The Winner's Crime(96)

“No?” said the emperor. “Kestrel, if there were a trial, your letter is confession enough.” His voice was filled with regret, but it wasn’t for her. “I could kill you now. What a serpent you are. What a poor reward for a man like your father. He came to me.”

Tears spilled down her cheeks. They trickled over the captain’s knuckles.

“He came, and told me the truth, no matter what it cost him. He set no terms. No pleas for mercy or mitigation. He simply gave me the truth of your treason. Of all the lessons you could have learned as empress, the most important would have been this: loyalty is the best love.”

Kestrel tried to look at her father, but the captain held her face firmly. She struggled. She tried to break free. The captain caged her in.

The emperor spoke again. “That kind of love tends to tarnish after the execution of one’s child. So I can’t repay Trajan’s loyalty with your blood, or turn you over to my captain and his messy art of questioning. Something else you would have learned—had you chosen to learn from me—is that your father has my loyalty, too. I will protect him as he has protected me. This means that you’re going north.”

To the tundra. The work camp. She dragged in air.

“Did you think I had no clue?” said the emperor softly. “I’ve had the Herrani minister followed for some time now. He was seen meeting with a Valorian maid. I asked myself whether that maid could have been you. Whether it was really possible that you might betray your country so easily, especially when it had been practically given to you. But people are capable of anything.”

Kestrel’s words were strangled beneath the captain’s hand. She wasn’t even sure what she was trying to say.

“Maybe you think that I can’t make you vanish,” the emperor continued, “that the court will ask too many questions. This is the tale I’ll tell. The prince and his bride were so consumed by love that they married in secret and slipped away to the southern isles. After some time—a month? two?—news will come that you’ve sickened. A rare disease that even my physician can’t cure. As far as the empire is concerned, you’ll be dead. You’ll be mourned.

“You might forget, in the tundra’s mines. I hear that people do, down in the dark. I hope that your father does. I hope that he forgets you, and your shame.”

Kestrel bit the captain’s hand. He didn’t even flinch, but the blood in her mouth made her lose herself. She twisted. The sounds she made under the captain’s hand were like an animal’s.

“Let her go,” said her father.

She ran to him. She skidded in the blood and fell against his chest, clinging, weeping. “Please don’t do this,” she sobbed, though he already had.

He didn’t touch her. “I wanted to trust you,” he whispered. “I tried. But I couldn’t lie to myself hard enough.”

She made fistfuls of his jacket. She pressed her face against his chest. Her shoulders jerked and heaved. “I didn’t—”

“Mean to? How do you not mean treason?”

“Please,” she begged. It seemed to be the only word she could say.

“I left your suite. I found the minister. I searched him. I read the letter. I killed him. And even then, I doubted. Even then, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that this would be you.”

“Papa, please.” She choked on her tears. “I love you.”

Slowly, carefully, he unhooked her hands from his jacket. The captain, sensing his moment, moved toward them.

The general’s voice came low, so that his words were only for him and his daughter. “Kestrel,” he said, “you have broken my heart.”





48

Dawn burned on the water.

Arin had been lucky. He’d slipped from the palace immediately after parting from Tensen. The elegant fortress had seemed absentminded, its energies turned inward, focused on something else.

Arin shrugged that thought away. Now, standing on the ship’s deck, his face to the raw dawn, it seemed silly.

No one had noticed him. No one had cared. He’d made it to the harbor. The wind had been high and fair and seaward. His ship had cast off.

It was as he sailed from the bay that something finally changed. He’d seen, in the moonlight, Valorian double-masters, the kind heavy with cannon, gun decks on two levels. They rode in his wake. It wasn’t that Arin had gone unnoticed—just that he had been noticed too late. There had been a delay. Some slowness to realize. Arin had the image of Valorians scrambling to catch up—and catch him. But his ship plowed the waves. His captain had been a master sailor in the height of Herran’s naval prowess. The wind favored them. It skipped them over the sea. It threw a scarf of dark cloud over the moon. By daybreak, the Valorian ships were gone.

It was a brief respite. The Valorians knew where he’d go. The empire was coming, and so was war, but Arin focused on listening to the wind gust the sails. He watched the sun lift dripping over the horizon. He let the sea air cram his lungs, and he felt free.

Arin unwrapped a small cloth bundle. Kestrel’s dagger gleamed. Now that it didn’t hurt him to look at it, he could see its beauty better. The sun set its ruby on fire and showed its pink heart. The chased gold became a liquid swirl. Arin weighed the weapon in his hand. Really, it weighed barely anything at all.