The Winner's Curse (22 page)

“The harbormaster?” Arin asked a man who seemed to be this new group’s leader.

“Inside,” the Herrani said, “under guard.” His gaze fell on Kestrel. “Tell me that’s not who I think it is.”

“She doesn’t matter. She’s under my authority, just as you are.” Arin shoved open the door, but not before Kestrel caught the defensive set to his mouth and the distaste on the other man’s face. And while Kestrel had already known that the rumors about her and Arin must have been as disturbing to his people as to hers, only now did that knowledge take a shape that felt like a weapon.

Let the Herrani think she was Arin’s lover. It would only make them doubt the intentions and loyalty of the man Cheat had called his second-in-command.

Kestrel followed Arin into the harbormaster’s house on the pier.

It smelled of pitch and hemp, since the harbormaster sold goods as well as working as a kind of clerk, noting in his ledger which ships came and went, and were docked at each pier. The house was stocked with barrels of tar and coils of rope, and the shipyard smell was stronger than even that of the urine that stained the harbormaster’s pants.

The Valorian was afraid. Although the last several hours had already shaken Kestrel’s sense of what she had believed, this man’s fear shook her yet again, for he was in his prime, he had trained as a soldier, his role on the docks was similar to that of a city guard. If he was afraid, what could that mean to the rule that a true Valorian never was?

How could the Valorians have been so easily surprised, so easily taken?

As she had been.

It was Arin. Arin, who had been a spy in the general’s household. Arin, whose sharp mind had been whittling away at a secret plan, carving it with weapons made on the sly, with information she had let slip. Who had dismissed her concerns about the captain of the city guard’s suicide, which could not have been a suicide but a murderous step toward revolution. Arin had waved away the oddity of Senator Andrax selling black powder to the eastern barbarians, and of course Arin had, for he had known that it had not been sold, but stolen by Herrani slaves.

Arin, who had set hooks into her heart and drawn her to him so that she wouldn’t see anything but his eyes.

Arin was her enemy.

Any enemy should be watched.
Always identify your opponent’s assets and weaknesses,
her father had said. Kestrel decided to be grateful for this moment, crammed into the harbormaster’s house with twenty-some Herrani, and fifty more waiting outside. This was a chance to see whether Arin was as good a leader as a spy and a player at Bite and Sting.

And perhaps Kestrel could seize an opportunity to tip the odds in her favor.

“I want names,” Arin told the harbormaster, “of all sailors ashore at the moment, and their ships.”

The harbormaster gave them, voice trembling. Kestrel saw Arin rub his cheek, considering the man, surely thinking, as she thought, that any plan of Arin’s to take or burn the ships would require as many people as possible. No one should be left on shore to guard the harbormaster, who was now useless.

Killing him was the obvious and quickest next step.

Arin hit the man’s head with the side of his fist. It was a precise strike, aimed at the temple. The man slumped over his desk. His breath stirred the pages of his ledger.

“We have two choices,” Arin told his people. “We’ve done well up to this point. We’ve taken the city. Its leadership has been removed or is under our power. Now we need time, as much as possible before the empire learns what’s happened. We have people guarding the mountain pass. The only other way to bring news to the empire is by sea. We take the ships, or we burn them. We must decide now.

“Either way, our approach is the same. Storm clouds are blowing in from the south. When they cover the moon, we’ll row small launches in the darkness, hugging the bay’s curve until we can come around the boats and approach their sterns. Each prow is pointed toward the city and its light. We’ll be on the dark side of the open sea while the sailors gather at the bow, watching the city’s fire. If we hope to seize all the ships, we split into two teams. One will start with the biggest and deadliest: Captain Wensan’s. The other waits at the nearest largest ship. We take Wensan’s ship, then turn its cannons on the second one, which will be overrun by the second group. With those two ships, we can force the surrender of the next nearest and largest and continue to shrink the possibility for the merchants to fight back. The fishermen have no cannons, so they’ll be ours after the sea battle. We’ll sink any ship that tries to flee the bay. Then we will not only buy the time we need, we will also have the ships as
our
weapons against the empire, as well as any goods they have on board.”

Apparently Arin wasn’t half as clever as Kestrel had thought, to discuss such a plan in front of
her
. Or he thought she could do no harm with the information. Maybe he didn’t care what she heard. Still, it was a decent plan … except for one thing.

“
How
will we seize Wensan’s ship?” a Herrani asked.

“We’ll climb its hull ladder.”

Kestrel laughed. “You’ll be picked off one at a time by Wensan’s crew as soon as they realize what’s happening.”

The room went still. Spines stiffened. Arin, who had been facing the Herrani, turned to stare at Kestrel. The look he gave her prickled the air between them like static.

“Then we’ll pretend we’re their Valorian sailors who have been on shore,” he said, “and ask for our launches to be winched up to the deck from the water.”

“Pretend to be Valorian?
That
will be believable.”

“It will be dark. They won’t see our faces, and we have the names of sailors on shore.”

“And your accent?”

Arin didn’t answer.

“I suppose you hope that the wind will blow your accent away,” Kestrel said. “But maybe the sailors will still ask you for the code of the call. Maybe your little plan will be dead in the water, just like all of you.”

There was silence.

“The code of the call,” she repeated. “The password that any sane crew uses and shares with no one but themselves, in order to prevent people from attacking them as you so very foolishly hope to do.”

“Kestrel, what are you doing?”

“Giving you some advice.”

He made an impatient noise. “You want me to burn the ships.”

“Do I? Is that what I want?”

“We’ll be weaker against the empire without them.”

She shrugged. “Even with them, you won’t stand a chance.”

Arin must have felt the mood in the room shift as Kestrel’s words exposed what everyone should have known: that the Herrani revolution was a hopeless endeavor, one that would be crushed once imperial forces marched, as planned, through the mountain pass to replace the regiments sent east. They would lay siege to the city and send messengers for more troops. This time, when the Herrani lost, they would not be enslaved. They would be put to death.

“Start loading the launches with those barrels of pitch,” Arin told the Herrani. “We’ll use them to burn the ships.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Kestrel said. “Not when I know Wensan’s code of the call.”

“You,” Arin said. “
You
know it.”

“I do.”

She didn’t. She had, however, a good guess. She had a limited range of possibilities—all the birds in “The Song of Death’s Feathers”—and the memory of the way Captain Wensan had looked at the kestrel plate. She would have bet gold on which code he would have chosen for the evening of the ball. Kestrel could read an expression as if looking through shifting water to see the grainy bottom, the silt rising or settling, the dart of a fish. She had seen Wensan making his decision like she could see the suspicion in Arin’s eyes now.

Her certainty wavered.

Arin. Didn’t Arin disprove her ability to read others? For she had thought him truthful in the carriage. She had thought that his lips had moved against hers as if in prayer. But she had been wrong.

Arin tugged Kestrel out of the harbormaster’s house. The door slamming shut behind them, Arin marched her to the far end of an empty pier. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

“I think you have had quite an intimate knowledge of my household. What’s delivered, what letters leave. Who comes, who goes. I think you know that Captain Wensan dined at our house the night before this one.”

“He was your father’s friend,” Arin said slowly.

“Whose ship brought my mother’s piano from the capital when I was a child. He was always kind to me. And now he’s dead. Isn’t he?”

Arin didn’t deny it.

The moonlight was dimming, but Kestrel knew that Arin could see the sorrow seep into her face.

Let him see it. It served her purposes. “I know the password,” she said.

“You would never reveal it.” Clouds blotted the moon, casting Arin’s features into shadow. “You’re taunting me. You want me to hate myself for what I’ve done. You will never forgive me, and you certainly won’t
help
me.”

“You have something I want.”

The cold dark seemed to pour around them.

“I doubt it,” Arin said.

“I want Jess. I will help you seize the ships, and you will give her to me.”

The truth can deceive as well as a lie. Kestrel
did
want to barter for the chance to help Jess, or at least be by her side if death came. Yet Kestrel also counted on this truth to be so believable that Arin wouldn’t see that it disguised something else: that she needed at least one fishing boat to remain in the harbor.

“I can’t just
give
her to you,” Arin said. “Cheat will decide what happens to the survivors.”

“Ah, but you seem to be entitled to special privileges. If you can claim one girl, why not two?”

His mouth twisted in what looked like disgust. “I’ll arrange for you to see her as soon as I can. Will you trust my word?”

“I have little choice. Now, to the purpose. You told Cheat that you went to the ball to collect information from the harbormaster’s slave. You will share that information with me.”

“That’s not why I went to the ball.”

“What?”

“There is no information. I lied.”

Kestrel raised one brow. “How very surprising. Didn’t you just make a promise and ask me to trust your word? Really, Arin. You must sort out your lies and your truths or even you won’t know which is which.”

Silence. Had she wounded him? She hoped so.

“Your plan to seize the ships is solid enough,” she said, “but you’ll need to finesse a few important details.” She told him what she had in mind. She wondered if Arin knew that accepting her help would increase his people’s suspicion that they were lovers, that he was collaborating with a Valorian who didn’t necessarily have their best interests at heart. She wondered if he knew that if he achieved his objective tonight, the winning would be undermined by the way he had won it.

Arin probably did. He must know that there was no such thing as a clear win.

But Kestrel doubted that he would guess that Captain Wensan had taught her how to sail. Even if Arin somehow knew that she could, she thought his mind was too occupied to notice that a fishing boat was her best chance of escape to the capital.

When she saw the opportunity to flee, she would take it. She would bring the hounds of the empire howling down on this city.

29

Arin had worked on the harbor before. He’d been sold out of the quarry into another forge, and when his second blacksmith master had died, Arin was part of the goods divided by the heirs. His name was still listed as Smith, but he had hidden the skills of that trade from his new owners and was sold at a loss to the shipyards. He had never sailed, yet he knew a Herrani ship when he saw it. He had dry-docked them along with other slaves, had hauled on ropes to tip the massive things onto their sides at low tide. Then he had waded in the mud to scrape the hardened sea life off the hull, shards of barnacles flaking around him, cutting skin, hatching thin red lines. He remembered the taste of sweat in his mouth, water oozing up his calves, and everything quick, so quick, so that the slaves could drag on the pulleys and flip the boat again and clean its other side before the tide rose.

Then the Valorians would take their stolen ship and sail away.

As he rowed the launch toward Wensan’s ship, which was Herrani-made and studded with Valorian cannon, Arin remembered the exhaustion of that work, but also how it had corded his muscles until the ache in his arms became stone. He was grateful to the Valorians for having made him strong. If he was strong enough, he might live through this night. If he lived, he could reclaim the shreds of who he had been, and explain himself to Kestrel in a way she would understand.

She sat silent next to him in the launch. The other Herrani at the oars watched as she lifted her bound hands to tug at the black cloth covering her hair. It was an awkward business. It was also necessary, since a new twist in the plan called for Kestrel to be seen and recognized.

The Herrani watched her struggle. They watched Arin drop an oar in its lock to offer a hand. She flinched hard enough that her shifted weight shook the boat. It was only a slight tremor along wood, but they all felt it.

Shame ate into his gut.

Kestrel pulled the cloth from her head. Even though clouds swelled in the sky, swallowing the moon and deepening the dark around them, Kestrel’s hair and pale skin seemed to glow. It looked like she was lit from within.

It wasn’t something Arin could bear to see. He returned to the oars and rowed.

Arin knew, far better than any of the ten Herrani in the launch, that Kestrel could be devious. That he shouldn’t trust her plan any more than he should have fallen for her ploys at Bite and Sting, or followed her blindly into the trap she had set and sprung for him the morning of the duel.

Her plan to seize the ship was sound. Their best option. Still, he kept examining it like he might a horse’s hoof, tapping the surface for a flaw, a dangerous split.

He couldn’t see it. He thought that there must be one, then realized that the flaw he sensed lay inside him. Tonight had cracked Arin open. It had brought the battle inside him to a boiling war.