The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

He didn’t believe her. “How could this happen to you? How could you not tell me?” He had pulled her to her feet. He was holding her by the upper arms. There was no flesh there. His thumbs met bone. He was not himself. This was not his world. There was no version of his world where this could be real.

  “You’re frightening her,” Sarsine said.

  Not fear. Kestrel’s face was a blazing challenge: chin lifted, shoulders tight, shirt loose at the neck. One of the lashes had curled up over her collar bone. She tugged free.

  His throat was tight. “You should have told me.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “Kestrel, you . . . did something for me. For this country. Don’t you remember? Can’t you try? Or let me tell you, please—”

  Her flat palm cracked across his face.

  It sucked the air out of him. His cheek burned. She’d caught him across the mouth, too. Her eyes were liquid and golden and lost and angry. He was too ashamed of himself to speak.

  Gently, Sarsine said, “I know you want to help.”

  “Of course I do,” he whispered.

  “Then you need to leave.”

  It wasn’t until he was alone in the hallway, sagged against the wall, that he touched where she had hit him. His fingers came away wet. He stared at the tears. They shone on his fingertips like blood.

  Chapter 11

  “Will she die?”

  Sarsine shut the door to Kestrel’s suite behind her with more force than necessary. Hands planted on her hips, she stared down at Arin where he sat in the hallway, back to the wall opposite Kestrel’s door. His joints were stiff. He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there.

  “Gods, Arin. Pull yourself together. No, she won’t die.”

  “The lashes. There could be an infection. A fever.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “It happened to me.”

  “She’s not you.”

  “She can’t keep anything down. It’s gotten worse.”

  “She was drugged twice a day, every day for about a month. Some of what she’s going through is because her body wants the drugs it can’t have.”

  He caught the plural form. “More than one kind?” Though he’d already suspected this from his own experience with the exhilarating power of the drug he’d been given in the mines, and the way Kestrel longed for something to make her sleep. Had begged for it, sometimes.

  “Yes.”

  “She told you this.” Hurt pinched his heart. He looked away from his cousin so that she wouldn’t see how it felt that Kestrel had so easily told her what he’d been forced to guess. He was in the tent again, on the tundra, listening to the wind buckle the canvas. The chill oozing up from the ground, Kestrel in his arms, his pulse wild, the awful shudder of her limbs, the curve of her neck in the dim green dark. The relief to hear, finally, her breath slow and quiet. The way his own breath stayed uneven for a long time after that.

  He said, “How did you get her to fall asleep?”

  “She’s not asleep.”

  “What?”

  “She’s calm enough for now.”

  “You left her alone, awake?” He remembered how she’d stood in a small boat high over black water on the night of the Firstwinter Rebellion, ready to jump. He heard her asking for Roshar’s numbing ring. “You can’t. Go back. Sarsine, you can’t leave her alone.”

  His cousin’s hands slid down from her hips. Her stance loosened, her expression growing soft and tired. “Kestrel’s too strong to do what you’re thinking.”

  “Look at her.” Arin spoke as if Kestrel were in the hallway with them. Look at what I’ve done, he almost said, then bit back the words. Sarsine would only say that none of this was his fault.

  He knew the truth.

  Sarsine sat on the floor across from him, knees drawn up under neath her muslin skirts. “I have looked at her. I’ve bathed and dressed her and put her to bed, and she’s malnourished and sick, but she’s alive. She’s fought hard to live. If you don’t think she’s strong, you’re mistaken.”

  “I’ll stay with her.”

  Sarsine slowly shook her head. “She doesn’t want you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “She won’t hurt herself.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Arin, I’ll care for her, of course, but we can’t be with her every moment of the day.”

  “I damned well can.”

  “She would hate it. She doesn’t even know who she is anymore. How can she find out if she’s never alone with herself?”

  Arin tunneled his fingers through his dirty hair and pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes until they flashed white under the lids. “I know who she is.” Proud girl. Hard, noble heart. And a liar, a liar. “I should have known.” Every moment with her in the capital rushed through him, freezing his veins. He’d swallowed her lies. The way she’d mocked him. Set him aside, made him insignificant. It had been easy to believe. It had made sense.

  He cursed himself. He saw the opportunities he’d had, over many months before her arrest, to seize the truth of things. But none of what he’d seen or suspected in the capital had made sense. It had been senseless, so apparently wrong, the way he’d seen her eyes slim with longing when he’d found her by a canal. The waters had swelled below. She’d worn a maid’s dress. Senseless: that she would gamble her safety to help someone else’s people. Senseless: that she’d smuggle information to Arin’s spymaster. A traitor to her country. The Valorian punishment for treason was death.

  And Arin had accused her of selfishness. In the capital, he’d thought words like power hungry, and shallow, and cruel. He’d said as much to her face. He’d blamed her for the deaths of the eastern plainspeople.

  Her stricken expression, clear in the rushlights of that filthy tavern. The white line of her mouth.

  He had ignored it. Misread it.

  He’d missed every thing that had mattered.

  Sarsine grabbed his wrists and tugged the hands from his eyes. He looked at her, but didn’t see her. He saw Kestrel’s wasted face. He saw himself as a child, the night of the invasion, soldiers in his home, how he had done nothing.

  Later, he’d told Sarsine when the messenger had come to see him.

  No, I won’t, he’d promised Roshar when the prince had listed reasons not to rescue the nameless spy from the tundra’s prison.

  “I was wrong,” Arin said. “I should have—”

  “Your should haves are gone. They belong to the god of the lost. What I want to know is what you are going to do now.”

  He had long avoided the general’s estate.

  Sarsine’s words ringing through his head, Arin rode Javelin through the unlocked gate.

  A yellow-throated thrush called from a low bough. The uncut grass of the meadow reached up to the horse’s hocks. Arin walked Javelin through the green hiss of it, away from the villa, which he wasn’t yet ready to see, and up a hill, through a grove daubed with small, ripening oranges. They’d be hard and dry if he plucked and peeled them. Not ready yet. But their scent made him want them now.

  He made a clicking sound with his teeth and tongue, nudged the horse with his heels. Javelin flicked an ear and picked up the pace, gusting a short breath through his nostrils, pleased to go more quickly.

  Arin kept clear of the larger outbuildings. The thatched cottage that had belonged to Kestrel’s nurse, just west of the overgrown garden. The empty stables. The empty slaves’ quarters. The windowless barnlike shape of it, the paint white and flaking in the sun. Arin kept Javelin on his determined path, but turned a little in the saddle for a backward glance at the last building, his sword shifting against his hip as he did so.

  He reached the forge and swung off the saddle, dropped his boots to the ground. He loosened the stallion’s girth and let him go. The grass was high and good. A horse’s heaven.

  Arin’s boots were loud on the flagstones. There were smithies in the city he could have used, b
ut this one—perversely—felt like his. Things were as Arin had left them last winter. Inside, tools hung where they should. The anvil had a skin of dust. The hearth was long dead. The coal scuttle full.

  He built a fire in the forge, worked the bellows, and watched flames snap to life. When it was going strong, he left the fire to burn. He’d be back. The fire would have to burn a while for what he wanted. In the meantime—he forced himself to think it—he should go see the house.

  The general’s villa—Kestrel’s—had stood empty since Arin had killed Cheat last winter. As the leader of the Herrani rebellion, Cheat had claimed the house as his and lived there because it was the best, and because it was the general’s. Maybe even because it was Kestrel’s. Arin didn’t know when Cheat’s malevolent fascination with her had begun. Arin swallowed hard to remember it.

  His hand was tight on the sword’s hilt. He looked at his clenched knuckles, looked again at his father’s sword, pulling out an inch of it to see the gleam of finely tempered steel in the sun. Then he dropped it back home into the scabbard and he went inside the house.

  Past the portico, the entry way’s fountain was silent and scummed over. Bugs walked the water’s green surface. Painted gods stared down at Arin from the walls. Other creatures, too: fawns, a leaping stag, birds. He caught a glimpse of one frescoed bird arrested in midflight and remembered seeing it for the first time over Kestrel’s shoulder, on the day that she’d bought him.

  Inside, the house was mostly bare. He’d thought it would be, but had never thought that it would look like this.

  After Arin had signed the imperial treaty that seemed to promise Herran freedom, the Valorian colonists surrendered their homes in this territory. Ships came to empty the houses of Valorian possessions. There were disputes over whose was what. Arin had waded in, brokered the negotiations, but had ignored Kestrel’s house. The Herrani family who’d owned it was long dead. When a Valorian ship entered the harbor to empty the general’s villa, Arin pretended that the ship and house didn’t exist. He’d assumed that every thing had been taken. He was almost right.

  He hadn’t been here since the Firstwinter Rebellion. He hadn’t wanted to be drawn to Kestrel’s rooms, or to see the kitchens where his people had been forced to work, or to find the place where the steward accused him of touching something he shouldn’t have. A flogging had followed, set far back on the grounds so that no one in the house would be bothered by unpleasant sounds. Arin hadn’t wanted to remember the music room ringing with Kestrel’s playing, or to see the library where he’d once shut himself inside with her. He’d wanted nothing of this place at all. Even when he’d come with men and a cart and draft horses to bring the piano to his house, Arin hadn’t gone inside. He’d waited outside, rigging a system of pulleys he used to help haul the instrument up and onto the cart after it had been wheeled out the wide doors of the music room.

  So he wasn’t prepared for the filth he saw and smelled.

  Cheat had been vengeful. The corners reeked of piss. There were stains on the walls, the windows. Several panes were shattered.

  Arin’s feet carried him swiftly to the music room. Things were odd there: leaves of sheet music scattered on the floor, some of it burned, but only a little, as if Cheat had started and then had had a better idea, prob ably the same idea that had kept him from ruining the piano. Maybe Cheat hadn’t been sure whether to force Kestrel to do what he wanted, or bribe her . . .

  Arin’s stomach seized. His lungs blazed. He flung open a window.

  He stared into the garden, remembering this view. He’d watched flowers dip and float in a breeze while Kestrel played a melody written for the flute. His mother used to sing along to it, in the evenings, for guests.

  He wondered if this was what it meant to have been born in the year of the god of death: to see every thing defiled.

  But the air cleared his head. He made his way to the kitchens. There he started yet another fire, this time to boil water. He found a harsh-smelling block of lye. Rags. Buckets. Orange-scented wood oil. Vinegar for the windows and walls. Arin began to clean the house from top to bottom.

  As he wrung out a cloth, he felt his god sneer. Cleaning? Ah, Arin. This is not why I made you. This is not our agreement.

  Arin had no sense of having agreed to anything, only of having been claimed, and liking it.

  He couldn’t dishonor his god. But he also couldn’t dishonor himself. He pushed the voice from his head and kept at his task.

  When he returned to the forge, the fire was long dead. He restarted it and stoked the flames. Then he set his father’s sword into the fire, heated it to the point of flexibility, and held it against the anvil. He chopped the blade. His mind was quiet as he trimmed it down and something new formed beneath his hands. Folded steel, layer upon layer. Forge-welded. Shorter, thinner. Strong and sprung. He reformed the hilt. Shaped and ground the blade. He did all that he could to make Kestrel’s dagger his finest work.

  Chapter 12

  She swam out of the murk.

  She was sore—shoulders and ribs and stomach especially. But the spasms that had racked her body were gone. Every thing was impossibly soft. The feather bed. Her thin shift. Clean skin. The tender give of the pillow beneath her cheek. She blinked, heard the short sweep of her eyelashes against the pillow’s fabric. Her hair lay loose, smooth. It had been disgusting when she’d arrived here. She remembered Sarsine working oiled fingers through it. “Cut it off,” Kestrel had said. She’d felt disjointed and eerie as the words left her dry lips, like she wasn’t really speaking but echoing something she’d already said.

  “Oh no,” Sarsine had replied. “Not this time.”

  Cut it off. Yes. There had been another time. Then, there’d been a tangle of myriad little braids beneath her fingers, and she’d hated the feel of them . . . because of the ghost of an unexpected plea sure . . . yet what kind of pleasure, and why it had vanished, her mind refused to say.

  You might regret cutting your hair, a society lady like you, Sarsine had said in this other, earlier time.

  Please. I can’t bear it.

  Sarsine unsnarled the dense clumps left by the prison camp. The movement of fingers in Kestrel’s hair made her dizzy. She’d gagged, and was sick all over again.

  Now, puzzling through this, Kestrel touched a ribbon of hair on the pillow. She’d lost track of its color in the prison.

  Familiar. Dark blonde. A little reddish. It had been a more fiery hue when she was little. Warrior red, her father had said, tweaking a braid. She suspected that he’d been disappointed to see it darken over time.

  She sat up—too swiftly. Her sight dimmed. She got light-headed.

  “Ah,” said a voice.

  Her vision cleared. Sarsine stretched up from a chair (dove-gray wood, upholstery the color of matte pearl. This, too: familiar) and padded to a small table that held a covered tureen. Sarsine ladled steaming broth into a cup and brought it to her. “Hungry?”

  Kestrel’s stomach growled. “Yes,” she said, marveling at such a simple thing as normal hunger. She drank, and felt immediately exhausted. The cup hung limp in her hands. “How long?” she managed to say.

  “Since you’ve been here? Two days.”

  The windows were curtained and glowed with daylight.

  “You’ve been fitful,” Sarsine said, “and very ill. But I think”—the woman touched Kestrel’s cheek—“that we’ve turned a corner.”

  This woman was good, Kestrel thought. All brisk confidence. Firm, matter-of-fact, with an undercurrent of care. A crease of worry about the eyes. Genuine, maybe.

  “You need some solid sleep,” Sarsine said. “Can you try?”

  Kestrel liked this, too: how Sarsine knew that something that should be easy wasn’t easy. It was true that wake and sleep in the past days (two, she reminded herself) had been broken and shuffled. She glanced up into Sarsine’s eyes. Then stared. She saw clearly now what she hadn’t noticed before. Her heart thumped.

  They were
the exact same color. Gray, like fine rain. Heavy black lashes. His eyes.

  Her mouth, too. Not quite the same shape. But the cut of the lower lip, the corner lifted in the smallest of smiles . . .

  “Well?” Sarsine said gently, taking the empty cup, which had become heavier than stone.

  Kestrel reached for Sarsine’s free hand and gripped it. She steadied under the unwavering gray gaze. Not right, part of her insisted. Not right to seek him in this woman’s face. To seek him at all. But Kestrel did, she couldn’t help doing it, and when sleep opened beneath her she wasn’t afraid to fall into it.

  It was night when she woke again. The lamp burned low. A large shadow lurked in the chair. Long, trousered legs stretched out, boots still tightly laced. His dark head crooked awkwardly against the carved trim of the chair’s back.

  Clean, asleep. Hard lines softer now. Face shaven. That scar.

  He was too clean. Close enough that she could smell him. He smelled strange: vinegar and orange and . . . lye?

  His eyes cracked open. Hazy for the length of one drawn breath. Then alert in the lamplight. He watched her watch him. He didn’t move.

  Her rabbit heart beat fast. She flickered between distrust and trust and an emotion less easy to name.

  “Go back to sleep,” he murmured.

  She closed her eyes. Her rabbit heart slowed, curled up in its warren, and seemed to become fully itself: warm fur, soft belly. A thrum of breath in the dark.

  When she woke again, the curtains were wide open. Midday. Yellow light. The pearl-colored chair was empty.

  An unpleasant bolt shot through her. She didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but it made her feel small.

  She pushed herself up. A mirror stood on a nearby dressing table. Kestrel slipped from the bed: hollow, unsteady. The dressing table and its chair weren’t so nearby after all. The distance between her and them yawned wide. When she reached the chair, she dropped down into it.

  The girl in the reflection looked so shocked that Kestrel’s first instinct was to touch her. To reassure. Fingertips met. The mirror was cool.

  “Planning on breaking it?” said a voice.