The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  Kestrel deliberately stepped on a fallen twig. It snapped.

  Maris glanced up. Her friends went pale and their laughter died, but Maris’s eyes were defiant. “Chocolate, Lady Kestrel?” she offered. “It’s hot.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Kestrel joined the ladies. They made room, edging away.

  Maris lifted the chocolate pot from its stand over the brazier and poured for Kestrel, who accepted the tiny cup and sipped. It wasn’t until the chocolate scalded her tongue that Kestrel knew the exact degree of her anger. It simmered: dark and bitter and somehow even sweet. Kestrel smiled. “Lady Maris, your father is looking very well. He’s so tan. Has your family been somewhere sunny?”

  “Oh, don’t talk to me about it!” Maris gave a little dramatic mew. “It is too, too horrible!”

  The other ladies relaxed, relieved that Kestrel seemed to have no interest in being vengeful. And why should she? their expressions seemed to say. It had been a bit of harmless gossip. In fact, Lady Kestrel ought to be pleased to hear compliments about the Herrani governor. It couldn’t have been so bad being his captive, now could it? The ladies saw quite another side to that Jadis coin.

  Kestrel watched them think this through, and shrug their furred shoulders, and drink their chocolate.

  “Can you believe that my father sailed to the southern isles without me?” Maris said. “A luxury trip to blue skies while his only child languishes here in winter. Though you can be sure that if I had gone, I would never have let the sun darken my skin. It makes one look so coarse! Like a dockworker! Really, what was my father thinking?”

  Kestrel shouldn’t have asked Maris about the Senate leader. She should steer clear of everything to do with him. She had sworn not to embroil herself any further in Herran’s affairs.

  And yet, she had gotten angry. She was angry still.

  And yet, the Senate leader was tan.

  And yet, this was unusual.

  Her mind kept returning to this detail, like a thumb rubbing a flaw in a bolt of silk, or that papery bark of the poison berry trees.

  But so what if the Senate leader was tan? A trip to the southern isles explained it. She told herself once more to leave the matter alone.

  Yet she didn’t.

  “The southern isles have many delights,” Kestrel said. “Surely your father brought you gifts?”

  “No,” said Maris. “The wretch. Oh, I love him, I do, but couldn’t he have spared one little thought for me? One little present?”

  “He brought you nothing? But the southern isles have linen, perfume, sugar, silver-tipped tea…”

  “Stop! Don’t remind me! I can’t bear it!”

  “Poor thing,” one of her friends said soothingly. “But just think, Maris. Now your many suitors have more choice in gifts to please you.”

  “They do, don’t they? And they should please me.”

  “Is that what fashionable young men do in the capital?” Kestrel asked. “Give gifts?”

  “Oh, yes … though they often ask for something in return.”

  “A kiss!” cried a lady.

  “Or an answer to a riddle,” said another. “Riddles are very popular. And the answer is always love.” Which made sense, given that the court was full of young people who had chosen to marry rather than serve in the military. By the time they turned twenty, every Valorian had to fight for the empire or begin giving it babies. Future soldiers, her father would say. The empire must grow, he’d add, and Kestrel would wonder if this was the working of every general’s mind, or only her father’s: to see something as soft as a baby and imagine it grown hard enough to kill. And then Kestrel would shrink from the thought of becoming like her father, and he would know that he had said the wrong thing, and then they would both say nothing.

  “No, I’ve heard other riddles,” said a girl, drawing Kestrel back to the conversation. “Ones with different answers: a mirror, a candle, an egg…”

  “I like riddles,” said Kestrel. “Tell me one.”

  “There is a riddle that I simply cannot figure out,” said the lady sitting next to Maris. “It is: I leap without feet to land, my cloth head is filled with sand. I have no wings, yet try to fly … what am I?”

  Kestrel helped herself to some cream. She wasn’t angry anymore. The truth was that she, like her father, knew how good it felt to cut with certain weapons. She took a whitened sip of chocolate, the cream cool and pillowy against her lips. “Maris knows the answer to that riddle,” she said.

  “I?” said Maris. “Not at all. I cannot guess it.”

  “Can you not? The answer is a fool.”

  Maris’s smile wilted. There was a silence broken only by the delicate clink of Kestrel setting her cup on the tray. She gathered her white furs about her and swept away.

  She noticed the eastern princess making a move at Borderlands. Her rider hopped over Verex’s pieces to kill an engineer. Verex laughed. The sound surprised Kestrel. He sounded so happy. Kestrel would have gone to their table, to find out once and for all just what kind of player the princess was, and why Verex had laughed as he had. But the emperor caught Kestrel’s eye. He beckoned her toward him.

  “We have a problem,” the emperor told Kestrel as she approached. “Come help us.” The senators surrounding him were high-ranking, all with seats in the Quorum. Kestrel joined them, grateful that the Senate leader had his back to his daughter’s coterie.

  “Problem?” said Kestrel to the emperor. “Don’t tell me you’ve run out of chocolate already.”

  “A more serious matter,” he said. “The barbarian plains.”

  Kestrel glanced at the eastern princess, but Risha was engaged in her game with Verex, and the emperor’s voice had been pitched not to carry. Risha possessed a grace perfectly proportioned to her beauty. Her black hair was braided like a Valorian’s. She wore rings when a true easterner would have kept her fingers bare, and the contrast of gold against Risha’s richly dark skin was striking. She was about Kestrel’s age. Maybe Risha didn’t remember much of her life in the east before her kidnapping. Maybe she had grown accustomed to the capital and thought of it as her home. Kestrel couldn’t say what the girl would have thought about the emperor referring to her country as a problem, and to her people as barbarians. Uncomfortably, Kestrel remembered that she’d called them barbarians before, too, just because that’s what people she knew did. Kestrel wouldn’t do that now. This seemed at once a meaningful difference and yet also worth very little.

  “Your father writes that the plainspeople prove tricky,” the emperor said. “The eastern tribes at our borders are skilled at stealth attacks. They vanish when the general musters his army against them.”

  “Burn the plains,” said a senator, a woman who had served under Kestrel’s father. “They’re dry this time of year.”

  “It’s good land,” said the emperor. “I’d like to turn it into farms. A fire would spoil my prize.”

  And kill the plainspeople, Kestrel thought, though this was a factor no one raised. The plains were vast, and north enough in Dacra that it didn’t rain much there this time of year. Valorian soliders would set the fire while the plainspeople slept. They would wake, and they would flee to the river, if they could make it. But a fire would rage fast and fierce through the dry grasses, and by the time the plainspeople woke it would likely be too late. They’d be burned alive.

  There was some debate about whether a fire might endanger Valorian troops. But if not, it would be a significant victory, argued the Senate leader. The plains lay north of the delta where the eastern queen ruled. If Valoria captured the plains, it would squeeze the savages into the southeastern corner of the continent. “And then it’s only a matter of time,” said the emperor, “before Valoria rules the entire continent.”

  “Then burn the grasses,” said the senator who had been in the military. “Fire is good for the earth anyway. Eventually.”

  Kestrel watched Risha knock over one of Verex’s pieces, an unimportant one. Risha shivered i
n her furs. It was never cold in the east. Did this knowledge live in Risha’s memory, or had it been given to her as it had been to Kestrel, as a piece of someone else’s information? The princess was young when she’d been captured, as young as Kestrel when her family had moved from the capital to the newly conquered territory of Herran. Maybe Risha didn’t remember her home at all.

  Kestrel saw Herran, and her garden there, and seeds beneath her childhood fingers as her nurse pressed them into the soft earth.

  She saw a plain of fire. Flames waving and snapping, horses running wild, tents burned to their frames, then crackling down. Parents would snatch up their children. The air would choke hot and black.

  “Kestrel?” said the emperor. “What do you think? Your father wrote that you’ve advised him well on the east before.”

  She blinked. The sky was white over the Winter Garden. The trees dripped their deadly berries. “Poison the horses.”

  The emperor smiled. “Intriguing. Tell me more.”

  “The plainspeople rely on horses,” Kestrel said. “For their milk, their hides, their meat, to ride for hunting … Kill the horses, and the tribes won’t be able to live without them. They’ll trek south to take refuge in the delta. The plains will be yours. You’ll mow the grasses and send it to feed our own horses. You can plant the earth as soon as you like.”

  “And how do you propose to poison the horses?”

  “Water supply,” suggested the military senator.

  That might poison people as well. Kestrel shook her head. “The river is wide and rapid. Any poison would be diluted. Instead, have my father send scouts to determine where the horses graze. Spray those grasses with the poison.”

  The emperor leaned back in his seat. His cup of chocolate steamed, veiling his face as he tipped his chin and studied Kestrel with a slanting gaze. “Very neat of you, Lady Kestrel. You solve all my worries. You hand me the unravaged plains for the low price of poison. How nice that you minimize our enemy’s civilian casualties at the same time.”

  Kestrel said nothing.

  He sipped his chocolate. “Have you ever witnessed your father in battle? You should. I’d like to see you fight under a black flag, just once. I’d like to see you truly at war.”

  Kestrel couldn’t quite return the emperor’s stare. She lifted her eyes and noticed the prince and Risha leave their gaming table. They disappeared into the hedge maze. Kestrel understood now why Verex seemed so happy. She wondered if the whole court knew about him and the princess. She suspected it must.

  “Oh,” the emperor drawled, “the Herrani wish to speak with you, Kestrel. They’ve made a formal request.”

  His words seemed to linger in the air longer than possible. Kestrel had the odd impression of the emperor playing a piano, and striking a dissonant chord that caught the fascination of everyone listening.

  “Hardly surprising,” she said coolly. “The Herrani are bound to want to speak with me from time to time. I was named their emissary.”

  “Yes, we should correct that. You’re too busy for such a dull job. They’ll be notified that you have given up the position. There’s no need for you to meet with either of the Herrani representatives again.”

  * * *

  When Kestrel returned to her suite, the bed was empty and made. Jess’s trunk was gone.

  But Jess had promised. Her visit was supposed to last longer than this. They’d barely seen each other, and for Jess to leave, to leave now, so soon …

  Kestrel tugged on a silken bellpull. When her ladies-in-waiting arrived in her sitting room, she asked, “Where’s my letter?”

  The maids looked quizzical.

  “From my friend,” Kestrel said. “For me. It’s not like her to leave. Not without saying something.”

  There was a silence. Then one of the maids offered, “The lady had her trunk sent to her townhome in the city.”

  “But why?”

  A silence made clear that no one knew why. Kestrel pressed her lips shut.

  “It’s late,” a maid said. “Shouldn’t you change into a new dress for the afternoon? What will you wear?”

  Kestrel waved a hand in a gesture very much like one she’d often seen the emperor make. She hadn’t meant to do that. It upset her. “I don’t care,” she said curtly. “You choose.”

  Her ladies-in-waiting bustled into action, putting away her furs and parading gowns. While the maids tutted over some fabrics and fingered others approvingly, Kestrel wondered what Jess would have chosen. She shoved that thought away.

  But this was like discarding a Bite and Sting tile only to draw a series of worse ones. Because there was Arin, in the velvet balcony of her mind, and there was the Winter Garden, cold with his absence, and there were the pink and red berries and her awful advice to the emperor.

  Kestrel knew what would happen after the eastern horses died.

  She imagined the yellow-green waves of grass. The ticking zizz of grasshoppers. Horse carcasses rotting in the sun.

  The plainspeople would starve. Their children would grow hollow. They would cry for horse milk. The plainspeople would move south on foot to their queen’s city in the delta. Many would fall in their tracks. Some would not get up.

  This would happen. It would happen because of Kestrel. She had done this.

  But wasn’t this better? Hadn’t the alternative been worse?

  The alternative almost didn’t matter. It didn’t keep Kestrel from feeling a sick horror at what she’d done.

  One of the maids shrieked.

  The maid had opened another wardrobe. Masker moths were flying out. They beat against the lamps and spun up in panicked, gray spirals. Their dusty wings began to wink orange and rose as they blended into the tapestries.

  “They’ve ruined the clothes!” A maid slapped moths out of the air. One hit the carpet and lay still. Its wings went red, tipped with white to match the carpet’s design exactly. Masker moths had the property of camouflage even in death.

  Kestrel stooped and picked it up. The furred, lifeless legs clung to her. The red wings changed to match her skin.

  The maids hunted the moths ferociously. Masker moths were a common household pest in the capital, and this wasn’t the first time they’d eaten into a wardrobe of expensive clothes. Judging by the number of moths, the larvae must have been fattening themselves on Kestrel’s silks for at least a week. The maids killed every last moth, crushing them against the walls. Masker moths left behind smears of no discernible color. Damaged wings lost their camouflage.

  “Go, all of you,” Kestrel told her maids. “Fetch servants to clean out the wardrobe.”

  None of the ladies-in-waiting thought to question why they all must go. No one asked why Kestrel couldn’t simply summon servants with the pull of a bell. They glared with satisfaction at the carnage of dusty wings, and left.

  When she was alone, Kestrel opened the wardrobe wider and found a pelisse crawling with moth maggots. Using her dagger, she cut a swath of fabric where the larvae squirmed most thickly. She brought it to her dressing table, which was stacked with bottles of perfumes and oils and jars of cream. She took a pot of bath salts and dumped its entire contents out a window, then dropped the cloth and its larvae into the pot and stoppered it, but loosely, so that air would flow. To be sure, she hatched a cross into the cork’s center with her dagger’s point. Kestrel set the pot at the back of her dressing table and arranged the bottles to hide it.

  She sat back in her dressing chair, thinking about the creatures feeding on the cloth in the pot. They were fat already. They’d become moths soon.

  And when they did, she had a plan for them.

  Kestrel went to her study, and wrote a letter to the Herrani minister of agriculture.

  11

  Kestrel set her cup on its saucer. “I didn’t ask to see you,” she said.

  “Too bad.” Arin claimed the chair across from her table in the library in a manner unbearably familiar to her. It was as if the chair had always been his.r />
  He slouched in his seat, tipped his head back, and looked at her from beneath lowered lids. The morning light fired his profile. “Worried, Lady Kestrel?” He spoke in Valorian, his accent roughening his voice. He always pronounced his r’s too low in his throat, so that when he spoke in her tongue everything came across as a soft growl. “Dreading what I’ll say … or do?” He smiled a grim little smile. “No need. I’ll be the perfect gentleman.” He tugged at his cuffs. It was only then that Kestrel noticed that they came too short on his arms and showed his wrists.

  It pained her to see his self-consciousness, the way it had suddenly revealed itself. In this light, his gray eyes were too clear. His posture had been confident. His words had had an edge. But his eyes were uncertain. Arin fidgeted again with his cuffs as if there was something wrong with them—with him. No, she would have said. You’re perfect, she wanted to say. She imagined it: how she would reach out to touch Arin’s bare wrist.

  That could lead nowhere good.

  She was nervous, she was cold. Her stomach was a flurry of snow.

  She dropped her hands to her lap.

  “No one’s here anyway,” Arin said, “and the librarians are in the stacks. You’re safe enough.”

  It was too early for courtiers to be in the library. Kestrel had counted on this, and on the fact that if anyone did turn up and saw her with the Herrani minister of agriculture, such a meeting would excite little interest.

  One with Arin, however, was an entirely different story. It was frustrating: his uncanny ability to unsettle her plans—and her very sense of self. She said, “Pressing where you’re not invited seems to be a habit with you.”

  “And yours is to put people in their place. But people aren’t gaming pieces. You can’t arrange them to suit yourself.”

  A librarian coughed.

  “Lower your voice,” Kestrel hissed at Arin. “Stop being so—”

  “Inconvenient?”

  “Frankly, yes.”

  His smile came: quick, true, surprised by itself. Then changing, and slow. “I could be worse.”

  “I am sure.”

  “I could tell you how.”