The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

  She found herself praying to Arin’s god. Please, let this be over soon.

  But she heard no answer.

  “Stand your ground,” Roshar shouted as arrows drove into the army. Eastern crossbows fired into the trees.

  Roshar ordered Xash, his second-in-command, to lead a company into the forest to the left of the road. Roshar would take another company to the right. “We’ll take care of the Rangers. You,” he said to Arin, “take command of the road.”

  Arin snagged the prince’s shoulder. “You’ll get bogged down in the mud. The Rangers will shoot every one down on the open land before you reach the trees.”

  “Not much choice. Continue to return fire. The Dacran archers are plainspeople. They’re good.”

  “They’re not gods.”

  “They will be, to protect their prince.”

  Then Roshar was gone, and Arin snapped his attention back to the road, because the enemy was upon them, thundering down the road, almost here, almost here.

  Here.

  As they played, the rain lessened and stopped. The glasses of wine sat untouched. The boneyard still held the four shiny tiles hidden among the others.

  It was the emperor’s turn. He reached for a tile, then paused, too much drama in his movements. He wasn’t truly hesitant, or even pretending to be hesitant, but rather making an open mockery of hesitancy that he knew she’d recognize as such.

  “Play your tile.” Her voice grated.

  “I’m thinking.”

  She said nothing.

  “Don’t you want to know what I’m thinking?” He leaned back in his chair, his short, silvered hair a bright bristle in the lamplight. The emperor passed his fingers over his mouth with enough pressure to pull slightly at the slack skin of his cheeks. His touch explored the grooves age had made near his mouth, and he seemed pleased.

  Then she saw that his gaze had shifted to her hands.

  They were trembling. She pressed them down against the table.

  “I’m thinking about what I’ll claim from you when I win,” he said. “The particularly appealing part of the deal you struck is the openness of your offer. ‘What ever you like.’ ”

  She wished she’d phrased things differently, though she didn’t know what else she would have said, since part of what had made him agree to the game was his anticipation of the plea sure of what he was doing now.

  “I could make you bring Arin of Herran to me,” the emperor said. “He’d surrender, for you.”

  The world deadened.

  “I never finished what I started with that boy’s face.” The emperor pushed the hilt of Kestrel’s dagger with one finger.

  The sound it made, though small, scraped down her spine.

  “Or perhaps it’s not his face that appeals to me most. We could see what might be done with yours.”

  Silence.

  “No, Lady Kestrel?”

  His gaze drifted over her shoulder. He continued to speak, voice soft as his list continued, and Kestrel’s mind jumped between thinking that he chose to name the things that would torment her most, and meant none of it, or that he did mean it and wanted her to hope that he didn’t, and that this hope was his most delicious form of brutalization.

  Her heart was loud in her ears. This wasn’t working. She’d made a grave mistake in coming.

  “But of course,” the emperor finally said, “with such an offer as you made, I could exact it all.”

  Arin ordered his vanguard to fall to the sides of the road.

  The black powder sacks were lit.

  The Valorian cavalry reared back from what they saw too late.

  The sacks burst under their hooves. Chunks of paving stone exploded into the air.

  “Do you forfeit your turn?” Kestrel asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “You’re afraid to play.”

  “We both know,” he said, “which of us is afraid.”

  She reached for her wine glass and drank.

  “I do admire your love for a gamble.” He took her cup and drank from it as well. “I was simply thinking out loud earlier. There’s no harm in thinking.”

  “I have my own thoughts. I am wondering why my father ever respected you.”

  The emperor set down the cup. “He’s my friend.”

  “Yet you say the things that you say.”

  “He’s not here, and if he were, he wouldn’t care.”

  “Yes, he would.”

  The emperor scrutinized her. “You don’t look like him. Except the eyes.”

  “Why?” The word burst from her lips.

  His reply was gentle. “Why what, Kestrel?”

  Her throat closed. Her eyes stung. She realized that she had forgotten the game . . . and that maybe this had been the emperor’s intention. She didn’t want to ask her question. Yet she couldn’t help it . . . or the hurt evident in her choked voice. “Why did he choose you over me?”

  “Ah.” The emperor rubbed his dry palms together and templed them with a little pat. “You’ve provided me with an entertaining evening so far. I feel I owe you something in exchange. So: the truth. Trajan wasn’t my friend—not at first. He was necessary for what I wanted. Military prowess. Imperial expansion. I, in turn, was an opportunity for what he wanted, which was nothing less than for his daughter to one day rule the empire. An understandable ambition. Or perhaps our friendship didn’t begin there, after all. We’ve known each other since well before your birth. He’s a man of rare intelligence. There’s plea sure in finding one’s equal. Perhaps things began with that. As to how it has grown . . .” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s because he knows how I am with every one else, and knows that I’m not like that with him. I value Trajan. Ultimately, when he held your treasonous letter in his hand and saw how you had lied to him, the choice between me and you was the choice between someone who loves him and someone who didn’t.”

  Tears spilled down her cheeks.

  The emperor patted her frozen hand. “I suggest that we not discuss your father.”

  He played his tile.

  The air reeked of sulfur and scorched horseflesh. The screams were so many and so loud that Arin couldn’t really hear them. Just noise. His ears buzzed.

  Valorians floundered in their blood on the broken road. Ranger arrows continued to furrow the sky. A blasted paving stone, Arin saw, had smashed into a Herrani soldier’s face. Her body lay half in the mud, half where the road had been.

  Arin couldn’t spot the general. The Valorian army was vast. Only a few ranks of cavalry had been decimated in the blast.

  Another unit of Valorian cavalry moved forward into position.

  Kestrel was losing. Earlier, the emperor had delayed in order to unsettle her, to revel in it, to spear her like a worm and watch her writhe. Kestrel’s tactic of delay was different. She took as much time as possible to draw the game out. Earlier, she’d wanted the game to be over quickly. Now she needed more time.

  The four shiny tiles in the boneyard winked at her. She knew their values. The wolf—she could use that if it were in her hand. Or even the bee.

  Her frustration rose.

  The tears had dried on her cheeks, the skin tight with salt. She couldn’t help returning to what the emperor had said about her father. The memory of how her father had told her that she’d broken his heart.

  If he were here, she would howl at him. He had broken her heart, over and over, for years. He’d tried to force her into the mold of his own idea of honor. What he wanted her to be. Not what she was.

  Kestrel felt her spine straighten.

  Damn his devotion to honor.

  When it came her turn to pull a tile, she didn’t choose any of the marked ones.

  “Steady,” Arin called. His horse tossed its head. His vanguard still held formation: those few files of broad ranks, running across the road and up to the trees.

  The Valorian cavalry nudged toward them, looking ready to tear through Arin’s ranks. Arin watched the cavalry shape into a w
edge. The left and right sides would pull up in the clash, and would try to flank the center ranks of Arin’s army by galloping up alongside the road once Arin’s vanguard had collapsed.

  Yes, said death. Good.

  The emperor pulled a shiny tile. Kestrel bit back a sound, glancing away so that he couldn’t read her expression.

  The windows had lightened. For the first time, she registered their intricate patterns of stained glass. In the dead of night, they’d looked black. Now they blushed with faint color. She saw what they would soon fully show. Flowers, gods, the prow of a ship. A bird’s flung-open wings.

  This was an eastern room. When dawn came, it would be glorious.

  The armies clashed. The center of Arin’s vanguard coalesced around him. But the edges—as planned—disintegrated, the soldiers appearing to retreat into the forest.

  The left and right flanks of the Valorian cavalry hurtled straight into the open spaces along the road that the edges of Arin’s vanguard had hidden.

  Valorian horses impaled their stomachs on the sharpened staves Arin had had driven into the mud.

  The emperor set down a fox. He examined the game in play. “Things don’t look so good for you,” he told Kestrel.

  A movement amid all the others—the torque of bodies, the muddy struggle, collapse, rise, murder—caught Arin’s attention. On the periphery of battle where gutted war horses flailed, there was some rabbitlike thing. He couldn’t look directly; he was too busy kneeing his horse out of the way of a rearing Valorian stallion’s plunging hooves. Then grappling with the stallion’s rider. Distracted, Arin seized the rider’s arm.

  Not a rabbit.

  Much too large for a rabbit.

  Still, that impression of something—someone—out of place. A softness. An innocence.

  Arin felt the arm pop from its shoulder.

  The rider screamed, but Arin wasn’t paying attention. He impatiently killed the Valorian. He’d seen, now, what that strange movement far off to the side of the road was, among the bloody staves.

  It was Verex. He was struggling to free his leg, trapped beneath the body of his fallen horse.

  He was easy prey.

  Arin saw his soldiers see the prince . . . but not see him as a prince, not as the one they were warned not to kill.

  This, a prince?

  Covered in mud, his only visible feature that straw-colored Valorian hair, Verex tugged, all thin limbs and terror. He didn’t see the Dacran archer’s taut bow, arrow nocked and drawn.

  Arin was too far away. He shouted No, but the word was lost in the roar of war.

  The archer aimed, and released her arrow.

  “I almost wish I’d lose,” the emperor mused. “It’d be a novel experience. Is it wrong for me to hope that, at least, this game will last longer? Improve, Kestrel, or this will be over too soon.”

  Kestrel reminded herself that there are ways to lose even if one holds the highest hand. She played her tile.

  Helpless, Arin watched the arrow slice a low, true path toward Verex. It struck him, glancing off his metal armor. Undaunted, the archer nocked another arrow.

  Get down, Arin willed as he tried to force his way to the edge of the road. He’d never reach Verex in time. Use your horse as a shield. But Verex, who now saw how the cloud of danger around him had condensed to the point of an arrowhead, froze.

  Arin’s gaze swiveled back to the archer, whose face underwent a curt shift of emotion just after she loosed the arrow. Her expression slackened with horror.

  Arin saw what she saw: Roshar, hurtling toward the Valorian prince and into the path of the arrow.

  Roshar flattened Verex into the mud. The arrow sailed over his shoulder.

  Then Risha’s brother raged at the stunned Valorian, dragged him out from under the horse, and hauled him toward the cover of the trees.

  They were both silent now, playing in concentration. The emperor reached for a second shiny tile.

  The stained-glass windows glowed, and something eased open inside Kestrel. As color seeped into the room, she felt an unexpected wish.

  She wished her father were here.

  You, who seek your own father’s death.

  But she didn’t, she found that she couldn’t, no matter how he had hurt her. She wished that he could see her play, and win. That he could see what she saw now.

  A window is just a window. Colored glass: mere glass. But in the sun it becomes more. She would show him, and say, love should do this.

  And you too, she would tell him, because she could no longer deny that it remained true, in spite of every thing.

  I love you, too.

  After Roshar and Verex had vanished into the trees, Arin stopped thinking. He rarely did, in battle. It was easier to give himself over. The pressure inside was a good one. His body obeyed it.

  The staves had ruined the Valorians’ strategy. It was impossible to flank Arin’s army, which became a solid column that thrust up the road. The edges of Arin’s vanguard began to work forward, fighting to reach the unprotected, muddy sides of the road on which the Valorians stood. With a little luck, Arin would flank them.

  When his sword cut an enemy open, Arin thought that he would have chosen no other god to rule him, that none of the hundred could please him so well.

  A gift, he thought.

  This is nothing, death said. Did I not make you a promise? Have you not kept faith with me, in hopes of this very moment? See, see what I have for you.

  Arin looked.

  Just a few paces away, unhorsed, helmet gone, stood General Trajan.

  This was taking too long.

  It was full dawn. The stained windows were wild now, lurid with color. Kestrel had reached the end of her line of play. She held a worthy hand, yet dreaded exposing her tiles to the emperor.

  It didn’t matter what tiles she held. All that mattered was that the game was over, and that the emperor appeared relaxed, lids half-lowered in anticipation, his dark eyes liquid.

  “Show me,” he said.

  Arin spurred his horse forward. The general saw him and stood tall. Arin’s mind went blank, he heard nothing, not even death, and he should have been listening, because at the last possible moment, the general fell to one knee and drove his sword deep into the chest of Arin’s horse.

  As slowly as possible, Kestrel turned her last tile.

  Four spiders.

  The emperor didn’t smile. She almost wished that he had. He closed his eyes once, and when he opened them their expression was even worse than his smile.

  He displayed his winning hand.

  Four tigers.

  Arin was thrown from his shrieking horse. His head rang against the road.

  And rang, and rang.

  Perspiration glimmered on the emperor’s upper lip. He touched it, glanced at his fingers strangely, then returned his attention to Kestrel.

  She scraped her chair back.

  He swept her dagger from the table and had it up to her throat in one swift movement. He pricked the skin; a tiny trickle of blood.

  She’d been stupid, her plan had been stupid, a fool’s gamble, yet her mind kept scrabbling for an idea, something else, anything else that could reverse her mistake or make happen what should have already happened.

  “Don’t take defeat too badly,” he said. “If it’s any consolation, I had no intention of ever fulfilling my agreement, even if you’d won. But the plea sure of the game was great. Now. Sit.”

  Her legs gave out beneath her.

  “Let’s discuss what you owe.”

  Arin felt the hum of metal in the air.

  He rocked his body out of its path, heard the general’s sword strike the road.

  Arin shoved himself to his feet.

  The emperor lowered back into his seat. Kestrel stared at his winning hand, light-headed with fear.

  “Does the sight of this trouble you?” Her dagger still in one hand, the emperor turned his tiles facedown. Then he paused, frowning at their backs. He
touched one of the two shiny ones, then flipped Kestrel’s hand over, studying her tiles’ backs. He found, in the boneyard, the two remaining marked tiles. “What is this?”

  She made an involuntary sound.

  He batted the air as if at an invisible insect. Colored light beamed into the room. The four tiles shone clearly.

  “You cheated?” he muttered. “How could you cheat and still lose?”

  Arin swung at the general, who cut the blow wide, deflecting it easily, holding it in a semi-bind that forced Arin’s sword low. Arin’s guard was open. The general was quick, his parry swift. The man’s steel was so sharp that Arin didn’t feel, at first, when it cut him.

  The emperor licked his dry lips. He turned over the two marked tiles in the boneyard. A wolf. A snake. “These are good tiles. Why would you mark tiles and not take them for yourself?” He swallowed. The knot of cartilage in his throat bobbed.

  Kestrel saw him begin to understand.

  His body began to understand, too.

  He lunged for her.

  The sword nicked the side of Arin’s neck just below the ear. It would have taken off his head if he hadn’t recoiled in time.

  Arin had been looking at the general’s face without really seeing it. He saw it now. He saw that the man knew exactly who he was, and that he longed for Arin’s death almost as much as Arin longed for his.

  The emperor knocked over the wine. He seized up against the table, hand clamped around Kestrel’s dagger.

  She stepped back from the table as he shuddered against it. She felt a relief so deep that it didn’t even feel like relief. It plunged straight into exhaustion.

  “I lied,” Kestrel told him.

  The emperor tried to push himself upright. She thought he might be trying to do something with the dagger, but his arm had gone rigid. It thumped into the spilled red wine.

  “I lied when I said I hadn’t come to murder you.”

  His eyes were wide, stark.

  “It never mattered whether I won or lost the game,” Kestrel said. “Only how long the poison would take to kill you. It comes from a tiny eastern worm. In its purest form, the poison is clear. It dries to a shine. I painted it onto four Bite and Sting tiles. You touched them.”