Marie Rutkoski - The Winner's Curse

The softness in his voice made her lift her gaze. She would have answered him—how, she wasn’t sure—if Javelin’s attention hadn’t turned to him. The stallion began nuzzling Arin as if he were the horse’s favorite person in the world. Kestrel felt a pang of jealousy. Then she saw something that sent thoughts of jealousy and loneliness and want right out of her head, and just made her mad. Javelin was nibbling a certain part of Arin, whuffling around a pocket exactly the right size to hold a—

“Winter apple,” Kestrel said. “Arin, you have been bribing my horse!”

“Me? No.”

“You have! No wonder he likes you so much.”

“Are you sure it’s not because of my good looks and pleasing manners?” This was said lightly—not quite sarcastically, yet in a voice that nevertheless told Kestrel that he doubted he possessed either of these things.

But he was pleasing. He pleased her. And she could never forget his beauty. She had learned it all too well.

She blushed. “It’s not fair,” she said.

He took in her rising color. His mouth curved. And although Kestrel wasn’t sure that he could interpret what effect he was having on her simply by standing there and saying the word pleasing , she knew that he always knew when he had an advantage.

He pressed it. “Doesn’t your father’s theory of war include winning over the other side by offering sweets? No? An oversight, I think. I wonder … might I bribe you ?”

Kestrel’s fingers clenched. It probably looked like anger. It wasn’t. It was the instinctive gesture of someone dangerously tempted.

“Open your hands, Little Fists,” said Arin. “Open your eyes. I haven’t stolen his love for you. Look.” It was true that in the course of their conversation, Javelin had turned away from Arin, disappointed by the empty pocket. The horse nosed Kestrel’s shoulder. “See?” Arin said. “He knows the difference between an easy mark and his mistress.”

Arin was an easy mark. He had offered to bring her to the stables, and here was the result: from where Kestrel stood, she could see the open tack room, how it was organized, and everything she would need to saddle Javelin quickly. Speed would matter when she escaped. And she would, she must , it was just a matter of getting out of the house at the right time, the right way. Javelin would be the fastest means to reach the harbor and a boat.

When Arin and Kestrel left the stables, the snow had stopped and everything was crystalline. Kestrel wasn’t sure if it had grown colder or only seemed that way. She shivered inside Arin’s coat. It smelled like him. Like dark, summer earth. She would be glad to give the coat back. To see him slip it on in preparation for whatever mission would carry him away from here. He clouded her head.

She inhaled the cold air and willed herself to be like that breath … a relentless, icy purity.

What would Kestrel’s father think, to know how she wavered, how close she came sometimes to wanting to remain a favored prisoner? He would disown her. No child of his would choose surrender.

She went, under guard, to see Jess.

The girl’s face was gray, but she could sit up and eat on her own. “Have you heard anything about my parents?” Jess asked.

Kestrel shook her head. A few Valorians—civilians, socialites—had returned unexpectedly early from their stay in the capital for the winter season. They had been stopped in the mountain pass and imprisoned. Jess’s parents hadn’t been among them.

“And Ronan?”

“I’m not allowed to see him,” Kestrel said.

“You’re allowed to see me .”

Kestrel remembered Arin’s one-word note. Carefully, she said, “I think that Arin doesn’t consider you to be a threat.”

“I wish I were,” Jess muttered, and fell silent. Her face seemed to sink in on itself. It was unbelievable to Kestrel that Jess— Jess —could look so withered.

“Have you been sleeping?” Kestrel asked.

“Too many nightmares.”

Kestrel had them, too. They began with Cheat’s hand on the back of her neck and ended with her gasping awake in the dark, reminding herself that the man was dead. She dreamed about Irex’s baby, dark eyes fixed on her, and sometimes he would speak like an adult. He accused her of making him an orphan. It was her fault, he said, for having been blind to Arin. You cannot trust him, the baby said.

“Forget your dreams,” Kestrel told Jess, even though she couldn’t follow her own advice. “I have something to cheer you up.” She handed her friend a folded pile of dresses. Once, her clothes would have been too tight for Jess. Now they would hang on her. Kestrel thought about that. She thought about Ronan, in prison, and Benix and Captain Wensan and that dark-eyed baby.

“How do you have these?” Jess ran a hand over silk. “Never mind. I know. Arin.” Her mouth twisted as if drinking the poison again. “Kestrel, tell me it isn’t true what they say, that you are truly his , that you are on their side.”

“It isn’t.”

With a glance to make certain no one overheard, Jess leaned forward and whispered, “Promise that you will make them pay.”

It was what Kestrel had hoped Jess would say. It was why she had come. She looked into the eyes of her friend, who had come so close to death.

“I will,” Kestrel said.

Yet when she returned to the house, Sarsine had a smile on her face. “Go into the salon,” she said.

Her piano. Its surface gleamed like wet ink. An emotion flooded through Kestrel, but she didn’t want to name it. It wasn’t right that she should feel it, simply because Arin had given back to her something that he had more or less taken.

Kestrel shouldn’t play. She shouldn’t sit on that familiar velvet bench or think about how transporting a piano across the city was no mean feat. It meant people. Pulleys. Horses straining to haul a cart. She shouldn’t wonder how Arin had found the time and begged his people’s goodwill to bring her piano here.

She shouldn’t touch the cool keys, or feel that delicious tension between silence and sound.

She remembered that Arin had refused to sing for who knows how long.

Kestrel didn’t have that particular kind of strength.

She sat and played.

In the end, it wasn’t hard to guess which rooms had been Arin’s before the war. They were silent and dusty. Any children’s furniture had been removed, and the suite was fairly ordinary, its windows hung with deeply purple curtains. It looked as if for the past ten years it had served as a guest suite for the lesser sort of visitors. Its only unusual qualities were that its outer door was made of a different, lighter wood than those in the rest of the house … and that the sitting room had instruments mounted on the walls.

Decoration. Perhaps Irex’s family had found the child-size instruments quaint. A wooden flute was tilted at an angle over the mantelpiece. On the far wall was a row of small violins, growing larger until the last, which was half the size of an adult violin.

Kestrel came often. One day, when she knew from Sarsine that Arin had returned home but she had not yet seen him, she went to the suite. She touched one of his violins, reaching furtively to pluck the highest string of the largest instrument. The sound was sour. The violin was ruined—no doubt all of them were. That is what happens when an instrument is left strung and uncased for ten years.

A floorboard creaked somewhere in one of the outer chambers.

Arin. He entered the room, and she realized that she had expected him. Why else had she come here so frequently, almost every day, if she hadn’t hoped that someone would notice and tell him to find her there? But even though she admitted to wanting to be here with him in his old rooms, she hadn’t imagined it would be like this.