The Winner's Crime (78 page)

mered his thoughts into a kind of nonthinking: smooth

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and burnished like a shield.

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Arin spun Tensen’s ring around his fi nger, but didn’t

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take it off .

The ship swam through the jade waters of the delta toward

MARIE RUTK

the eastern queen’s city. Then the vessel could go no farther.

Arin gave Tensen’s ring to the captain. Arin had wrapped it

in a handkerchief edged with a stitched, coded message.

The message told Tensen that Arin had arrived safely

in the queen’s city. A white lie. It was almost true. Arin

didn’t want the old man to worry. As for the ring—

I couldn’t bear to lose such a gift,
Arin had sewn onto the

handkerchief.

Then he had strapped on Kestrel’s dagger, which he

rather wished he
would
lose.

Arin was lowered alone in a launch. He rowed away

from the ship, which would sail back to Herran. The cap-

tain would pass the ring and message into other hands.

There was a slight risk the ring wouldn’t make it to Tensen.

It could be intercepted by a Valorian. But Arin trusted

himself with it less, and wasn’t worried that the ring itself

might be identifi ed. It was very plain.

Arin faced the ship as he rowed away. When he rowed

up a thin river fringed with reeds, he could no longer see

the ship. Twice, tempestuous bursts of rain came out of

nowhere, soaked him to the skin, and vanished.

The river gave way to winding canals. The city had

begun. It was made from white, slick stone, with little bridges

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over each canal like bracelets on a lady’s arm. Somewhere,

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a bell began to ring in its tower.

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Arin was just beginning to navigate the city’s watery

labyrinth . . . but not the stares. The canal glided with

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sleek vessels that made his launch look like a duck. Even if

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that hadn’t marked him as a foreigner, his skin would have.

People stopped what they were doing to look at him. A

child washing laundry in the canal was so startled that he

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let go of the shirt in his hands. It fl oated out into the canal,

then was sucked under.

Word must have traveled ahead of Arin, or loped along

the banks of the canals.

Grappling hooks spun out over the water and snared

Arin’s launch. One bit into his arm and tore a small red

line.

Arin’s boat was dragged to a pier, where he was quickly

seized.

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24

THE PRISON WASN’T TERRIBLE. HE HAD A TINY

window with a view of the sky.

Arin had tried to explain when they’d hauled him off

the boat, but even though his language felt close to Dacran,

like a thin skin was all that separated them from under-

standing him, the easterners regarded him with the same

uncomprehending frustration Arin felt.

Their black eyes were lined with sunset colors. Both

men and women had closely cropped hair, and wore the

same loose white trousers and shirts. When a sudden rain-

fall plummeted down with a violence that bounced rain-

drops off the paved bank of the canal, it soaked through

the white fabric, revealing trim muscle.

Kestrel’s dagger was taken. At the sight of an imperial

weapon, something hardened in the air between Arin and

them.

A woman had asked him a curt question.

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“Look at me,” Arin had said. “I’m no Valorian.” The

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Dacrans could see his dark hair, the gray Herrani eyes.

They must know that he had been their enemies’ slave.

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But his last word had made matters worse. The tension

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tightened.

“Please,” he said then. “I need to speak with your queen.”

That was understood.

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There was a sudden surge toward him. His arms were

wrenched behind his back. His hands were bound, and he

was dragged away.

In his cell, Arin passed his hand over the rectangle of

blue sky. He blocked it, revealed it, blocked it again. Then

he let the color fully in. The walls of his schoolroom in

Herran had been painted this shade. Arin thought of the

times when his father came to listen to his lesson in logic,

and told the tutor to leave. He would take over from there.

The quiet plea sure of that memory tried to keep Arin

company. When it slipped away, Arin knew that he was

afraid.

A foreigner armed with an imperial dagger, asking to

see the queen?

Arin had been so stupid. But not quite stupid enough

to be able to ignore what might lie in store for him once

someone opened that prison door.

Arin rubbed at his cheek, felt the raised and tender

scar. He was no stranger to pain. The Valorians had shown

him the ways a body can betray you.

When Arin was a slave in the quarries, Cheat had tried

to teach him about it, too. It was for Arin’s own good, he’d

said. Arin should learn to resist it. Cheat had cut Arin’s

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inner arm with a sharp stone. Arin had gasped at the blood.

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He’d dragged at Cheat’s grip. “Stop,” he’d said. “Please.”

“All right, all right.” Cheat fi nally let go. “I don’t want

to do this, either. What can I say? I’m too fond of you.”

And Arin, who had been twelve years old, felt ashamed

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and grateful.

There were various ends to the story of this eastern

prison cell, this window. Most of them weren’t good. Arin

didn’t know how he would do under torture.

He remembered telling his plan to Tensen. He’d travel

to the east. He’d gain the queen’s sympathy and help. Easy.

In his memory, Arin’s own voice sounded almost blithe.

No, not quite.

Arin had been
eager
to leave the capital. Desperate. He

had needed to escape, and he knew whom he was fl eeing.

How could Arin ever trust his instincts, when Kestrel had

proven him so grievously wrong? Arin should have known

that sailing to the east was a bad idea. He swore that from

now on, he would doubt everything he was tempted to be-

lieve.

There were footsteps, multiple ones, approaching the

other side of his solid cell door.

Logic is a game,
came the memory of his father’s voice.

Let’s see how you play.

There was a window in his cell.

A prisoner would be drawn to it, like an insect to light.

Like he had been.

Whoever was coming would expect to see him near it.

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Arin moved away.

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He positioned himself in the path the door’s swing

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would take. When it opened, and someone began to step

forward, Arin slammed the door back against him. Arin

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hauled the man close and choked an arm around his neck.

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The guard cried out in his language.

“Let me go,” Arin said, even though it was he who held

the man tight. “Get me out of here.”

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The Dacran wheezed. He scratched Arin’s arms, his

face. He spoke again, and Arin remembered only then that

he’d heard more than one set of footsteps.

The other set belonged to a man standing in the door-

way.

“Do something!” Arin thought the guard in his grasp

must be trying to say. Because the second Dacran was

oddly still. Arin peered, not understanding what kept him

back from the fray, or from bargaining for the safety of his

friend.

The silent man took one step into the cell. The light

caught his face. Arin’s grip on the guard tightened.

The man in the doorway had a skull’s face. The tip of

his nose was gone, the nostrils unnaturally wide slits. A

scar that grazed the upper lip showed that the knife had

gone downward to cut off the nose. The man’s ears were

nothing but holes.

“You,” the man said to Arin in Herrani. “I remember

you.”

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25

THE DAY BEFORE KESTREL HAD BOUGHT HIM.

The eastern slave who had tried to run away.

The emperor will get what he deserves,
he had told Arin.

“I see that you, too, have earned your marks,” said the

Dacran as he stood in the cell’s doorway. “But you still

aren’t as good- looking as me.”

“Who are you?”

“Your translator. Are you going to let him go?” He nod-

ded at the guard, who had gone unconscious in Arin’s grip.

“What will happen to me if I do?”

“Something nicer than if you don’t. Come, youngling.

Do you think my queen would have bothered to send some-

one who speaks your language if she meant you harm?”

Arin let the guard slide to the fl oor.

“Good boy,” said the skull- faced man, and lifted a

hand. Arin thought it was to touch his scar, or maybe to

place a palm to his cheek as Herrani men did. That gesture

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wasn’t appropriate with a stranger, let alone someone from

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another country, yet Arin decided to allow it.

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The man wore a heavy ring, and the hand went not to

Arin’s face but his neck.

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The ring stung Arin. It drove in a little needle that

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fuzzed the blood.

Arin’s limbs became lead. Darkness climbed up his

body, opened its wide mouth, and swallowed him whole.

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Someone was weeping. Her tears fell warm on his brow, his

lashes, his mouth.

Don’t cry,
he tried to say.

Please listen,
she said.

He would, of course he would. How could she think

that he wouldn’t? But when Arin tried to answer her, there

was only a rustling of air in his throat. He thought of leaves.

He remembered the punishment of the god of music, how

he had been cast into the body of a tree for one cycle of the

pantheon: one hundred years of silence. Arin felt his skin

splitting into bark. Twigs burst from him. Leaves grew.

They stuff ed his mouth with green. The wind swayed his

branches.

Arin opened his eyes. Water dropped in. He blinked,

and realized that no one had been weeping over him after

all. He was on a boat beneath the rain. He was trussed up

and fl at on his back in a slow- moving, narrow vessel not

very diff erent from a canoe.

The rain stopped. A dragonfl y with wings as large as a

bird’s swept over him. It shimmered red against the sud-

denly blue sky.

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Arin strained against his bonds.

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The boat shifted, and a face leaned over him. The east-

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ern man’s mutilations were starker in open daylight. He

tsked. “Didn’t it occur to you, little Herrani, that the queen

might have sent me to translate an interrogation of a not-

so- friendly nature? You’re too trusting.”

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With a fi ngernail, he fl icked open a tiny compartment

on the underside of his ring. He touched Arin, and the

skull and the sky and the red dragonfl y were gone.

The emperor was furious. He showed it in certain ways.

To the Herrani minister of agriculture, who had been

the one to break the news of the infested hearthnut crop, the

emperor sent a personal invitation to a theatrical per for-

mance of the conquest of Herran. Tensen had a front row

seat and was spattered with animal blood during the kill-

ing of the Herrani royal family.

The court used fl attering ways to soften the emperor’s

mood. This irritated him with disastrous consequences.

Many aristocrats found that their sons and daughters had

abruptly “decided” to enlist in the military, and were sent

east.

“Just stay out of his way,” Verex told Kestrel.

“It’s no one’s fault that gall wasps ruined the crop. He