The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  She looked at the green liquor left in the glass. It was green. It was liquid. This was a glass. To hide from her would break him. Simple things, so apparent, so not anything other than what they showed themselves to be. She dipped a finger into the liquor’s dregs and touched it to her tongue. It burned.

  Arin made a sound.

  She glanced up. She didn’t know where her voice had gone. She was nervous. Her flesh was resonant with the knowledge of what she wanted to understand and what she’d come here to find out. It was much riskier than what she’d already asked. She stood.

  He watched her pace toward him.

  She stopped just short of his chair and looked down at him. Her loose hair slipped over her shoulder. “I remember something. I’m not sure if it happened or not. Will you tell me?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “I remember lying with you on the lawn of the imperial palace’s spring garden.”

  He shifted. Lamplight pulsed over his face. He shook his head.

  “I remember finding you in your suite.” This memory was coming to her now. It had a similar flavor as the last one. “I promised to tell you my secrets. You held a book. Or kindling? You were making a fire.”

  “That didn’t happen.”

  “I kissed you.” She touched the hollow at the base of his neck. His pulse was wild.

  “Not then,” he said finally.

  “But I have before.” There was a rush of images. It was as if the melody she’d imagined while lying in the dark had been dunked in the green liquor. All the cold stops gained heat and ran together. It was easy to remember Arin, especially now. Her hand slid to his chest. The cotton of his shirt was hot. “Your kitchens. A table. Honey and flour.”

  His heart slammed against her palm. “Yes.”

  “A carriage.”

  “Yes.”

  “A balcony.”

  Breath escaped him like a laugh. “Almost.”

  “I remember falling asleep in your bed when you weren’t here.”

  He pulled back slightly, searched her face. “That didn’t happen.”

  “Yes it did.”

  His mouth parted, but he didn’t speak. The blacks of his eyes were bright. She wondered what it would be like to give her body what it wanted. It knew something she didn’t. Her heart sped, her blood was lush in her veins.

  “The first day,” she said. “Last summer. Your hair was a mess. I wanted to sweep it back and make you meet my eyes. I wanted to see you.”

  His chest rose and fell beneath her hand. “I don’t know. I can’t—I don’t know what you wanted.”

  “I never said?”

  “No.”

  She lowered her mouth to his. She tasted him: the raw burn of liquor on his tongue. She felt him swallow, heard the low, dry sound of it.

  He pulled her down to him, tangled his hands in her hair, sucked the breath from her lips. She became uncertain whose breath was whose. He kissed her back, fingertips fanning across her face, then gone, nowhere. Then: a light touch along the curve of her hip, just barely. A stone skipping the surface of the water. “Strange,” he murmured into her mouth.

  She wasn’t listening. She was rippling, the sensation spreading wide. Stone on water, dimpled pockets of pressure. The wait for the stone to finally drop down.

  Suddenly she knew—or thought she knew—what he found strange as he traced where a dagger should have been. To see a part of her missing. She felt her missing pieces, the stark gaps. She was arrested by the thought (it pierced her, sharp and surreal) that she had become transparent, that if he touched her again his hand would go right through her, into air, into the empty spaces of who she was now.

  She didn’t want to be empty, didn’t want to vanish. She wanted to be whole.

  She said, “I want to remember you.”

  An emotion flared in his face. He braced her hips, tugged her closer. His lids were heavy, eyes dark. His mouth was a wet gleam. She didn’t recognize his expression. It was new. She leaned in and drank the newness of him.

  Their kiss turned savage. She made it so. She felt his teeth, reveled in the sure knowledge that it had never been like this between them. Yet at the same time, she felt each kiss they’d shared before, felt them live inside this one. His mouth left hers, rasping down her neck. He buried his face in her skin.

  She sought his mouth and found that he tasted different now. She was tasting the taste of her skin on his mouth. Coppery. She dipped her tongue into it again.

  “Kestrel.”

  She didn’t answer him.

  “This is a bad idea.”

  “No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

  He pulled away, closed his eyes, and dropped his head to press his brow against her belly. She felt rich with the words he muttered against her nightdress. His mouth burned through the cloth.

  His chair scraped back. He no longer touched her. “Not like this.”

  “Yes. Exactly like this.” She tried to find the words to express how this helped, how he somehow mapped the country of herself, showed the ridges, the rise and valley of her very being.

  “Kestrel, I think that you’re . . . using me a little.”

  She stopped, unpleasantly startled. It occurred to her that what he’d said was another version of what she’d been struggling to say.

  “It’s not, ah, a hardship.” He gave a rueful smile. “It’s not that I don’t want—” She’d never heard him stammer. Even with her untrustworthy memory, she knew this. You’re easy to know, she wanted to say. Memories of him came quickly. It didn’t hurt, not as much as she’d feared before, on the tundra, or in his empty bed. At least, it didn’t hurt anymore. It was better. Better than . . . other things.

  A faceless horror. A monster. Inside her. It thickened, grew into a featureless, blunt shape. She wouldn’t touch it. She’d go nowhere near it.

  Arin had been right, that day when he’d suggested that there was something too horrible for her to remember.

  “It’s not enough,” he said. It took her a moment to realize he was continuing his refusal and not responding to her thoughts, which were so loud in her head that she felt as if she’d shouted them.

  She said, “What would be enough?”

  Color mounted in his face.

  “You can tell me,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Well. Me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I want . . . you to want me.”

  “I do.”

  He pushed a hand through his rough hair. “I don’t mean this.” He gestured between them, his hand flipping from her to him. “I . . .” He struggled, knuckled his eyes, and let the words come. “I want you to be mine, wholly mine, your heart, too. I want you to feel the same way.”

  Her stomach sank. She’d sworn to herself not to lie to him.

  He read her answer in her eyes. He dimmed, and said nothing either. But he brushed hair from her face, lifting away strands that had caught in her eyelashes and between her lips. His fingertip painted a slow line over her lower lip. She felt it down her spine, in her belly. Then his hand fell away, and she felt alone.

  “I leave tomorrow morning with Roshar,” he said. “It’ll be some time before I return.”

  An ember of hurt. An old feeling, as old as her whole life. She was always being left. War always won. She saw herself: a little girl, holding up a level, sheathed sword nearly as long as she was tall. Her arms ached. She must not drop it. The man on the horse would take it soon. He glanced down, and she wondered if he was waiting to see how long she could hold the blade steady. He smiled, and her twinned heart—the girl, the woman, her past, her present—burst with pride and sorrow and rage.

  “Take me with you,” she told Arin.

  A shadow crossed his face. “No. Absolutely not.”

  “I can help. I know my father’s system of running scouts, his tactics, codes, formations—”

  “No.”

  “You don’t have the right to choose for me.”r />
  “It won’t happen.” He caught his anger, became aware of it as well as hers, and said more gently, “It’s too dangerous.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “I can’t lose you.” Grief slashed through his voice. “Not you, too.”

  The story he had told her about the night of the invasion flickered in his eyes, darkening them.

  Her father had done this to him. She remembered her father, felt the memory squeeze her—a crunch, a creak of bone—and then seemed to feel how Arin guessed where her mind had gone. She felt what the direction of her thoughts did to him.

  She had begged her father to let her go to war with him. He’d promised that one day she would, but then she had grown and no longer wanted what he wanted, and wanted him to stay instead, and he wouldn’t.

  Arin’s story and hers twisted together into patterns she couldn’t follow. Their silence grew.

  Quietly, Arin said, “I’ll stay.”

  Her eyes flew to him. It was so unexpected that she was shaken out of her thoughts.

  “If you want,” he said. “I could stay. We’d be together.”

  “If you stay here while the Dacrans march south to fight your war, the alliance will crumble.”

  He studied his hands.

  “Unless you do it for the queen.”

  He gave Kestrel a reproachful look.

  “Then you can’t,” she said.

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  Kestrel wondered if every question is a way of putting yourself at the mercy of someone else. “It would cost you too much.”

  “Think about it. Will you think about it? We’re to leave at dawn. Meet me then at the brook, the one near the horse paths, to tell me what you’ve decided.”

  Her answer should be no, yet she couldn’t make herself say it.

  “Meet me anyway,” he said, “even if it’s to say goodbye. Will you wish me well?”

  Kestrel saw the ripped grass of the battlefield, stained with gore. Him: broken, bloody. Skin ashen. His blank gaze fixed on something she couldn’t see. His light gone.

  Stay, she almost said. Then an invisible hand clamped down over her mouth and warned again about the political consequences. Either way, Kestrel read his doom. Death in battle, or the slower death of the alliance collapsing and the empire’s victory.

  Tears welled in her eyes. She turned so that he wouldn’t see them.

  “Won’t you wish me well?” Arin asked.

  “I will. I do.”

  He seemed uncertain. “If I don’t see you at dawn, I’ll take it to mean that you want me to go.”

  “I’ll be there,” she told him. “I promise.”

  Chapter 18

  She couldn’t sleep. she roamed the dreaming house, saw copper pots gleaming in the dark kitchen like a row of hung moons. Her feet made mouse sounds on the staircases. She found the library, remembered touching the spines of the books when she’d lived here before. She touched them again. She remembered and touched them, touched and remembered. Her piano was a large shadow in the parlor. Arin had brought it from her home. This was before the prison, before the imperial palace. He’d asked her to stay and share his life. She’d left him, had gone down to the harbor and stolen a fishing boat. The stormy sea. The emperor. A choice.

  The capital: stiff lace, sugar, snow. Thick blood, skinned fingers. A white knuckle joint.

  Choose, the emperor had said when she’d stood before him for the first time and saw his cold cunning. She’d chosen to marry his son. Her father had been proud.

  Memory crept over her skin in a prickling rash. Through a silvered window, Kestrel saw the harbor. The bay was a bucket of light. Although she wasn’t cold, she chafed her bare shoulders in the habit of someone who’d once been cold for a long time. Her hands paused in their movements when she realized what she was doing. Again she wondered at it: the way the mind and the body have different sets of memories that aren’t necessarily always aware of each other.

  She was not cold, yet she felt cold. There was a lump of ice in her heart.

  She didn’t know what she would say to Arin when dawn came. The choice he’d offered became so large that she couldn’t clearly see either stay or go, only choice.

  She was afraid of choices. She had paid dearly for them.

  She looked at the harbor and remembered standing there last winter, her breath a fog—Arin’s, too. Her hand on a jagged shard of pottery, sharp as a knife. The fishing boat rocking at its dock. He’d let her escape, had chosen her freedom and his probable ruin simply because he couldn’t bear the thought of forcing her to stay.

  Arin wasn’t the ice in her heart. He didn’t cause the fear that kept her from knowing who she was and what she’d done and what had been done to her.

  Who was Kestrel? She turned over what she knew, studied the pieces of her old self. Honorable, Arin had said. Brave, she’d thought before. She imagined this Kestrel, a creature straight out of stories, and wished that she could be like her.

  Her feet were moving. They were heading to Sarsine’s rooms. They stole over the floorboards as she opened doors, opened a wardrobe, fastened clothes. She pulled on boots.

  The soldiers would ride south at dawn. She had several hours. The moonlight was strong. Bright enough.

  She left the house by a back door for servants. She quickened her pace over flagstones, through the garden, and across the grounds to the stables.

  The high dark grass rippled around the villa in the warm wind. She let Javelin walk toward the house. Somewhere on the grounds must be a pond or creek she couldn’t see. Frogs sang. The full moon shone overhead, its light diminishing the stars.

  The house was grand in its silence, its windows shut tight. A shudder shook her, and she understood the nature of her fear a little better than she had before. It wasn’t formless. It was sharply specific. It was the fear of pain.

  She swung a leg off Javelin and dropped down into the grass. It itched. She pushed through it, let it tickle, annoy. Look at the grass, she thought. It is grass. The house is a house. The moon, a moon. They are themselves and nothing else.

  Her feet found a flagstone path hidden beneath the grass. She pushed forward, holding a dead lantern she’d taken from the saddlebag. She longed to light it yet dreaded what it might show. The house—the house, the second-floor windows, those eaves, that portico, all so clearly and sickeningly hers—held a secret she must understand.

  She felt naked when she came out of the grass. She looked back over her shoulder, saw the dark arch of Javelin’s neck. Then she met the blank black eyes of the villa’s windows.

  Nothing’s there, Arin had said. It’s empty.

  No, it wasn’t.

  Something was in there. She felt it swell against the walls.

  I’d be with you, Arin had said that day on the horse paths. She knew that she could turn around this very moment, return, wake him. He wouldn’t question her. He wouldn’t say wait.

  Some horror, she’d tell him and then stop, unable to say more.

  I’ ll come with you, he’d answer. You won’t be alone.

  A door whined open at her unsteady touch.

  The smell was an assault. She gagged on the familiarity of it. Redolent. Orange-scented wood oil. Windows washed with vinegar. A clean house, her clean house, the cleanliness of every day of almost all her life. The childhood smell she didn’t realize was from her childhood until she had forgotten it and encountered it again.

  It stripped away what ever strength she’d had. She almost stumbled from the entry way and back out into the night.

  Then a thought brushed her panicked consciousness. It was gentle, and gave her pause. It said that the smell’s familiarity wasn’t just the fermented memory of many years. She’d also encountered this smell (orange, vinegar, lye) recently. In some small way, one difficult to determine.

  She lit the lamp. The house burst into being.

  It was empty. Jagged shadows. Glittering tiles.

  Sh
e passed into a parlor, feeling pushed. The echoes she made here were quieter. This room had a wooden floor, paler in places where furniture had been. Its varnish gleamed.

  The house, though abandoned for months (grounds unkept, grass hip-high), was clean. No dust. She went from room to room.

  She stopped in one that had windowed double doors facing the garden. Sheet music lined inset shelves built specially with narrow dividers to hold the thin booklets, which were neatly organized. Though not—she realized as she went through them, the music echoing inside her as she traced a marked passage—not exactly as she had organized them.

  The Herrani music was arranged by composer (she saw her old self, that elegant ghost, slipping the music into its slots). The Valorian music—little though there was of it—was organized in the same way. But that wasn’t right. She wouldn’t have classed the Valorian music like that. Valorians ordered books by the binding’s color, which was coded by subject. They organized music by kind.

  Kestrel went through the music again, recalling how she’d missed these pieces when she was in the capital, but didn’t ask for them, because to ask was to admit that she missed something from her home, and it was too hard to think about what she missed, and too dangerous to reveal that she missed anything at all.

  Another person had painstakingly organized these booklets. Not her. Not a Valorian.

  She heard the memory of Arin’s voice. I have no interest in the music room.

  It hadn’t been true then. It wasn’t true now.

  She understood now what had stopped her from leaving the villa. It had been a feathery sort of almost-idea, its fronds still floating in her mind. You know where you’ve smelled that too-clean smell before. Orange, vinegar, lye.

  Arin. It had been when she was sore and broken and in between dreams, and he slept in a chair beside her bed in the suite that had belonged to his mother. He had woken. Go back to sleep, he’d murmured. He’d had a strange scent. An alkaline tang. Clean, she’d thought then. Too clean.