The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  “Arin, how is it for you here, in the capital?”

  He held her gaze. “I would rather talk about what we were talking about.”

  She arranged her fingers along the studs that pinned green leather to the tabletop. She felt each cool, small, hard nail. The silence inside her was like those nails. What it held down was something sheer: a feeling like fragile silk, billowing up at the sound of his voice.

  If she and Arin were to talk about what they had been talking about, that silk could tear free. It would float up. It would catch the light, and cast a colored shadow.

  What color would it be, Kestrel wondered, the silk of what she felt?

  What would it be like to let it go, let it canopy above her?

  “It wasn’t a false question,” she said quietly. “I think the capital must be strange for you.”

  Arin studied her, thoughtful now. “Is it that way for you?”

  “It shouldn’t be.”

  “You were raised in Herran. This isn’t your home.”

  “It’s my country.”

  Arin’s face closed along lines she knew well. He shrugged, the movement small and short. He helped himself to tea.

  Hesitant, Kestrel asked, “Are they good to you here?”

  A rising ribbon of steam curled around his face. He drank from the cup and lowered it, the gesture as fluid as that of any courtier. But his hand was a laborer’s hand, and the porcelain cup, painted with flowers and dipped in gold, looked out of place. Arin frowned at the cup. “Sometimes I think it was easier to be ignored. Here, no one ignores me. Even if they ignore me they don’t, not really. The way they don’t look feels like they’re staring. When I was a slave in Herran, no one ever looked at me. No one looks at a slave.” Arin set the cup on its saucer with an abrupt click. “Kestrel, when did I do it? I keep asking myself when I did the thing that was beyond your understanding. Was there one thing that made too many for you to forgive me? The lies—”

  “I would have lied, too.”

  “The Herrani rebellion. I plotted for months. I plotted against you.”

  “I understand why.”

  “Your friends, then. Your people. The poison. Benix’s death. Jess’s sickness. It was my fault. You blame me.”

  Kestrel shook her head—not to deny his words, but because it wasn’t as simple as he’d said. “Sometimes I imagine that I’m you. I imagine your life. What we did to it. And I know what you did back. So yes, I blame you … and I don’t. If I’d been you, I would have done the same. I might have done worse.”

  “Then what can’t you understand?” His voice grew hoarse. “Was it … the kiss? In my kitchen. Was that the unforgivable thing?”

  “Arin.”

  “I shouldn’t have.”

  “Arin.”

  “I’m sorry, Kestrel. I’m sorry. Tell me what I can say.”

  It wasn’t the misery that gave her pause. It was his voice. It was what lay beneath his voice: that underground river of song that was always there, that he tried to dam and block and bury. It had been his secret. When she had bought him, she’d felt the strain of this secret even then. Arin was a singer. Yet he had disowned it, he hid it. His secret had seemed so vital, so fiercely kept, that Kestrel had never forced its fact to the surface, and hadn’t thought to question whether Arin hid anything else.

  He was waiting for her to speak. A library clock chimed. The sound woke her from her memory. A new thought made her skin prickle with fear.

  Even if Arin didn’t know her secrets, he sensed them. It was as if he could hear them rustling in her dark heart. Kestrel had decided she would never tell him. Yet a mere moment ago she’d spoken too openly, like someone who hoped he would guess exactly what her secrets were.

  She met his anxious eyes. She thought of the nails in the table and the force it had taken to drive them in. She thought about temptation, and the smart thing, and how in the seventeen years before she’d met Arin, she’d always known which to choose. “I forgive you.” Kestrel made her tone offhandedly kind, even bored. “There, do you feel better? My choice to marry the prince isn’t about blaming you. It’s not about you at all. I simply want something else.”

  He stared.

  “Really, Arin. I have the chance to rule half the known world one day. That isn’t too difficult to understand.”

  He turned to look out the window. The light was stronger now. It bleached his face.

  “Since we are being so honest,” she said, “I’d like for you to tell me why you’re here instead of Tensen. Did he send you?”

  “He never read your note,” Arin said to the window. “I saw your seal. I opened the letter.”

  “I suppose I should scold you for it.” She lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “Though I might as well tell you as him.”

  Arin looked at her then. “Tell me what?”

  “That I am no longer the imperial ambassador to Herran.”

  “But you agreed. It was part of the treaty the emperor signed. That I signed. It’s law.”

  “The law is written by the sword. The emperor holds the sword, not you, and if he says that I am not to be burdened by a tiresome post, who are we to disagree? Come, let’s not quarrel. The tea is nice, isn’t it? A little too steeped, though. I might not finish my cup.”

  Arin’s expression was turning dangerous. “So we’re to talk about tea?”

  “Would you prefer chocolate?”

  “And when I see you next, shall I compliment your dazzling shoes and doeskin gloves? Because what else will you have to discuss? Doesn’t the life of an empress-to-be bore you?” Arin had switched to speaking in his own language, but she’d never heard him sound like this before. His voice was mincing and sharp. It was a mockery of the way courtiers talked. “Maybe we can discuss the latest crimes of your beloved empire over tea. I can admire the cunning little shapes of hardened sugar and pass you a tiny sweet swan on a spoon. You can set it to swim in your cup while you pretend that the massacres in the east aren’t happening. And maybe I will note how the people of the southern isles are still slaves, and the tribes of the northern tundra were wiped out long ago. You will say that the southern slaves have it better under the empire than when they were free. Look at all that clean water piped down from the mountains through the imperial aqueducts, you’ll say. Isn’t that lovely? As for the northern tribes, there were never very many of them anyway.”

  His voice tightened. The mockery was gone. “And I might tell you that Herran is thinned to the point of starvation. We are poor, Kestrel. We eat through a meager supply of grain and wait for the hearthnut harvest, and for news of how much your emperor will seize of it. What if I ask if you know how much? You’ll probably say that you remember how your Herrani nurse used to bake hearthnut bread for you. Maybe you’ve even been to the southern tip of Herran’s peninsula where the hearthnut trees grow, and remember how the sun there is hot year-round. You’ll say all this in a cozy tone as if we share something, when what we share is what your people steal from mine.

  “I will say tell me. Tell me how much we’ll have to live by after the emperor’s tithe. You’ll say you don’t know. You have no intention of knowing.”

  Kestrel had risen from her seat.

  “Then I will be silent,” Arin said, “and you will stir your tea. You will drink and I will drink. There. Is that how it will be?”

  Kestrel was light-headed. “Go away,” she whispered, though she was the one standing. Arin didn’t move from the table. He stared up at her, jawline tight, and she didn’t understand how it could still be there in his face: that hard expectation, that angry faith. Don’t fail me, his eyes said. Don’t fail yourself.

  She quit the table.

  “You’re better than this,” he called after her. A librarian stepped from the stacks to shush him. Kestrel walked away.

  He said, “How can the inconsequence of your life not shame you?”

  He said, “How do you not feel empty?”

  I do, she though
t as she pushed through the library doors and let them thud behind her. I do.

  * * *

  Kestrel was shaking when she sat down in front of her dressing table. Curse Tensen. Curse him for not collecting his own letters, or for sleeping in late while Arin had riffled through them. She’d been discreet in what she had written—this was the imperial court, and the only secrets put down on paper were meant to become gossip—but what if she hadn’t been?

  She’d better reconsider her plan. Tensen couldn’t be trusted to keep Arin in check. She was a fool even to consider becoming the minister of agriculture’s new spy. What kind of spymaster allows his letters to be read?

  Then again, what kind of would-be spy stamps a letter with her own seal? What a stupid mistake.

  Kestrel looked at the bottles on her dressing table and imagined how it would sound if she sent the whole lot of them crashing to the stone floor. A great, glorious smash. But a moment passed, then another, and she calmed, reaching carefully for a pot set back behind the others.

  Kestrel seemed to see the pot in her hand as if it were far away.

  You’re better than this, Arin had said.

  Her fingers tightened around the pot. She brought it close. She smiled a hard smile, one as thin as the glass beneath her nails.

  The masker moth larvae had cocooned. There were bulging, pellet-like cases all over the silk.

  Kestrel returned the pot to its place. She would wait for the moths to hatch. It wouldn’t take long. Then she would make her move.

  * * *

  She pled a minor illness: a cold caught from sitting too long in the Winter Garden after the ball. Verex didn’t visit, but sent a kind note along with a vial of medicine.

  The emperor sent no word.

  Kestrel wrote to Jess: a teasing letter filled with merry turns of phrase that chided Jess for abandoning her in her hour of need. There were too many parties, too many boring people. Jess had left her defenseless.

  I need my friend, Kestrel wrote. Then she saw the anxiety in her spiky cursive. Kestrel felt the nibbling fear that she had been abandoned, that she had unknowingly offended Jess.

  I saw him, Jess had said. She had seen Arin at the ball.

  But then she’d clung to Kestrel’s hand in the dark. Jess wouldn’t have done that, surely, had she guessed what Arin and Kestrel had been doing while the dancers danced?

  Maybe the sight of Arin had frightened Jess. Kestrel couldn’t blame her. Jess had witnessed things Kestrel hadn’t the night of the Firstwinter Rebellion. And Jess knew they were Arin’s doing.

  Kestrel blacked out her last line of writing.

  I miss you, little sister, she wrote instead.

  Jess’s reply was slow in coming. It was short. Jess was tired, the letter explained, her health worse than thought. By the time you receive this, we will have left for the south again, Jess wrote. The entire family would go. Jess was sorry.

  It was an explanation of sorts. But Kestrel found herself rereading the letter in her empty receiving room, searching for signs of love as if it could be captured in a double-dotted i, or in the decorative slash through the last word of Jess’s last sentence. The paper in Kestrel’s hand felt thin.

  Uneasy, Kestrel crumbled the letter’s wax seal between her fingers. She tried not to think about how she hadn’t even been able to see Jess one more time. She tried not to think about how the empty room felt suddenly emptier.

  * * *

  Kestrel kept to parts of her suite that were unquestionably private: her bedchamber and dressing room. And one day, even though she couldn’t have possibly heard the flutter of such small wings, Kestrel lifted her head, came quickly to the dressing table, and cleared a path through the bottles to see masker moths hatching in their pot. Some were struggling out of cocoons. Others clung to the glass, their wings clear, or they clustered upside down on the bottom of the cork and turned a stippled light brown.

  Kestrel lit a candle. When the moths had all hatched and the candle had burned down, Kestrel poured molten wax over the stopper of the moths’ pot. She sealed it thoroughly, so that no air would leak into the pot.

  It took a day for the moths to die. Afterward, Kestrel announced to her maids that she felt much better.

  12

  There was a reception in the palace gallery. Everyone was invited to admire the emperor’s collection of stolen art. Kestrel’s father had once told her that the military had a standing order to spare art during the sack of a city. “He didn’t like that I razed the Herrani palace when we invaded.” The general had shrugged. “But it had been the right military move.”

  Her father had never feared the emperor, so Kestrel told herself that neither should she. This was why, in full view of a crush of guests milling about the statues and paintings, Kestrel made her way toward Tensen.

  A few amused eyebrows were raised—Can’t seem to keep away from the Herrani, can she? Kestrel practically heard—but the emperor’s back was to her for now, and she would need only a few moments. She slipped a hand into her dress pocket.

  Tensen stood before a landscape stolen from the southern isles. Arin wasn’t with him. He was late. Perhaps he wouldn’t come at all, given their last conversation.

  The painting of Tensen’s choice showed bleachfields, where fabric had been stretched out to whiten in the sun, and crops of indigo flowers grown for dye. “Lady Kestrel,” Tensen began, pleased, but she cut him off.

  “I see you appreciate a fine landscape,” she said. “Did you know that these flowers are painted with actual indigo? They represent the thing and are the thing at the same time.” Kestrel began to talk, long and loud, about art. She watched as nearby courtiers, once interested in eavesdropping on this conversation, grew bored and turned away. Kestrel let her voice gradually lower as Tensen waited, green eyes curious—and bright with cautious hope. Even if he’d never seen the note Arin had stolen, it couldn’t be hard for him to guess that Kestrel wanted to discuss more than art.

  She removed her hand from her pocket. “Such exquisite detail,” she said, pointing. “Look, you can practically see each petal.” With a brush of her fingers, she set a dead masker moth at the bottom edge of the painting where it met the frame. The moth clung. It deepened to purple. It became part of the painting.

  Tensen looked at the moth, then looked at her.

  Quietly, she said, “I will find out whatever it was that Thrynne overheard. And when I do, I will leave another moth here for you. Come to the gallery every morning. Develop a fondness for this painting. Look for the moth. That’s how you will know to meet me.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside the palace.” But her knowledge of the city was meager, and she wasn’t sure how to be more specific.

  “There’s a tavern in town that serves Herrani—”

  “Then they serve the captain of the guard’s spies, too. The emperor must know what you are, Tensen. He does nothing to get in your way at the moment because he’s waiting to see what you know and what you’ll do with it.” Kestrel glanced again at the emperor. Prince Verex had approached him and was saying something heated, his face flushed. The emperor’s profile showed sardonic boredom.

  “Then where?” asked Tensen.

  Kestrel watched the emperor take a glass of wine from a servant who then faded into the background as if she, too, were a masker moth. No one looks at a slave, Arin had said. This gave Kestrel an idea. “How is fresh food brought into the palace?”

  “The kitchen staff buys it in the city market, from the grocers’ stalls and the Butcher’s Row.”

  “Yes. There. We’ll meet in the Row. If you dress as a servant, no one will give you a second glance.”

  “The prince’s bride is bound to draw more than a few stares.”

  “Let me worry about myself.” She was anxious to sort out the trickier detail of meeting: when. “Look.” She pointed to the bottom edge of the painting’s frame and explained how he was to imagine the line was the rim of a clock’s face straig
htened, and that time moved along the frame from dawn to dusk. Where the moth rested would indicate the hour of their meeting the following day.

  “What if someone else notices the moth?” Tensen asked.

  “It’s just a moth. A common pest. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “A servant might find it before I do and sweep it away.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll assume has happened, if I don’t see you in the Row at the appointed hour. Really, Tensen. Do you want my help or not?” She understood his doubt, yet it rankled, and bothered her all the more because she had the uneasy feeling of playing a doomed game. The winner knows her whole line of play. But Kestrel saw only one move, and maybe the next.

  Verex was getting louder. Kestrel couldn’t hear what he was saying to the emperor, but heads were starting to turn even before Verex stormed from the gallery.

  “Rumor has it that the prince doesn’t approve of what’s happening in the east,” Tensen murmured.

  Kestrel didn’t want to think about the east.

  “Slaves say that the eastern princess is like a sister to Verex,” Tensen added. “They were raised together—at first—after her kidnapping.”

  Kestrel’s eyes automatically sought Risha then, and when she saw her, standing at the other end of the long hall, Kestrel’s blood seemed to pale. She felt her pulse quiet. Kestrel imagined the blood it pushed through her body growing pink, then clear. Thin, trickling water.

  It wasn’t Risha that made Kestrel go cold, or the tiny eastern painting the princess gazed at as if it were hung on the moon. Kestrel told herself it wasn’t the clear loss on Risha’s face.

  But there was nothing else in this gallery that could strike Kestrel with such guilt.

  “There’s been a Valorian victory in the eastern plains,” Tensen said. “Have you heard? No? Well, you’ve been ill. Your father poisoned the tribes’ horses and seized the plains. It was swift.”

  She tried not to hear him. She looked at the princess standing alone.

  Kestrel would go to her. She would leave Tensen and the indigo moth and cut a path through the courtiers, passing between the soapstone sculptures plundered from the northern tundra, because if Kestrel didn’t go to Risha now, she was sure that she would become just like the statues: smooth, cold, hard.