The Winner's Kiss (20 page)

Kestrel felt Arin's absence. She wondered what he would make of this woman on the pier. But then Kestrel reminded herself that Arin knew the queen already, must know her well, quite well, if he'd been able to persuade her to take his side in war.

The queen (her name was Inishanaway, Kestrel heard someone in the crowd murmur) listened as her brother spoke. Her face was so still that it was easy to see its magnetic quality. A deep sort of mouth, ears so small that they looked like ornamentation, the nose softly shaped. Yes, beautiful, Kestrel decided, yet she didn't understand why that thought dug hard into some vulnerable place.

Kestrel wanted her horse. She wished she hadn't tethered Javelin in the marketplace and continued to the harbor on foot. She wanted to ride away. Now.

Foolish. If she felt dingy and small, it was her own fault for comparing herself where no comparisons could be made. She'd seen a mirror.

As she tried to understand it—this compulsion to compare—she began to realize slowly that the queen's features were familiar. It wasn't because they resembled Roshar's, though they did.

A little sister. Kestrel had known her at court. Risha, the
eastern
princess, the youngest child of the three, beloved of the Valorian crown prince . . . who had been engaged to Kestrel.

Kestrel felt dizzy under the lemon-yellow sun. A sour taste in her mouth. Her father had been pleased, she remembered. He had hoped for Kestrel to marry Prince Verex, had hoped for it even when they were babies. His daughter: an empress.

She told herself that now she understood her fascination with the queen. It had been the familiarity, which Kestrel had needed to place. Or maybe it had been discomfort, to be powerless and behold someone with great power.

Maybe. But she still couldn't explain the rotten ooze in her heart.

Kestrel saw Roshar's gaze touch upon her, and dwell. He said something only the queen could hear. The woman's eyes went to Kestrel.

Roshar murmured in his sister's ear, his smile as light as a little knife.

There was an obvious reason for the way the queen looked at her: Kestrel was Valorian. She was to be questioned, doubted. Picked apart. Kestrel felt the dissecting gaze. She had a sudden image of herself as her namesake: a small hunting hawk, feathers plucked, wings lifted, spread back, pinioned.

Kestrel crossed her arms over her chest. The sun was hot. She was thirsty, throat dry. She stared right back at the woman and understood that the way the queen looked at her wasn't because Kestrel was Valorian, or her father's
daugh
ter. It was because of a secret Kestrel didn't know, and wasn't sure she wanted to know.

“Ah, Kestrel. I hoped to find you here.”

She looked up from currying her horse and glanced over Roshar's shoulder, but no one lingered behind him. They were alone in the stables. She blew a wisp of hair out of her eyes and kept at her task.

“I have a favor to beg,” he said.

“No need to speak so prettily, princeling.”

“My sister . . .”

Kestrel felt it again: a sore wariness. Something was coming. Something sure to hurt.

“. . . I had thought she'd reside in the palace of the former governor. However, it seems to not quite meet her standards.”

“It's grander than anything else in the city.”

“She likes
this
home.”

Kestrel stopped brushing Javelin's coat. “What does that have to do with me?”

Roshar coughed, clearly uncomfortable. “Your suite.”

“Oh.”

“It's the only set of rooms suitable.”

“I see.”

“Would you mind?”

With a flash of feeling, she said, “This is Arin's home.”

Roshar muttered in his language.

“What did you say?”

He
met her eyes. “I said, ‘Yes, precisely.' ”

Javelin knocked his nose against her shoulder. Her fingers tightened around the curry brush. There was no
precisely
. There were only undercurrents of meaning to this situation that pushed Kestrel into a place she couldn't name. She forced herself to shrug. “I'll move my things.” The thought of that day on the horse path rose unbidden in her mind: the fork in the road. The general's villa. She almost saw the house in her mind.
Her
house. Then came the fountaining fear, and Kestrel knew she couldn't go there, she never would, not even if there was no place for her here. “I'll speak with Sarsine.”

“Yes.” Roshar was relieved. “Thank you.” He moved to leave.

“Did Arin tell you to ask me this?”

Roshar turned, surprised. “Of course not.”

Questions rose within her. She was too proud to ask them.

“Arin,” Roshar added, “is likely to kill me when he returns. But I never have any peace when my sister doesn't get her way. Death might be preferable. Be a good friend and make my next few days pleasant ones, for they'll be my last.”

“Then he'll be here soon.”

“My sister has summoned him.”

Kestrel stared at Javelin's brown coat. She rubbed a dark dapple on his shoulder.

“Arin turned pirate for a while, but all for the best of causes,” Roshar said. “Now that the queen has assumed command of the city, I won't linger. Neither will he. We'll both head south. After his royal audience, of course.”

Her
eyes pricked. She brushed a thumb against her fingers and looked at the dust from the ride through the city, then glanced up and found Roshar studying her, his expression sympathetic but also searching, and when she understood what it was he sought she became determined that he not find it. Her eyes cleared. She took the house keys from the pocket of her riding trousers and unhooked the key to the suite in the east wing. She offered it to Roshar. As she dropped it in his palm she knew perfectly well what had hurt her at the sight of the queen.

She did not give him the key to the rooftop garden.

“You'll share my rooms,” Sarsine decided.

“All right.”

“We can't offend her.”

“I know.”

Sarsine looked at her closely. “Arin would offend her. He wouldn't agree to this if he were here.”

Kestrel wasn't so sure. She thought that Roshar knew a secret about the queen and Arin that Sarsine didn't. She said, “It doesn't matter to me.”

But it did.

Four days later, Kestrel was in the kitchen gardens on the grounds. She weeded. She liked it. She enjoyed knowing what belonged and what didn't. There'd been a few mistakes at first, particularly with cooking herbs, but she knew what she was doing now. There was a plea sure in snapping pea
pods
from their stems and dropping them into her basket. She liked the bitter, ashy scent of the stunted plants that bore striped erasti, a fruit that grew only on this peninsula and only in this month. It was used in savory dishes. Kestrel picked them carefully. The cook, who'd been amusedly gentle with Kestrel's gardening and her mistakes, had sucked in his breath when she'd first brought in a basket of erasti. They'd been unripe. “You must wait.” His tone was as close to chastisement as it ever got. “Leave them on the vine until they look like they'll explode if you touch them.”

Her skin had burned on the first day of gardening, then peeled. She tanned. At first, she'd used a little knife to scrape out the dirt beneath her nails. Now she didn't bother.

Today the wind was high. The earth was soft. She didn't hear Arin approach.

“I've been looking everywhere for you.”

Kestrel glanced up at him. The wind swirled her hair into her face. She couldn't see his expression and wanted to hide her own. She didn't like what she felt. Relief, that he was safe. And a very different emotion: simmering, awful.

He said, “I need to speak with you.”

She knew from his tone what this was about. Knew that she had been right. She turned back to the plants. “I'm busy,” she told him. Green juice trickled down her wrist. The fruit went into the basket.

He crouched next to her between the plants. Gently, he pushed the stray, windborn strands of hair from her face. His thumb touched her cheek. She looked at him then. He was unwashed, hair knotted, clothes rimed white with salt,
his
jaw green and yellow from an old bruise. His boots were Valorian, high and hooked.

She didn't want to see how the sun jeweled his eyes, or for her skin to feel suddenly alive simply because he had touched her. She didn't want him to look at her as if there were a door inside her he wanted to open and enter.

She said, “You should marry the queen.”

He dropped his hand. “No.”

“Then you're a fool.”

“I've asked Inisha to move into the governor's palace.”

“Twice a fool. Beg her back.”

“Listen, please. When I was in the east, I thought all the wrong things of you. And you were engaged. You wouldn't change your mind. I asked you . . .” Arin stopped.

She heard the memory of his voice:
Marry him
.
But be mine in secret.

She ached at the memory of it, saw her hurt mirrored in his eyes as he remembered it, too, saw the echo of his expression last winter, in a tavern. He had begged for scraps. Hated himself for it. Asked anyway.

“It was a kiss,” Arin said. “Nothing more. There are no promises between me and the queen.”

“You have no sense of self-preservation.” Her heart was pounding hard. “If you've made no promises, you had better make them now. Why do you think she has allied with you?”

“Why doesn't matter.”

“Of course it does.” She leaped to her feet. He followed her, caught the hand that held the basket. “Was it a ploy?”
she
demanded. Her heart was beating in a double rhythm now. Fear and anger, fear and anger. “Did you kiss her so that she'd believe your alliance would be permanent?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“Because I wanted to!” The words burst from him. “Because she wanted me, and it felt too good to be wanted.”

Kestrel took a shuddering breath. How was it possible to be wounded by someone she didn't even love? The wind rode high. It whipped hair across her mouth. She waited until she could speak evenly. “I think that you don't understand the politics of this situation. Did you expect the queen to come to Herran?”

“No.”

“Did Roshar?” But she knew the answer.

“Yes.”

“Yet your friend didn't tell you.”

Arin paused. “No.”

“Why is she here?”

“To take command of the city.”

“Arin.
Why is she here?
”

He was silent, and she saw from his expression that he guessed what she was going to say.

“She's here,” Kestrel told him, “to show her soldiers that this land is as good as hers. The Dacrans don't like the alliance. They don't see what they get out of it. But they will begin to see, once she establishes herself in this city. It's not just for your new weapon, or for the sake of keeping the empire at bay that she agreed to help a small country with a
weakened
population. It's because if you win this war, she can annex Herran and make it part of the east.”

He didn't deny it. “She doesn't need
me
to do that,” he said finally. “She could take it by force. Using me wouldn't help much.”

She saw what he meant. It was true: Arin's people loved him—she'd seen it, it was plain and powerful, the love flared up every time he smiled at someone, said a brief word—but he was no governor. No resurrected member of the massacred royal family. His political power was uncertain. Kestrel didn't think she was wrong about the queen's designs on this country, but her stomach clenched as she recognized how unavoidably, obviously true it was that the queen had wanted Arin for himself alone. “She must enjoy you, then. Maybe marriage isn't exactly what she wants from you. Still, you should give her what she wants. You might get a nice future out of it. At the very least, you should ask.”

His expression seemed to shrink and tighten. “I won't.”

She hitched the basket into the crook of her arm. “I must go. The cook needs these supplies.” She was mortified to hear her voice break.

Arin's face changed. “Kestrel, forgive me.”

“There's nothing to forgive.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“I don't care.”

He shook his head, eyes not leaving hers. He was wholly altered now, quiet with surprise, alive with some new idea. He touched fingertips to her cheek, traced the path of a tear. “But you do,” he said wonderingly.

She
broke away.

“Wait.”

She kept her back to him as she hurried, basket banging against her hip. “Don't follow me.” She wiped her dirty wrist across her face, heard her breath escape in an ugly sound. “I will never speak with you again if you follow me.”

He didn't.

Kestrel turned down the lamp and climbed into the high bed next to Sarsine. She could have slept on a divan in another room in the suite, but Sarsine wouldn't hear of it, and Kestrel, though shy, had been touched.

Sarsine turned beneath the light blanket and studied Kestrel, her loose hair and lashes and brows very black against the white pillow. She was looking at her in a way difficult for Kestrel to name, though maybe only because her own emotions were such a mess. Sarsine looked too much like Arin.

Abruptly, as if changing a conversation, Kestrel said, “I used to share a bed with my friend Jess.”

“I remember her. You saved her life.”

“No, I didn't.”

“I was there. She'd been poisoned. She would have died if not for you.”

But all Kestrel could recall was Jess's accusation of betrayal. She tried to explain to Sarsine, but didn't have enough pieces of the story for it to make sense. Sarsine listened, then said, “Maybe you both changed too much. Or you'll see her again one day, and things will be clearer between you. But
I
saw what you did for her. How you loved her.” Sarsine pulled the blanket up over Kestrel's shoulder.