The Winner's Crime (18 page)

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feet. He wouldn’t go down again.

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His attacker shook away the stun of Arin’s blow, his

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hair catching the lamplight. The man was blond. Valorian.

Dressed in military black.

CRIME

And well armed. A knife in each hand, a short sword at

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his waist. One of those knives was Arin’s.

He’d have to get it back.

Arin was still trapped between the man and the gate. A

THE WINNER

bad position. The man swung the hand that held Arin’s

blade, and Arin ducked. The knife raked the gate behind

him, shot sparks. Hitting metal instead of fl esh seemed to

throw Arin’s opponent off balance, and Arin drove into the

opening made when the man’s swing had gone wide and

wrong. Arin thrust a knee up, sank it into the man’s gut,

seized a wrist, and wrested back his knife.

But not before the man sliced through the air with his

own.

That dagger was beautiful. Arin saw its fl ash. It ar-

rested him somehow, it started him thinking when he had

absolutely no business thinking. Arin didn’t fl inch away

fast enough. The blade cut into his face.

Pain seared from forehead to cheek. Red fl ooded Arin’s

left eye. He was blinking, he was half- blind, he was desper-

ate to know if someone can still blink if an eye has been

gouged out. He wept blood. His face had split. He could

feel air inside the parted fl esh, and his hand instinctively

went to it.

That saved him. Without meaning to, Arin had blocked

a second blow, which caught him in the forearm. It tipped

him sideways, and in his shock Arin didn’t fi ght the mo-

mentum, which knocked him against the long wall of the

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hallway.

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He had dropped his knife. But his hand was scrabbling

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the wall even as his mind screamed at it not to be stupid,

there was no weapon there.

Arin’s hand wrapped around a dead lamp set into the

wall and ripped it free. He smashed it against the man’s

MARIE RUTK

head. He heard a cry. He ground the shards in.

And now the fi ght was his. Now Arin was remembering

every nasty trick he’d ever learned with his fi sts, elbows,

and feet, and he was forgetting that he’d never really been

trained to hold a weapon, except as a boy, and that boy’s

arm had trembled under the weight of a child- size sword,

and little Arin had begged not to be made to do it, and so

what did his grown self know about the sword, which he

yanked from the attacker’s scabbard? What did Arin know

about the Valorian dagger that appeared in his hand as if a

god had set it there? What could he do even as both of his

blades were hurtling through the darkness, and the Valo-

rian cried, “Please,” and Arin stabbed into him as if this was

an art, this was
his
art?

With all the grace in the world, Arin’s body said
mine
,

and cut the man’s soul right out of him.

Where was Arin’s breath?

He gasped. With one good eye, Arin looked down at

the bloody mess of the Valorian at his feet. He dropped the

sword. He tried to wipe away the red- black blindness from

the left side of his face. Blood streamed. No matter how

Arin pawed at the fl owing wet curtain, he couldn’t see

through it.

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He gave up.

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He was still holding the Valorian dagger. He was hold-

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ing it strangely, as if it belonged to him, which was impos-

sible. Yet his fi ngers clutched it and refused to let go.

CRIME

His breath still shuddering through him, the pain still

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hot, Arin lifted the dagger into the weak light.

He knew this blade.

How could he know it?

THE WINNER

The dagger was light, well balanced. It hadn’t been

made for a strong hand. Arin had been a blacksmith; he

knew quality when he felt it. The tang was simple yet strong.

The hilt had been chased in gold, but not overly so—

nothing gave the dagger too much weight or interfered with

its clean effi

ciency.

And it was loved. Someone had taken very good care of

the blade that had carved Arin’s face open.

None of this explained why Arin’s hand held the

weapon so tightly. He frowned, then rubbed at the blood

on the hilt. There was something red beneath the red. A

ruby.

It was a seal.

The dagger’s seal showed the hooked talons of a kestrel.

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15

ONCE TENSEN HAD RECOVERED FROM THE

sight of Arin dripping blood on the carpet of their suite,

the old man was remarkably matter- of- fact. “Let me see,”

he said, and gently pushed Arin down into a chair.

Arin kept the sodden cloth to his face. In that dark

hallway, he had ripped the sleeve from his inner shirt and

pressed it against the pulsing cut. He hadn’t lifted it away

since. He was afraid to know what lay beneath. Every-

thing hurt too much to tell exactly how badly he’d been

injured.

“Arin.” Tensen tried to peel Arin’s fi ngers away from his

face. Arin sighed, and let him. He thought about things

like depth perception, and how it would be to fi ght if he

had one eye. He thought about a monster’s face.

The cut bled freely. Blood ran into Arin’s mouth and

down his neck as Tensen inspected him.

“Open,” Tensen said.

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Arin’s lashes were sticky with blood. “Open,” Tensen

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said again, and when Arin still didn’t, the minister fetched

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a pitcher of water from the bathing room and poured it

onto Arin’s face.

CRIME

Arin hissed. He choked on the water. He pressed back

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into the chair, soaked, and trembled like an animal as

Tensen’s fi ngers went to the corner of his eye and pried the

lids apart.

THE WINNER

Arin caught a glimpse of light, then the blood ran in

again.

“It missed the eye,” Tensen said. “You’re cut from the

middle of your forehead down through the brow and into

the cheek. Your eyelid’s even scratched, just a bit. But the

bone of your brow caught the worst of it.”

Relief fl owed through Arin.

Tensen produced a clean handkerchief and padded it

onto the left side of Arin’s face. “You need stitches. And”— he

looked more carefully at Arin’s right hand, curled against

his thigh—“tweezers.”

The shards from the lamp. They had embedded deep

into his palm when he’d hauled up the iron gate to escape

his trap.

Tensen said, “The god of luck must love you.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Give the gods their due, Arin, or they might not look

kindly on you during the next assassination attempt.”

“I’m not sure he meant to kill me. At least not right

away.”
Let’s make you pretty,
the man had said. Arin had

the sense that his face had been a piece of paper meant to

be scrawled with a message. Arin told Tensen as much, in-

cluding that the dead man had worn the insignia of the pal-

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ace guard. But Arin said nothing of the dagger and its seal.

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He had slipped it inside his boot, where it fi t badly to the

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sheath for his own knife. He felt the Valorian blade rattle

whenever he shifted his feet. The pommel peeked out over

the top of Arin’s boot, but he had tugged the legs of his

trousers down to hide it.

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Tensen went to work on him. The cut to Arin’s forearm

had been a glancing blow muffl

ed by the wool of his jacket.

Tensen cleaned the wound, bound it tightly, and left it

alone. Then he began to rub soap into a froth in his hands

until they held a quivering white cloud, bubbles popping

lightly. It was lovely, this cloud. It smelled of summer fl ow-

ers; it was an airy poem. It looked very innocent. But Arin

knew what Tensen meant to do with it.

“This,” Tensen said, “will feel very pleasant.” He patted

the foam into the slash on Arin’s face.

Murderous. The soap ate into the wound. It licked a

burning tongue into Arin’s fl esh. He couldn’t breathe. If he

breathed, he would scream.

Tensen rinsed it all away. Then more soap. More water.

By the time he fi nished, Arin was limp in his chair and

desperately grateful when Tensen pressed a new cloth to

the cut. The fi re in his face throbbed down. Arin kept his

eyes closed and slipped back into the old, familiar, seeping

pain as easily as into a warm bath. How much better that

old pain seemed now. How comforting, how like a friend.

Arin was half in love with it.

But Tensen was moving around in the suite, and Arin

knew what would happen next. He opened his good eye to

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see Tensen sterilizing a needle in the fl ame of an oil lamp.

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“No,” Arin croaked. “Get Deliah.”

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“You’re not a dress.”

“Do it,” he said, though he’d seen Tensen patch wounds

CRIME

together on a battlefi eld. It was why he had agreed to take

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an el der ly man on every military mission in Herran— that,

and the fervency in Tensen’s green eyes, the truth in his

voice when he had sworn to do anything for his country.

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Tensen had an actor’s knack for becoming what ever he

wanted to be. If it was a doctor, he would be one. He used

to joke that it was because he had once played the role of a

doctor in a theatrical production. Arin didn’t much care

where Tensen’s skills came from. He appreciated them. But

he wouldn’t let Tensen sew his face.

“I’m not sure it’s wise for Deliah to know,” said Tensen.

“Do you think
this
can be kept a secret?”

Tensen gave a slight smile to show that a point had

been made. Arin would never look the same again.

The minister left.

When he returned with Deliah, the cloth on Arin’s face

was seeping blood and he felt almost sleepy. Deliah gave

him a grim look edged with weariness, as if Arin were a

child who had gotten himself hurt doing exactly what

she’d told him not to do. The expression made her look a

little like his mother. That’s what Arin imagined as she

threaded the needle and put her cool hands on his hot face.

It wasn’t hard to see his mother when he squinted through

one eye that watered. The needle went in. It pushed out.

There was the grating tug of the thread. A tightening pain.

Tensen blotted away blood so that Deliah could see better,

and it began again. A bolt of lightning stitched down his

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cheek.

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Maybe it was because half of his face no longer felt like

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his face. Maybe it was because he wanted so very much to

forget what Deliah was doing, or needed to believe that

things could be worse. Arin thought of the beating he’d

received the day before Kestrel had bought him. He had

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been shoveling gravel with other slaves put to laying a new

Valorian road. He’d been keeping his head down. He was

being good . . . until there came a scuffl

ing sound.

Arin had looked up. Two Valorians were dragging an

easterner toward the other slaves. A murmur went through

the Herrani working on the road. From what Arin heard,

the eastern slave had managed to escape several days be-

fore. He had just been caught.

The Valorian law on runaway slaves was clear.

Arin had lunged forward. He shouted at the Valorians.

He cursed them.

His masters that day didn’t understand Arin’s language

well, or his punishment would have been worse. The over-

seer punched Arin in the face. The Valorians ordered the

Herrani to hold Arin down. They did. They shoved him

into the gravel. The overseer hit again, and even from

where Arin lay he could see the other masters preparing the