He wasn’t thinking. He wasn’t thinking about her. But then he thought about how he wasn’t thinking about her. The song became lead. He shut his mouth.
There was a silence.
Finally, behind him, Roshar spoke. “Don’t let my sister hear you do that, or she won’t let me kill you.”
Arin didn’t look back. Then he said, “When I was leaving the capital, I saw Risha.”
The canoe angled its direction. Roshar had stopped rowing again. “Does everyone there call her that, or just you?” When Arin glanced questioningly over his shoulder at the prince, Roshar said, “Her name is Rishanaway. That’s what strangers should call her. Risha is her little name.”
Arin wasn’t sure if this was what Risha had asked to be called by the court, or what they had decided to call her. He remembered what she’d said to him on his last day there. Reluctantly, but firmly, because he thought Roshar should know, Arin said, “She told me that her place was in the palace.”
Arin saw regret on Roshar’s face, and loss … but also relief. Arin didn’t understand it. As he found himself questioning whether the queen and her brother wanted their stolen sister returned, he realized that some furtive part of him had been wondering whether that would have been enough to secure the alliance his country needed. If he had brought Risha with him to Dacra, would that have been the queen’s “something more”? How would Risha have been most valuable to Herran—as Tensen’s Moth, or as a bargaining chip with the Dacran queen?
Arin checked himself. These were questions Kestrel would ask. Kestrel knew exactly how to calculate what someone was worth. His lips curled in sudden disgust.
“Pleasant thoughts for both of us, I see,” said Roshar. “Oars in the water now, little Herrani, or we’ll never make the camp before nightfall.”
* * *
The day had gone orange. It hadn’t rained once.
“Nearly there,” Roshar said.
“Why do the plainspeople have to move camp?”
“They don’t have to, but this particular tribe has camped upstream of an agricultural village with crops. The villagers have complained that the water flowing downstream to them is contaminated. My sister wants these refugees to move into the city with the rest.”
A fist squeezed Arin’s heart. He remembered the woman with the cloth baby. He thought about being forced from his home, and how it would be to build a new home, and to be forced from that one, too. “So they suffer yet again.”
“Arin, do you think I want to ask them to move? My sister always gets me to do her dirty work.” Roshar sighed. “I suppose my face must be good for something.” When he caught the startled quality of Arin’s silence, Roshar said, “Yes, poor prince, maimed by the empire. Don’t you want to do what he asks of you, ye people of the plains? Look at him. Look at his face. He has lost something, too.” Roshar swore under his breath.
Arin looked back, even though he knew that Roshar wouldn’t want him to see his expression then. It was in moments like these, when the emotion in Roshar’s eyes matched his mutilations, that the prince looked most damaged.
Roshar spoke again, clearly this time. “Dacra will take the plains back. General Trajan is in the imperial capital now. It’s the right time. We’ll take back what they stole.”
“No. Don’t.”
“What?”
“Burn the plains.”
“What? Never.”
“Curse the empire,” said Arin. “Curse them. Burn that godsforsaken army out of your land. If they want it so badly, let them burn for it.”
“But we can take the plains back. I know we can.”
“And when the general returns to the front? What do you think he’ll do? He will set you on fire. You’re lucky he didn’t do that to begin with.” Something twinged inside Arin. Something that had to do with Kestrel. And he was so sickeningly furious with himself, for the way his mind kept reaching for her, at the way his body remembered her, even now, even here, half a world away, that he ground whatever thought he had been about to think into dust.
“Arin.” Roshar was still horrified. “That’s our land.”
“Sometimes you think you want something,” Arin told him, “when what you need is to let it go.”
* * *
The sky was dusky pink when Roshar announced that they’d reached their destination. Arin didn’t see an encampment, only a rust-colored screen of reeds. Beyond it, Roshar said, were grassy fields and the refugees.
They paddled to shore and slid into the mucky shallows to drag the boat into the mud and reeds. Roshar loaded his crossbow. He caught Arin’s glance. “Just a precaution.”
“I thought you were joking about the snake.”
Mournfully, Roshar said, “And I thought you believed every little word I said.” He pushed ahead through the reeds.
Arin wasn’t sure what worried Roshar—he hoped not snakes; a crossbow wasn’t a practical weapon against them—but he, too, was worried now. Roshar, a good distance in front of him, looked small in the reeds. Arin moved to catch up. Mud sucked at his heels. “The queen shouldn’t have sent you alone.”
Roshar turned. “I’m not alone,” he said simply. “You’re here.”
Arin was about to ask for a weapon. He was closing the gap between them.
There was a ripple in the reeds. A prowling wave.
The beast surged from the reeds and spread its claws.
36
The tiger slammed into Roshar. Roshar flung an arm up just as it struck him down. The beast bit the limb, snarling low, its muzzle wet with blood. Its jaws opened to reach for the neck, then closed again on the arm that got in the way.
Arin turned and ran for the canoe. It rocked under the heave of his body against its side. He snatched an oar from its well, stumbled back through mud and bent reeds, and cracked the oar down on the tiger. He beat its face aside.
A roar. The massive striped body recoiled. Roshar rolled away, crimson with his own blood. His hands were empty. He made a gasping sound that was, for one split instant, the only thing Arin heard.
Then the tiger came down on Arin.
He was shoved onto his back into the mud. He sank down. He was swallowing mud, straining the oar up between him and the tiger, who bared broken teeth. Its breath was hot. Its snarls ripped through Arin’s body as if he were the one making that sound. Claws were in his shoulders. Pain curled in. He tried to push back with the oar and block the jaws, but he knew how this would end. His arms would give out. The oar would splinter. The tiger would finally get the right angle and close in on his neck.
Black nose. Pulsing stripes. Wild amber eyes. The colors of Arin’s death.
But he remembered Roshar’s empty hands.
He remembered a crossbow.
And although he knew that a crossbow was no good (how could he aim it and keep the tiger at bay? Gods, was it even still loaded?), he risked a glance. He looked away from the tiger’s teeth. He looked into the reeds. He saw a snapped crossbow quarrel, its leaden tip sticking out of the mud.
An arm’s length away.
“Roshar,” he choked out.
Arin heard the reeds rattle. He couldn’t see Roshar move, but the prince did, and that was enough.
The tiger’s attention lifted from Arin.
Arin reached out, yanked the quarrel from the mud, and drove it into the tiger’s eye.
He felt the tiger roar. He dug in deeper. Hot liquid spilled between his fingers. He pushed the quarrel in.
The body heaved onto him. Claws slackened.
Somehow that was when fear set in. The tiger was dead, but Arin was struggling against it, half drowning in the mud as he beat against the striped fur and stared, horrified, into one amber eye, and one ruined and leaking.
Then Roshar was there, and they worked together until Arin slid out from under the body.
He lay gasping in the mud. Roshar sat heavily beside him. The prince’s forearm was shredded, held gingerly at an angle. Blood ran from the elbow.
Arin closed his eyes. He saw the tiger’s eyes. He opened his. He saw a labyrinth of reeds, the slick of mud beneath his cheek.
Roshar inhaled. For one bizarre moment, Arin thought that the sound he heard next had come from the prince.
A scratchy cry. A mewl.
No. Arin knew what that was. He screwed his eyes shut. He wouldn’t look.
“A cub,” Roshar said.
And then Arin had to see. A little tiger clambered through the bent reeds. Its forelegs sank into mud. It looked at its slumped mother and cried piteously.
Arin was stricken. He tasted mud in his mouth.
He saw, in his memory, a boy. Begging and weeping. Pulling at his mother’s dead hand. Tugging her long, bloody black hair. Arin’s hands had been small then. But they’d had a terrible strength. They’d clung hard. Then his mother’s murderer had dragged him away.
Arin breathed through the memory. He choked on air as if it were knotted rope. He wiped mud from his face. Spat it out.
“Now, what to do with you,” said Roshar, looking at the cub. It floundered in the mud. It sank in past its haunches.
“Leave it alone.”
Roshar ignored Arin. He slogged through the boggy reeds until he reached the cub. With his good arm, Roshar lifted the tiger free.
* * *
“Brother, you are mad,” said the queen.
“He loves me,” Roshar protested. The cub was sleeping, huddled against Roshar’s leg.
“And when it has grown, and is large enough to eat a man?”
“Then I’ll make Arin take care of him.”
Arin had had enough. He moved to leave Roshar’s suite.
“Wait,” said the queen.
Arin was sore. His raked shoulders were padded with gauze, and he was tired, achingly tired from the journey back, from the shock of the plainspeople when he and Roshar had stumbled to the camp with a tiger cub, from how easily they had agreed to move camp once they saw the danger of tigers breeding nearby. How they’d fed Arin when he hadn’t wanted to eat. And then there had been Roshar’s fascination with the tiger’s carcass, the way the prince had inspected the slack jaws to pronounce that the broken teeth were an old injury, and thank the goddess for that, he’d said, or they would have had no chance at all. “I would have lost my arm at the very least,” Roshar had said. As it was, his arm was a bloody mess. It had been cleaned, stitched, and dressed in the camp. “Looks like you’ll have to get me and the cub home all by yourself,” Roshar had said cheerfully. So Arin had paddled downstream while Roshar slept, having numbed his arm with a lighter dose of the same drug he’d once used to knock out Arin. The drugged ring was a cunning thing. He’d pricked himself with it, then eyed Arin’s torn shirt and raked shoulders. “Sorry,” he’d said. “None for you. You’ve got to row.”
Arin swore at him.
Roshar smiled. “Watch your mouth,” he’d said, and closed his eyes.
Arin’s shoulders had burned and bled as he paddled. The cub unhappily paced the canoe the entire way to the queen’s city. The boat wobbled as the animal moved, and moved again, and found its uncertain footing, and cried.
“Wait,” the queen said again to Arin. She left Roshar’s side, crossed the room, and offered something. It gleamed on her uplifted palm: Kestrel’s dagger. “Thank you,” said the queen. She tried to give it to him.
“I don’t want it.”
The hand that held the dagger faltered.
Arin said, “You know what I want.”
The queen shook her head. “No alliance.”
Arin remembered the suffocating fear as he lay trapped beneath the tiger’s paws. The fear had squeezed his gut. It had robbed his breath. It was the familiarity of that fear, not just the fear itself, that had done it. This was how he had felt for months, for years: pinned down by the empire.
In his mind, Arin shrank the dagger on the queen’s palm. He made it the size of a needle. Easy to ignore. Easy to lose.
He saw again how Roshar had tossed Risha’s tiny weapons into the castle dollhouse.
He saw an eastern crossbow, so small compared to a Valorian one.
The tiger cub, its little teeth bared.
His own country, helpless before the empire’s massive army, their engineers, their black flags, their black rows of cannon, their seemingly limitless supply of black powder.
Arin saw, suddenly, an idea.
It took shape inside him. It was small. Compact, hard, mobile. It grew behind his eyes until he blinked, and saw again what was actually there before him in Roshar’s suite. Not a memory, or a fear, or an idea. Just a dagger on the queen’s palm.
How much damage, really, could one dagger do?
“Get that thing away from me,” Arin told the queen. “I want a forge, and I want to be left alone.”
37
Kestrel’s father inspected the puppy. He gripped the scruff of its neck and held it stock-still. He lifted the surprisingly big paws. He held the muzzle and peeled back the pink-and-black lips to see the teeth.
“That’s a good dog,” he said finally. “You’ll have to train her.”
No, Kestrel decided. She didn’t.
* * *
Kestrel had a gift. It lay in a small box tucked into her skirt pocket. It tapped against her thigh as she walked through an arcade and into the Spring Garden. The wind was warm and soft. It made the puppy beside her sniff the air. The dog caught the scent of something and bolted for the trees. Kestrel didn’t call her back.
The palace physician was known to tend to his own plot of medicinal herbs. Kestrel found him there by a shrub with a peppery scent.
He straightened at the sight of her. Immediately concerned, he asked if her father had worsened.
“He’s well,” she said, “though I am here because of him.” She offered the small box. “Thank you. You saved his life.”
He was pleased. There was a slight flush to his lined cheeks, and his hands, dusted with earth, accepted the box carefully. Then he became awkward, fumbling with the box in his haste to clean his hands on a handkerchief, which he didn’t have. Kestrel gave him hers.
He smiled apologetically. “I’m not used to appearing presentable to society.” He opened the box and caught his breath. Inside lay a golden pin: a flowering tree, the sign of the physicians’ order. It bore jeweled fruit. “This is too much.”
“For my father’s life? It is not enough.”
His eyes grew moist. Kestrel felt a little guilty, as if she’d sat down to play Bite and Sting with someone who had no head for the game.
Yet there might be a connection between the physician and the water engineer. She’d promised Tensen to discover what the water engineer had done for the emperor. And then there was that long table set with empty plates in her mind. The eastern plains. The slaves who cleaned the imperial palace. Arin’s stitched face.
“Will you show me your garden?” Kestrel asked.
They walked the green rows.
“I’m worried about a friend of mine.” Kestrel described Jess’s vial of dark liquid. “Is it safe?”
“I think I know who this friend of yours is. A colonial girl from Herran? No need to worry. I gave her the medicine myself. It’s just something to calm the nerves.”
Kestrel was relieved. “So it is safe.”
“Well, in the right dosage.” Quickly, he added, “But she would never have access to enough to do her harm. Even city apothecaries aren’t allowed to sell it. I oversee the making of that medicine in the palace, and I give out very small supplies.”
“Is it addictive?”
“No. The body doesn’t crave it. But the mind might. Your friend might come to rely upon it to sleep. If used for too long, it could be dangerous.”
“How dangerous?”
His expression spoke the answer. “But that would take months of use.”
Kestrel’s voice rose. “Why would you give my friend a medicine that could kill her?”
“My lady.” His
voice was respectful but firm. “Every medicine has its risks. We use a medicine because its benefit outweighs potential harm. Your friend needs peace and sleep. Not forever. Just long enough for her to feel that peace is possible. She’s weak. I worry that if she doesn’t rest, she could fall prey to a serious illness.” When he saw Kestrel’s uncertainty, he said, “When you saw her, did your friend tremble? Did her hands shake?”
“No.”
“Then there’s no need to worry. Trembling is a sign of overdosage—not that this would even be possible in the case of your friend. I gave her very little.”
The puppy bayed in the distance. “Don’t give her any more.” Kestrel twisted her fingers together. “Please don’t.”
“I wouldn’t.” The physician was affronted. “There’s no need to even ask that. I would never risk a Valorian’s well-being.”
Kestrel tried not to worry. With years of practice at pretending that what really mattered was nothing, she asked the physician about his garden. They discussed his herbs and the earth and the weather.
In war, her father said, the best feint is the one that you mean. If you want to distract your enemy and make him miss a key move, your ruses must be real.
This was Kestrel’s line of play:
She truly wanted to thank the physician.
She truly wanted to know about Jess’s health.
The truth of things, she was coming to understand, has a weight that people sense. She’d given these truths to the physician for him to hold so that while his mind was heavy with them, she could make a move that wouldn’t seem like a move at all.
“I’m amazed at how well your garden is doing,” she said. “The weather is so fickle. Warm one day, chilly the next. I hardly know what to wear anymore.”
“You always dress exquisitely.”
“I do, don’t I? But it’s hard to settle on the right choice. Why, I’ve even changed the plans for my wedding dress.”
He paused midstride. He started to say something, but she carefully missed it. She was helped in ignoring him by the puppy, who came bounding toward Kestrel. It carried a stick in its teeth. The puppy laid it at Kestrel’s feet and barked.
“But … but it’s too late to change your wedding dress,” said the physician. “A new one would never be ready in time. Lady Kestrel, you must reconsider…”
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