The Winner's Crime

by Marie Rutkoski

  “Better not tell me any more.”

  Arin went cold. Those had been the words of someone who feared torture. “Come with me.”

  “No. I need to know what happens next.”

  “This isn’t a story!”

  “Isn’t it?” Tensen asked. “Isn’t this the one about the boy who becomes a man and saves his people? I like that story. I acted the role once, decades ago, in a performance for Herran’s royal family. It ended happily.” Tensen touched his chest, right above his heart. Arin thought he heard a faint, papery sound. There was a flash of indecisiveness on Tensen’s face. Then it was gone. Tensen’s hand fell, and Arin forgot what he’d heard with the minister’s next words, and when he later remembered that look of indecisiveness, Arin hated himself, because he believed that the choice Tensen had been debating inside him had been about staying or leaving, and that if Arin had only found the right words, he could have persuaded Tensen to come with him.

  “Go on, now. Go,” Tensen said. “My grandson looked so much like you, Arin. Don’t make me grieve him twice.”

  Tensen took the gold ring from his finger and offered it. “This time, keep it, will you?” He smiled.

  Arin caught the man’s hand. He kissed the dry palm. He took the ring. Then he said goodbye.

  * * *

  Kestrel’s father had left her. He wouldn’t stay for dinner, though Kestrel had said they could have it brought to her suite. He didn’t claim he was tired, or that his freshly healed wound might trouble him, but his step was slow as he let himself out, and Kestrel thought for a moment that he would put a hand to where he’d been gutted.

  After he’d gone, she felt shame in a solid rush. She realized that she had been hoping he was tired, hoping his wound was sore … it would explain why even though he’d said that he trusted her, he didn’t want to stay.

  Dinner came. Kestrel couldn’t eat it.

  She opened a window. The almost-summer air was soft and sweet. There was a high wind. It smelled like the mountains, which meant it was blowing out to sea.

  Kestrel’s maids came. They asked if she wanted to be changed for bed. She fidgeted with the wrist fastening that kept the moth inside her blue silk sleeve. She told the maids no. She wanted to send them away, then dreaded being alone. The maids stayed and gossiped quietly in their corners. It grew late. She sat, and worried. Had Tensen given Arin the letter? Was Arin still in the palace?

  Later, Kestrel saw all of her mistakes, strung in such a crowded, ugly line that it was difficult to tell which one had come first.

  But she knew the last. That was when she left her suite and went back to Tensen’s rooms to find out whether he’d seen Arin and delivered her letter.

  * * *

  The halls were hushed. Even quieter than before. Though the sweat that trickled between her shoulder blades proved that it was almost summer, Kestrel had the sensation that it was snowing. Her ears rang with a white, mirroring silence. Anxiety pricked her skin in icy flakes. The stone heap of the palace held its cold breath.

  Tensen’s door was almost flush with its jamb, but it hadn’t been closed completely. Kestrel thought for a moment that he’d been waiting for her, but a part of her knew better. That self had already guessed what the slightly open door might mean. Yet Kestrel refused to believe it … and so that other, wiser self turned away from her, disowned her, and refused to help any further someone who had wrought her own doom.

  Kestrel lifted her hand to knock. Her knuckles stuttered against the wood.

  The emperor opened the door. The captain of the guard reached around him and dragged Kestrel inside.

  47

  At first, Kestrel couldn’t quite see. She was straining against the captain’s grasp, her breath coming in terrified gulps, and he and the emperor were tall. It seemed that she saw nothing but the rich cloth of their shoulders, their chests. Then she heard her father’s voice: “Please.”

  The captain let go.

  Kestrel saw her father now. He stood in the far corner of the room, on the other side of a dark spill of blood. Tensen lay on the floor. His green eyes were child’s marbles. The body was already rigid. On the general’s sleeve was a short line of blood from where he must have wiped his dagger before sheathing it.

  Kestrel met her father’s eyes. They were as cold as the dead man’s. She opened her frostbitten mouth, and she was numb, too numb to speak, so she screamed.

  The captain covered her mouth. Her father looked away. She froze.

  “We’re trying to keep this as quiet as possible,” the emperor told her. “No one but us will know what you’ve done. It can’t be public. I won’t let your father be so dishonored.” The emperor took Kestrel’s dagger from its sheath. “This is mine. And that”—he held out the unfolded page of sheet music—“is yours.”

  Her letter. “No,” she tried to say against the captain’s salty palm, but he gripped her jaw, and the emperor lightly touched the captain’s hand so that it turned Kestrel’s face to meet him.

  “No?” said the emperor. “Kestrel, if there were a trial, your letter is confession enough.” His voice was filled with regret, but it wasn’t for her. “I could kill you now. What a serpent you are. What a poor reward for a man like your father. He came to me.”

  Tears spilled down her cheeks. They trickled over the captain’s knuckles.

  “He came, and told me the truth, no matter what it cost him. He set no terms. No pleas for mercy or mitigation. He simply gave me the truth of your treason. Of all the lessons you could have learned as empress, the most important would have been this: loyalty is the best love.”

  Kestrel tried to look at her father, but the captain held her face firmly. She struggled. She tried to break free. The captain caged her in.

  The emperor spoke again. “That kind of love tends to tarnish after the execution of one’s child. So I can’t repay Trajan’s loyalty with your blood, or turn you over to my captain and his messy art of questioning. Something else you would have learned—had you chosen to learn from me—is that your father has my loyalty, too. I will protect him as he has protected me. This means that you’re going north.”

  To the tundra. The work camp. She dragged in air.

  “Did you think I had no clue?” said the emperor softly. “I’ve had the Herrani minister followed for some time now. He was seen meeting with a Valorian maid. I asked myself whether that maid could have been you. Whether it was really possible that you might betray your country so easily, especially when it had been practically given to you. But people are capable of anything.”

  Kestrel’s words were strangled beneath the captain’s hand. She wasn’t even sure what she was trying to say.

  “Maybe you think that I can’t make you vanish,” the emperor continued, “that the court will ask too many questions. This is the tale I’ll tell. The prince and his bride were so consumed by love that they married in secret and slipped away to the southern isles. After some time—a month? two?—news will come that you’ve sickened. A rare disease that even my physician can’t cure. As far as the empire is concerned, you’ll be dead. You’ll be mourned.

  “You might forget, in the tundra’s mines. I hear that people do, down in the dark. I hope that your father does. I hope that he forgets you, and your shame.”

  Kestrel bit the captain’s hand. He didn’t even flinch, but the blood in her mouth made her lose herself. She twisted. The sounds she made under the captain’s hand were like an animal’s.

  “Let her go,” said her father.

  She ran to him. She skidded in the blood and fell against his chest, clinging, weeping. “Please don’t do this,” she sobbed, though he already had.

  He didn’t touch her. “I wanted to trust you,” he whispered. “I tried. But I couldn’t lie to myself hard enough.”

  She made fistfuls of his jacket. She pressed her face against his chest. Her shoulders jerked and heaved. “I didn’t—”

  “Mean to? How do you not mean treason?”
/>   “Please,” she begged. It seemed to be the only word she could say.

  “I left your suite. I found the minister. I searched him. I read the letter. I killed him. And even then, I doubted. Even then, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that this would be you.”

  “Papa, please.” She choked on her tears. “I love you.”

  Slowly, carefully, he unhooked her hands from his jacket. The captain, sensing his moment, moved toward them.

  The general’s voice came low, so that his words were only for him and his daughter. “Kestrel,” he said, “you have broken my heart.”

  48

  Dawn burned on the water.

  Arin had been lucky. He’d slipped from the palace immediately after parting from Tensen. The elegant fortress had seemed absentminded, its energies turned inward, focused on something else.

  Arin shrugged that thought away. Now, standing on the ship’s deck, his face to the raw dawn, it seemed silly.

  No one had noticed him. No one had cared. He’d made it to the harbor. The wind had been high and fair and seaward. His ship had cast off.

  It was as he sailed from the bay that something finally changed. He’d seen, in the moonlight, Valorian double-masters, the kind heavy with cannon, gun decks on two levels. They rode in his wake. It wasn’t that Arin had gone unnoticed—just that he had been noticed too late. There had been a delay. Some slowness to realize. Arin had the image of Valorians scrambling to catch up—and catch him. But his ship plowed the waves. His captain had been a master sailor in the height of Herran’s naval prowess. The wind favored them. It skipped them over the sea. It threw a scarf of dark cloud over the moon. By daybreak, the Valorian ships were gone.

  It was a brief respite. The Valorians knew where he’d go. The empire was coming, and so was war, but Arin focused on listening to the wind gust the sails. He watched the sun lift dripping over the horizon. He let the sea air cram his lungs, and he felt free.

  Arin unwrapped a small cloth bundle. Kestrel’s dagger gleamed. Now that it didn’t hurt him to look at it, he could see its beauty better. The sun set its ruby on fire and showed its pink heart. The chased gold became a liquid swirl. Arin weighed the weapon in his hand. Really, it weighed barely anything at all.

  Yes, it was beautiful. But beauty seemed a feeble reason to keep something he didn’t want.

  Arin dropped the dagger in the sea.

  He sailed home.

  * * *

  The wagon stopped. The horses needed to be watered.

  The sun was up now. It came in through the wagon’s small, barred window. It showed Kestrel her shackled wrists, limp in the lap of the same pretty blue gown she had been wearing last night. Though the wagon had stopped, Kestrel still felt jolted, sore. Her eyes were swollen. The sunlight hurt.

  But something brought her to her feet. A voice in another language as familiar to her as her own. Someone outside had spoken in Herrani.

  Kestrel went to the window. She couldn’t see the guards. She couldn’t see anything at first; the light was too bright. But then she saw the peaks of empty mountains. She heard the Herrani voice again: a man, talking to the horses. She heard the swing of an empty metal bucket. Footsteps in grainy dirt.

  “Please,” she called softly in his language. The footsteps stopped. Her shackles rattled as she fumbled to get a finger and thumb up her left sleeve. She pinched the moth she had hidden there and pulled it free. She put her hand through the bars. “Take this.”

  Slowly, the footsteps neared. She still couldn’t see him, but imagined him standing just below her hand. Kestrel stretched. Her wrist strained, and her hand began to go numb. She offered the moth held in her fingertips.

  Had he taken it? Had it fallen? It was gone.

  “Give it to your governor,” Kestrel whispered. “Tell Arin—”

  There was a cry, a heavy thump. Valorian curses, boots scuffing dirt. “What did she give you?” said one of the Valorian guards.

  “Nothing,” said the Herrani.

  The door to the wagon flung open. Kestrel shrank into a corner. The guard was a large shadow against the achingly white light. He advanced. “What did you give him?”

  Outside, the rough sounds continued. Protests. An unceremonious search. But what, after all, would the guard outside see? A battered moth. Nothing precious. Nothing important. Just an ordinary thing, blending into everything else.

  The guard grabbed her shoulders. Her shackled hands went up. She hid behind them.

  All over, people were waking up to an ordinary day, as ordinary as a moth. Kestrel grieved for an ordinary day. She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of how it would be, her perfect ordinary morning. A horse ride with Arin. A race.

  I’m going to miss you when I wake up, she’d told him as she’d dreamed on the palace lawn.

  Don’t wake up.

  On that perfect, ordinary morning, she would pour tea for her father. He would stay, and he would never leave to be anywhere else.

  Someone was shaking her. Kestrel remembered that it was the guard.

  She remembered that it was her eighteenth birthday. She laughed, chokingly, to imagine the emperor explaining her absence to everyone gathered for her recital. She thought she was laughing, but then that sound tore along its edges. It clawed at her throat. Her face was wet. Tears stung her lips.

  Her birthday. I remember the day you were born, her father had said. I could hold you with one hand.

  The guard hit Kestrel across the face. “I said, what did you give him?”

  You had a warrior’s heart, even then.

  Kestrel spat blood. “Nothing,” she told the guard. She thought of her father, she thought of Arin. She told her final lie. “I gave him nothing.”

  Author’s Note

  This book was exhausting to write and took a while for me to finish (having a baby in the middle of it might have had something to do with it). So first, an enormous thank you to those who read drafts of The Winner’s Crime or portions of it: Ann Aguirre, Marianna Baer, Kristin Cashore, Donna Freitas, Daphne Grab, Mordicai Knode, Anne Heltzl, Sarah Mesle, Jill Santopolo, Eliot Schrefer, and Robin Wasserman. You always had the right words to keep me going and to make this a better book.

  Such is also true for people who talked with me about knotty plot problems or thorny emotional questions, or worldbuilding ones. Thanks to everyone at Kindling Words, for excellent talks, advice, and comments that helped me piece together The Winner’s Crime at a stage when I knew where I was going but not what I was doing. I especially thank Franny Billingsley, Judy Blundell, Sarah Beth Durst, Deborah Heiligman, Rebecca Stead, and Nancy Werlin. In Parisian cafés, Coe Booth and Aviva Cashmira Kakar helped me shape Tensen into the sneaky character he became. Also in Paris, at the Broken Arm café, Pamela Druckerman and I mulled over Arin, the bookkeeper, and the queen. Leigh Bardugo and I had an awesome conversation about guns, and Mordicai Knode contributed on separate occasions. He also told me about Quipu Code after reading an early scene about Favor-Keeping. Lunch with Sarah MacLean resulted in a plot point that I’m thrilled about but can’t share (Book 3 spoiler, sorry!). Kristin Cashore brainstormed with me on so many points that it’s hard to list them all. Robin Wasserman is probably the person you can thank (or blame) for this being a trilogy to begin with. Barry Lyga, aka my torture expert extraordinaire (he asked to be called that. Or something like that), suggested I go after Thrynne’s fingers in the prison scene, and Kristin Raven, a doctor, gave very useful (and gory) information about how those fingers would look. She also confirmed my instinct that the general’s abdominal wound could be “packed.” Miriam Jacobson, a scholar and pianist, gave me (as she put it) “le mot juste” for a piece that Kestrel plays: an impromptu. Mordicai and Jenny Knode were consulted about ideas for the map. High praise to Keith Thompson for his artistry in representing this world. My husband, Thomas Philippon, is always my most crucial adviser when it comes to sorting out ideas, and he’s especially great about anything to do with the
military or horses.

  My goal for this trilogy has been to read one ancient Greek or Roman text while writing each book. This time it was Herodotus’s The Histories, which gave me some ideas about how to represent the East. I should also admit that I had the temerity to take a metaphor from Shakespeare and reshape it to suit my fancy for a particular line in the scene by the canal (hint: it’s from Much Ado about Nothing).

  Thank you to all the librarians, booksellers, and bloggers who have championed The Winner’s Curse. It’s been a real pleasure to get to know you in person and online. Your enthusiasm is so infectious—and appreciated.

  Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group! I’m one lucky woman. I’m very grateful to everyone who has supported me and this series. My amazing editor, Janine O’Malley. My intrepid publicist, Gina Gagliano. My designer of heart-stopping covers, Beth Clark. And a whole marvelous cohort of people: Nicole Banholzer, Simon Boughton, Anna Booth, Molly Brouillette, Angie Chen, Jennifer Edwards, Jean Feiwel, Jennifer Gonzalez, Liz Fithian, Katie Halata, Angus Killick, Kathryn Little, Karen Ninnis, Joy Peskin, Karla Reganold, Caitlin Sweeney, Claire B. Taylor, Mary Van Akin, Allison Verost, Mark Von Bargen, Ksenia Winnicki, and Jon Yaged.

  Charlotte Sheedy, my agent, is a dream, and I thank her and Mackenzie Brady and Joan Rosen.

  Sometimes people ask me what the secret is to writing books, and my very serious reply is “good child care.” Thanks to my babysitters, parents, and in-laws: Monica Ciucurel, Anne Heltzl, Shaida Khan, Georgi MacCarthy, Sharon Singh, Marilyn and Robert Rutkoski, and Jean-Claude and Christiane Philippon.

  My older son, Eliot (now five and a half), has an idea about why I sit in front of the computer instead of taking him to the Natural History Museum. My younger son, Téo (two years old), has only the sense of some great injustice and betrayal. Boys, I always miss you when I’m not with you, and I love you both best.

  About the Author

  Marie Rutkoski is the author of The Winner’s Curse, The Shadow Society, and the Kronos Chronicles, which includes The Cabinet of Wonders. She is a professor at Brooklyn College and lives in New York City. Learn more about her at marierutkoski.com or sign up for email updates here.