The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  “You hate me,” Kestrel said.

  He sagged in his chair. His messy, fair hair fell forward, and he rubbed his eyes like someone woken too early. “No, I really don’t. I hate this.” He waved a hand around the room. “I hate that you’re using me to get the crown. I hate that my father thinks it’s a brilliant idea.”

  Kestrel touched a piece from the Borderlands game. It was a scout. “You could tell him that you don’t wish to marry me.”

  “Oh, I have.”

  “Maybe neither of us has much choice in the matter.” She saw his swift curiosity and regretted her words. She moved the Borderlands scout closer to the general. “I like this game. It makes me think that the eastern empire appreciates a good story as well as a battle.”

  He gave her a look that noted a sharp change in subject, but said only, “Borderlands is a game, not a book.”

  “Borderlands could be like a book, if one had constantly shifting possibilities for different endings, and for the way characters can veer off course into the unexpected. Borderlands is tricky, too. It tempts a player into thinking she knows the story of her opponent. Take the story of the inexperienced player. The beginner who doesn’t see traps being set.” Verex’s expression had grown softer, so Kestrel arranged the Borderlands pieces into an opening gambit and moved them into different patterns of play for two opponents, explaining how a perceived beginner might win a game by deliberately falling for a trap in order to set one of his own. When the green general finally toppled the red, Kestrel said, “We could practice together.”

  Verex’s large eyes were suddenly too shiny. “By ‘practice,’ you mean ‘teach.’”

  “Friends play games together all the time without thinking of it as practicing or teaching or winning or losing.”

  “Friends.”

  “I don’t have many.” She had one. She missed Jess terribly. Jess had gone to the southern isles with her family for her health. In the past, Jess would have gone to a charming little house her family owned by the sea on the warm southern tip of Herran, but the Midwinter Edict ordered Valorian colonists to surrender all property in Herran. The colonists were compensated by the emperor, and Jess’s parents had purchased a new house in the islands. But Kestrel read the homesickness in Jess’s letters. Kestrel wrote back. They wrote often, but letters weren’t enough.

  Verex nudged the fallen red general with his green one, listening to the rocking tap of marble on marble. “Maybe we could be friends, if you could explain why you don’t tell my father that you don’t wish to marry me.”

  But Kestrel couldn’t explain.

  “You don’t want me,” Verex said.

  She couldn’t lie.

  “You claimed that you don’t have a choice,” he said. “What did you mean?”

  “Nothing. Truly, I want to marry you.”

  His anger returned. “Then let’s list the reasons.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “You seek the empire, and a husband you can manipulate as easily as these game pieces.”

  “No,” she said, but why wouldn’t Verex believe his portrait of her: power-hungry, unfeeling? It was what Arin believed.

  “You want a good laugh. So that at our engagement ball you can watch me lose at Borderlands while every single aristocrat and governor of the territories laughs with you.”

  “A ball? All the governors? Are you sure? No one’s told me about this.”

  “My father tells you everything.”

  “He didn’t. I swear, I knew nothing of a ball.”

  “So he plays games with you, too. My father is two-faced, Kestrel. If you think he adores you, you’d better think again.”

  Kestrel threw up her hands. “You’re impossible. You can’t blame me for his favor and claim that I’m no more than an amusing toy to him.” She stood and went toward the door, for she saw that the brief peace between them had disintegrated, and her mind was reeling. An engagement ball. With all the governors. Arin was coming. Arin would be here.

  “I wonder why my father didn’t tell you,” Verex said. “Could it be so that in catching you off guard, he could observe exactly what lies between you and the new governor of Herran?”

  Kestrel stopped, turned. “There is nothing between us.”

  “I’ve seen the Jadis coin. I’ve heard the rumors. Before the rebellion, he was your favorite slave. You fought a duel for him.”

  She almost reached out to a bookshelf to steady herself. It felt as if she might fall.

  “I know why you’re marrying me, Kestrel. It’s so that everyone will forget that after the rebellion, no one put you in a prison, not like every other Valorian in Herran’s city. You were special, weren’t you? Because you were his. Everyone knows what you were.”

  Her vertigo vanished. She snatched the clay soldier off the shelf.

  She saw instantly from Verex’s expression that she held something he cherished. She would smash it, she would smash it against the floor. She would break Verex like his father had broken him.

  Like she had broken her own heart. Kestrel felt the pieces of her heart suddenly, as if love had been an object, something as frail as a bird’s egg, its shell an impossible cloudy pink. She saw the shock of its bloody yolk. She felt the shards of shell pricking her throat and lungs.

  Kestrel set the soldier back on the shelf. She made certain her voice was clear when she spoke her last words before leaving the room. “If you won’t be my friend, you’ll regret being my enemy.”

  * * *

  Kestrel retreated to her suite and sent her maids away. She didn’t trust any of them now. She sat by a tiny window that gave a feeble light. When she took the Jadis coin from her pocket, it looked dull on her palm.

  This is the year of money, she remembered. She had indeed planned on going to the library earlier today, as her maid had informed Verex. She’d hoped to research the Herrani gods, then thought better of it. The library possessed a paltry collection of books; it was mostly a glamorous room where courtiers sometimes met for a quiet tea, or where a military officer might consult one of the thousands of maps. The library would have suited Kestrel well if she had wanted to find a map or to socialize … or if she’d wanted members of the court to see her researching Herrani books.

  She had turned away from the thick library doors.

  Now she huddled in her velvet chair, trying to concentrate on the actual words of her conversation with Verex instead of on their emotional undertow. She flipped the coin, flipped it again. Emperor. Jadis. Emperor. Jadis. He’s two-faced, Verex had said of his father. Kestrel thought about that phrase as she considered each side of the coin. Two-faced: the word dangled a hook into the dark well of her memory. It snagged on something.

  The Herrani believed that a god ruled not just one thing, but a whole domain of associated ideas, actions, objects. The god of stars was the god of stars, yes, but also of accidents, beauty, and disasters. The god of souls … Kestrel’s throat closed as she remembered Arin invoking that god, who ruled love. My soul is yours, he had said. You know that it is. His expression had been so open, so true. Frightened, even, of what he was saying. And she had been frightened, too, by how he had spoken what she felt. It frightened her still.

  The coin. Kestrel forced her attention again to the coin.

  There was nothing honest about the god of money. She recalled that now. This god was two-faced, like this piece of gold. Sometimes male, sometimes female. He rules buying and selling, Enai had said, which means she rules negotiation. And hidden things. You can’t see both sides of one coin at once, can you, child? The god of money always keeps a secret.

  The god of money was also the god of spies.

  5

  Arin remembered.

  It had been easy at first, the promise to be Cheat’s spy. “I trust you most,” the leader of the rebellion had murmured in Arin’s ear after his sale to the general’s daughter. “You are my second-in-command, lad, and between you and me we will have the Valorians on their knees.”

&nbs
p; Everything had slid and locked into place along well-oiled grooves.

  Except …

  Except.

  The general’s daughter had taken an interest in Arin. It was a gods-given opportunity, yet even in those early days as her slave, Arin had had the misgiving—uncomfortable, low, electric, like sparks rubbed off clothes in winter—that her interest would lead to his undoing.

  And Arin was Arin: he pushed his luck, as he always did.

  His habit was worse with her. He said things he shouldn’t. He broke rules, and she watched him do it, and said little of the breaking.

  It was, he decided, because she didn’t care what he did.

  Then came an impulse whose danger he should have seen—would have seen, if he had been able to admit to himself what it was that made him want to shake her awake even though her eyes were open.

  Why should she care what a slave did?

  Arin would make her care.

  * * *

  Arin remembered.

  How he couldn’t sleep at night in the slaves’ quarters for the music that needled its way through the dark, across the general’s grounds from the villa, where the girl played and played and didn’t care that he was tired, because she didn’t know that he was tired, because she gave no thought to him at all.

  He was whipped barebacked by her Valorian steward for some slight offense. The next day she had ordered him to escort her to a tea party. Pride had kept him from wincing as he moved. The fiery stripes on his back split and bled. She wouldn’t see, he would not let her see, he would not give her the satisfaction.

  Nonetheless, he searched for a sign that she’d even heard of the flogging. His gaze raked her face, finding nothing there but a discomfort to be so scrutinized.

  She didn’t know. He was certain he would have been able to tell. Guilt was an emotion she was bad at hiding.

  Across the distance, where she was sitting on a brocade divan, teacup and saucer in hand, she dropped his gaze, turned to a lord, and laughed at something he had said.

  Her innocence was maddening.

  She should know. She should know what her steward had done. She should know it to be her fault whether she’d given the order or not—and whether she knew or not. Innocent? Her? Never.

  He pulled the high collar of his shirt higher to hide a lash that had snaked up his neck.

  He did not want her to know.

  He did not want her to see.

  But:

  Look at me, he found himself thinking furiously at her. Look at me.

  She lifted her eyes, and did.

  * * *

  The memories were strange, they were a network of lashes, laid one on top of the other, burning traces that might have resembled a pattern if it wasn’t clear that they had been left by a wild hand with no restraint. The lashes were lit with feeling.

  He was stinging, stinging.

  “Arin,” Tensen said during their meeting with the Herrani treasurer, who was even grimmer than usual, “where is your head? You’ve heard nothing I’ve said.”

  “Say it again.”

  “The emperor has had a new coin minted to celebrate the engagement.”

  Arin didn’t want to hear about the engagement.

  “I think that you should see it,” Tensen said.

  Arin took the coin, and didn’t see whatever it was that Tensen thought he should see.

  Tensen told him the story of Jadis.

  Arin dropped the coin.

  He remembered.

  He remembered changing.

  He saw Kestrel give a flower to a baby everyone else ignored. He watched her lose cheerfully at cards to an old Valorian woman whom society giggled about, not even bothering to hush their words, for she was too senile, they said, to understand.

  Arin had stood behind Kestrel during that card game. He’d seen her high hand.

  He saw her honesty with him. She offered it like a cup of clear water that he drank deep.

  Her tears, glinting in the dark.

  Her fierce creature of a mind: sleek and sharp-clawed and utterly unwilling to be caught.

  Arin saw Kestrel step between him and punishment as if it meant nothing, instead of everything.

  “Arin?” Tensen called through the memories.

  Arin remembered the sunken days after he’d seen her last, after she’d handed him her emperor’s decree of Herrani freedom and told him about her engagement. “Congratulate me,” she’d said. He hadn’t believed it. He had begged. She hadn’t listened. “Oh, Arin,” Sarsine said to him during the time when he wouldn’t leave the rooms Kestrel had lived in. “What did you expect?”

  Grief. It had all come to this.

  “Arin,” Tensen said to him again, and Arin could no longer ignore him. “For the last time, are you going to the capital or not?”

  6

  Officials and aristocrats began to arrive in the capital in preparation for the ball. Every day more sets of fine horses were brought into the imperial stables, limping from the bitter ride down winter roads. Although Kestrel had pointed out the difficulties of bad travel conditions for their guests, the emperor apparently thought this was unimportant. He had invited them; they must come. Fires were laid to warm palace guest suites that would be lived in for quite some time: after the ball, there would be parties and events right up until the wedding.

  One afternoon, Kestrel took a carriage down through the city to the harbor, a maid shivering beside her. There was no reason why this girl couldn’t be the one in Verex’s employ, but Kestrel heaped furs on their laps and encouraged the maid to nudge her toes closer to the hot brick on the carriage floor.

  Their progress through the city was slow. The roads were steep and narrow, made less for the convenience of society and more for the purpose of slowing an enemy’s progress up the slopes to the palace.

  No new ships had arrived. Kestrel shouldn’t have expected to see one Herrani-made anyway. It was green storm season. No sane person would sail between the Herran peninsula and the capital.

  The harbor wind chapped Kestrel’s lips.

  “What are we doing here?” said the maid through chattering teeth.

  Kestrel could hardly say that she was looking for a boat that had brought Arin. Time was running out for him to make the longer but safer trek through the mountain pass, which had been cleared after the treaty with Herran had been signed. The ball loomed at the end of the week. Most guests had already arrived. But not him.

  “Nothing,” Kestrel said. “I wanted the view.” The girl blinked: her only sign of annoyance to have been dragged down to the harbor. But Kestrel wasn’t allowed to travel without an escort. She had hundreds of engagement gifts—a pen made from the ivory of a horned whale, ruby dice from a colonial lord who had heard of Kestrel’s love of games, even a clever collapsible tiara for traveling … The list of pretty presents was long, but Kestrel would have gladly traded them all for one hour of privacy outside the palace.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and didn’t return to the harbor.

  * * *

  She dined with senators. Over the rim of her wineglass, Kestrel watched the Senate leader, who looked oddly tan for winter, murmur something to the emperor.

  What were you doing, she remembered the captain asking Thrynne in the prison, eavesdropping outside the doors of a private meeting between the emperor and the Senate leader?

  It suddenly seemed that Kestrel’s cup wasn’t filled with wine but blood.

  The emperor glanced up and caught Kestrel staring at him and the Senate leader. He lifted one brow.

  Kestrel glanced away. She drank her wine to the bottom.

  * * *

  Her father sent his apologies. He couldn’t come to the ball. He was mired in fighting near the border with the eastern plains. I’m sorry, General Trajan wrote, but I have my orders.

  Kestrel stopped rereading the scant black lines of writing. Instead, she stared at all the blank space left on that one sheet of paper. The white of it hurt her
eyes. She let the letter fall.

  She’d never even considered it a possibility that her father would come—not until the moment that she had held his letter in her hands and ripped it open.

  That blinding hope. That drop into disappointment. She should have known better.

  She remembered the letter’s last word: orders. Kestrel wondered how far her father’s obedience to the emperor would go. What would the general have done in Thrynne’s prison cell? Would his knife have cut as easily as the captain’s, or worse, or not at all?

  But when she thought of her father and imagined him in the captain’s role, Thrynne wasn’t there in the prison in her mind. She was the one in chains. What were you doing, the general asked, bargaining with the emperor for a slave’s life?

  Kestrel shook her head, and no longer saw the prison or her father. She was looking out a window in one of her rooms high above the palace’s inner ward, facing the barbican, where visitors would enter.

  She palmed away the window’s frost. The barbican’s gate was shut.

  Come away from the window, she heard her father order.

  She stayed where she was. The glass fogged.

  ‘No’ doesn’t exist, Kestrel. Only ‘yes.’

  The view had clouded over.

  She left the window. There was nothing to see anyway.

  * * *

  The days wore on.

  There was a performance for the court. A Herrani singer. His voice was acceptable. But higher than Arin’s. Thinner. Kestrel became angry at the way this unknown man’s voice scraped the bottom of his register. This music was inferior, thready stuff. It had none of Arin’s strength, his lithe resilience.

  Kestrel hoarded the memory of Arin’s song. It was honey in the hive of her heart. As the performance continued, Kestrel began to worry that the music she was hearing now was going to replace what she remembered of Arin’s voice. He would never sing for her again. What if she could no longer even remember how he had sung for her once? She curled her fingers under the edge of her chair and gripped hard.

  Finally the performance came to an end. The audience met the singer’s silence with a dull silence of their own. No one clapped—not because everyone else had been able to judge the music’s quality and found it wanting, but because they saw no point in applauding a slave, even after remembering that he no longer was one. And Kestrel, who had never forgotten what this man was and was not, certainly had no intention of applauding either.