The Winner's Kiss

  “It’s not drugged,” he told her.

  “I know,” she replied, and thought from the way his face changed that he’d seen her disappointment.

  He kept apologizing. He kept trying to tell her something that she wouldn’t let him finish, and when she cut him off he didn’t look remotely like the person who had pulled her across the prison yard and attacked anyone who stood in their way, using that odd, heavy ring on his finger, and then disarming a fallen guard, wielding the stolen dagger as his own, burying it in the next guard’s belly.

  “Please let me explain,” he said as they rode.

  Fear flickered in her lungs. Her mind felt sore. Though it was dizzying to not know so much, a shrinking thing inside her warned that it’d be much worse to remember. “Leave me alone.”

  “Don’t you want to know what happened? Why you were there?”

  She saw his naked misery. She suspected that any explanation he could provide was more for his sake than hers.

  She wanted to shove him off his horse. Make him feel how it was to fall. She was falling, she was plunging through the black nothingness of why and how, she was terrified of what she had forgotten. She blamed him for not seeing her fear even as she was determined to hide it. “All right,” she said. “Go ahead. Tell me why.”

  For all his earlier persistence, he now didn’t seem to know where to begin. “You were a spy. You were caught.”

  “Your spy?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Close enough. So that’s why you came for me. That’s why you want me to remember. That’s what you want from me: information.”

  “No. Kestrel, we—”

  “If we’re friends, how did we meet?”

  His mare tossed her head. He was drawing the reins too tight. “In the market.”

  “That’s where, not how.”

  He swallowed. “You—”

  But she glimpsed the market, the dusty heat of it. She heard a crowd roar and remembered seeing his unscarred face looking at her, his features taut with hatred.

  “Where are you taking me?” she whispered.

  Now he saw the fear. She saw him see it. He stopped his horse. Her horse stopped, too. He reached to touch her. She flinched away. “Kestrel.” There it was again: his inexplicable hurt. “I’m taking you home.”

  “You know what I think? I think that you could be taking me anywhere. I think that you do want something from me. I think that you are a liar.”

  She spurred Javelin ahead.

  He let her go. He knew that she needed him to survive on the tundra. She couldn’t go far.

  She glanced down at the horse moving beneath her. Javelin. This horse was hers. His name felt right. Little else did.

  The pink sun lowered in the sky. Mosquitoes rose from the mud. As she rode alongside him, her horse seemed to grow larger and higher. She wasn’t doing well.

  He asked if she was hurt. After she said that she wasn’t, he asked again. “Maybe your memory . . .” he trailed off, and she couldn’t stand how hopeful he looked, as if some head injury was the desired cause of every thing. His searching gaze made her want to snarl like an animal.

  By sunset, her body had become almost uncontrollable. The need had been building all day, shuddering inside her. Her stomach cramped. She had the faint certainty that she must have been trained to ride well or she would have already dropped off her horse.

  He saw it. He kept slowing the pace even though she could tell that he wanted to push farther. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She didn’t want to admit that she craved a drug that she’d been forced to take. He guessed it anyway. He nodded, and said, “They gave it to me, too, yesterday.” Then she really hated him, for guessing, and for thinking he understood the clawing desire for something he’d only tasted once.

  She kept going until she couldn’t see straight and her stomach was wobbling, heaving. Finally, he grabbed her horse’s bridle and dragged them both to a stop.

  She was sick all over the tundra’s moss and bracken. He held her hair away from her face. Some part of her that apparently cared didn’t know how he could stand to touch her. He wasn’t clean, but she was beyond filthy.

  He gave her water. She swished it, spat it out, drank, then eyed the canteen in her shaking fingers. She appreciated that he’d come well supplied—for three people, even—but he kept producing things she needed, and packing them away when she didn’t, and building fires and leading the way and doing every thing, that she almost wished he wouldn’t.

  “Why don’t you hold on to that.” He nodded at the canteen.

  Her fingers tightened around it. “Don’t condescend to me.”

  He touched his scar. “I didn’t mean to.”

  She got back on her horse. “Let’s go,” she told him.

  Nightfall presented a new set of issues.

  “There’s only one tent.” He cleared his throat. “But there are three bedrolls.” He waited—to see, she thought, if she’d insist that he sleep outside, but she felt that that would be admitting too much, even as she refused to consider exactly what she would be admitting. So she gave him a curt nod.

  He didn’t build a fire, which made her think he was still worried they might be seen. “We should be traveling by night,” she said, “and sleeping by day.”

  He shook his head. He didn’t look at her.

  “I’m wide awake,” she insisted.

  “You should try to sleep. Things should be normal for you.”

  This, if the pattern of the day was any proof, should have made her wild with irritation. But his expression as he unloaded the folded tent was slow and heavy. His hands were busy. His eyes, though, were quiet. Silver in the dark. Shining. Like water.

  “All right.” She huddled, arms tight around her knees. She tried to stop her bones from rattling. She didn’t want to be sick again. She turned so that she wouldn’t see him, and listened to the sounds of him setting up the tent.

  Even in the tent, with the heat of him barely an arm’s length away, she was desperately cold. She longed for her nighttime drug. She could taste its metallic flavor on her tongue.

  He’d already given her all the spare clothes he had. That first night, after the horses came, he’d opened a pack near the body of his friend and pulled out a coat. He’d stuffed her limp arms into it. She had recognized that it was his by the way that it smelled. Her own clothes seemed to have been cut from a sack: dun-colored, long sleeves, trousers. She hadn’t been wearing this her whole time in the prison. She’d remembered this as he’d bundled her and she’d drowsed in the gorgeous haze of her nighttime drug. She remembered when her clothes had changed and why. She could still feel the buttons of her dress popping open along her back. A rash of cold and terror as the air hit her skin. The pain. But the drug was soft and she was sleeping then and what did clothes matter, anyway?

  Now she was nowhere near sleep. She was a curled worm under a mound of cloth. He’d tucked the second bedroll over her, then got out of his and gave her that, too. There was nothing left for him to give her.

  His voice came through the dark, hesitant. “Kestrel . . .”

  “I wouldn’t be cold if I were asleep,” she said through jittering teeth. “I need to sleep.”

  A pause. “I know you do.”

  “Give me something to sleep.”

  “I don’t have anything like that.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  A longer pause this time. “I don’t.”

  “You have that ring.”

  “No.”

  “Use it.”

  “No.”

  “I want you to.”

  “I don’t really know how to use it. It could kill you.”

  “I don’t care.”

  He was angry. “I do.”

  She knew why his eyes had been too bright earlier. Her own were stinging.

  He shifted. She kept her back to him as she felt him move closer. The warmth of him slowly fitted along her spine. It was li
ke sinking into a bath. His words brushed the back of her neck: “Just to keep you warm,” he said, a question in his tone.

  “You say that we’re friends.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have we done this before?”

  Another pause. “No.”

  Her shaking quieted to a shiver. She found that she’d moved even closer to him, had sealed herself against him. His heart beat fast against her back. He held her, and the weight of his arm made her feel more solid, more real, less ready to shatter into mirrorlike pieces. She calmed, relaxing into his warmth.

  She still didn’t sleep. Neither did he. She could feel his wakefulness. She thought, fleetingly, that it was like him not to fall asleep before she did. She didn’t know how she could believe this to be true. It was hard to reconcile with the one memory she had of him: his face in the market, across a distance. An enemy’s mouth, enemy’s eyes.

  But he was here, he had saved her, and he’d asked nothing of her except to remember, and had stopped asking even for that. She knew his scent. Knew that she liked it. His hand reached to touch the pulse in her neck. He kept his fingers there, slightly too firm to be gentle, as if he doubted she was alive.

  Had they really never shared a bed? No. She would remember that. Wouldn’t she?

  There was a musical cry far off, out on the tundra.

  Wolves. They sounded lonely. Beautiful, though, as they called to each other.

  In the morning, she discovered that she had, at some point, fallen asleep. It was brutal to be awake. He wasn’t in the tent.

  A feeling jolted her heart. The movement she made then must have been loud. “I’m here,” he called from outside the tent, and she emerged to see him in front of the fire that she should have smelled and interpreted as meaning he must be there or nearby—or she would have, if she hadn’t been so afraid that he had left her.

  She walked to the fire, still stumbling on her feet. She had the frustrated idea that she’d never been especially graceful in her body, but that she’d at least been competent. Before.

  She sat across from him. The pale fire leaped between them. Snapped.

  He was no longer wearing the heavy ring. She wondered what he’d done with it, then decided that she wouldn’t ask as long as he said nothing about the night before.

  They sat and ate in silence.

  He kept looking at the injured mare, the one they didn’t ride. She caught him doing it, and knew that he didn’t want her to see him doing it.

  When they stopped later in the day to rest, she held his gaze just as it was about to flick back to the mare. “Don’t,” she said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “How would you, even?”

  He shrugged, and she became conscious of the dagger at his hip, the one he’d taken off a prison guard. She recognized the dagger as the sort of thing that should belong to her and not to him. She had a sudden, intense feeling of difference. She realized that they’d been speaking in his language, not hers.

  She imagined him taking the knife and cutting into the horse’s throat. There was no other way to do it. A massive gush of blood. Thrashing body. The slide of hooves.

  “She’s slowing us down.”

  “I said no.”

  Finally, he nodded.

  That felt familiar: his obedience. She had commanded him before. But she also thought that he had never obeyed her this way, and that even when he’d appeared to, he hadn’t, really.

  Definitely not friends. Something else.

  That night was like the one before. He held her. She warmed. Her limbs softened. It seemed to be the only thing that could possibly make her sleep.

  He said, “You bought me.”

  “What?”

  He had murmured the words against the nape of her neck. His voice came again, stronger this time. “You asked how we met. It was in the market. I was for sale. You bought me.”

  Instinct told her to turn in his arms and search his face, to see what expression it showed.

  She didn’t trust her instincts. She stayed very still. “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do I still own you?”

  The wind pushed against the tent’s canvas.

  “Yes.”

  Her reply was blunt. “No one would believe the things you say. Do you think having no memory makes me a fool?”

  “No.”

  “You say that I was your spy, which means that I worked for you. You say that I own you, which means that you work for me. You say that we are friends. Masters and slaves are not friends. And then there is this—” she broke off, unwilling to go any further. She was too aware of his heat next to her. “You say impossible things. I don’t believe you.”

  His ribs expanded: hard wings against her back. “If you let me explain—”

  “Stop talking. Stop talking. I don’t want to hear your voice.”

  He fell silent. She lay rigid against him, wishing that she could make herself pull away.

  At an uncertain hour of the night, she felt him draw breath. He was going to try again to explain, she thought. She went stony with panic. Again, she had that sense of falling, hurtling toward what she didn’t remember. The skull-crushing impact.

  She didn’t want him to speak, she was suddenly not even sure he meant to speak. It occurred to her, strangely, that he might sing.

  “Don’t.” Her command was sharp.

  He didn’t.

  Later, she woke because she was shaking again. He was gone.

  It was still nighttime. He should not be gone.

  She pushed out of the tent and saw him standing beneath an imaginary sky. Above the darkness, beyond the needlepoint stars, were swirls of green and pink edged with violet. She was sure she’d never seen anything like it.

  He turned to meet her gaze, which had lowered from the sky to him. She didn’t understand how he wasn’t freezing. Then she saw the way his shoulders hunched and realized that he was. He looked back up at the night’s gauzy colors.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “The gods.”

  “They don’t exist.” She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she knew that she believed it.

  “They do. They’ve come to punish me.”

  “It was you,” she said, giving voice to her lurking suspicion, and knowing, as his face twisted, that she was right. “You’re the reason I was in that prison.”

  He met her eyes. “Yes.”

  Chapter 10

  Arin wasn’t sure how they made it home.

  Kestrel had worsened. She was sick during the day. At night her body became a silently keening thing. He would hold her, worried that it was wrong of him, even (sometimes, especially) when she seemed to welcome it. Then it was as if a wave washed through her and pushed her out into sleep. He felt her go, and became wrenchingly grateful, while knowing that what ever comfort he could offer was something she didn’t actually want.

  She refused to let him help her inside his house. The glowing summer day did little to warm her. She huddled inside his dirty coat, and their progress up the path to the house was slow enough that by the time they reached the main entrance, the entire house hold had gathered to see them. Kestrel kept her eyes on her unsteady feet, but Arin knew that she was aware of the crowd; her mouth had set into a grim line.

  Roshar came to them first, boots crunching on the gravel. He was uncharacteristically silent. Appalled, when he wasn’t someone given to being appalled by the appearance of others.

  “I want Sarsine,” Arin told him, but Sarsine was already there. Kestrel eyed her: a moment’s worth of hesitation. Then she accepted Sarsine’s arm, and Arin had to hide the sting of what could be nothing other than hurt jealousy, after which he had to hide his shame at such a petty feeling. He trailed after them, hands upsettingly empty. He wasn’t ready to be useless. He had at least been useful on the tundra.

  Arin followed them up the stairs to the east wing, where Sarsine opened the door to the
suite where Kestrel had once stayed. When they entered, Arin searched Kestrel’s face for some sign of recognition. She kept her gaze averted from his in a way that showed that she knew she was being scrutinized, and why.

  Sarsine settled Kestrel onto the nearest soft chair and knelt before her, removing the battered shoes that were barely recognizable as having once been a lady’s slippers.

  Her expression flickering, Kestrel studied Sarsine’s dark, bent head. Kestrel’s voice, which she’d used less and less in the past few days, was hoarse. “Are you my maid?”

  His cousin flinched. He saw Kestrel realize that she’d said something wrong. Sarsine looked to him. He leaned and whispered in her ear.

  Sarsine set the shoes down in a neat pair. “Yes,” she finally said. “I will be for now, if you like.” She rose and began to peel the coat off Kestrel.

  Something that Arin had tried to wind tightly inside him during the days on the tundra began to unwind. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen when it came undone. He would have said—if he could have said anything at all—that what he felt was like the desolate trembling that seized Kestrel’s body at night.

  Sarsine caught his eye. Lifted her brows. She had paused in the removal of Kestrel’s clothes. Her message was clear.

  He nodded. He should leave, of course he should, yet he couldn’t make himself move.

  “Arin.” Sarsine was stern now.

  He turned, but hadn’t gotten far when he heard Sarsine’s sucked breath. He glanced back.

  His eyes went wide. He was next to them before he was aware of having taken a step. His hand snatched the loose cloth of Kestrel’s shirt at the shoulder. He saw it: the red welt that slashed down her shoulder blade. She jerked away from his grasp. The cloth tore. Not much. Enough.

  “Arin!” Sarsine.

  He saw more, he saw how the lashes looked like his own, how they had sliced her skin and went out of his sight under the cloth. He knew it was all over her back. “I asked you.” His voice was wretched. “I asked you if you were hurt.”

  “I’m not. It’s healed.”

  “But you were.”

  “I didn’t remember.”