The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

A sob of fear burst past her lips. She heard them behind her. Fanned out wide. Galloping. A hunt.

  A shout. She’d been seen.

  Little rabbit, little fox.

  Run.

  She fled. She couldn’t really see where she was going, couldn’t look back. Gasps tore at her throat. She stumbled, nearly fell, forced herself forward. She heard the horses stop and that was worse, because the guards must be dismounting now, they were close, and she didn’t want to know this. It could not be over.

  But someone caught her from behind. Pitched her down. She screamed against the wet earth.

  She was dragged back inside the prison gate. She refused to walk. They pulled her through the mud and then finally carried her.

  As on her first day in the camp, she was brought before the silver-braided woman. A thin purple welt cut across the woman’s throat. Kestrel should have killed her. She should have locked all the women prisoners in their cells. Her escape had been too quickly discovered. She hadn’t had enough of a head start. Yet another mistake.

  “I told you that if you behaved, no one would hurt you,” the woman said. She unhooked the whip from her belt.

  “No.” Kestrel shrank. “Please. I won’t do it again.”

  “I know you won’t.” The woman shook the looped whip. It snapped out loose at her thigh.

  “That makes no sense.” Kestrel’s voice got threaded and high. “I won’t be able to work if you do that.”

  “Not at first. But afterward I think you’ll work much better.”

  “No. Please. Why punish me if I won’t remember it? I won’t, I’ll be just like the other prisoners, I’ll forget it, I’ll forget every thing.”

  “You’ll remember long enough.”

  Kestrel twisted wildly, but hands were already opening the back of her dress, she was being turned around, pushed up against the gate, tied to the bars. The wind whispered across her bare back.

  I have been whipped before, she heard the memory of Arin’s voice. Did you think I couldn’t bear the punishment for being caught?

  Kestrel strained against her bonds, terrified.

  “Princess,” said the guard behind her.

  Kestrel’s muscles went tight. Her shoulders hunched. She couldn’t breathe.

  “Every new prisoner shines with a little light,” the guard said. “Your light happens to shine brighter. It’s best for everyone if it goes out.”

  Kestrel pressed her forehead against the bars. She stared at the tundra. Her breath was coming again now. Hard and fast.

  There was a sharp, whistling sound like a bird taking off.

  The whip came down. It carved into her. Something wet ran down her ribs.

  She wasn’t brave. She could hear herself as it continued. She wasn’t anything she recognized.

  It used to be that Kestrel would treasure the memory of Arin singing to her. She’d worry that she’d somehow forget it. The sliding low notes. The sweet intervals, or the way he’d sustain a long line, and how she loved the sound of him taking a breath as much as she did the way he could hold a musical phrase aloft until it ended exactly where it should.

  But after the guards untied her from the gate, when her back was on fire and she couldn’t walk and her bones were a trembling liquid, she looked at the cup in the woman’s hand. Kestrel reached for it. She begged to drink.

  The cup was set to her lips. She caught the silvery scent of the nighttime drug. The thought of becoming just like the other prisoners no longer seemed so bad.

  It would be a blessing to forget.

  After all, what was there to remember?

  Someone she never could have had. Friends dead or gone. A father who did not love her.

  The cup tipped. Water ran over her tongue, cool and delicious. She forgot the pain, forgot where she was, forgot who she’d been, forgot that she had ever been afraid of forgetting.

  Chapter 3

  Arin added the captured Valorian vessels to his fleet.

  Some of the Dacran sailors who had been sent to scour the aqueducts found the source of the poison that had been flowing into the city’s water supply. It was a large vat lodged in a mountain tunnel that connected the water’s path to arcades that came down the mountainside in a series of tiered arches. The vat was cleverly designed; it leaked a thick, brownish liquid in a dose measured by internal weights and counterweights.

  When Arin saw it, brought forth from one of the old mountain trenches that had been used ten years ago by Herrani slaves to construct the tunnel, he had wanted to pitch the vat off the cliff and watch it shatter on the rocks below. Instead, he helped carry it carefully down the mountain and stored it in the city’s arsenal to be used against the Valorians in case of a siege.

  Every one in the city drank rainwater collected in barrels or brought in from the countryside. They all went a little thirsty until Arin, having waited a few days for the aqueduct to flush itself clean, drank some of its water and felt no different than he had before.

  “Do you really think it could work?” Sarsine asked. Arin’s cousin lay in her bed in his family home, still pallid. Her movements were slow and she slept most of the day, but her eyes had grown brighter in the past few days.

  “It does work.” Arin described the different parts of the miniature cannon he had designed in the Dacran castle forge. “It’s what made the eastern queen agree to ally with us,” he added, though with an uncomfortable sense that this perhaps had not been the whole explanation for the queen’s decision. “This weapon might give us the edge we need against the empire, but we must make more. Sarsine, I need you.” He brushed lank hair from her forehead and looked into the face that reminded him of his father, for whom she’d been named—an unfashionable, solid-sounding name she’d hated as a girl. He cupped her cheek. “I can’t do this alone.”

  She reached for his hand and held it. She no longer looked so weak. Sarsine smiled. “You’re not alone,” she told him.

  Eastern reinforcements came by ship roughly a week after the sea battle, and Arin was hugely relieved to see the new sloops drop anchor in his harbor. The Valorian counterattack would come soon—possibly somewhere along the western coast, he suspected.

  One of the new arrivals in the harbor created quite a commotion. A cage was lowered from the largest sloop into a launch and rowed slowly to the piers. As the launch approached, Arin saw that the Dacrans at the oars were stiff and silent, edged as far away as possible from the cage. One figure, though, leaned against the bars, crooning to the pacing animal inside. Arin immediately recognized the young man. He felt a surge of gladness. He hadn’t expected Roshar to come.

  The eastern prince looked up to see Arin standing on the pier. A grin split his face. Arin used to think that Roshar had a skull’s face; the nose and ears had been cut off. But Roshar looked so ferociously alive, his black eyes shining and lined with green paint, his teeth white and even, that although Arin remembered what he’d thought when he’d had his first shocking glimpse of Roshar’s mutilations, that memory felt distant now.

  Roshar, ignoring the startled cries of his crewman, leaped from the launch onto the pier. The launch rocked in the water. The small tiger growled.

  Arms folded across his chest, Arin walked to the end of the pier. “Did you have to bring the tiger?”

  “I kept him hungry during the journey here, just for you,” Roshar said. “Go give him a nice snuggle, won’t you? He’s come all this way to see you. The least you could do is give him one of your arms to eat. Too much? What about a hand? At least some fingers. Arin, where’s your hospitality?”

  Arin, laughing, embraced his friend.

  He choked on his first lungful of smoke. “This is vile.”

  “I told you you’d like it.” Roshar bit the stem of his pipe, lighting the tobacco. He shook the match out. For a few moments, he smoked in silent contentment. Both the silence and the contentment were, in Arin’s experience, rare for the prince. “Try it again,” Roshar said, “or I’ll think you’re rude.”


  Arin, ignoring him, went to open a window. Sweet warm air washed into his father’s study.

  “Arin,” Roshar complained. “Shut the window. I’m cold. Why is your country so damned cold?”

  “It’s summer.” The first day of the season, which Valorians celebrated as Firstsummer, had already passed.

  Roshar shuddered. “I want to go home.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Admit it. You missed me.”

  Arin looked at him. Softly, he said, “I did.”

  The prince squinted at him through a cloud of smoke. “You seem better.”

  Arin frowned, leaning against the casement. “I wasn’t aware that I seemed all that bad.”

  Roshar snorted. “As one of Dacra’s royal line and educated in the finest points of grace and discretion, I shall pass over any description of exactly how you were when you set your no-good, illegal foot in my city.” Roshar eyed him closely, then his gaze wandered to the sword that Arin had unbuckled and slung by its belt over the back of a chair when they’d entered the study. “What happened to your dagger?”

  “Gone.” Arin had dropped Kestrel’s dagger into the sea.

  Roshar toyed with his pipe. “As for why I’m here, the queen thought that you could use someone with authority.”

  “I’ve been managing fine.”

  “So I understand. Xash is impressed. Also, he hates you. But your delightful little power struggle is moot now that I’m here and outrank you both. Don’t I?”

  Slowly, Arin said, “Of course.”

  Roshar smiled. “The queen sends her greetings.”

  Arin was silent.

  “Hoping for something a little more friendly? Well”—Roshar’s voice went sly—“you know how she is, don’t you?”

  Arin flushed. “I think we should discuss possible scenarios for a Valorian attack.”

  “Boring.”

  “We don’t have time for—”

  “Oh! Oh! The Valorians are battering down the door right now. We have to do something.”

  “You can go home now.”

  Roshar settled comfortably into his chair. “Speaking of Valorians, I hear that Lady Kestrel and Prince Verex married in secret. Yes, word has it that they were so consumed with passionate love that they disappointed hundreds of wedding guests with a private ceremony right after the lady’s birthday at the end of spring. The amorous couple simply couldn’t wait.”

  Arin doubted that “passionate love” had much to do with it. He shook his head. “She wants the empire. She gets what she wants.”

  “They’re on a lovers’ holiday in the southern isles.”

  Arin shrugged. His shoulders felt tight. Roshar didn’t appear to notice. “You are better,” said the prince.

  “Can we talk about the war now?”

  “What ever you want, little Herrani.”

  Arin unrolled a map and spread it across his father’s desk. They studied the western coastline, the cliffs and rocky shores that would offer the Valorians an opportunity for a surprise attack, and the beach, known as Lerralen, that led to flat land running right into the southern Herrani estates.

  When daylight had darkened and Roshar’s eyes grew slowly heavier, Arin realized that the prince’s gleeful needling had hidden a genuine fatigue from his journey. Arin told him he should rest.

  “Choose what ever suite suits you best,” Arin said. “But please: keep that tiger in his cage.”

  “Arin’s a kitten,” Roshar protested. Purely for the purpose of annoying Arin, it seemed, Roshar had named the tiger after him. “He’s sweet-tempered and polite and very good-looking . . . unlike some people I could mention.”

  “You’re wrong,” Roshar said.

  They were leaning over a map in Arin’s library. Arin kept his fingers stubbornly pressed down on the cliffs along his country’s western shore.

  “Wrong,” Roshar insisted.

  Arin shook his head. “You’re underestimating the Valorian general.”

  “He’s not going to send soldiers up cliffs. He doesn’t need to. He’s got the numbers. He can land his ships on that beach and take the countryside with sheer force. He doesn’t have to be clever.”

  Arin remembered Kestrel. “I think he enjoys being clever. I think he might be undercut by his own cunning, if we can catch him at it.”

  “Those cliffs are monstrously high.”

  “His Rangers are capable of it. If they scale the cliffs and come south while we’re dealing with the Valorians that have landed on the beach, they’ll flank us and squeeze us between them.”

  Roshar made a dismissive noise.

  Frustrated, Arin said, “Are you so proud that you think no one can outmaneuver you?”

  “Are you so ready to make the general into some almighty being capable of anything just because he had your family slaughtered?”

  Anger knocked the wind out of Arin. There was a hard silence.

  Roshar rubbed his eyes, smearing the green paint that lined them. He sighed. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Arin.” It was Sarsine. She was standing in the library doorway.

  “Not now,” he told her.

  “Someone’s here to see you.”

  “Not now.”

  “He says it’s important.”

  “What is important?”

  “His message.”

  “Which is?”

  “He won’t tell me. He wants to tell you himself.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “No, no,” said Roshar. “Go ahead, talk to him. We’re done anyway. I’ll inform the battalion leaders of my battle plan, and—”

  “Wait. Sarsine, who is this person?”

  “A Herrani groom who took care of horses at a way station in Valoria along the road that goes north to the tundra.”

  “Does his message have anything to do with a Valorian military operation?”

  “I asked him. He says no.”

  “Does he have information on the general, his troops, or the emperor?”

  “No, nothing like that. But—”

  Arin turned away. “Later.”

  She took a breath as if to argue, then seemed to change her mind. “I’ll put him in your old rooms. He’s traveled far to see you.”

  “Well,” Roshar said cheerfully, rolling up the map he and Arin had argued over. “Every thing’s settled, then. What’s that beach called? Lerralen? We’ll set out for it tomorrow at dawn.”

  Arin couldn’t sleep. He threw his windows open. He heard an owl hunting in the summer dark.

  It was, of course, safer to send the majority of the eastern forces to the beach at Lerralen, with no soldiers held back to guard the cliffs. The beach was an ideal place for the Valorian army to land. The beach and its surrounding terrain were relatively flat and wide open—good for an invasion. The Dacrans, who didn’t know the land they were defending, wouldn’t have any height on the Valorians, and that would make repelling the invaders harder . . . which General Trajan would like. Roshar was prob ably right.

  Prob ably.

  Arin had no power to overrule him anyway. Few of his people were in any condition to fight. He had no troops to command. He was lucky to have the eastern queen’s help.

  Yes, lucky.

  The queen, however, was no fool. She must have heard of Xash’s resentment at being ignored by Arin in the planning of a key battle.

  Arin was glad Roshar was here, but it was nonetheless clear that he had been sent to put Arin in his place.

  Arin braced an arm against the casement, resting his forehead against his wrist. The night curled around him. He’d lit no lamp. He wondered if one of the reasons Valorians trained to get by on little sleep was so that they could feel the way he did right now: like there was no difference between him and the darkness. He heard the sough of trees. He thought of the general landing on Herran’s shore. The muscles in his arm hardened. He’d never sleep now. He kept seeing the cliffs. They rose, white and sparkling, in his mind.


  Kestrel wouldn’t be able to resist those cliffs.

  If she were mustering an invasion, she’d like the looks of the beach at Lerralen, but she’d love the cliffs. The cunning of it would be its own attraction. And the results . . . if even a small force got up those cliffs and came south to meet the Valorians already massed on the beach, Herran’s defenses would be easily broken. The Valorians would take the countryside and work their way to the city, whose bay was now too well defended to take by sea.

  If Kestrel were the general, that’s what she’d do.

  If Arin were Kestrel, that’s what he’d do.

  Arin found that his loose hand had become a fist.

  He remembered the golden, oiled line that had marked Kestrel’s brow as the sign of an engaged woman, and how much he’d hated it. One evening in the palace, Arin had slowly nudged Kestrel up against the wintered windows of a closed balcony door. He’d felt her slender length against him. He’d kissed her mark. Later, he tasted the cosmetic oil on his lips. It had been bitter. He’d touched his tongue to it again.

  Arin had had to struggle so hard for clarity. The things he had believed! He thought about the night the spell had finally broken. He’d sailed from the east. He’d risked everything to creep into the palace. He saw her again: the dismay on her face, the cold irritation, the way she’d rubbed her hands against the skirts of her blue silk dress, the sleeves belled and fastened tight at the wrist. That deep blue poured around her as she’d sat at the piano and tried to ignore him and played a laughing little melody. When he refused to leave, she’d turned cruel.

  It wasn’t entirely true that Arin felt nothing when he thought of Kestrel. He felt shame. He shuddered to think of his godsforsaken questions. He couldn’t believe he’d asked them.

  What did you do for that treaty?

  It gave me my country’s freedom. It saved my life. What did you do to make the emperor sign it?

  Did you . . . are you . . . marrying the prince because of me? Was it . . . part of some kind of deal you made with the emperor?

  He still heard her cutting replies.

  He thanked the god of chance he’d stopped short of asking whether she was Tensen’s Moth—yet another of the fantasies he’d entertained about her in his compulsion to transform her into the person he longed for her to be. This, despite Tensen’s loyalty to him, his honesty. Tensen had already told him the identity of his anonymous spy: Risha, the eastern princess held hostage in the imperial court.