The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  Soft gold lamplight. His voice, its low timbre. The gleam of eyes. Slow silence. Then sleep.

  Kestrel lifted the lamp higher, though she didn’t need its light like she had when she’d first entered the house. It was easier to see now. This room was just an empty space where things had once been, and the dread of those things no longer overwhelmed her, because she no longer felt alone.

  She explored the house.

  Night lifted. Shadows dwindled into their corners. Kestrel didn’t notice this—or, if she did, she thought it was because her mind saw better, not her eyes.

  She waded through her memory. Her mother. Her nurse, Enai. A love so full that it welled up beneath her breastbone.

  Her suite. Painted walls. In the bedchamber, where a curtain had hung: the scratched lines of a name. Jess. They’d done it with a pin when they were little. There was no curve to the scratched letters. Each s was all angles. Kestrel touched the name, and knew she’d find her own on the wall of Jess’s suite. She recalled the pin digging into paint. Her eyes stung.

  The lamp burned low. It gave off a hot ceramic odor. She knew, vaguely, that time was running out, but she was so lost in time that she knew it was running out without really knowing what this meant.

  She walked quickly now. There was a tug on her heart, like it had been tied with twine and someone had jerked a loose end. Again: the fear of pain. The surety that it would come. A drag forward. She dug in her heels and stopped.

  Gray light glowed in the windows.

  She remembered her promise to Arin. The worry in his voice: Won’t you wish me well ? She thought of the person who had cleaned her home for no other reason, as far as she could tell, than that this home was hers and he didn’t want it to be dirty. She thought of how he’d feel to leave the city with his question unanswered, his offer disregarded, with not even a wish for his safe return.

  The awfulness of it hit her with a cold, fresh slap.

  She could make it to him by dawn if she left now.

  She strode down a hallway, fast footsteps ringing loud. She reached a landing, ready to race down the stairs and back out into the grass.

  But the twine tied inside her cut harder, pulling tight. Before she knew it, she’d crossed the landing and entered a narrow, mirrored gallery, her shadow flitting alongside her. At the end of the gallery was a door. Behind the door was a suite. Dark wainscoting lined the walls, and she remembered silk curtains on the now bare rods. Your mother chose the color, her father had said, looking at the curtains as though he couldn’t say what their color was.

  Kestrel was in her father’s rooms.

  She groped her way back to the stairs, retreating. She’d lost her lamp. She stumbled past a small ballroom. A dining hall. The parlor. She gripped the knob of a door: the library.

  She remembered him better in the library than in his suite, to which she’d rarely been invited. He didn’t brook intrusion. The library was achingly familiar, even with the books missing. There was no sign of violence here. Still, it felt as if violence had been done, as if the books had been gouged out of their inset shelves. There used to be a translucent red paperweight that had sat on a squat marble-topped table. The paperweight had been made from blown glass. She recalled the whorls beneath her fingertips. He’d used it to hold down maps. She didn’t know where it was now.

  She sat on the floor where a chair had been. As the pearled dawn touched her wet eyes, searing the room orange and pink and yellow, Kestrel knew that she’d come to this house for only one true reason: to find her father.

  Her memory limped up to her. It crawled into her lap. Kestrel didn’t remember every thing, but she remembered enough.

  Chapter 19

  Arin arrived early at the brook in the gray hour before dawn. Sat on the grass. Had thoughts that kept forcing each other from his head.

  Nervous. He pressed his palms hard against the earth. He was too nervous.

  She didn’t come.

  He watched the water glint with the rising sun. The brook gently coursed along its path. Birds sang out. An irrielle called, notes flat and sweet. It repeated itself. There was no answer. It continued, the sound casting a spell. The bird sounded caught in its own enchantment.

  He waited as long as he could. Eventually, a quiet part of him admitted that he had doubted all along. He’d never really expected she would come. It had been doubt, hadn’t it, that had kept him from sleeping after she’d left his rooms? Not the difficult plea sure of her presence there, or how her absence felt. Not the anticipation of war, nor the possibility that she might lay claim to him.

  Be honest, now.

  He held himself to honesty. Held hard. Conceded. Yes, the plea sure and difficulty and absence and anticipation had all conspired to keep him from sleep last night. Still, doubt—fizzy, sour—had also been part of it.

  And now some heavy emotion. Round. About the size of the hollow of his palm. An emotion he seemed to have kept in an invisible pocket, and now took out to see fully.

  Just a small sorrow, he told himself. Small, because expected. What else could he have expected?

  He plucked a few blades of grass, rubbed them between fingers and thumb, and inhaled the young scent. Then—he knew it was odd, he wanted the oddity of it to distract him, or to give him one last thing to do before he left, because maybe she would arrive in that final moment, if he waited but one more moment—he put a blade of grass in his mouth and chewed. It tasted soapy. Clean.

  She wasn’t coming. She prob ably had never had any intention of coming.

  He went to ready his horse.

  Arin drew up short several paces from the stables. Soldiers—perhaps a hundred strong, on horse and on foot—gathered on the hill. The morning was loud with the huff and stamp of horses, the rough irritation of people who got in each other’s way, the click and tap of metal and leather, the slap of a saddle dropped on a horse’s back. None of this surprised Arin. What surprised him was the sight of Roshar, standing with two saddled horses, smiling at him.

  Roshar approached, the horses walking behind. “You’re late. Sleep in, did you?”

  Arin said nothing.

  “Here you are.” Roshar passed the reins. “You ride this one sometimes, I’ve noticed. He’s good. Not as good as mine, but he’ll do. I thought you’d want to leave that big war horse behind. Hers, isn’t it?”

  “Javelin stays.”

  “Of course,” Roshar said easily. “Well. Wasn’t this thoughtful?” He swept his hand at Arin’s saddled horse.

  “Yes . . . though a little unlike you.”

  “Never say so. I am the soul of thoughtfulness.”

  Arin found himself smiling faintly back. He mounted the horse.

  Every one ordered themselves behind him and the prince. They would make their way down to the city, gathering soldiers as they went. Eventually they’d reach the harbor, where eastern soldiers who’d come on ships waited for them. Then the march south.

  But first they passed along the path to the house. A few people lined the path, having learned or guessed of the soldiers’ leaving.

  Kestrel wasn’t there. Sarsine was, and the queen. Inisha lifted one sardonic brow at him, and said, “Careful.”

  But Sarsine. She looked different than he’d ever seen, like she knew he wasn’t sure he’d come back this time. He thought that his promise to his god might be absolute. She was weeping. She held out flowers, tiny ones that grew at the base of trees, in their shadows. The kind you had to get on your hands and knees to see properly. They had been his favorites, long ago.

  He took them. From his height on the horse, he leaned to brush away her tears. “Don’t,” he said, which only made her eyes swim again.

  “I love you,” she said. He said that he loved her, too.

  The horse moved forward. His hand fell away. The distance grew between them.

  Don’t you worry, murmured a voice within him. I take care of my own. Yet the god of death sounded ominous.

  I heard yo
u, the god added. Last night. A promise to stay? To miss it all? Arin, you made me a promise. Glory. In my name. Or do I misremember?

  Arin said nothing.

  Ah, Arin. You’re lucky that I like you.

  Why do you? Arin asked, but the god just smirked silently inside him.

  The ships stayed in the bay. The queen would defend the city. Arin tried to dismiss the thought that she could easily claim it for her own. He had no choice but to trust her.

  A few thousand marched south. They could only travel as fast as foot soldiers walked and supply wagons trundled. The roads were good. They were Valorian, made after the invasion by slave labor. They were paved for war.

  “You haven’t asked me about Arin,” Roshar said as he rode alongside him.

  “What?”

  “The tiger. Not the surly human. I thought it was best to leave him behind to keep my sister company. Since you won’t.”

  Arin shot him a look.

  “Did I say I wanted you to be my sister’s pet? Did I not merely imply it in order to get under that ridiculously thin skin of yours? I prefer to have you here.”

  “Why?”

  “It would have been a mistake to stay. Don’t tell me you didn’t consider it. She—”

  “You mean Kestrel.”

  “I mean both of them. I’ll say nothing of your little ghost. You’d chuck me off my horse and then I’d have to kill you for insubordination, which would set the tone nicely for the army’s underlings but would be messy and inconvenient.”

  “Make your point.”

  Roshar turned serious. “Watch your back, especially around my sister.”

  Arin’s gaze flicked over him. He didn’t think Inisha would appreciate that warning. “Are you disloyal to her?”

  Roshar’s smile said that he found it charming that Arin would ask such a direct question and expect a direct answer. “Never.”

  The sound of the army—the creak of wagons, the hooves, boots, bits of conversation in two different languages—hammered the thoughts from Arin’s head. But he still carried that emotion with him, the one he’d found by the brook. It knocked against his breastbone: a small, heavy stone.

  Yellow thorn bushes bloomed by the side of the road. Once, he saw a fox and her kits tumble out of a bush and scramble across the road in front of him. He’d stayed his horse, feeling foolish—then relieved to see them dodge several sets of hooves and make it safely to the other side.

  “The Valorian general might try again to land at Lerralen’s beach,” Roshar said.

  “It’d be costly.”

  “True, but it’s still the best location for a large invasion. He’s got the numbers to do it. If reports are right, our force is the smaller one. Still, we are better looking, which is a significant advantage.”

  “I think that it’s not just about winning for him.” Arin remembered Kestrel at the gaming table. “He likes to win with style. Make you feel the fool for ever thinking you could compete. He could push all his troops up onto that beach and bleed them out, and still win, and come up north to take the city. Brute force victory. A nasty one, though, with heavy losses. And a little too straightforward. He prefers a trick. He already played one with the cliffs. Unless he’s got another trick up his sleeve for the beach, I wouldn’t focus our forces there.”

  “If we have none in position at Lerralen, he’ll walk right onto the peninsula with no resistance.”

  “Send a division.”

  “Two-thirds?”

  “Plus most of the supplies, and infantry. Stationed there. The rest of the army keeps moving south—light, fast, mainly cavalry. Small cannon. And guns.”

  “Where would you put your people?”

  “Where you want them.”

  Roshar’s eyes went exaggeratedly round. “How very accommodating of you.”

  “So long as they’re under my command.”

  “Why not,” Roshar said graciously, “so long as you are under mine?”

  Night. Without commenting on it, Arin and Roshar had pitched their tents near each other. A small fire crackled. A chill had crept into the air; the weather was changing.

  Roshar lay on his back, the dip of his neck bolstered by a tied bedroll. He smoked. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Dear gods.”

  “It occurs to me that you have no official rank, and that I, as your prince, might give you one.” He said an eastern word Arin didn’t know. “Well? Will it suit?”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “Whether that word was some horrific insult you’re pretending is an actual military rank.”

  “How mistrustful! Arin, I have taught you every foul curse I know.”

  “I’m sure you’ve saved a few, for just such a time.”

  Roshar said something about pigs and Arin’s fondness for certain questionable practices.

  Arin laughed.

  “I wasn’t joking earlier,” Roshar said. “I don’t know how to translate that word. For your rank. It puts you third. After Xash.” The sea captain had requested the queen’s permission to leave his ships under her orders, and that of his second-in-command. He wanted to be part of the land operation. “He has the experience. He fought the general in the mountains four years back. He’s good. Also, he’d kill me if I ranked you above him.”

  Arin shifted a log and watched the darting sparks. “Thank you.”

  Roshar squinted up at him, dragging on his pipe. Its bowl blistered red. “You don’t seem wholly pleased.” Smoke curled around his face. “What is it? What makes you not glad for third? You don’t like Xash? Neither do I. So what? You can’t have second, and you damned well won’t get first.” He studied Arin more carefully. “No, it’s not thwarted ambition that’s bothering you. Not even wounded pride, which is usually the obvious interpretation where you’re concerned. Not this time, somehow. Arin, you’re not nervous, are you? You’re perfect for this. You want it. Just earlier today you claimed command of the Herrani.”

  “I must. I’m responsible for them.”

  “And they love you. They think you’re some holy gift from your gods. Very nice work, I must say.”

  “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  “Even better. Makes it seem more authentic. Convenient, you understand, when sending people to their deaths.”

  Arin looked at his stolen Valorian boots and felt the fire’s heat in his cheeks.

  “Too late to have qualms about death and dying and killing,” Roshar said. “You’re in it. Some people were born to be in it.”

  Arin wondered if that’s why Kestrel hadn’t come: because she could smell death on him.

  Roshar said, “You’ll do well.”

  “I know.”

  Roshar crossed a leg over one bent knee, sat up slightly to knock spent ash out of his pipe by rapping it against a boot, then eased back against his bedroll. “I smell rain.”

  “Hmm.”

  “The leaves of the trees are cupped for it.”

  “You can’t see that in this dark.”

  “I see it in my mind.” The smoke from his pipe lingered. He folded his arms across his chest. His body looked close to sleep. “Arin.”

  Arin, who was sitting with his forearms propped on bent knees, fingers loose, felt nowhere near sleep. “Yes?”

  “How do I look in the dark?”

  Startled, Arin glanced at him. The question had had no edges. It wasn’t sleek, either. Its soft, uncertain shape suggested that Roshar truly wanted to know. In the fired red shadows, his limbs looked lax and his mutilated face met Arin’s squarely. The heavy feeling that Arin carried—that specific sadness, nestled just below his collar bone, like a pendant—lessened. He said, “Like my friend.”

  Roshar didn’t smile. When he spoke, his voice matched his expression, which was rare for him. Rarer still: his tone. Quiet and true. “You do, too.”

  Alone in his tent, Arin must have fallen asleep at some point. He woke expecting Kestrel to be beside him. H
er presence seemed clear and real, as real as when she’d stood before him in his rooms. That thin shift. The sear of her hot skin. I want to remember you.

  Go back to sleep, he told himself. You can’t hold her to any promise.

  He curled onto his side. There was a clap of thunder. The sky opened. Rain pattered the canvas, and grew loud.

  It didn’t let up. Water streamed down the horses as they walked. After noon looked no different from morning, which hadn’t looked a lot different from night. Every thing was a muddled gray. Arin was soaked to the skin. Rain ran off his nose.

  Progress was slow. Arin fell back to the middle lines and stopped to help shoulder a wagon wheel out of a slick rut between split paving stones. He’d just mounted his horse again when he realized that a halt must have been called. Every one stayed where they were.

  He rode up through the ranks to Roshar. “What is it?” he asked the prince.

  “A parting of ways.” Roshar nodded at the road ahead, and he pulled a waxed map from a tube in his saddlebags. Arin took a roughly woven blanket from his and sidled his horse along Roshar’s, reaching the blanket over him and the prince as a shield to keep the worst of the rain off the map.

  The road would soon fork. West lay Lerralen.

  “I’m going to listen to your advice,” Roshar said. “We split. Most to the west. Some south. Lay your bet, Arin. It’s your country. Where will the action be?”

  Arin studied the map, worrying his lower lip between his teeth.

  Mmm, said death. Those estates look nice.

  A few unwalled villages stood near them. The estates were far enough south that it’d be easy for the general to run his supplies from Ithrya onto the mainland.

  “One of these,” Arin said, rain dripping from his mouth. It felt like he was spitting. “If the general gains a foothold there he can strengthen his position, take almost every thing he needs from the estates, except black powder. He could creep up, spread out, form flanks to the east and west. Scoop us up. Push to the city.”