The Winner's Kiss (9 page)

“She's not?” Sarsine sounded worried.

He watched the horse's muscles twitch and leap under the brush. “No.”

“Arin, I know how this feels. You know that I do. Like it's impossible, like some mistake has been made and if you could only correct it—”

“That's not it. I'm saying that the whole story sounds false.”

“I don't understand.”

The brush was moving rapidly. “The secret marriage, to start with. The Firstsummer wedding was valuable to the emperor. All that goodwill. The excitement to witness the emperor's dynasty growing. The bride. She was a prize, do you know that? That wedding wasn't about the emperor's son marrying Kestrel. It was about the emperor marrying the military. The emperor would never forgo that wedding. If they married in secret, then why didn't the emperor force them to marry again for every one to see? It doesn't make sense.”

“You don't want it to make sense.”

“A
disease
killed her? I never saw her sick the entire time I worked in her villa. She was only bedridden once, and that's because—” Arin stopped, remembering how she'd limped. She'd been injured in a duel that she had fought for him.

He lowered the brush.

He'd been here before. He used to do this all the time: invent stories about Kestrel that fit with her bandaged knee,
the
way she'd kissed him, the night she'd unlocked the door that separated her rooftop garden from his. From a window in his suite, he'd seen the door open. He had waited, pulse rising. Moments like that, right before she had shut the door again, haunted him in the capital, made him imagine things about her. Lovely, tempting scenarios. He remembered how he'd even wondered if she could be Tensen's Moth.

“Firstsummer was about a month ago,” he heard himself saying.

Javelin huffed and stamped. He curved his neck to whuffle Arin's chest.

Sarsine started to speak.

“Please leave,” Arin said. “I answered your question. I want to be alone. I need to think,” he added, though he wasn't even sure what he was thinking.

When she'd gone, Arin threaded fingers through the horse's mane. Kestrel loved Javelin. She'd left him behind anyway.

Arin remembered seeing her hand in Javelin's mane, curling into the coarse strands. This made him remember the almost freakish length between her littlest finger and thumb as her hand spanned piano keys. The black star of the birthmark. He saw her again in the imperial palace. Her music room. He'd seen that room only once. About a month ago, right before Firstsummer. Her blue sleeves were fastened at the wrist.

Something tugged inside him. A flutter of unease.

Do you sing?

Those had been her first words to him, the day she had bought him.

A
band of nausea circled Arin's throat, just as it had when she had asked him that question, in part for the same reason.

She'd had no trace of an accent. She had spoken in perfect, natural, mother-taught Herrani.

“I told you every thing I know,” said the messenger. Arin had gone to his childhood suite, feeling an anxiety verging on panic at the thought of not finding the man there, of having to track him down, of time lost . . . but the man had opened the outermost door almost immediately after Arin's pounding knock.

“I didn't ask you the right questions,” Arin said. “I want to start again. You said that the prisoner reached through the bars of the wagon to give you the moth.”

“Yes.”

“And you couldn't really see her.”

“That's right.”

“But you said she was Herrani. Why would you say that if you couldn't
see
her?”

“Because she spoke in Herrani.”

“Perfectly.”

“Yes.”

“No accent.”

“No.”

“Describe the hand.”

“I'm not sure . . .”

“Start with the skin. You said it was paler than yours, than mine.”

“Yes, like a house slave's.”

Which
wasn't very different from a Valorian's. “Could you see her wrist, her arm?”

“The wrist, yes, now that you mention it. She was in chains. I saw the manacle.”

“Did you see the sleeve of a dress?”

“Maybe. Blue?”

Dread churned inside Arin. “You think or you know?”

“I don't know. Things happened too fast.”

“Please. This is important.”

“I don't want to say something I'm not sure is true.”

“All right, all right. Was this her right hand or her left?”

“I don't know.”

“Can you tell me
anything
about it? Did she wear a seal ring?”

“Not that I saw, but—”

“Yes?”

“She had a birthmark. On the hand, near the thumb. It looked like a little black star.”

“Arin.” Roshar briefly squeezed his eyes shut, then regarded him with the slightly repelled, slightly fascinated look reserved for aberrations of nature, such as animals born with two heads. “This sounds—”

“I don't care how it sounds.”

“You've thought this kind of thing about her before.”

“I should have trusted myself. She lied. I believed her. I shouldn't have.”

“Arin, she's dead.”

“
Show me the body.”

“I'm worried about you. I'm serious.”

“I don't need soldiers. I'll go to the tundra alone.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“I know. But I'm going.”

“You can't leave in the middle of a war to chase a ghost.”

“I'll be back.”

“The tundra is Valorian territory. Do you understand what they'll do to you if you're caught? You can't hide who you are. That scar—”

“You don't need me. You said it yourself.”

“I was joking!”

Arin gave Roshar a copy of the same plans for the miniature cannon he'd given to Sarsine. “I've asked my cousin to oversee production on this. The Herrani aren't well enough to fight, but it doesn't require much physical strength to make these. And you can assign the construction of different parts of the mechanism to different people. Even the elderly can make the ammunition. If you start now, you'll have a small arsenal of these weapons by the time I'm back.”

“You're giving this to me?”

“I should have given it to you before.”

“This is the sort of thing people do before they kill themselves.”

Arin shook his head. “Suicide is an undignified way to die.”

Roshar drew himself up to his full height. He folded his arms, rippling fingers along the biceps. “I could keep you
here
by force. In my country, we have laws about making sure crazy people don't hurt themselves.”

Arin said, “There
is
something you can do for me.”

“I dread to ask.”

“Can I borrow your ring?”

Chapter 7

The tundra air was white with mist. Through his spyglass as he crouched behind a stunted bush, boots seeping into cold mud, Arin saw the dark line of prisoners emerge from behind rocks at the base of the volcanoes. He scanned each prisoner that passed within view. He couldn't see her face. The mist was too thick. They filed through the work camp's open gate. It shut behind them.

He waited for nightfall. The temperature plummeted. A wolf howled in the distance.

Ilyan, the messenger, had warned him about the wolves. He'd shown Arin a way into the tundra that kept them out of sight of the Valorian road to the work camp. They'd slept by day and traveled by night. Ilyan was waiting for Arin where they'd stopped to unload their gear and rest the three horses near a shallow lake. Arin remembered the way Javelin's head had lifted to see him go.

Arin went quiet inside. He stared at the shut gate. He was filled with a tense, solid stillness, the kind that wouldn't let him think about anything other than what he needed to
do.
It stopped the emotions that had claimed him ever since Roshar's news. It spread like a cold mist over the tarry grief, the elated hope. It kept at bay the feeling that had gutted him, had made it impossible to breathe: remorse.

Another wolf called. It was now as dark as it was going to get.

He left his cover and made for the volcanoes.

At the base of a volcano, whose top dis appeared into the greenish half dark, Arin scrubbed loose sulfur into his hair. He rubbed the yellow, crumbly, stinking stuff into his face, smudging it along the line of his scar. He caked his hands with it. He rubbed it over Roshar's ring.

Arin's plain clothes were streaked with mud from days of travel. If he could have seen himself, he would have seen a blur of yellow and brown. A man of uncertain age and origin, unless someone looked closely.

He prayed that no one would. He went down into the mines. His heartbeat seemed to echo in the tunnel like a drum.

He waited for morning.

At dawn, when the prisoners came down into the tunnel with pickaxes, Arin stepped out of the shadows to mingle with them, become one of them. Furtively, he searched their faces. When he didn't see her, he grew terrified that he was too late.
A month
. He hated himself for it. As he went deeper into the mines he couldn't bear his thoughts: that she was
sick,
hurt. That she'd been transferred to some other kind of prison. Maybe he was wasting yet more time here while she suffered elsewhere.

He couldn't let himself think the worst thought.

Kestrel was strong. She could survive this. She could survive anything. But when he saw the slack faces of the other prisoners—their blank stares, their shuffling gait—he wasn't so sure. Fear slid down his spine.

There were two Valorian guards down in the mines with him, but they paid little attention. They didn't notice when Arin took a pickax right out of a prisoner's hands. The guards broke their conversation with each other only when the empty-handed prisoner, wandering like a sleepwalker, tried to dig sulfur out of the rocky walls with his fingers, which bled, nails broken. Out of the corner of his eye, Arin watched the man's mechanical determination. Arin kept his head down, his shoulders slumped, and his face as blank as the guards neared the prisoner and conferred. Then they shrugged. They found the man a pickax.

Arin worked. He thought of Kestrel doing this. He drove his ax into the wall, swallowed the bile in his throat. He could not get sick, could not draw attention to himself. But the nausea didn't leave him.

Hours might have gone by like this. He couldn't count time passing. The grayish light that filtered down from the tunnel's mouth hadn't changed.

But the prisoners did. They went suddenly still. Arin snatched his ax back in midswing. He, too, made himself into a statue. He wondered what they were waiting for.

It
was water. The guards distributed it. The prisoners' bodies went taut, and they eagerly drank.

Arin imitated them. He swallowed the water.

Moments later, his pulse shot up to the sky.

He felt too big for his body. He knew, as if from a distance, that he'd been tampered with. The water.

He struck the rock with an energy resembling delight. This wasn't right. He told himself that this wasn't right, that this wasn't what he really felt. Yet he lovingly filled his double basket with sulfur.

He was going to fail. He'd had a plan, he had come here with a plan . . . sweat soaked his shirt, the pieces of the plan scattered, and he became certain only of his failure.

Because of you
.

Arin's hands slowed. He heard Kestrel's voice again, felt the sway of a carriage. Firstwinter. If he put his palm to the carriage window, he'd melt its feathered frost.

Because of you,
Kestrel had said. Her mouth had opened beneath his.

The knowledge of what Arin was here to do drove into him and turned like a screw.

He became himself again. He wouldn't fail her, not again.

The drug faded. It was still there—it grasshoppered in his blood—but his body was almost quiet now. Tired. His bones
felt
loose in their sockets. The guards led him to the surface, where other yellow-coated prisoners waited, too many to count at a glance, enough that they could have overwhelmed the guards even without weapons. And they
did
have weapons. Axes, some of them. Other prisoners could have grabbed the rocks at their feet.

Arin understood obedience. After the Valorian invasion, it had been easy for him to obey. He saw what happened to people who didn't. He'd been a frightened child. Then he grew and changed, resisted. He got what came next. Blood in the mouth. Elsewhere. Sometimes it felt like it was everywhere, in his eyes, too, changing his vision. It coated his thoughts. The taste of things. Once, to prove a point: a horse halter was tightened over his head, an iron bit set between his teeth.

After ten years of slavery, Arin knew obedience in its many forms. The fear of pain, the gritty promise to oneself of vengeance. Hopelessness. A grinding monotony broken just often enough by the strap or fist. The way punishment made his master more his master, and him less himself. He'd been prone to defiance, no matter how stupid it was, because he could insist, at least in that moment, on the integrity of his will: unalterable by anyone. But then pain did alter it. Humiliation did. Obedience became a version of despair.

But he'd never seen the kind of obedience he witnessed when the guards herded the prisoners into a line. They were cows. They weren't even like people
pretending
to be animals, which he had seen and had done. There was no question of resistance here on the tundra, no glimmer of hatred.

Arin
couldn't imagine Kestrel obeying like this. He couldn't imagine her obeying at all.

He strained to see her through the ragged line of prisoners. Was she at the front of the line? Was she so changed that he couldn't recognize her?