been too little food. Now people are so weak they don’t even want to eat what’s left.”

Kestrel glanced up. “That doesn’t sound like starvation.”

“You know nothing about starvation.”

That silenced her.

Arin sighed. He rubbed hard at his brow, pushing along the line of the scar, which was poorly disguised by a cosmetic. “Everyone’s thin, tired. Hollow-eyed. It’s gotten worse. They sleep most of the day, Sarsine said. Even she does. If you could see her … she couldn’t stop her hands from shaking.”

Kestrel’s mind snagged on his last word. Shaking. It made her think—inexplicably—about how she had dyed her villa’s fountain pink when she was a little girl. She remembered telling the water engineer about it, not more than two months ago. She saw again the red dye spreading through the water and fading to pink. An experiment. Kestrel—had she been ten years old then?—had overheard the water engineer talking about a strange word, dilution, with her father at dinner. He thought well of the engineer, who had served with him in the war and designed Herran’s aqueducts. The girl Kestrel decided she should understand how dilution worked.