Marie Rutkoski - The Winner's Curse

“Yes.”

The couple raised eyebrows, yet clearly decided that the situation was none of their business except as a piece of gossip to spread.

Kestrel left the slave market, the auctioneer and Smith trailing behind her.

She walked quickly through the neighborhoods that separated this dingy part of town from the Garden District. The cross-hatching of streets was ordered, right-angled, Valorian-designed. She knew the way, yet had the odd sense of being lost. Today, everything seemed foreign. When she passed through the Warriors’ Quarter, whose dense barracks she had run through as a child, she imagined soldiers rising against her.

Though of course any of these armed men and women would die to protect her, and expected her to become one of their own. Kestrel had only to obey her father’s wishes and enlist.

When the streets began to change, to twist in irrational directions and bend like water, Kestrel was relieved. Trees leafed into a green canopy overhead. She could hear fountains behind high stone walls.

She came to a massive iron door. One of her father’s guards peered through its window and swung the door open.

Kestrel said nothing to him or the other guards, and they said nothing to her. She led the way across the grounds. The auctioneer and slave followed.

She was home. But the footfalls behind her on the flagstone path reminded Kestrel that this had not always been her home. This estate, and the entire Garden District, had been made by the Herrani, who had called it by another name when it had been theirs.

She stepped onto the lawn. So did the men, their footsteps now hushed by grass.

A yellow bird trilled and swooped through the trees. Kestrel listened until the song dwindled. She continued toward the villa.

The sound of her sandals on the marble floor of the entryway echoed gently against walls painted with leaping creatures, flowers, and gods she didn’t know. Her footfalls blurred into the whisper of water bubbling up from a shallow pool set into the floor.

“A beautiful home,” said the auctioneer.

She glanced at him sharply, though she heard nothing bitter in his voice. She searched him for some sign that he recognized the house, that he had visited it—as an honored guest, friend, or even family member—before the Herran War. But that was a foolish notion. The villas in the Garden District had belonged to aristocratic Herrani, and if the auctioneer had been one of those, he wouldn’t have ended up in his line of work. He would have become a house slave, perhaps a tutor for Valorian children. If the auctioneer did know her house, it was because he had delivered slaves here for her father.

She hesitated to look at Smith. When she did, he refused to look back.

The housekeeper came toward her down the long hall that stretched beyond the fountain. Kestrel sent her away again with the order to fetch the steward and ask him to return with twenty-six keystones. When the steward arrived, his blond brows were drawn together and the hands holding a small coffer were tight. Harman’s hands became tighter still when he noticed the auctioneer and slave.

Kestrel opened the coffer and counted money into the auctioneer’s outstretched hand. He pocketed the silver, then emptied her purse, which he had carried with him. With a slight bow, he returned the flat bag to her. “Such a pleasure to have your business.” He turned to go.

She said, “There had better not be a fresh mark on him.”

The auctioneer’s eyes flicked to the slave and traced his rags, his dirty, scarred arms. “You’re welcome to inspect, my lady,” the auctioneer drawled.

Kestrel frowned, unsettled by the idea of inspecting any person, let alone this person. But before she could form a response, the auctioneer had left.

“How much?” Harman demanded. “How much, total, did this cost?”

She told him.

He drew in a long breath. “Your father—”

“I will tell my father.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do with him ?”

Kestrel looked at the slave. He hadn’t moved, but remained standing on the same black tile as if still on the auction block. He had ignored the entire conversation, tuning out the Valorian he probably didn’t fully understand. His eyes were raised, resting on a painted nightingale that graced a far wall. “This is Smith,” Kestrel told the steward.

Harman’s anxiety eased somewhat. “A blacksmith?” Slaves were sometimes named by masters for their work. “We could use that. I’ll send him to the forge.”

“Wait. I’m not sure that’s where I want him.” She spoke to Smith in Herrani: “Do you sing?”

He looked at her then, and Kestrel saw the same expression she had seen earlier in the waiting room. His gray eyes were icy. “No.”

Smith had answered in her language, and his accent was light.

He turned away. Dark hair fell forward. It curtained his profile.

Kestrel’s nails bit into her palms. “See to it that he has a bath,” she told Harman in a voice she hoped was brisk rather than frustrated. “Give him appropriate clothes.”

She started to walk down the hallway, then stopped. The words flashed out of her mouth: “And cut his hair.”

Kestrel felt the chill of Smith’s gaze on her back as she retreated. It was easy, now, to name that expression in his eyes.

Contempt.

Kestrel didn’t know what to say.

Her father, fresh from a bath after a hot day of training soldiers, watered his wine. The third course was served: small hens stuffed with spiced raisins and crushed almonds. It tasted dry to her.

“Did you practice?” he asked.

“No.”

His large hands paused in their movements.

“I will,” she said. “Later.” She drank from her cup, then ran a thumb over its surface. The glass was smoky green and finely blown. It had come with the house. “How are the new recruits?”

“Wet behind the ears, but not a bad lot.” He shrugged. “We need them.”

Kestrel nodded. The Valorians had always faced barbarian invasions on the fringes of their territories, and as the empire had grown in the past five years, attacks became more frequent. They didn’t threaten the Herran peninsula, but General Trajan often trained battalions that would be sent to the empire’s outer reaches.

He prodded a glazed carrot with his fork. Kestrel looked at the silver utensil, its tines shining sharply in the candlelight. It was a Herrani invention, one that had been absorbed into her culture so long ago it was easy to forget Valorians had ever eaten with their fingers.

“I thought you were going to the market this afternoon with Jess,” he said. “Why didn’t she join us for dinner?”

“She didn’t accompany me home.”

He set down his fork. “Then who did?”

“Father, I spent fifty keystones today.”

He waved a hand to indicate that the sum was irrelevant. His voice was deceptively calm: “If you walked through the city alone, again —”

“I didn’t.” She told him who had come home with her, and why.

The general rubbed his brow and squeezed his eyes shut. “ That was your escort?”

“I don’t need an escort.”

“You certainly wouldn’t, if you enlisted.”

And there they were, pressing the sore spot of an old argument. “I will never be a soldier,” she said.

“You’ve made that clear.”

“If a woman can fight and die for the empire, why can’t a woman walk alone?”

“That’s the point. A woman soldier has proved her strength, and so doesn’t need protection.”

“Neither do I.”

The general flattened his hands against the table. When a girl came to clear away the plates, he barked at her to leave.