The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  “No one has made me change.”

  “But you have.”

  Kestrel was silent.

  “He took Ronan,” Jess said. “Ronan’s joined the Rangers, did you know that?”

  No. Kestrel had known only of his enlistment. The Rangers were an elite brigade. They vied for the deadliest missions. A bright shard of fear entered Kestrel’s heart. “Ronan took himself away,” she said finally. “No one made him enlist.”

  “No one?” Jess’s voice was hoarse with fury.

  “I begged him,” Kestrel said. “I begged him not to.”

  “What does it matter what you begged? Ronan knew. I would bet anything that he did. He knows what I know. That slave took you. That was my gift on his clothes. That was your engagement mark on his mouth. And that was what you wanted. It was what you wanted when I lay dying on the floor of the governor’s palace. And even before that: when I chose your dress and asked you to be my sister. You wanted it all along.”

  Kestrel’s gaze fell to the needlepoint sofa. She stared at the unraveling hunter girl.

  “Deny it,” Jess said.

  If Kestrel pulled on the loose thread, the embroidered face would come undone. If she pulled hard enough, maybe the needlepoint girl would disappear altogether.

  “Deny it!”

  “I can’t,” Kestrel said miserably.

  “Then leave.”

  But Kestrel couldn’t move.

  “Go away, Kestrel. I don’t want to see you again.”

  * * *

  Kestrel sat before the piano in the stark palace music room. The row of keys looked blankly back.

  Jess knew.

  Kestrel sank one hand down into a violent chord. And there it was again, that odd, troubling echo, the one that always made her music sound as if it were listening to itself. She took her hand away. Her body became rigid, her bones grimly set. Maybe she would have been able to do what she usually did, which was to forget the echo. Maybe she would have stormed right into the music. But she was held tight by a feeling she’d never had.

  She didn’t want to play.

  Kestrel left the piano. She considered the room. What would make the acoustics sound right? Tapestries on the walls? Kestrel thought about this. She thought hard, hard enough to ignore how desperately she had wanted Jess to understand.

  Kestrel was inspecting a shelf and wondering whether the acoustics would be better if she filled the shelves with more books when she saw it. At the back of one of the high shelves set into the wall, there was no wooden panel. The other shelves had wooden backs.

  This one had a screen. A cunningly painted screen, with realistic knots of wood and darker grain.

  Kestrel came close. She stood on her toes and shifted a barometer out of her way. She tapped the metal screen.

  Echo.

  There was some kind of chamber on the other side of the wall. Behind the painted screen was a place where someone could see what Kestrel did, could hear what she played, could hear anything she said to someone else in this room.

  This room, which had been Verex’s, and which the emperor had given to her.

  Kestrel came down on her heels.

  The emperor loved his games.

  Kestrel frantically revisted every moment she’d spent in the music room. Had she ever made a mistake? Let slip something she shouldn’t have? She didn’t think so. No, no one could have seen anything wrong.

  Deviant.

  Treasonous.

  Kestrel backed away. Someone could be watching her even now.

  She left the room. She scoured the hallway outside for a way inside the hidden space. She ran fingers over the hallway’s carvings until the center of a wooden flower gave way under her touch, and a panel slid aside.

  The secret room was empty and small and dark and cold. The screen gave a view of her piano and most of the brightly lit room, but not the door. Kestrel stared at where she had been sitting.

  She turned once more to face the hidden room. It looked almost ordinary. Plain, clean. Not dusty. But it smelled airless and dank. Like a prison.

  34

  Kestrel stayed close to her father. He could walk well enough but tired easily, so she challenged him to Borderlands games played in his suite, though most of the court spent whole days out of doors in the blue weather, opening parasols against the sun. There had never been such a spring, the courtiers exclaimed. The Firstsummer wedding was sure to be glorious.

  When Kestrel played Borderlands with her father in his suite, they usually moved their pieces in silence. But one day, not long after she had seen Jess, her father shifted his infantry forward in reckless fashion.

  “Why are you exposing your soldiers?” Kestrel asked.

  His brows lifted. “Are you criticizing my line of play?”

  “You should use your cannon.”

  He had the beginnings of a smile. “Have I foiled some strategy of yours?”

  “I could decimate your front lines. I could do it right now.”

  “Well, if you must.”

  Kestrel was growing angry. She made no move.

  Her father said, “Are we arguing?”

  “No.”

  “What are we arguing about?”

  Kestrel thought of Ronan, fighting in the east. She thought about how she’d crushed the necklace Jess had given her because it had been expendable. It was the kind of choice her father had raised her to be able to make. She thought about how when they were little girls, she and Jess had walked hand in hand, Jess’s palm fresh against hers. Kestrel thought about Arin, in Herran’s city, and what he must think of her now. And finally, Kestrel thought about herself as if she were two people, and one self stood behind the screen in the music room, watching her other self, and judging.

  “You are sacrificing them,” she told her father.

  “It’s just a game.”

  Kestrel said nothing.

  “You worry about my methods,” said the general. “You think I don’t know how to go to war.”

  “You’re wasting lives.”

  “I protect my soldiers as best as I can. And I do use cannon. The Valorian army is well-gunned. We have significant stores of black powder. Our arsenal outstrips anything an enemy can offer. I rarely even need much cannon.”

  She imagined Ronan at the very front of an army. “So you let our people fight hand to hand instead.”

  “That’s what we do. It’s who we are. If we can’t take what we want with our own hands, we don’t deserve to win it.”

  Kestrel leaned away from the gaming table. She sat back in her chair.

  He said, “Would you rather I line up my cannon barrel to barrel and raze the eastern forces?”

  No, of course not. That wasn’t what she’d meant.

  “You accuse me of wasting lives. I could, Kestrel. I could waste them in the thousands, the tens of thousands. I don’t. I try to minimize enemy casualties.”

  “Only so that you can enslave people afterward.”

  His mouth thinned. “I think we should finish our game.”

  He won.

  * * *

  Verex stopped her in the hallway. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Maybe you bribed the wrong lady-in-waiting. You should choose one who keeps a closer eye on my whereabouts.”

  He laughed. “Or maybe you should bribe one of my valets, so that we’d be even. Then again”—he shrugged good-naturedly—“my whereabouts aren’t very interesting.” He tugged her hand. “Come. I have something to show you. Give you, actually.”

  “A gift?”

  “A wedding present.”

  The word wedding stopped her heart. “It’s too early for that.”

  “It’s never too early for presents.”

  “I don’t have anything for you.”

  “Oh, just come. You’ll like it, I promise.”

  It was a good-size puppy. A black, squirming creature with folded ears and a tail that had been docked for hunting. It was chewing the leg of o
ne of the ornate chairs in Verex’s sitting room. It had left a yellow puddle on the wooden floor.

  “The runt,” Verex said proudly. “She survived.”

  Kestrel bent low, her organza skirts rustling. She offered a hand to the animal, who snuffled it, then pushed beneath so that Kestrel could properly scratch behind her ears. Her stubby tail beat back and forth. Delightedly, the puppy nipped Kestrel’s wrist.

  Kestrel felt suddenly quiet and warm, as if she had just come inside from a long walk on a day chillier than anyone had predicted.

  She straightened. She went to Verex and kissed his cheek.

  “Oh,” he said, and awkwardly patted her shoulder. “Well.” He smiled.

  They played with the puppy, whom Kestrel didn’t yet want to name. They tossed velvet cushions for the dog to catch. She savaged them. Feathers flurried over the floor.

  This moment was simple, smooth, like a pebble lifted from a riverbed. Kestrel could have asked Verex about the screen in the music room. She could have talked about that Borderlands game with her father, or how her oldest friend was no longer her friend. But Kestrel didn’t want to. Nothing should spoil this moment. She played tug-of-war with the dog until the animal dropped her cushion, which no longer bore even the vaguest resemblance to a cushion. The puppy collapsed in a black heap and fell asleep.

  Kestrel wondered what Jess would name her, then shoved that thought from her mind.

  But …

  Something had been troubling her. Something about that day in Jess’s parlor that she should be able to figure out. A mystery that Kestrel thought could have a clear answer when so much else seemed bewildering, like how she understood Jess’s anger—and didn’t.

  “You know a lot about healing,” she said to Verex.

  “Not really.” He sat on the floor by the sleeping puppy, who had huddled on Kestrel’s feet. “I studied it a bit. I told you: my father didn’t like it. I didn’t get far.”

  “But you know some things.”

  He shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “Is there a brownish medicine one might take with water?”

  “Diluted with water?”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean. The medicine leaves a residue at the bottom of the glass.”

  He pursed his lips. “That could be a few different things. You should ask the palace physician. He’s developed many medicines made in concentrated form to be diluted later with water. He’s excellent at calculating dilution. He trained as a water engineer.” When he saw Kestrel’s surprise, Verex said, “Yes, he even served in the military with the palace water engineer. But that was long ago. He had a gift as a medic on the battlefield and changed professions.” Verex ran a hand down the back of the puppy, who sighed heavily. “Don’t you wish it were that easy? To change who you are?”

  For a moment, Kestrel didn’t quite hear his question. Her mind was sparking with the connection between the palace physician and its chief water engineer, who had been bribed for some unknown thing.

  She’d promised Tensen she would discover what that thing was.

  She’d promised herself to live by her own ideas of honor. She would help Tensen. Because it was right. Because it mattered.

  How can the inconsequence of your life not shame you?

  Kestrel’s memory was so full of Arin’s voice that she didn’t realize that Verex was peering at her. What had he asked?

  If she wished to change herself.

  “No,” she lied. Then she decided that what she’d said was the truth. “No,” she said again, “I don’t.”

  35

  “This came for you,” the Dacran queen said in her language, handing Arin a parcel. “A Herrani ship brought it to the temple island.”

  He tucked the package under his arm. It couldn’t be simply a package. It was news. Arin hid his eagerness.

  And he hid his surprise. At the queen, delivering something to him. At her standing in his room, which was only one room, not a suite. The bed—much higher than Arin was used to, and narrower—was in a corner, neatly made. The light was soft and gray. It haloed a geometric star of small, triangular windows clustered into a radiant pattern. The queen’s black eyes, lined with streaks of blue paint that swirled greenly down to her brown cheekbones, seemed to glow. She was tall; her gaze was almost level with his.

  “Open it,” she said.

  Arin rubbed a palm against his scarred cheek.

  “Do you understand me?” she said. “You seem to. You’ve learned my language quickly.”

  “So could Herrani soldiers. We could fight together.”

  “And yet you cannot obey even a simple command.”

  Arin opened the package. It was a shirt edged with intricately woven trim in colors he knew well. He shouldn’t have stared and begun to decode the knots and colors beneath the queen’s gaze, but he did. The Moth—

  “That cloth is too heavy for our weather,” said the queen.

  “I’ll send it back.” Arin would cut away the woven trim and sew on a message of his own for Tensen.

  He draped the shirt casually across the back of a chair, reading in the threads that the imperial water engineer was living beyond her apparent means, and was unfriendly to Herran. The Moth believed that the engineer had made a bargain with the emperor. There was no proof, but—

  It began to rain. Arin heard water rushing through the castle pipes. The queen had been silent, watching him. He forced himself to turn away from the shirt.

  Maybe it was because his mind was full of the Moth, and the way the gray thread that represented her wove throughout the entire trim. Arin looked at the queen and saw Risha instead. The queen had those straight brows, the same shape of the mouth, and the same—he began to suspect it, the idea grew—generosity.

  “I am sending my brother outside the city,” she said. “You will go with him.” She paused, then added, “You are good for him. He is restless.”

  “Was he with your sister when she was captured by the empire?”

  The queen’s face closed.

  Arin said, “I think he blames himself.”

  “He blames me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The queen went to the kaleidoscopic windows and watched the rainfall. She pretended his words had meant something else. “It can’t be easy to learn another language so quickly. Do you have a gift for it?”

  He wasn’t sure. Even now, he didn’t recognize every word she used. His mind darted meaning into the blank moments and made sense of what he didn’t know, crafted whole sentences from understood parts. It felt like a game …

  As this last thought occurred to him, he saw its danger. He felt the kick in his gut that told his mind to stop, and he snatched at that half thought about words and meaning and games. He tried to drag the thought back. It spun away. It began to think for itself, about Bite and Sting, and about how he could beat someone without knowing each tile in play. Yes, he had won, even when playing against Kestrel made it feel like all the tiles were blind on both sides.

  He slammed that thought down. Because the truth was that guessing at what he hadn’t known about Kestrel had served him badly. He had believed in things that weren’t there … or weren’t there anymore.

  “No,” he bluntly told the queen. “No gift.”

  “Perhaps Dacra and Herran shared some common ancestor, thousands of years ago,” she mused, “and that is why our languages are close. But no. We are too different.”

  “We don’t have to be.”

  She turned to face him. “Stop asking for an alliance.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Fool.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as an optimist.”

  She clicked her teeth: a Dacran way to say no. It was an impatient noise. Arin had heard it used with children. “Herran has nothing to offer us but lives,” the queen told him. “I would pack your people into the front lines. When we win, I would take your country and make it mine. The word we want for you is not optimist. Nor, I th
ink”—she appraised him—“fool. It is desperate.”

  The rain must have stopped. The pipes hushed.

  She said, “I would be, too. I would ask what you ask. But I would offer more. Then I would negotiate better terms of an alliance.”

  He thought of that emerald earring he’d paid into the bookkeeper’s hand. He thought not about what it was, but what it had meant. He held the value in his mind, its pricelessness, and he cast about for an idea of what could match it. “Tell me what I can give you.”

  She lifted one shoulder in a delicate shrug. “Something more.”

  “Tell me what that is.”

  “I will know,” she said, “when you give it to me.”

  * * *

  Arin and Roshar rowed up the river. Soft dawn hardened into bright day. The castle was at their backs, then gone. Reeds on the banks tapped a light tattoo against each other, and swarms of enormous dragonflies rippled like flags alongside the canoe.

  Roshar steered. When they’d set off from the city, Arin had noted the crossbow slung across Roshar’s back, and a set of throwing knives at his hips. Arin had asked if Roshar expected resistance from the plainspeople who had made camp upstream. Roshar had blithely said, “Oh, this is for river beasties,” and looked coy. Then, though Arin hadn’t pressed him, Roshar added, “If you must know, I’m going to hunt a nice poisonous snake and make you eat it. You do like to ruin a surprise.”

  The canoe slowed. Roshar had paused, so Arin lifted his oar, too, and glanced behind him. Roshar was looking into the reeds. His mutilated nose made his profile jarringly flat.

  The current started to push them downstream. They took up their oars again.

  There was something about the day—the tempo of the reeds, the dipping of the oars, the dragonflies’ brrr, and even Roshar’s stunted profile—that opened something inside Arin. If he had had to put what he felt into words, he would have perhaps said that it was a kinship with the moment.

  He began to sing. For himself, for the day, for the way it made him feel. It had been a while. It felt good to push that music up and into the world, to feel how the initial heft of it lightened on his tongue. The song floated out of him.