The Winner's Crime(92)

“Have we discussed them all?” He dragged a hand through his dirty hair. “Kestrel, I feel like I’m going mad. That I’m seeing things—or not seeing things. Just tell me. Did you … are you … marrying the prince because of me? Was it … part of some kind of deal you made with the emperor?”

The silence wasn’t just Kestrel’s. It was her father’s, too.

She sucked in a sharp breath. She could say this. She could do it, she promised herself, because she would make it better later. She would take it all back very, very soon.

Gently, Kestrel told him, “That sounds like a story.”

Arin hung back, eyes uncertain, and despite his insistence that he knew what she had done, Kestrel sensed how new his belief was. How fragile. Yes, it could break. With just the right amount of pressure in the right place, it would crack like a mirror. Kestrel saw something in Arin that she’d never seen in him before, something unbearably young. She saw, for a moment, the boy Arin must have been. Right around the eyes. A softness. A yearning. There, in the lines of his sensitive mouth. There, to show her how to strike hardest.

“This isn’t one of your Herrani tales with gods and villains and heroes and great sacrifices,” she said. “I loved those stories when I was little. I’m sure you did, too. They’re better than real life, where a person makes decisions in her best interests. Reality isn’t very poetic, I know.” She shrugged. “Neither is the sort of arrogance that encourages someone to think that so much revolves around him.”

Arin looked away. He stared at the piano, its strung insides exposed under the propped-open lid.

She walked around him in a slow circle, sizing him up. “I wonder what you believe could compel me to go to such epic lengths for your sake. Is it your charm? Your breeding?”

His eyes cut to her. She paused, letting her gaze trace his scar. He tensed. She made her mouth curl. “Not your looks, surely.”

His jaw tightened.

Thorns pricked her throat, she ached with self-disgust. Yet she forced her smile to grow. “I don’t mean to be cruel. But these ideas of yours are so unbelievable. And frankly, a little desperate. Like a fantasy. Hasn’t it occurred to you that you’re just seeing what you want to see?”

“No.”

But she’d seen him waver. “You must realize that you’ve been telling yourself a story. Arin, we’re too old for stories.”

His voice came low. “Are we?”

“I am. Stop being a child. It’s time you grew up.”


“Yes.” The word was slow. His tone was unexpectedly filled with something Kestrel recognized as wonder at the same moment that the recognition cramped her stomach. She knew that sound. It was the voice of someone for whom a cloud of confusion has been lifted. It was clarity, and the strength that returns with it.

“You’re right,” Arin said. When he faced her again she saw no shadow of that boy. It was as if she’d dreamed him. “I misunderstood,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

Formally, even clinically, Arin touched three fingers to the back of Kestrel’s hand. Then he left, and closed the door behind him.





44

The door’s thud echoed loud. A toxic fear ate at Kestrel. Even as doubt grew, and hinted that her strategy was the wrong one, or that no strategy could mend what she’d just done, Kestrel clung to the most important rule her father had taught her: Deal with danger before it deals with you.

“Father?” Kestrel called. Her voice rose higher. “Father?”

There was no answer. Had he been too shocked by what he had heard … suspicious? Was he refusing already to speak with her?

She rushed to the door and fumbled it open. The hallway was empty. Arin had vanished. An overturned bucket had spilled its foaming water. It was soaking Kestrel’s shoes. She stood in the puddle for a moment, her feet wet and cold. Then she felt wildly along the corridor’s carvings until she found the wooden button in the center of a blown flower. The panel slid aside, and light from the hallway illuminated the hidden room. It was empty.

What did this mean? Kestrel wondered whether her father could have left sometime after his watch had struck the hour, but before Arin had arrived. Had everything she’d said to Arin been for nothing?

She pressed fingertips to her temples. Her mind teemed with possibilities, her pulse soared, and she wasn’t thinking so much as scrambling from one thought to the next.

Kestrel returned to the music room and picked up the fallen pen. She wrote Arin a letter. She wrote it on the sheet music, running words right over the notes. The ink flowed and smeared as Kestrel told Arin the truth, from the treaty to her engagement, from the Moth to her love, from the eastern horses to the poison that was killing his people. She wrote feelingly, fiercely, the nib of the pen sometimes puncturing the page.

The words came easily. In a bare minute, the letter was done.

*

It burned in her skirt pocket like a hot coal. Kestrel went to her father’s suite—he wasn’t there, his valet didn’t know where he was—and then finally to her own, where two maids were so perfectly normal that their ordinariness was dizzying to Kestrel. She made an excuse and ducked into her dressing room. Alone, she tucked a masker moth into her sleeve. The buttoned fastening at the wrist kept the moth safely inside, and she wished fervently that she had done this earlier. If only she’d had a moth in the music room. She could have slipped it to Arin. A sign. She would have been subtle—a sleight of hand was all it would have taken, an absentminded rub of her wrists, and then the reveal.