The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  She kept close company with Roshar. Arin saw from afar the way the prince teased her. Heard her laugh. It squeezed a fist inside him. At dusk, the pair of them played cards. Roshar bled the air with a string of eastern curses when he lost.

  On an evening when they were about ten leagues from Errilith, Arin came to Roshar’s tent, which was large enough to accommodate a small table, a set of canvas-backed chairs, and a collapsible bed woven in the style and colors of the nomadic plainspeople. The ticking had feathers, not straw, and the table offered roasted fowl, hulled red berries, and a bowl of eastern rice rendered a shocking orange by a spice Arin had tasted before, and found tangy, sweet, and a little bitter. There was a gourd of wine and two pewter cups. Two plates.

  “And lo,” Roshar said from where he lounged in his teak chair with its swoop of green cloth. “The rains opened, and the stranger was a stranger no more.”

  Arin looked at him.

  “Poetry,” Roshar explained, “though it doesn’t scan so well in your tongue.”

  “You’re expecting someone.”

  “Maybe. You’ll do for now. Sit with me.”

  “Kestrel?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Are you expecting Kestrel.” The question came out flat.

  Roshar coughed. “Nooo,” he drawled, but Arin didn’t like the humor in his voice. He sat anyway and watched Roshar prepare a plate for him, which wasn’t at all expected of an eastern prince and his guest, but Roshar sometimes liked to play the prince and sometimes didn’t. “Kestrel has raised the issue of Valorian scouts. We can’t expect to be wholly unnoticed, tramping along the main southern road.”

  “There’s been no attack.” Which was what Arin thought would ensue if the Valorians became aware of their movements.

  “She wagers that the general has noticed the concentration of our forces at Lerralen. Whether he knows of this contingent is unclear, but he might be refraining from attacking us because he doesn’t want to position forces north of Errilith when his supply lines run south of it. Or maybe he thinks we’ll choose to defend the wrong estate and he can seize his prize unchallenged. Why confront us now and pay the price in blood if we’ll waste our energies elsewhere while he takes what he wants? Of course, Errilith could be the wrong estate.”

  “If Kestrel says that’s the one, she’s right.”

  “I agree.” Roshar drank his wine.

  Arin tried to eat.

  “Have you ever bested her at cards? Borderlands? Anything? She murders me,” Roshar complained.

  “You spend a good deal of time with her.”

  Roshar’s cup paused in midair. “Arin.”

  Swift jealousy. A caged resentment.

  “I’m not—shall we say—interested in Kestrel.” The prince’s expression changed slightly, and in the pause that followed, a slow thought occurred to Arin, one that offered an entirely new explanation for why Roshar’s soldiers had done nothing when Arin had pushed him into the shadowed trees. “Women don’t interest me that way,” Roshar said.

  It seemed to Arin that he had understood this for a long time without actually realizing that he did. He caught Roshar’s expression, which on another man Arin might have called tentative, but on the prince looked closer to soft curiosity. His black eyes were quiet. Arin felt things shift between them into more intricate patterns than before. “I know,” Arin told him.

  “Oh do you?” A wicked grin. “Would you like to know for sure?”

  Arin flushed. “Roshar . . .” He floundered for what to say.

  The prince laughed at him. He filled Arin’s cup. “Drink fast, little Herrani. As you astutely observed, I have someone else coming to night, and while your company is almost always welcome, his is company I will best enjoy alone.”

  Kestrel waited outside Arin’s tent. It was a muzzy sort of night, too warm for a fire. The camp was a dark terrain. He didn’t see her clearly, just the shape of her.

  “I brought you something.” She held out her hand and dropped a round object into his.

  He knew it instantly. He ran fingers over its firm, lightly pebbled surface. “An orange.”

  “I found a tree not far from camp and took as many as I could carry. Most I gave away. This one, I thought we could share.”

  He jumped the orange from one hand to the other, marveling at it.

  She said, “I didn’t know whether you like them.”

  “I do.”

  “Did you tell this to me once? Did I forget?”

  “I never told you. Actually . . .” He rolled it in the well of one palm. “I love them.”

  He could have sworn that she smiled in the dark. “Then what are you waiting for?”

  He dug his thumb in and peeled it open. Its perfume sprayed the air. He halved it and gave Kestrel her share.

  They sat on the grass outside his tent. They’d camped in a meadow not far from the road. He touched the grass, sleek beneath his fingers. He ate. The fruit was vibrant on his tongue. It had been years. “Thank you.”

  He thought he saw her mouth curve, and he was washed by a breathless nervousness. He spat a seed into his palm and wondered what little kernel lay in the folds of this moment. Then he told himself to stop thinking. An orange. A rare enough plea sure. Just eat.

  After a moment, he asked, “How are you?”

  “Better. Before . . . it was like I was trying to navigate a new country where there was no such thing as the ground. At least now I know where I stand.” He heard the sound of her brushing her hands clean, and then the sound of things unsaid, of words weighed and found wanting. Sorrow, radiating from her. The low throb of it.

  Gently, he asked, “Are you truly better?”

  He heard her breath catch.

  “You don’t have to be better.”

  The silence expanded.

  He said, “I wouldn’t be.”

  Her voice was a mere thread. “How would you be?”

  He thought of the wrongness of loss, how as a child he’d step right into it, and fall, and then would blame himself not only for every thing he hadn’t done when the soldiers had invaded his home, but also for his fathomless grief. He should see the gaping holes in his life. Avoid them. Step carefully, Arin, why can’t you step carefully? Mother, father, sister. What could you say about someone who walked daily into his grief and lived at the bottom of its hole and didn’t even want to come out?

  He remembered how he’d begun to hate himself. The sculpting of his anger. He thought about how certain words mean themselves and also their opposites, like cleave. Come together, split apart. He thought about how sorrow limns the places where parts of you join. Your past and present. Loves and hates. It sets a chisel into the cracks and pries. He wanted to say this, yet worried. He feared saying the wrong thing. He feared that his anger for her father might twist what he wanted to say. And he wasn’t sure, suddenly, if he should answer her question . . . if by answering it he might, without meaning to, push his own loss into the place of hers, or make hers look like his.

  He stared at the dark outline of her face. Her question overwhelmed him.

  Until it didn’t. Until he seemed to be able to see in the dark. He knew how she must be tightening her jaw, how she was curling her nails into her palms. He knew her. “I think that you try hard to be strong. You don’t have to be.”

  “He would want me to be strong.”

  This made Arin too angry to trust himself to speak.

  She said, “I’ve been trying to tell you something since I’ve come here.”

  And he had avoided her, letting her know in more ways than one that she needed to leave. He felt ashamed. His hands were empty; the orange rinds had fallen to the dirt. “I’m sorry. I’ve been unbearable.”

  “Just scared. And there weren’t even spiders involved.”

  This was like her: the way her voice became light when something was hard.

  “Please,” he said, “tell me.”

  “I remembered more about my last day in t
he imperial palace than I said when I first joined your army. I thought that maybe it would hurt you, if I said.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “You came to me in the palace music room.”

  “Yes.” He remembered: his palm flat against the music room door. Opening it, seeing her face go white.

  “My father heard our conversation. He was listening in a secret room, one built for spying, hidden behind a screen in the shelves.”

  Understanding gripped him. It all rushed sickeningly through his brain. The gesture of her slim hand lifted, trembling, to ward him away as he stood on the threshold of the music room. He’d barreled ahead. She had told him to leave. He had come closer.

  “I tried to warn you that he was there,” Kestrel said. “Nothing worked.”

  She had reached for a pen and paper. A note—he realized now. She’d meant to write what she couldn’t say out loud. He’d wrenched the pen from her hand and dashed it to the floor.

  This was how it must feel, he thought, to take a knife to the gut.

  Kestrel was talking rapidly now, voice unsteady. “He hadn’t come to spy on me, only to listen to me play. It was hard for us to talk with each other. Easier to have an open secret between us. He would come and listen, and he could pretend that he wasn’t really there. But I was happy to have him hear me. Then you opened the music room door. I felt . . . I remember how I felt. I didn’t mean what I said. I was insulting. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t say that. Not to me. I failed you.”

  “I never trusted you enough to give you the chance to fail me, or not fail me. I am sorry. I was cruel. Not only to protect you from my father. I wanted to protect myself, too. I couldn’t bear for him to know. But what if I’d given up on all those secret ways to try to tell you he was hiding behind the screen? I could have just told you. I could have admitted to what I’d done and let him hear it. Yes, I agreed to marry the prince so that you could have your independence. Yes, I was Tensen’s spy. Yes, I loved you.” There was a silence. Fireflies lit the distance. “Why didn’t I say that then? I wonder what would have happened if I had.”

  And now? he wanted to ask. Do you love me now? He felt her uncertainty. He felt—as if it had already happened, and he’d already asked—the damage of forcing the question.

  She spoke as if she’d heard it anyway. “You are important to me,” she said, and touched his face.

  Important. The word swelled and deflated. More than he’d thought. Less than he wanted.

  But this: her touching him. How his blood jumped. He stayed very still.

  No more mistakes. He couldn’t afford any. He would do nothing.

  Something.

  No.

  She found the curves of his closed eyelids, the shape of his nose, the divot above his mouth, the rasp along his jaw where he hadn’t shaved. His skin began to dream. Then his pulse. His flesh. Right down to the bones.

  She shifted on the grass. Green and orange perfumed the air. It was on her skin. She tasted like it, too, when her mouth brushed his, and their noses bumped awkwardly, and he wished he could see her as she breathed a laugh and his hands went into her hair despite himself, despite what he’d told her the night before he’d left his home about what was enough and what wasn’t. The tang of citrus on her tongue. He forgot himself. He moved her beneath him and felt their bodies mark the grass.

  A fluffy breeze stirred the heavy air, floating over the arch of his back. She tugged up his shirt and he went down onto his elbows. The hilt of her dagger dug into his belly. He stayed where he was, her palms warm water flowing over his skin. He didn’t want to make a sound. Even his blood seemed loud as he kissed her.

  Then a campfire lit the near dark. Startled, he pulled away.

  He could see her face better now. Slow eyes, a blurry mouth, and a question stealing across her expression. He’d imagined this before, or something close to it.

  Close enough, he decided, but then had the sudden worry that if before she had come to him in his suite because she had wanted to remember, maybe this time, knowing what she knew now, he was just a way for her to forget.

  He pushed himself up.

  He heard a rustle as she sat up, too, and wrapped her arms around her trousered knees. He kept his eyes off her. He straightened his shirt, but it felt odd, like it didn’t fit him anymore. The sticky air cooled between them. He pushed damp hair off his brow. His limbs—so certain of themselves only moments ago—became an awkward jumble.

  Kestrel said, “Will you tell me about the day we met?”

  This was unexpected. “It wasn’t a nice day.”

  “I want to know every thing from then until now.”

  Still unsure, Arin said, “But you haven’t before.”

  “I trust you. You won’t lie to me.”

  So he began to tell her, with a hesitancy that eventually steadied as the nearby campfire died down and the night surrendered fully to its creatures: the singing insects, the almost soundless flap of bat wings, a breeze that flowed with the mellow scent of cooling earth. As he spoke, it seemed to him that this was really the only story he wanted to tell.

  He kept nothing from her.

  Somehow they ended up lying down again, side by side, the grass dense beneath them as they talked. The moon above was large yet intimate. Questions and answers were lifted out into the dark. Sometimes Kestrel recalled a moment Arin described, and then it felt to Arin as if he’d looked into a mirror and saw her instead of his own reflection.

  They talked long and late.

  Chapter 22

  As they neared the first village on the outskirts of Errilith, Kestrel considered it: why didn’t she know what she felt for him?

  It shouldn’t be hard to figure out. She knew enough—remembered enough—of her past to guess the strength of the emotions she had hidden. Yet the tether between her and the past felt like it could snap with a mere twist.

  One memory ruled her mind: how her father had pushed her away from him as her heels skidded the floor and she begged.

  Arin’s horse, galled by something unseen, tossed its head. He muttered at the creature—crooned, practically; even at its roughest, there always was a musical quality to his voice—then glanced slantways through the sun at Kestrel. His brown hair fell over his scarred brow.

  They’d slept little the night before. But she didn’t feel sleepy, not now, as he regarded her.

  A thought etched itself in unreadable patterns across his face. There was a delay, and she grew nervous as she wondered whether what changed his expression was regret, and if it was regret, what did he regret? What they hadn’t done last night, or the secrets they had shared?

  Some of what he’d said still made her hesitate, like his role in the eastern fire that killed her friend Ronan. Even if Arin hadn’t intended her friend’s death, even if when he had learned of it, she had felt Arin’s regret, she knew that the regret was for her sake, not for Ronan.

  It was disorienting to be reminded of things she hadn’t known she’d forgotten. To have a friend, a whole person, Ronan, rise up inside her only to vanish. She remembered how she’d mourned him. She mourned him again.

  Kestrel held Arin’s gaze. She didn’t break it as he held himself loose in his saddle. His body rocked slightly in rhythm with the stride of his horse. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to speak now. His voice had the power to call whole memories into being. Even when he was silent, she was awake to the supple quality of his voice: grave, slow, graveled, graceful. Clear, sometimes so transparent with feeling that she wondered how he had ever deceived her in those first months in her house hold. With a voice like that. It shouldn’t have been possible.

  He studied her. This, too, should be impossible: the way a kind of wonder tinged his expression. Surprised. A little amused.

  Arin reached across the narrow space between them. With a dusty finger, he briefly touched her nose. “You freckle in the sun,” he said, and smiled.

  She felt suddenly light and sheer,
as if this moment were encased in golden glass.

  Maybe love was easy, she thought.

  Maybe her past wasn’t as vital as her present, she thought.

  But then she heard her father say that she’d broken his heart, and she could no longer believe that either thought was true.

  Arin was against riding through the village. Kestrel heard him argue with the prince. Scouts had run ahead and learned that the general’s army had seized, uncontested, an estate just south of Errilith. The Valorians would move north soon, and fall on Errilith’s farmlands. They’d butcher the sheep. Seize grain. Add another link in the supply chain running from Ithrya Island. Fortify themselves for a farther push north toward the city.

  “We need to position ourselves in the hills outside the estate,” Arin said. “Now.”

  “What,” Roshar said, “would you leave the village undefended?”

  “Of course not. Garrison a contingent. You don’t need to parade the whole army down its streets.”

  “The whole army? Not so. You forget: three-quarters of our forces lie at Lerralen. We brave few are all that stand between these villagers and bloody dominion.” Roshar sounded merry.

  “This is not a play,” Arin said through his teeth.

  Kestrel didn’t understand Arin’s discomfort until the prince said, “Let them get a look at you.”

  Even then, Kestrel didn’t fully understand until she saw it happen.

  Although the Herrani and easterners usually marched in discrete brigades, Roshar gave orders for them to mingle. On the road outside the village, he took a personal artistic interest in arranging the visual appearance of, as he put it, “friendship in the face of adversity”—a phrase that made Arin cringe.

  Roshar bullied Arin into the front of the ranks alongside him. The prince caught Kestrel’s eyes. She saw the gleam of strategy in his and responded to it. She held Javelin slightly back. They entered the village, Roshar and Arin riding abreast.