The Winner's Crime (41 page)

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The envelope contained the letter Kestrel had sent to

Jess: unopened, unread.

CRIME

’S

Kestrel hadn’t played the piano since discovering the music

room’s hidden screen, but she no longer cared who heard

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her. She wanted someone to listen to her grief.

Her music was angrier than she had expected. A sweet

prelude that twisted away from her, and darkened, and

knitted its way down into the lower octaves. She played

until her wrists hurt. She played until she fumbled. The

room vibrated with dying chords.

Kestrel rubbed her hot wrists. There was a ringing si-

lence. Then, just as Kestrel was about to go over her mis-

take, she heard a faint chime.

She knew that sound.

There
was
someone behind that screen. A person likely to

know about the palace’s hidden listening chambers. And why

wouldn’t the emperor share such a secret with this man? The

emperor valued him. The proof ? Consider the emperor’s gift:

a golden watch. It showed the phases of the moon. Its hour

and minute hands were tipped with diamonds. It chimed the

hour.

Kestrel didn’t know what had made her father hide be-

hind the screen. She didn’t know if he was still there, or if

he’d left the instant after his watch had chimed and Kestrel

had lifted her head at the sound.

All she knew was that he had listened to her play. He’d

never done that before.

—-1

A memory came to Kestrel. Deep into her seventh year,

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when Kestrel was still weak from the same disease that had

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killed her mother, the general had decided to ride with his

daughter out of the city. She had nearly fallen asleep on

her pony. The Herran countryside was crisp. The chill had

made her nose run. He had taken her hunting. He helped

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her notch the bow. He pointed out the prey. He shifted her

elbow into the right position. When she missed, he didn’t

say anything. He shot a pheasant, plucked it, and built a

fi re. She dozed before it, and woke to fi nd herself covered

with furs. It was dark. Her hair smelled like smoke and

roasted fowl. When her father saw that she was awake, he

reached into a saddlebag for a loaf of bread, which he broke.

He gave her the larger half.

In the listening silence of the music room, Kestrel low-

ered her hands to the piano keys and played the memory of

that day. She played the sway of her pony beneath her, the

phlegm in her lungs, the tension in the bowstring, the

glowing heart of the fi re. She played the way that her fa-

ther, when he thought that she was still asleep, had brushed

hair from her forehead and tucked it behind her ear. He

had drawn the furs up to her cheek. She was young enough

then to call him papa.

Kestrel played the moment when she had opened her

eyes, and he had looked away. She played the feeling of the

bread in her hand.

Not long after, Kestrel went to the gallery. She was brought

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up short to see her father there. He was looking out one of

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the slender windows, his back to the art. He turned when

she entered.

CRIME

“I heard that you come here every day,” he said. “I

’S

hoped to speak with you alone.”

They’d been avoiding each other since she’d heard his

watch chime. “You could have come to my suite,” she

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said.

“I was curious. I wondered what you like so much

about the gallery.” He came to meet her. His boots echoed

in the vast space.

“You know what I like.” How many times had he called

her love for music a weakness? He had warned her: the Her-

rani had admired the arts, and look what had happened to

them. They’d forgotten about the sword.

A frown dented his brow. He lifted his gaze from the

collection of sculptures and paintings and focused again

on Kestrel. His voice low, he said, “Your mother played

beautifully.”

“And I?”

“You, even more so.”

“I was glad that you listened to me play.”

He sighed. “That watch.”

“I like your watch. You must continue to wear it. It’ll

keep you honest.”

“Listening like that was beneath me.”

“What if I had invited you?” Kestrel asked.

“You didn’t.”

“I did, over and over, for years.”

He was silent.

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“It was always an open invitation,” Kestrel said. “It still

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is.”

Her father gave her a small smile. “Would you show me

your favorites?” He gestured at the gallery.

Kestrel had almost forgotten why she was here. She’d

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pushed thoughts of Tensen, the water engineer, and the

palace physician away. Now they came back. She felt a

stitch of fear, a thread of guilt pulled tight.

She couldn’t really see the painting she now thought of

as Tensen’s. It was farther down the gallery. From the en-

trance, it was a mere square of purple.

She kept her father from it. She showed him an alabas-

ter bowl she admired, and a bronze fi sherman lifting a fi sh

scaled with lapis lazuli. There was an eastern porcelain egg

that opened to show an armed girl.

But her father noticed the painting. “I remember that,”

he said. “I took it for the emperor.”

He approached it. Kestrel, silent with dread, had no

choice but to go with him. If she tried to turn him away

from the painting, she would only call more attention to it.

A masker moth lay on the painting’s frame. Kestrel’s

pulse leaped.

Her father studied the landscape. “It looks diff erent

here than it did in that southern mansion.” He didn’t ap-

pear to notice the camoufl aged moth. If he did, what

would he make of it? Nothing? It seemed impossible that

something that meant a great deal to her could mean noth-

ing to him. Carefully casual, she said, “Do you like the

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painting?”

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He shrugged. “The emperor does.” His gaze lifted from

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the canvas. Kestrel felt a terrible relief. Then her father

spoke again, and as she listened, that relief shriveled into

CRIME

shame. “I know that you don’t want me to return to the

’S

east. I won’t lie, Kestrel. I need to fi ght. But the need . . .

has been diff erent over the years. It hasn’t been just for

honor.” His light brown eyes were fi xed on hers. “You were

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born a few months after Verex. I wouldn’t have made you

marry him. But I hoped. On the battlefi eld, I hoped you’d

inherit the empire. When you chose Verex, it felt like fate.”

“You don’t believe in fate.”

“I believe that the land I won was for you. You are my

fate.”

Guilt swelled in her throat. It made it hard to breathe,

and she couldn’t hold his gaze any longer. But the instant

her eyes fell from his, they darted quickly, helplessly, to-

ward the moth.

Her father saw. He blinked. He peered at the painting’s

frame. He frowned.

It was just a moth, Kestrel tried to tell herself. He

couldn’t possibly guess what it meant.

She thought her father might say something. She read-

ied herself to answer him. But in the end, all he did was

silently fl ick the moth to the fl oor.

“The water engineer changed her bet,” Tensen said. “She

and the emperor’s physician
are
working together.”

“I can’t meet with you again like this,” Kestrel said.

“I’m going to be caught.”

—-1

Tensen was instantly worried. He asked for her reasons,

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but it wasn’t so simple as her father seeing the moth on the

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painting’s frame, which Tensen dismissed. It was that feel-

ing of skating close to ruin. She’d felt this before, or some-

thing like it, when she had fi rst begun playing Bite and

Sting and didn’t know when to leave the table, or stayed

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because she needed to know what would happen next. She

needed to see all the tiles turned, the play played, the fi nal

mea sure ment of who had what and who had come short.

She’d lost easily at fi rst, especially against her father. Then

she had learned.

“I just can’t,” she told Tensen.

He tried to fl atter her. He appealed to her sense of good.

He questioned her courage. He did everything but mention

Arin, which he seemed to sense would end everything.

Tensen was a skilled player, too.

“Well,” he sighed, “you could keep your ears open,

couldn’t you? If there’s something I need to know, tell your

dressmaker.”

Kestrel was eager to leave the Butcher’s Row. She agreed

to pass anything of note on to Deliah. She hurried away,

the hem of her maid’s dress catching on her boothooks.

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39

TEMPTATION WAS THE COLOR WHITE.

It was black ink, quivering at the point of a pen’s nib.

It was Kestrel, writing in her study. She wrote a letter to

Arin. She wrote her reasons. She wrote her heart. Every-

thing was inked in quick and heavy lines. Nothing was

crossed out. It looked up at her: bare, black- and- white

honesty.

That was temptation. But this was reality: the fi re that

burned low on the grate, despite the high spring weather,

despite the nearing end of spring and the climb of days to-

ward the Firstsummer wedding.

Reality was red. It was hot, hungry, snapping. It ate

what ever Kestrel fed it. She burned the letter. Soon there was

nothing left of the fi re but cold, scaly black wood, lightly

furred with ash. The letter lay in fl akes. One page curled like

a black shell.

Kestrel thought of the emperor. She thought of her fa-

ther.

—-1

There was nothing left to read in the dead fi replace.

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Still, Kestrel took a poker and raked it through the ash to

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make sure.

Kestrel’s eigh teenth birthday was fast approaching. Her

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birthday—

and the piano recital the emperor had

commanded— was less than a fortnight away. It would be

the last offi

cial court gathering until her wedding two days

following. She played ferociously for hours on end. Some-

times she heard her father’s watch chime: a light sound, as

light as a smile. It always soothed her music. When Kestrel

played for him, the melody ran sweet, sheer, and strong.

She had a dress fi tting for the recital. The gown was a

delicate aff air of creamy lutestring silk, the lace sleeves short

and loose. Kestrel stood still on the dressmaker’s block.

Fleetingly, it occurred to her that the block was about the

height of an auction block. She remembered Arin standing

on one.

Kestrel wondered what it would be like if time could be

unsewn, the threads ripped out and redone. She went back

to the day of the auction, that fi rst day, that sight of a slave

stepping onto the block. She imagined everything diff er-

ently. This time, she didn’t bid. He wasn’t for sale. Her fa-

ther had never won the Herran War. Kestrel grew up in the

capital instead. Her mother didn’t sicken, didn’t die. Kes-

trel saw the baby in her father’s arms, the one that she had

been. In Kestrel’s reimagining of the world, that baby was

exactly as her father had described.

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Deliah knelt, fl oating the hem up. The silk puff ed,

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then fell in scalloped folds. Deliah fussed with it. Kestrel’s

maids grew bored and drifted into other rooms.

CRIME

Then, quickly, quietly, Deliah said, “Do you have any

’S

news for me?”

Kestrel sharply glanced down at her. “No.”