The Winner's Crime(97)

Yes, it was beautiful. But beauty seemed a feeble reason to keep something he didn’t want.

Arin dropped the dagger in the sea.

He sailed home.

*

The wagon stopped. The horses needed to be watered.

The sun was up now. It came in through the wagon’s small, barred window. It showed Kestrel her shackled wrists, limp in the lap of the same pretty blue gown she had been wearing last night. Though the wagon had stopped, Kestrel still felt jolted, sore. Her eyes were swollen. The sunlight hurt.

But something brought her to her feet. A voice in another language as familiar to her as her own. Someone outside had spoken in Herrani.

Kestrel went to the window. She couldn’t see the guards. She couldn’t see anything at first; the light was too bright. But then she saw the peaks of empty mountains. She heard the Herrani voice again: a man, talking to the horses. She heard the swing of an empty metal bucket. Footsteps in grainy dirt.

“Please,” she called softly in his language. The footsteps stopped. Her shackles rattled as she fumbled to get a finger and thumb up her left sleeve. She pinched the moth she had hidden there and pulled it free. She put her hand through the bars. “Take this.”

Slowly, the footsteps neared. She still couldn’t see him, but imagined him standing just below her hand. Kestrel stretched. Her wrist strained, and her hand began to go numb. She offered the moth held in her fingertips.

Had he taken it? Had it fallen? It was gone.

“Give it to your governor,” Kestrel whispered. “Tell Arin—”

There was a cry, a heavy thump. Valorian curses, boots scuffing dirt. “What did she give you?” said one of the Valorian guards.

“Nothing,” said the Herrani.

The door to the wagon flung open. Kestrel shrank into a corner. The guard was a large shadow against the achingly white light. He advanced. “What did you give him?”

Outside, the rough sounds continued. Protests. An unceremonious search. But what, after all, would the guard outside see? A battered moth. Nothing precious. Nothing important. Just an ordinary thing, blending into everything else.

The guard grabbed her shoulders. Her shackled hands went up. She hid behind them.

All over, people were waking up to an ordinary day, as ordinary as a moth. Kestrel grieved for an ordinary day. She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of how it would be, her perfect ordinary morning. A horse ride with Arin. A race.

I’m going to miss you when I wake up, she’d told him as she’d dreamed on the palace lawn.

Don’t wake up.

On that perfect, ordinary morning, she would pour tea for her father. He would stay, and he would never leave to be anywhere else.

Someone was shaking her. Kestrel remembered that it was the guard.

She remembered that it was her eighteenth birthday. She laughed, chokingly, to imagine the emperor explaining her absence to everyone gathered for her recital. She thought she was laughing, but then that sound tore along its edges. It clawed at her throat. Her face was wet. Tears stung her lips.

Her birthday. I remember the day you were born, her father had said. I could hold you with one hand.

The guard hit Kestrel across the face. “I said, what did you give him?”

You had a warrior’s heart, even then.

Kestrel spat blood. “Nothing,” she told the guard. She thought of her father, she thought of Arin. She told her final lie. “I gave him nothing.”





Author’s Note

This book was exhausting to write and took a while for me to finish (having a baby in the middle of it might have had something to do with it). So first, an enormous thank you to those who read drafts of The Winner’s Crime or portions of it: Ann Aguirre, Marianna Baer, Kristin Cashore, Donna Freitas, Daphne Grab, Mordicai Knode, Anne Heltzl, Sarah Mesle, Jill Santopolo, Eliot Schrefer, and Robin Wasserman. You always had the right words to keep me going and to make this a better book.

Such is also true for people who talked with me about knotty plot problems or thorny emotional questions, or worldbuilding ones. Thanks to everyone at Kindling Words, for excellent talks, advice, and comments that helped me piece together The Winner’s Crime at a stage when I knew where I was going but not what I was doing. I especially thank Franny Billingsley, Judy Blundell, Sarah Beth Durst, Deborah Heiligman, Rebecca Stead, and Nancy Werlin. In Parisian cafés, Coe Booth and Aviva Cashmira Kakar helped me shape Tensen into the sneaky character he became. Also in Paris, at the Broken Arm café, Pamela Druckerman and I mulled over Arin, the bookkeeper, and the queen. Leigh Bardugo and I had an awesome conversation about guns, and Mordicai Knode contributed on separate occasions. He also told me about Quipu Code after reading an early scene about Favor-Keeping. Lunch with Sarah MacLean resulted in a plot point that I’m thrilled about but can’t share (Book 3 spoiler, sorry!). Kristin Cashore brainstormed with me on so many points that it’s hard to list them all. Robin Wasserman is probably the person you can thank (or blame) for this being a trilogy to begin with. Barry Lyga, aka my torture expert extraordinaire (he asked to be called that. Or something like that), suggested I go after Thrynne’s fingers in the prison scene, and Kristin Raven, a doctor, gave very useful (and gory) information about how those fingers would look. She also confirmed my instinct that the general’s abdominal wound could be “packed.” Miriam Jacobson, a scholar and pianist, gave me (as she put it) “le mot juste” for a piece that Kestrel plays: an impromptu. Mordicai and Jenny Knode were consulted about ideas for the map. High praise to Keith Thompson for his artistry in representing this world. My husband, Thomas Philippon, is always my most crucial adviser when it comes to sorting out ideas, and he’s especially great about anything to do with the military or horses.