The Winner's Kiss

by Marie Rutkoski

“She fell off a ladder.”

  He must have visibly relaxed, because his cousin raised her brows and looked ready to scold.

  “I imagined something worse,” he tried to explain.

  She appeared to understand his relief that pain, if it had to come, came this time without malice. Just an accident. Done by no one. The luck, sometimes, of life. A bad slip that ends with bread, and someone to bind you.

  It was a long walk home. But a plea sure to regain, unexpectedly, the memory of walking home as a child, secure in the knowledge that he would find every thing he loved there, whole and unbroken, his certainty so absolute that he hadn’t even been aware of it.

  The city gave way to cypress trees. His feet were dusty. The sun made every scent stronger: his hot skin, the roasted path, a breath of lavender blown from somewhere he couldn’t see.

  The god of death was silent. Not gone. Inhabiting Arin, but comfortably, in a kind of kinship. Arin kept company with death, but death was not all that lived inside him.

  A girl in his heart. In his home.

  Waiting for him.

  There were old stone steps cut into the final hill. His pace quickened.

  The house rose into view, sequined with open windows. A war horse was cropping the meadow.

  Although Arin was eager to see Kestrel, he would have to wait. He caught threads of music from far away. As he came across the grass, the piano’s melody strengthened. It opened within him a happiness that gathered and gleamed . . . glossy, but the way water is, with weight.

  A lovely fatigue claimed him. He lay down on the grass and listened. He thought about how Kestrel had slept on the palace lawn and dreamed of him. When she had told him this, he’d wished that it had been real. He tried to imagine the dream, then found himself dreaming. Every thing made sense in his dream yet he felt the tenuousness of this perfect reason. The arch of Kestrel’s bare foot. An old tale about the god of death and the seamstress. Arin would lose, upon waking, his understanding of why touching Kestrel would arouse the memory of a story he’d not thought about in a long time.

  He dreamed: one stocking balled in his fist, and the stray question of how it had been made, who had sewn this? He saw his hands—though they did not look like his hands—measuring and cutting fabric, sewing invisible stitches. A dark-haired boy tumbled from a room, a god-mark upon his brow. When a guest entered and said, Weave me the cloth of yourself, Arin thought that he was the forbidding guest and the child and the sewing girl all at once. She said, I’m going to miss you when I wake up.

  Don’t wake up, he answered.

  But he did.

  Kestrel, beside him on the grass, said, “Did I wake you? I didn’t mean to.”

  It took him a velvety moment to understand that this was real. The air was quiet. An insect beat its clear wings. She brushed hair from his brow. Now he was very awake.

  “You were sleeping so sweetly,” she said.

  “Dreaming.” He touched her tender mouth.

  “About what?”

  “Come closer, and I’ll tell you.”

  But he forgot. He kissed her, and became lost in the exquisite sensation of his skin becoming too tight for his body. He murmured other things instead. A secret, a want, a promise. A story, in its own way.

  She curled her fingers into the green earth.

  Chapter 44

  The night was fresh and foretold summer’s end. The slow, hot day gave way to a breeze as cool as laundered sheets.

  Kestrel, in the stables, fed Javelin a carrot. She promised him apples. “Soon,” she said, and wondered if horses notice how the seasons change. Do they see apples swell on the trees? Have they any way to mark the passage of time, or is it always now for them, with no sense of then? Maybe soon had no meaning either.

  She’d meant to visit her father. She’d wanted to ask him about her childhood. Her memory was still a tattered thing sometimes, and Arin couldn’t tell her what he himself didn’t know. She wanted to ask her father: How was it when you gave me Javelin? What was my first word? Did you save my milk teeth, or did my nurse plant them in the ground as the Herrani do? What was I like, and how were you with me, and with my mother?

  She wouldn’t have known some of the answers even if her memory hadn’t been damaged. Every one loses pieces of the past. But then it occurred to her that her father might not know either, or that he would, and say nothing. Or he would, and try to bargain his memories for the use of her dagger. Kestrel’s courage failed her. She didn’t go to the prison.

  “You will when you can,” Arin had said when she’d told him.

  “I should be able to now.”

  “This isn’t a wound in the flesh. No one can say how long it takes to heal.”

  Then she had noticed that Arin’s fingernails were blackened, and how he kept reaching into his pocket as if to reassure himself that something was there.

  She had told herself not to guess. But she could never help guessing. A smile warmed her face.

  He shut his eyes in mock chagrin. “Gods, can I keep nothing from you?”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Devious thing. I won’t give it to you yet. It’s for Ninarrith.”

  Time seemed strange; it was as if the ring were already on her smallest finger, the most vulnerable one.

  “It’s simple,” Arin had hastened to say.

  “I will love it.”

  “Will you wear it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Always?”

  “Yes,” she had said, “if you show me how to make one for you, too.”

  Kestrel gave her horse a final caress. It was full night. She left the stables. Fireflies spangled the black lawn.

  She thought about Arin’s expression when she’d asked if he would teach her how to forge a ring for him, and the whole conversation glowed within her like one of those fireflies. Watching them, you’d almost think that a firefly winks out of existence, then comes to life, vanishes again, returns. That when it’s not lit, it’s not there at all.

  But it is.

  A night breeze ruffled a curtain. Arin’s bedroom—she realized with soft surprise—had come to feel like her own. He was lazily tracing circles on her belly. It hypnotized her into a rare, pure unthinking.

  He settled back on the bed, propped on one elbow. “It occurs to me that there is something we have never done.”

  Her thoughts rushed back. She arched one brow.

  He moved to whisper in her ear.

  “Yes,” she laughed. “Let’s.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  So they reached for dressing robes and the bedside lamp, and padded barefoot through his suite, rushing slightly, and then through the silent house, suppressing giddy breaths. They couldn’t look each other in the face; a wild, loud joyousness threatened to break free if they did. They wound down the staircase and into the parlor.

  They shut the door behind them, but still . . .

  “We are going to wake the whole house,” Kestrel said.

  “How should we do this?”

  She led him to her piano. “Easy.”

  He placed a palm on the instrument as if already feeling it vibrate with music. He cleared his throat. “Now that I think about it, I’m a little nervous.”

  “You’ve sung for me before.”

  “Not the same.”

  “Arin. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.”

  Her words silenced him, steadied him.

  Anticipation lifted within her like the fragrance of a garden under the rain. She sat at the piano, touching the keys. “Ready?”

  He smiled. “Play.”

  Author’s Note

  I’m grateful to the following books, among others, for their inspiration and guidance: Edward Said’s Orientalism, Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Linda Colley’s Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850, Herodotus’s The Histories, Frederick Douglass’s N
arrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Arrian’s The Campaigns of Alexander, Jacob de Gheyn’s The Renaissance Drill Book, and Bert S. Hall’s Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Eu rope.

  Thank you to friends who have read drafts or portions of drafts: Renée Ahdieh, Marianna Baer, Olivia Benowitz, Kristin Cashore, Donna Freitas, Daphne Benedis-Grab, Anne Heltzel, Mordicai Knode, Sarah Mesle, Mary E. Pearson, Jill Santopolo, and Eliot Schrefer. Many other friends, too, talked with me about various issues concerning this book, like Sarah MacLean (about amnesia); my husband Thomas Philippon (about military strategy); Robin Wasserman (about secret things); and the aforementioned Olivia, Miriam Jacobson, Nadine Knight, Sarah Wall-Randell, and Kate Moncrief (about horses). Olivia and I had several exchanges about when Arin treats a horse’s hoof; her suggestions and expertise were critical. Drew Gorman-Lewis, Associate Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, talked with me at length about the geology and terrain of my fictional tundra and the real-life properties of sulfur. Tony Swatton, a modern day swordsmith, gave me key advice for how Arin might transform his father’s sword into a dagger. Tony can be found at his shop (and forge) The Sword and the Stone, and hosts a Web series called Man at Arms. Thanks to Dan Wolfe for putting me in touch with Tony, and to Becky Rosenthal, for passing the phone to Drew (and for being my very dear friend).

  My publishing house, Macmillan, is the best. I trust Janine O’Malley, my editor, with my figurative life, and I applaud her and every one else in-house, especially my publicist, Gina Gagliano, and Mary Van Akin, Simon Boughton, Molly Brouillette, Jean Feiwel, Liz Fithian, Katie Halata, Angus Killick, Kathryn Little, Karen Ninnis, Joy Peskin, Cynthia Ritter, Caitlin Sweeny, Allison Verost, Ashley Woodfolk, and Jon Yaged.

  As always, I’m deeply appreciative of my agent, Charlotte Sheedy, as well as every one at the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, Joan Rosen in particular.

  The close of a series is a strange place to inhabit: a kind of nimbus of sadness and excitement. It reminds me of Angela Carter’s portrayal of in-between times, like the solstice, or liminal states when one is neither truly one thing or the other. As she knew well, uncertainty (and its eventual fulfillment) is the essence of fairy tales. It is a perfect fairy tale to me that I have written a book and you have read it. I’m grateful to all my readers, including librarians, booksellers, and bloggers, and want to acknowledge Stephanie Sinclair and Kat Kennedy of the blog Cuddlebuggery in particular, because they were the first people to review The Winner’s Curse. I saw their reviews on an incredibly snowy day, and it was magic to discover that two total strangers understood my book in the way I had hoped it would be understood. I thank them, and you, too.

  MARIE RUTKOSKI is a professor of English literature at Brooklyn College, where she teaches Shakespeare, children’s literature and creative writing. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons. Marie can tie a good double figure-eight knot and is very fond of perfume, tea and excellent bread and butter.

  ALSO BY MARIE RUTKOSKI

  The Winner’s Curse

  The Winner’s Crime

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney

  First published in Great Britain in March 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  First published in the United States of America by

  Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers

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  www.bloomsbury.com

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  Text copyright © Marie Rutkoski 2016

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  epub ISBN: 97814088 58752

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