The Winner's Crime

  She would enjoy the game all the more.

  “Well?” she said. “Will you play?”

  He gave her an appreciative grin. “Absolutely.”

  They stepped off the promenade and onto the rocky beach, where they found a few wooden crates dragged together. There were signs of an earlier, abandoned game: an empty bottle of wine and scattered tobacco ash.

  Kestrel sat. “I trust you have a deck.”

  “A sailor always does.” He joined her. He lit his pipe, sucked until the tobacco crisped and glowed, and reached for his purse.

  Kestrel said, “Let’s play for something else.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that.”

  “Mind out of the gutter, seaboy. The stakes are questions and answers.”

  “Can I ask the sort of questions that belong in the gutter?”

  “If you win.”

  “I warn you, I’m pretty good.”

  Kestrel smiled. “I’m better.”

  * * *

  The bookkeeper climbed onto Arin’s lap. She settled her knees at his hips, lifted smoke-scented fingers to his jaw. She tipped his head back. Her black eyes glinted down at him, and her red hair slipped over his cheek. Her hair lay cool against his stitches. He thought about his ruined face, and how, in this moment, it was to not feel so ruined.

  “I’d like to make a bet,” she said, and leaned to whisper in his ear.

  Arin’s hands went to her waist.

  * * *

  “You look disappointed,” Kestrel said.

  The sailor tossed his cards onto Kestrel’s winning hand spread out on the crate. “I did hope for something more exciting than telling you that yes, the Maris sailed to southern Herran about a month ago. Can’t I at least lose in an interesting way?”

  Kestrel’s laugh was white in the cold. “We could gamble for your coat.”

  “Ah, love, why don’t we skip to the part where you win and I give it to you?”

  * * *

  Arin lifted the bookkeeper off his lap. He set her gently down on her chair.

  “It’s sad,” she said, “to see someone act against his best interests.”

  Sometimes, it was as if Kestrel still owned him. Arin thought about the silver she’d paid for him. He felt its terrible weight. He couldn’t forgive it. It lay hard and shiny inside him. As he’d grown to know her, in Herran, the silver sank slowly down through uncertain waters. Then came a current’s warm push. He’d floated up. That silver lay deep below, and the thought of diving for it had felt like drowning. But sometimes—especially since the treaty, especially in this damned city, and especially now—the silver seemed close. Bright as treasure.

  Yet Arin knew the pull of his blood. He turned away from the bookkeeper. “I know my own best interests,” he told her.

  She smiled, propping her boots back on the table. “Someday you’ll know better.”

  Arin quit the table. He stepped out of the tavern and into the night.

  * * *

  The sailor stood and offered Kestrel a flourished hand. She let him lift her to her feet. He wrapped his coat around her shoulders and bunched the loose fabric together in an almost fascinated sort of way. “Sweet palace maid, won’t you come to sea with me?”

  “I’d sink the ship. Can’t you tell? I’m bad luck.”

  “Just my kind.” He gave her a hearty kiss on the cheek. Then he took off over the rocks, running up onto the promenade. “I’m freezing!” he shouted. He ran in the direction of the city. He opened up, and began to sing the melody he had been humming earlier. He sang it full and loud. The song was more or less on pitch, and Kestrel liked to hear it leaping over the wavebreaks, jagged with his runner’s breath.

  It was not beautiful. It was not Arin’s voice: rich liquor poured to the brim. But it was happy. Kestrel was happy to hear it, and thought about being grateful for what one can get.

  18

  Kestrel had what she needed. It was time to return to the palace. But her feet were slow on her way through the city. They dragged up the hill.

  She didn’t want to go back. Refusal rose up within her: stony in her throat, hard and hurting. She stood before a high bridge over the river that ran down from the mountain and switchbacked through the city. Kestrel should have crossed it. She should have come down on the other side and made her way up through the aristocratic quarter with its diamond-paned oil lamps.

  But she didn’t.

  Kestrel touched the wrought-iron railing that ran the length of the river. The cold metal burned. Kestrel skimmed her palm along it as she walked—slowly, then quickly, racing along the river’s edge for no other purpose than to see where it would lead her … so long as it was away from where she was supposed to be.

  * * *

  A water engineer. Arin took a skinny set of stairs that led up out of the Narrows. At the top, he turned to look down at the city. Lamplights scattered over the darkness: jewels across a black velvet lap.

  To Arin, the bets about the wedding dress were clear. Though Tensen had doubted him, Arin had been right: the Senate leader was being paid with lucrative information. He had done the emperor a favor. But what?

  And if the water engineer had been paid in kind, what had she done?

  Arin heard the sound of rushing water. The river.

  There was a canal, he remembered, where the river thinned and gentled. A series of locks, crafted by the water engineer herself.

  Arin found the river and followed it.

  * * *

  Kestrel stopped at the sight of the locks. At first, she marveled at their design, at the way a series of gates could open or close to raise or lower the water level so that a barge could deliver its goods.

  Such an invention. What a sharp mind had made these.

  * * *

  When Arin came to the locks, someone else was there. A palace maid, her back to him. She was Valorian; through the faint light of a far-off lamp, he could see the white-trimmed hem of her blue skirt peeking out from beneath a large coat. Her hair was covered with a work scarf. She was all shadow, a small huddle of it.

  Somehow his heart caught at the sight. The boy he had been, the one that Arin caught glimpses of sometimes in the mirror, spoke up shyly within him to say lonely. He said beautiful.

  But this was not a painting. This was a person. This was a Valorian stranger he wanted no part of, with her palace dress that reminded Arin of everything the empire had cost him.

  He told that boy to go away.

  Arin kept walking. He followed the canal until it curved. Even if he looked back, he would no longer be able to see the maid.

  * * *

  The more Kestrel stared at the locks, the more she began to feel like that river. She sensed her staggered self. The things pent up behind the floodgates. The iron lies she herself had swung into place and locked tight.

  Kestrel heard footsteps: another late-night wanderer. They slowed, but didn’t stop. They carried on, became faraway echoes, then gone.

  She, too, should leave. Kestrel couldn’t avoid the palace forever.

  * * *

  Something made Arin turn back. The hand of a god? He couldn’t say. But his feet were retracing their steps before he even realized it. His body was alight, alive, insistent.

  Arin’s mind buzzed with the puzzle of it even as he quickened his pace. Why did he feel the urge to return? There was no great mystery in a palace maid standing alone by the canal. There was nothing more to see.

  But:

  Hurry, said his feet.

  Hurry, said his heart.

  The maid, however, had gone.

  * * *

  He kept searching. As the canal expanded into the river and a bridge arched its back in the gloom, he remembered the maid’s shoes: black dueling boots. Why would a maid wear boots that were part of the ceremonial garb for a Valorian duel?

  Unless she had nothing more practical to wear. Arin had a very strange image of a faceless maid sorting through piles of glamorous shoes fo
r a comfortable pair.

  Why would he think that?

  Her dagger, too, hadn’t been quite right. It wasn’t unusual for a maid to wear one—all Valorians did—but they didn’t wrap their hilts with cloth. That changed the grip. Arin couldn’t think of any reason that someone would cover a hilt like this … unless it needed to be hidden.

  He was running now. Sweat stung the cut on his face.

  Although he hadn’t seen the maid’s hands, he kept imagining a memory of them.

  He saw pale, lithe fingers. He remembered them reaching for his own. He felt them slide under his shirt, over his skin. He saw them strike music from black and white keys, storm down, then quiet the melody, lull it, and trick it into dreams.

  When Arin truly did see the girl’s hand in the darkness, resting on a railing near the bridge, he thought it was a phantom of his imagination. The maid’s fingers rippled along the railing. They played an unheard song.

  He knew that gesture.

  He knew that hand.

  Arin slowed. She was lost in thought. She didn’t hear him coming, or if she did it didn’t matter to her. The river mattered. The music in her head mattered. She stared into the dark.

  Arin was quiet as he came close, quiet when he said her name, and quiet when he touched her cold, bare hand. He touched her little black star of a birthmark, near the base of her thumb.

  He didn’t want to startle her. At first, he thought he hadn’t. He felt the stillness in her before she turned to look at him. He felt the recognition. But when Kestrel finally glanced up at Arin, she recoiled as if she didn’t know him. She snatched her hand from his and lifted it—to ward him off, he thought. To block the very sight of him.

  He’d frightened her after all. There was a cry on her lips. Horror in her eyes.

  A monster stood before her. Arin remembered that now.

  The monster was him.

  19

  Kestrel saw Arin flinch away, hard, from the hand she’d lifted to touch him. It fell as if burned.

  She seemed to feel the knife that had done this to him. It went into her. It hit something vital, and she hunched inside herself. Shock made it impossible to speak. Pain scooped the air from her throat.

  Arin’s fingers touched the two seams that cut a long broken slash down the left side of his face.

  “What happened to you?” she whispered.

  He covered the wound. But Kestrel had seen its length. The livid skin straining at black stitches. The way it had changed him. The way he hid it.

  “Arin, tell me.”

  He stayed silent.

  “Please,” she said.

  Arin crouched down, and Kestrel didn’t understand the movement until he had pulled a dagger from his boot.

  Her dagger. Her beloved dagger, with its perfect weight and her seal carved into the hilt’s ruby. Her dagger, which the emperor had taken weeks ago.

  “This,” Arin said, and gave it to Kestrel.

  I’m sorry, she had told the emperor.

  No, you’re not. But you will be.

  She dropped the dagger to the ground.

  Arin retrieved it. “Take care. You’ll damage the blade. I happen to know that it keeps a nice, sharp edge. I made sure that the palace guard I took it from knew it, too. You’d think that a Valorian would have more courage than to hire someone to attack me in a dark corner.”

  “Arin, it wasn’t me.”

  “I didn’t say it was.” But he was angry and rough.

  “I could never.”

  Arin must have sensed that she was ready to weep, that the dagger in his hands was warping in her blurred vision. He spoke more gently. “I don’t think that you did.”

  “Why?” Her voice wavered and broke. “I could have arranged for it. That’s my dagger. That’s my seal. Why do you believe what I say? Why would you believe in me at all?”

  He moved to lean forward on the railing, forearms folded with the blade dangling down over the river, his face in profile. Finally, he said, “I trust you.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “I know,” he muttered.

  She heard the strain in his voice. His eyes cut to her, and she saw that he knew she had heard it. His body shifted into a position of determined nonchalance. “Logically speaking,” he said lightly, “the idea that you hired someone to attack me doesn’t make much sense. I’m not sure what your motive would be.”

  “I could have wanted to put an end to the rumors.”

  “That would be a shame. I like the rumors.”

  “Don’t joke. You should blame me. You must.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not like you to send someone else to do your dirty work.”

  “I could have changed.”

  “Kestrel, why are you trying to convince me of your guilt?”

  Because this is my fault, she wanted to say.

  “A moment ago, you insisted that you had nothing to do with this,” Arin said, “and that’s what makes sense. Do you want to tell me why the emperor took your dagger? Whom did he want to punish with it? Just me … or you, too?”

  Kestrel couldn’t speak.

  “I might even be flattered,” Arin said, “if the emperor’s form of flattery didn’t hurt so much.” He straightened, and offered her the dagger again.

  “No,” she said sharply.

  “It’s not the blade’s fault.”

  She choked on her anguish. On her guilt, her fault, and his trust. “If you give that dagger to me, I will throw it in the river.”

  Arin shrugged. He tucked the dagger back into his boot, then he faced her. The slash curved slightly in his cheek like half a smile, but his mouth was flat as he watched her take him in. “I’m sure that my new appearance is fascinating in all sorts of ways, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’d rather talk about this.” He pointed at Kestrel’s work scarf and dragged his finger down through the air to her black boots. “Kestrel, what are you doing?”

  She had forgotten what she wore. “Nothing.”

  He lifted his dark brows.

  “It was a dare,” she said. “A senator’s daughter dared me to sneak out of the palace without an escort.”

  “Try harder, Kestrel.”

  She muttered, “I was tired of being closed up inside the palace.”

  “That I believe. But I doubt it’s the whole truth.”

  Arin’s eyes were narrow, inspecting her. His hand slid along the railing as he came close. He reached for the collar of the sailor’s coat. He drew it away from her neck.

  The world went luscious, and slow, and still.

  He bowed his head. Stitches scratched against her cheek. Arin buried his face in the hollow between her neck and the coat collar and breathed in. Warmth flooded her.

  Kestrel imagined: his mouth parting against her skin. The teeth of his smile. And she imagined more, she saw what she would do, how she would forget herself, how everything would slip and unloop, like rich ribbon off its spool. The dream of this held her. She couldn’t move.

  She felt him feel how she didn’t move. Arin hesitated. He lifted his head and looked down at her. The blacks of his eyes were huge.

  He released her. “You smell like a man.” He put some distance between them. “Where’d you get that coat?”

  Kestrel’s voice wasn’t quite as shaky as the rest of her. “I won it.”

  “Who was your victim this time?”

  “A sailor. At cards. I was cold.”

  “Flustered, Kestrel?”

  “Not at all.” She firmed up her voice. “To tell the truth, he gave it to me.”

  “Quite an evening you’re having. Sneaking out. Taking coats off sailors. Why do I feel, though, that that’s not the whole of it?”

  She shrugged. “I enjoy a good card game. Courtiers provide few.”

  “What were the stakes of your late-night gamble?”

  “I told you. The coat.”

  “You said he gave it to you. You also said that you won. What did you win,
then, at cards?”

  “Nothing. It was merely for fun.”

  “A game against you with nothing at stake? Never.”

  “I don’t see why. I once played against you for matches.”

  “Yes, you did.” He briefly closed his eyes. Kestrel saw the thin, almost vertical red line that marked his left lid. It scratched at her heart.

  He looked at her. His gray eyes hunted her face. She fell prey to them as she always did. Arin smiled. It wasn’t a real smile, and it dragged at the left side of his face. “I challenge you to a game of Bite and Sting, Kestrel. Will you play?”

  She turned back to the river. “You should leave the capital.”

  “A stormy journey across the sea with no one to keep me company? How tempting.”

  She said nothing.

  “I don’t want to leave,” Arin said. “I want to play with you. One game.”

  There was temptation, and there was the smart thing, but it was becoming increasingly hard for Kestrel to make the right choice. “When?” she managed.

  “The next available opportunity.”

  There was hardly a Bite and Sting set lying at their feet. Kestrel would have time to prepare … though she had no real notion of what such preparation could be.

  Wasn’t it just a game? Just one? “Very well,” she heard herself say.

  “Winner take all,” said Arin.

  She looked at him. “The stakes?”

  “The truth.”

  Kestrel couldn’t agree to that. She couldn’t even say no, for that would admit that the truth was something she couldn’t afford to give.

  “Not enticing?” said Arin. “I see. Maybe such stakes aren’t high enough. Not for you. That’s it, isn’t it? I’d give you my truth for the asking. You know that. You don’t want to win something that’s free.” His eyes measured her. “Kestrel. You’re hiding something. And I want it. Let’s say this. If you win, I’ll do whatever you ask. If you tell me to leave the capital, I’ll go. If you want me never to speak with you again, I won’t. You name your price.” Arin offered his hand. “Give me your word that you’ll pay properly. On your honor, as a Valorian.”