The Winner's Kiss (18 page)

She did not ask him to honor her. She was suspicious of honor.

She nudged her knees into Javelin's sides. Arin's fingertips fell away. The horse headed for the stables.

Arin said nothing more to her that day, beyond an offer to curry Javelin. She accepted. She wanted to be alone. Even when she retreated into the house, her skin felt vibrant. Wakeful, unruly. Like it would give her no quarter. It would
insist
and insist, all because of a touch that had seemed intended to soothe.

But it was not soothing.

Although the day had not been without comfort, Kestrel kept the last potent moment of it in mind. She decided that Arin was the opposite of relief.

Chapter 14

Arin was gone again. He left Kestrel A note that announced his departure but gave no reason for it nor an indication of how long he'd be away. She assumed it had something to do with the war, and that he hesitated to explain anything in writing, which begged the question of why he hadn't spoken with her, which in turn reminded her of how she'd flinched from his touch.

She understood the note. But she didn't like it.

She asked Roshar where Arin was and why.

“Nosy, nosy,” said the prince. His tone was arch. Friendly enough. Still, it drew a clear hard line that warned she'd waste her time pressing for more information.

They were playing Borderlands in the parlor. The windows were open and a storm was brewing, but the rain hadn't come yet. Dark clouds knotted on the horizon. The wind that stirred the curtains smelled raw. Roshar shifted, and shifted again, eyeing the game pieces.

Arin hadn't taken Javelin. No horses were missing from the stables. She'd counted them.

Roshar
glanced at the darkening sky.

“Is he at sea?” Kestrel asked.

“Dear one, what do you care?”

“You're nervous.”

“I'm nervous about
you
. You're going to beat me.”

“I thought you were at war. You should have better things to do than stay here and play Borderlands with me.”

He lifted one brow, but merely said, “Your move.”

She made it. It had been a plea sure to discover that she remembered how to play.
How
was not a problem for her. She knew how to do things. Play a game, play the piano, ride a horse, speak a language. If there was anything she no longer knew
how
to do, she wasn't conscious of it.

The issue was
what
. Her memory was a gaming set where she could see the board and knew the rules of the game yet didn't recognize all the pieces.

She said, “Who commands the Dacran-Herrani alliance?”

“Need you even ask? Do I not exude an air of irrefutable authority?”

“What's Arin's role?”

“That,” he told her, “is a good question.”

The wind billowed a curtain. She moved her engineer, keeping her eyes on the board. “I'm surprised your people support the alliance.”

He shrugged, muttering something short and irritable in his language.

“Dying for someone else's people is not usually how war works,” Kestrel said. “What exactly does your queen want from Herran?”

“
That deadly little invention of Arin's, for one.”

“You have that already. He's given you the plans.”

“The empire must be kept at bay. If they take this peninsula, it's only a matter of time before they take the east.”

“Is your sister intelligent?”

He gave her an impatient look. She saw his answer. “Then she must want something more,” Kestrel said. “Does Arin know what she wants?”

Roshar's green-rimmed eyes narrowed. “Arin knows a good deal when he sees one. We're the best thing that could have happened to him.”

“Yes, clearly. You are great benefactors. If you care so much for his well-being, why have you sent him to sea in the middle of a storm?”

“Arin sent himself.”

She fell silent. Roshar made his move. “Tell me, little ghost: do you enjoy my company?”

She was surprised. “Yes.”

“I enjoy yours, too. I can see why you like me. I'm intelligent, charming—not to mention handsome.”

“And skilled at preening. Let's not forget that.”

“Lies, all lies.” He met her eyes across the gaming board. “The reason you enjoy my company is because I look like how you feel.”

“That's not it,” she said, though when she looked again at his damaged face she realized that what he'd said was true. Yet it was only partly true, and she didn't know how to put the other parts into words.

“Arin is my friend,” Roshar told her. “I trust him with my life, and he trusts me with his. That's rare. I won't have
it
questioned by someone who, for all I can tell, has no love for him.” He knocked over his general: the gesture of surrender. The marble game piece rolled. “Go away, little ghost. Go haunt someone else.” But he was the one who left.

Rain tapped the panes. She went to draw the windows shut, then paused, seeing how the trees bent, lashed by wind blowing in from the sea. It smelled like a cut-open oyster.

Dear one, what do you care?

A small serpent of worry lifted its hooded head inside her.

Rain drove into Arin's eyes. The deck heaved. It wasn't a green storm, but just as bad. They'd seen the signs. They'd been warned against sailing by the Herrani captain who'd taken Arin east last winter.

“We must,” Arin had told Roshar. “The general holds Ithrya. He'll use it to supply a strike at the mainland and can sustain that attack only if he's able to supply his forces. He's stockpiling Ithrya. We must break his supply lines with the Valorian capital. I'll sail to the Empty Islands between our western shores and Valoria.”

“ You're no sailor.”

Arin spoke as if he hadn't heard. “A Herrani ship, with Herrani crew.”

“I'll send Xash.”

Arin shook his head. “My people have recovered. They want to fight. As it is, your soldiers wonder when we're going to pull our own weight.”

So Arin's ship had set sail.

Now it quaked under each hit from a monstrous wave.
The
sea swelled into purple hills and valleys. The sails had been stowed lest they be shredded by the wind. The captain had set a drogue in the water to slow the ship and stabilize it, but its prow punctured wave after wave. The deck was slick. Arin struggled to keep his footing. He slid, hit the railing, and gripped it. Vomited.

“God of madness.” The captain seized Arin's upper arm and hauled him upright. The captain was three times Arin's age and growled with that lilt that Herrani sailors had had before the war. “Get below, boy. What good're you on deck? You know nothing of the sea.” Then the captain's attention darted away, and he was gone.

The captain was right. Arin was headed toward the bolt-hole, his face stinging with salt and rain, eyes burning, when it struck him that he was too seasick to be afraid. This made him remember his conversation with Kestrel as they'd ridden her horse, and how, if he'd had to touch her, he should have known better than to touch her where they had hurt her, even if he had wanted to say, without words, that he understood how they had hurt her.

His boots skidded. The world was a dizzy, wet blur. The ship shuddered and leaned on its side. Again, Arin tumbled against the railing. This time, he went over. He plunged into the seething water below.

Chapter 15

He punched to the surface. Broke it. Gasped. Was shoved under again by a swell of water. His lungs blazed.

This time, when he came up from the silence into the roaring air, he was smarter. He broke the laces of his boots with a savage yank, kicked the heavy things from his feet. He sucked in his breath, swam straight through the next wave, and struck out for the tempest-tossed ship, which wasn't far. The water was blood-warm. It tugged at him. Dragged and pushed. His shoulders ached. He swam through another wave. He prayed. He was closer.

A rope? Could someone lower a rope from the deck?

Maybe . . . if anyone had even seen him go over.

He kicked harder.
Don't leave me,
he prayed again to his god.
Not like this
.

There was no sound but the sea.

I' ll serve you,
Arin promised.

His god didn't answer. Arin was close enough to see the
barnacles
on the ship's hull. He looked up. No one looked down. He pushed forward.

How can I serve you, if I drown?

And now the fear. Weariness. His limbs felt as if they were plowing through mud. Salt in his throat. His lungs. His death wasn't supposed to happen this way.

By the sword. Please.

Not like this.

Not alone.

Not yet.

A current sucked him away from the ship.

Arin almost surrendered himself to it. You can't fight the will of the gods, and never this god.

A tattered desolation fluttered through him. Again:
Not alone, not yet.
But he
was
alone. He had been alone for a long time.

I wish,
he thought,
that I could hear your voice again
. He wondered if he would, in the end.

The current still gripped him. But it turned on itself. It flung Arin forward, muscling him swiftly through the water until he slammed against the hull's side.

He almost blacked out. Head ringing, vision weird, Arin went up and down. He swallowed water. Scrambled against the hull. His hands sought something, anything.

And hooked hard. Squeezed.

The hull ladder.

Arin looked up and saw the line of rusted rungs leading up the hull. For a moment, he couldn't move. He was rapt with wonder.

In
your name,
Arin swore.
I' ll bring glory to you.

Shaking, grateful, he climbed.

The next day broke clean, like it had been spat on and polished to a shine.

The black powder stored in the magazine deep in the ship's hold had stayed dry. Some sacks, though, had been kept at the ready on the gundecks. They were soaked. The sea had swamped the gunports before the sailors had hauled back the cannons and bolted the ports.

Arin and some of the sailors opened the sacks and spread powder out in shallow pans laid out on the quarterdeck. The sun was hot on his bare shoulders. He bowed with the weight of a full sack. The powder was damp and cakey as he jostled it out of the bag and sifted the grit with his hands, spreading it into a fine layer. His palms became black. They looked familiar. Not so different from how they'd used to look after a day in the forge. A normal day.

But today was not normal. He kept his eyes on his task. The black powder, made from sulfur extracted from Dacra's northern plateau, was precious. The eastern supply was limited, so it was important that the powder, useless when wet, dry well. It was important that Arin take care. And it was very important that he keep his gaze averted from the other sailors, who kept sneaking glances at him.

Because Arin was not normal. No one fell into the sea like that and lived.

He felt the stare from the girl scraping scales from a
freshly
caught fish half her size. Other sailors stared, too. The ones mending a sail and tarring the rigging. Those nearest to him, emptying their sacks.

Sweat dripped from his brow and vanished into the powder in its pan near his bare feet. Arin wondered when that powder would be used. He wondered what damage it would do, and if, when the powder exploded, some essence of himself would burn with it.

He wondered if this was a normal thought.

The sacks were now empty. He brushed his black palms. He needed to rinse. He was a walking fire hazard. A bucket of seawater was kept near the mainmast. He went to it, dunked his arms in up to his elbows, and splashed a little over his shoulders, feeling the water go down the runnel of his spine. He'd itch once the water dried to salt.

“You look none the worse for drowning.”

Arin straightened to see the captain leaning near the shrouds, watching him. Arin remembered the man's expression during the storm, when Arin had hauled himself over the railing, slopped down onto the deck, and retched a bellyful of seawater.

Arin asked, “How long until the Empty Islands?”

“Ithrya's near, but we must give her a wide berth. Two, three days, then, to sail south around Ithrya and up to the islands. Should the winds stay fair.”

“Do you think they will?”

“Ask them, why don't you, and see if they will for
you
.”

The sun was in the captain's face. Arin couldn't read his expression. The man's voice could have either been mock serious, or dead serious. Arin cleared his throat. “The gun
powder
should be dry by day's end. No one's to smoke. Even one stray spark—”

“We're not daft, boy.”

Arin rubbed the nape of his neck, nodded, and thought the conversation was over. He looked out at the sea. Green and dazzling, like his mother's emerald. He remembered the day he'd traded it away, and wished he'd kept it. He thought that every one should have one precious thing to hold with his whole heart, to know to be incontrovertibly his own. He held the emerald in his mind, felt its cool facets. He imagined placing it in the palm of a hand he knew well, and wondered if it would be accepted, and how it would feel to have someone else hold what he held with his whole heart.

He blinked, looked away from the horizon. He was sea-dreaming. Imagining things that would hurt him later.

Now, even.

“There've been stories about you.” The captain was squinting at him. “Well before the storm.”

It disconcerted Arin, the way people had begun to look at him. There was this shining expectation. He wasn't sure how much of it really had to do with him. Maybe when people have nothing precious, an idea takes its place. Arin wasn't ready to be an idea.
They're just stories,
Arin wanted to say, but the words died on his lips. He knew better than to deny his god.