Marie Rutkoski - The Winner's Curse

With her caught touching his things.

Her gaze dropped. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t mind.” He lifted the violin off its nails and set it in her hands. It was light, but Kestrel’s arms lowered as if the violin’s hollowness were terribly heavy.

She cleared her throat. “Do you still play?”

He shook his head. “I’ve mostly forgotten how. I wasn’t good at it anyway. I loved to sing. Before the war, I worried that gift would leave me, the way it often does with boys. We grow, we change, our voices break. It doesn’t matter how well you sing when you’re nine years old, you know. Not when you’re a boy. When the change comes you just have to hope for the best … that your voice settles into something you can love again. My voice broke two years after the invasion. Gods, how I squeaked. And when my voice finally settled, it seemed like a cruel joke. It was too good. I hardly knew what to do with it. I felt so grateful to have this gift … and so angry, for it to mean so little. And now…” He shrugged, a self-deprecating gesture. “Well, I know I’m rusty.”

“No,” Kestrel said. “You’re not. Your voice is beautiful.”

The silence after that was soft.

Her fingers curled around the violin. She wanted to ask Arin a question yet couldn’t bear to do it, couldn’t say that she didn’t understand what had happened to him the night of the invasion. It didn’t make sense. The death of his family was what her father would call a “waste of resources.” The Valorian force had had no pity for the Herrani military, but it had tried to minimize civilian casualties. You can’t make a dead body work.

“What is it, Kestrel?”

She shook her head. She set the violin back on the wall.

“Ask me.”

She remembered standing outside the governor’s palace and refusing to hear his story, and was ashamed once more.

“You can ask me anything,” he said.

Each question seemed the wrong one. Finally, she said, “How did you survive the invasion?”

He didn’t speak at first. Then he said, “My parents and sister fought. I didn’t.”

Words were useless, pitifully useless—criminal, even, in how they could not account for Arin’s grief, and could not excuse how her people had lived on the ruin of his. Yet again Kestrel said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

It felt as if it was.

Arin led the way out of his old suite. When they came to the last room, the greeting room, he paused before the outermost door. It was the slightest of hesitations, no longer than if the second hand of a clock stayed a beat longer on its mark than it should. But in that fraction of time, Kestrel understood that the last door was not paler than the others because it had been made from a different wood.

It was newer.

Kestrel took Arin’s battered hand in hers, the rough heat of it, the fingernails still ringed with carbon from the smith’s coal fire. His skin was raw-looking: scrubbed clean and scrubbed often. But the black grime was too ingrained.

She twined her fingers with his. Kestrel and Arin walked together through the passageway and the ghost of its old door, which her people had smashed through ten years before.

After that, Kestrel sought him out. She used the excuse of those lessons he had given her. She said that she wanted more. She acquired a number of menial skills, like how to blacken boots.

Arin was easy to find. Although raids on the countryside continued, he increasingly relied on lieutenants to lead the sorties. He spent more time at home.

“I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing,” Sarsine said.

“He’s giving officers under his command the chance to prove their worth,” Kestrel said. “He’s showing his trust in them and letting them build their confidence. It’s sound military strategy.”

Sarsine gave her a hard look.

“He’s delegating,” Kestrel said.

“He’s shirking . And for what , I’m sure you know.”

This struck a bright match of pleasure within Kestrel.

Like a match, it burned out quickly. She recalled her promise to Jess to make the Herrani pay.

But she did not want to think about that.

It occurred to her that she had never thanked Arin for bringing her piano here. She found him in the library and meant to say what she had come to say, yet when she saw him studying a map near the fire, lit by an upward shower of sparks as one log fell on another, she remembered her promise precisely because of how she longed to forget it.

She blurted something that had nothing to do with anything. “Do you know how to make honeyed half-moons?”

“Do I…?” He lowered the map. “Kestrel, I hate to disappoint you, but I was never a cook.”

“You know how to make tea.”

He laughed. “You do realize that boiling water is within the capabilities of anybody?”

“Oh.” Kestrel moved to leave, feeling foolish. What had possessed her to ask such a ridiculous question anyway?

“I mean, yes,” Arin said. “Yes, I know how to make half-moons.”

“Really?”

“Ah … no. But we can try.”

They went into the kitchens. A glance from Arin cleared the room, and then it was only the two of them, dumping flour onto the wooden worktable, Arin palming a jar of honey out of a cabinet.

Kestrel cracked an egg into a bowl and knew why she had asked for this.

So that she could pretend that there had been no war, there were no sides, and that this was her life.

The half-moons came out as hard as rocks.

“Hmm.” Arin inspected one. “I could use these as weapons.”

She laughed before she could tell herself it wasn’t funny.

“Actually, they’re about the size of your weapon of choice,” he said. “Which reminds me that you’ve never said how you dueled at Needles against the city’s finest fighter and won.”

It would be a mistake to tell him. It would defy the simplest rule of warfare: to hide one’s strengths and weaknesses for as long as possible. Yet Kestrel told Arin the story of how she had beaten Irex.

Arin covered his face with one floured hand and peeked at her between his fingers. “You are terrifying. Gods help me if I cross you, Kestrel.”

“You already have,” she pointed out.

“But am I your enemy?” Arin crossed the space between them. Softly, he repeated, “Am I?”

She didn’t answer. She concentrated on the feel of the table’s edge pressing into the small of her back. The table was simple and real, joined wood and nails and right corners. No wobble. No give.

“You’re not mine,” Arin said.

And kissed her.

Kestrel’s lips parted. This was real, yet not simple at all. He smelled of woodsmoke and sugar. Sweet beneath the burn. He tasted like the honey he’d licked off his fingers minutes before. Her heartbeat skidded, and it was she who leaned greedily into the kiss, she who slid one knee between his legs. Then his breath went ragged and the kiss grew dark and deep. He lifted her up onto the table so that her face was level with his, and as they kissed it seemed that words were hiding in the air around them, that they were invisible creatures that feathered against her and Arin, then nudged, and buzzed, and tugged.

Speak, they said.

Speak, the kiss answered.

Love was on the tip of Kestrel’s tongue. But she couldn’t say that. How could she ever say that, after everything between them, after fifty keystones paid into the auctioneer’s hand, after hours of Kestrel secretly wondering what it would sound like if Arin sang while she played, after wrists bound together and the crack of her knee under a boot and Arin confessing in the carriage on Firstwinter night.