The Winner's Curse (18 page)

She found Arin walking through the bare orange grove, horse tack draped over his shoulder. It jangled when he stopped and stared at her. He stood, shoulders stiff. As Kestrel came close she saw that his jaw was clenched, and that there was no trace of what her guards had done to him. No bruises. Nor would there be, not for something that had happened nearly a month ago.

“Did I shame you?” Kestrel said.

Something strange crossed his face. “Shame me,” Arin repeated. He looked up into the empty branches as if he expected to see fruit there, as if it weren’t almost winter.

“The book. The inscription I read. The duel. The way I tricked you. The order I gave to have you imprisoned. Did I shame you?”

He crossed his arms over his chest. He shook his head, his gaze never wavering from the trees. “No. The god of debts knows what I owe.”

“Then what is it?” Kestrel was trying so hard not to ask about the rumors or the woman in the market that she said something worse. “Why won’t you look at me?”

“I shouldn’t even be speaking with you,” he muttered.

It dawned on her why it had never made sense that Rax had been the one to release Arin. “My father,” she said. “Arin, you don’t have to worry about him. He’ll be leaving the morning of the Firstwinter ball. The entire regiment has been ordered east to fight the barbarians.”

“What?” He glanced at her, eyes sharp.

“Things can be as they were.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But … you are my friend.” His expression changed, though not in a way Kestrel could read. “Just tell me what’s wrong, Arin. Tell me the truth.”

When he spoke, his voice was raw. “You own me. How can you believe I’ll tell you the truth? Why would I?”

The parasol trembled in Kestrel’s grip. She opened her mouth to speak, yet realized that if she did, she wouldn’t be able to control what she said.

“I will tell you something you can trust is true.” Arin’s eyes held hers. “We are not friends.”

Kestrel swallowed. “You’re right,” she whispered. “We’re not.”

*   *   *

Arin nearly got his throat cut.

“The god of life preserve you,” Cheat gasped. He staggered back, his knife glinting in the shadows of his small bedroom. “What the hell are you doing here? Breaking into my home like a thief in the night. Climbing through the window. You’re lucky I saw your face in time.”

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Start with why you couldn’t come by the auction house at a decent hour. I thought you had a free pass. What about the girl’s seal ring?”

“Unavailable.”

Cheat squinted up at Arin, tapping the flat of the short blade against his thigh. In the dim light of a streetlamp, a slow grin spread across his face. “Had a falling-out with your lady, did you? A lovers’ quarrel?”

Arin felt his face go dark and tight.

“Easy, lad. Just tell me: are the rumors true?”

“No.”

“All right.” Cheat held up his hands as if in surrender, the knife held loosely. “If you say they’re not, they’re not.”

“Cheat. I broke curfew, scaled the general’s wall, and stole through a guarded city to speak with you. Don’t you think we have more important things to discuss than Valorian gossip?”

Cheat cocked one brow.

“The general is leaving to fight in the east. He’s taking the entire regiment. The morning of the Firstwinter ball. It’s the opportunity we’ve been waiting for.”

Cheat dropped the knife to a table. He let out a breath that swelled into laughter. “This is beautiful,” he said. “Perfect.”

Arin saw, in his mind’s eye, Kestrel’s delicate face. He saw her bandaged knee. How her knuckles had whitened. He heard her voice crack.

“The revolution will happen the night of the ball,” Cheat said. “Black powder kegs will be in place. I’ll lead the assault on the general’s estates. He’ll leave his personal guard behind, so we can expect resistance. But it’s nothing we can’t handle, with your weapons, and seizing that property will be an important victory. Meanwhile, those high society Valorians at the ball will find a poisoned surprise in their wine. Arin.” Cheat frowned at him. “Don’t look like that. Even you can’t find a flaw in this plan. It’ll come off nicely. The city will be ours.” Cheat rested a hand on Arin’s shoulder and gripped it. “Freedom will be ours.”

Those words sliced through the knots tangled within Arin. He slowly nodded. He turned toward the window.

“What’re you doing?” Cheat said. “You risked enough coming here, and you’ll risk the same returning to the estate. Stay. I can hide you until the assault.”

Why won’t you look at me?
Kestrel had said. The hurt in her voice had hurt him. It hurt him still. It made him remember how his father had given him a blown-glass horse for his eighth nameday. Arin remembered its tapered legs, the arched neck: a thing of starlike clarity. He had fumbled, and it had smashed on the tiles below.

“No,” Arin told Cheat. “I’m going back. I need to be there when it happens.”

25

The walk to the orange grove had helped Kestrel’s knee, if nothing else. The stiffness had eased, and she forced herself to walk more every day. Soon she had only the barest of limps, then none at all. She returned to her music, let her fingers fly, let wild notes riddle her mind until she couldn’t think. It was bliss not to think, not to remember the cold orange grove, and what she had said and done and asked and wanted.

Kestrel played. She forgot everything but the music unfurling around her.

*   *   *

The day before Firstwinter, the Valorian housekeeper delivered a muslin-wrapped package to Kestrel. “From the dressmaker’s,” she said.

Kestrel held the package and almost seemed to see a gleam through the muslin.

She set it aside.

That evening, a slave brought a note from her father.
There is someone here who wishes to see you.

Ronan, perhaps. The thought didn’t make her glad. It came and went and didn’t touch her, except when she realized that it hadn’t touched her and that it should have.

There was something wrong with her. She should be glad to see her friend. She should hope Ronan was more than that.

We are not friends,
Arin had said.

But she would not think of Arin.

She dressed for dinner with care.

*   *   *

Kestrel recognized the man’s voice drifting down the hall from the dining room, but couldn’t place it at first. “Thank you for not requisitioning my ship,” he was saying. “I would have lost a great deal of profit—maybe even the ship itself—if the empire had borrowed it for the war effort.”

“Don’t thank me,” said Kestrel’s father. “If I had needed it, I would have taken it.”

“Not big enough for you, Trajan?” the voice teased. Kestrel, hovering outside the door, suddenly knew who it was. She remembered being a little girl, a gray-haired man’s easy smiles, sheaves of sheet music brought to her from far-off territories.

“On the contrary, Captain Wensan,” she said, entering the room. The men rose from their seats. “I believe my father has not taken your ship for the military because it is one of the best, loaded with cannon, and he doesn’t like to leave the harbor unprotected when he leaves tomorrow.”

“Kestrel.” The captain didn’t take her hand in greeting, but rested his briefly on her head, as one did with a beloved child. She felt no disappointment that he, and not Ronan, was their guest. “You overestimate me,” Wensan said. “I’m a simple merchant.”

“Maybe,” Kestrel said as the three sat at the table in their expected places, her father at the head, she at his right, the captain at his left. “But I doubt the two decks’ worth of ten-pound cannon are there for decoration.”

“I carry valuable goods. The cannon keep pirates away.”

“As do your crew. They have quite the reputation.”

“Fine fighters,” her father agreed, “though they don’t have the best memory.”

The captain gave him a keen glance. “You can’t possibly have heard about that.”

“That your crew can’t remember the code of the call to save their lives?”

The code of the call was the password sailors on deck demanded from shipmates in launches far below on the water when it was too dark to see who had rowed up from shore.

“I inspected each ship and crew before deciding which to take for battle,” said Kestrel’s father. “I like to be thorough.” He studied his plate. It was empty, waiting for the first course. He touched its white rim, shifting it to center its design of a bird. There was something deliberate in his gesture.

Wensan looked at the plate, then at his own, Kestrel’s, and the three others on the table in honor of the family dead. “You certainly are.” He added unnecessarily, “I agree.”

A message was being passed between the two men. Kestrel considered the porcelain her father must have chosen tonight for a reason. Her household had countless sets of dishes with various patterns. This particular set was of Valorian design, each showing a bird of prey: falcon, kite, lanceling, harrow owl, osprey, and kestrel. They referred to a marching song Valorian children learned.

“Are you using the birds from ‘The Song of Death’s Feathers’ as passwords for your ship?” Kestrel asked the captain.

Wensan showed only a moment’s surprise, and her father none. Kestrel had always been quick to guess secrets.

Mournfully, Wensan said, “It’s the only thing the crew can seem to keep straight. The password must change every night, you know. The order of bird names in the song is an easy pattern to remember.”

The general rang for slaves to bring the first course. Wensan began spinning stories of his travels, and Kestrel thought that perhaps this was why her father had invited him: to lift her spirits. Then she looked more closely at the captain’s plate and realized that this was not the reason.

His plate showed the kestrel.

Clearly, it wasn’t because the captain was an old friend that her father hadn’t requisitioned his ship, or because its cannon might protect the harbor. It was a trade. A favor that demanded repayment. “I agree,” Captain Wensan had said, looking at his plate.

He had agreed to watch over Kestrel in her father’s absence.

Kestrel became aware that she had gone still. Her eyes lifted to her father, who said, “Captain Wensan will be attending the Firstwinter ball.”

Slaves came bearing food, and served. Kestrel looked at the three empty plates, two for her father’s brother and sister, who had died in battle, and the harrow owl for her mother. Kestrel wondered if things would have been different if her mother had lived. Maybe Kestrel and her father wouldn’t communicate in code, or strategize against each other, and for each other. Maybe Kestrel could speak her heart.

What would she say? That she knew her father wanted the captain to watch over her, yes, but also to make certain that she didn’t err, didn’t sin against society and him?

She could say that she didn’t blame his lack of faith when she no longer trusted herself.

She could say that she saw her father’s love as well as his worry.

“How nice for Captain Wensan,” she said with a smile, reaching for her knife and fork. “I’m sure he will enjoy the ball. I, however, am not going.”

*   *   *

At dawn, Kestrel took the carriage into the city and down to the harbor. Her father had said that he didn’t want her to see him off, so she hadn’t been there during the gray hours as the ships made ready to set sail. But she stood in the cold sunrise on the almost empty docks. The wind rose, and salty air knifed through her cloak.

She saw the ships, two hundred strong, sailing toward open water. Only six merchant ships remained, including Captain Wensan’s, rocking against their anchors. A handful of fishing boats clung to the shore, too small to do the military any good. She idly counted them.

Kestrel wondered if the general was on the deck of one of the warships, and if he could see her.

The fleet glided away, almost like dancers in a dance where one doesn’t touch.

Happiness depends on being free,
Kestrel’s father often said,
and freedom depends on being courageous.

She thought of the muslin-wrapped ball gown.

Why shouldn’t she go to the ball? What had she to fear?

The stares?

Let them stare. She was not defenseless, nor did she need her father’s protection, or the captain’s.

Kestrel had been injured, but she wasn’t anymore.

*   *   *

The cloth was almost liquid. The dress lay cool against her skin, falling in simple, golden lines, pale as a winter sun. It left her arms bare, and was low enough to show the wings of her collarbone.

The dress was easy to slip on—a slave had only to fasten a few tiny pearl buttons that ran up the low back—and Kestrel was accustomed to belting the jeweled dagger around her waist herself. But once she was alone she knew her hair would be trouble, and she wasn’t going to call for Lirah, the person most able to help.

She sat at her dressing table, eyeing her reflection warily. Her hair was loose, spilling over her shoulders, a few shades darker than the dress. She gathered a handful and began to braid.

“I hear you’re going to the ball tonight.”

Kestrel glanced in the mirror to see Arin standing behind her. Then she focused on her own shadowed eyes. “You’re not allowed in here,” Kestrel said. She didn’t look again at him, but sensed him waiting. She realized that she was waiting, too—waiting for the will to send him away.

She sighed and continued to braid.

He said, “It’s not a good idea for you to attend the ball.”

“I hardly think you’re in a position to advise me on what I should or shouldn’t do.” She glanced back at his reflection. His face frayed her already sheer nerves. The braid slipped from her fingers and unraveled. “What?” she snapped. “Does this amuse you?”

The corner of his mouth lifted, and Arin looked like himself, like the person she had grown to know since summer’s end. “‘Amuse’ isn’t the right word.”

Heavy locks fell forward to curtain her face. “Lirah usually does my hair,” she muttered. She heard Arin inhale as if to speak, but he didn’t.