The Winner's Crime(95)

Arin wanted to protest that he hadn’t been, then to admit that he had, then to prove that he wasn’t anymore. “I didn’t fail you.”

“I never said you did.”

“I secured the eastern alliance. I made something, Tensen, a new thing, something that might check the imperial army. The emperor isn’t as secure as he thinks. He—”

“Better not tell me any more.”

Arin went cold. Those had been the words of someone who feared torture. “Come with me.”

“No. I need to know what happens next.”

“This isn’t a story!”

“Isn’t it?” Tensen asked. “Isn’t this the one about the boy who becomes a man and saves his people? I like that story. I acted the role once, decades ago, in a performance for Herran’s royal family. It ended happily.” Tensen touched his chest, right above his heart. Arin thought he heard a faint, papery sound. There was a flash of indecisiveness on Tensen’s face. Then it was gone. Tensen’s hand fell, and Arin forgot what he’d heard with the minister’s next words, and when he later remembered that look of indecisiveness, Arin hated himself, because he believed that the choice Tensen had been debating inside him had been about staying or leaving, and that if Arin had only found the right words, he could have persuaded Tensen to come with him.

“Go on, now. Go,” Tensen said. “My grandson looked so much like you, Arin. Don’t make me grieve him twice.”

Tensen took the gold ring from his finger and offered it. “This time, keep it, will you?” He smiled.

Arin caught the man’s hand. He kissed the dry palm. He took the ring. Then he said goodbye.

*

Kestrel’s father had left her. He wouldn’t stay for dinner, though Kestrel had said they could have it brought to her suite. He didn’t claim he was tired, or that his freshly healed wound might trouble him, but his step was slow as he let himself out, and Kestrel thought for a moment that he would put a hand to where he’d been gutted.

After he’d gone, she felt shame in a solid rush. She realized that she had been hoping he was tired, hoping his wound was sore … it would explain why even though he’d said that he trusted her, he didn’t want to stay.

Dinner came. Kestrel couldn’t eat it.

She opened a window. The almost-summer air was soft and sweet. There was a high wind. It smelled like the mountains, which meant it was blowing out to sea.

Kestrel’s maids came. They asked if she wanted to be changed for bed. She fidgeted with the wrist fastening that kept the moth inside her blue silk sleeve. She told the maids no. She wanted to send them away, then dreaded being alone. The maids stayed and gossiped quietly in their corners. It grew late. She sat, and worried. Had Tensen given Arin the letter? Was Arin still in the palace?

Later, Kestrel saw all of her mistakes, strung in such a crowded, ugly line that it was difficult to tell which one had come first.

But she knew the last. That was when she left her suite and went back to Tensen’s rooms to find out whether he’d seen Arin and delivered her letter.

*

The halls were hushed. Even quieter than before. Though the sweat that trickled between her shoulder blades proved that it was almost summer, Kestrel had the sensation that it was snowing. Her ears rang with a white, mirroring silence. Anxiety pricked her skin in icy flakes. The stone heap of the palace held its cold breath.

Tensen’s door was almost flush with its jamb, but it hadn’t been closed completely. Kestrel thought for a moment that he’d been waiting for her, but a part of her knew better. That self had already guessed what the slightly open door might mean. Yet Kestrel refused to believe it … and so that other, wiser self turned away from her, disowned her, and refused to help any further someone who had wrought her own doom.

Kestrel lifted her hand to knock. Her knuckles stuttered against the wood.

The emperor opened the door. The captain of the guard reached around him and dragged Kestrel inside.





47

At first, Kestrel couldn’t quite see. She was straining against the captain’s grasp, her breath coming in terrified gulps, and he and the emperor were tall. It seemed that she saw nothing but the rich cloth of their shoulders, their chests. Then she heard her father’s voice: “Please.”

The captain let go.

Kestrel saw her father now. He stood in the far corner of the room, on the other side of a dark spill of blood. Tensen lay on the floor. His green eyes were child’s marbles. The body was already rigid. On the general’s sleeve was a short line of blood from where he must have wiped his dagger before sheathing it.

Kestrel met her father’s eyes. They were as cold as the dead man’s. She opened her frostbitten mouth, and she was numb, too numb to speak, so she screamed.

The captain covered her mouth. Her father looked away. She froze.

“We’re trying to keep this as quiet as possible,” the emperor told her. “No one but us will know what you’ve done. It can’t be public. I won’t let your father be so dishonored.” The emperor took Kestrel’s dagger from its sheath. “This is mine. And that”—he held out the unfolded page of sheet music—“is yours.”

Her letter. “No,” she tried to say against the captain’s salty palm, but he gripped her jaw, and the emperor lightly touched the captain’s hand so that it turned Kestrel’s face to meet him.