Marie Rutkoski - The Winner's Curse

“Yes. Aren’t you … glad? I thought you would want this.”

Enai’s hands fell to her lap. “Where would I go?”

Kestrel saw, then, what Enai did: the difficulties of an old Herrani woman alone—however free—in her occupied country. Where would she sleep? How would she earn enough to eat, and who would employ her when Herrani couldn’t employ anyone and Valorians had slaves?

Kestrel used some of the inheritance settled on her after her mother’s death to have the cottage built.

Today, Enai scowled when she opened the door. “Where have you been? I must be nothing to you, that you should ignore me for so long.”

“I’m sorry.”

Enai softened, tucking a scraggly lock of Kestrel’s hair back into place. “You certainly are a sorry sight. Come inside, child.”

A small cooking fire chittered on the hearth. Kestrel sank into a chair before it, and when Enai asked if she was hungry and was told no, the Herrani gave Kestrel a searching look. “What’s wrong? Surely by now you’re used to being beaten by Rax.”

“There is something I am afraid to tell you.”

Enai waved this away as nonsense. “Haven’t I always kept your secrets?”

“It’s not a secret. Practically everyone knows.” What she said next sounded small for something that felt so big. “I went to the market with Jess more than a week ago. I went to an auction.”

Enai’s expression grew wary.

“Oh, Enai,” Kestrel said. “I’ve made a mistake.”

Arin was satisfied. He was given more orders for weapons and repair, and took the absence of complaints from the guard to mean his work was valued. Though the steward frequently demanded more horseshoes than could possibly be necessary, even for stables so large as the general’s, Arin didn’t mind that rote and easy labor. It was mind numbing. He imagined his head was filled with snow.

As his newness to the general’s slaves wore away, they spoke more with him during meals, grew less cautious with their words. He became such a common feature in the stables that he was soon ignored by the soldiers. He overheard accounts of training sessions outside the city walls. He listened, knuckles whitened as they gripped a horse’s bridle, to awed tales of ten years ago, of how the general, then a lieutenant, had razed a path of destruction from this peninsula’s mountains to its port city and brought an end to the Herran war.

Arin unclenched his fingers, one by one, and went about his business.

Once, at dinner, Lirah sat next to him. She was shy, sending sidelong looks of curiosity his way well before she asked, “What were you, before the war?”

He lifted a brow. “What were you ?”

Lirah’s face clouded. “I don’t remember.”

Arin lied, too. “Neither do I.”

He broke no rules.

Other slaves might have been tempted, during the walk through the orange grove that stood between the forge and the slaves’ quarters, to pluck a fruit from the tree. To peel it hurriedly, bury the bright rind in the soil, and eat. Sometimes as Arin ate his meals of bread and stew he thought about it. When he walked under the trees, it was almost unbearable. The scent of citrus made his throat dry. But he didn’t touch the fruit. He looked away and kept walking.

Arin wasn’t sure which god he had offended. The god of laughter, maybe. One with an idle, cruel spirit who looked at Arin’s unprecedented streak of good behavior, smiled, and said it couldn’t last forever.

It was almost dusk and Arin was returning from the stables to the slaves’ quarters when he heard it.

Music. He went still. His first thought was that the dreams he had almost every night were spooling out of his head. Then, as notes continued to pierce through wavering trees and dart over the whir of cicadas, he realized that this was real.

It was coming from the villa. Arin’s feet moved after the music before his mind could tell them to stop, and by the time his mind understood what was happening, it was enchanted, too.

The notes were quick, limpid. They struggled with each other in gorgeous ways, like crosscurrents at sea. Then they stopped.

Arin looked up. He had reached a clearing in the trees. The sky grayed into purple.

Curfew was coming.

He had almost regained his senses, had almost turned back, when a few low notes stole into the air. The music now came in slow strokes, in a different key. A nocturne. Arin moved toward the garden. Past it, ground-floor glass doors burned with light.

Curfew had come and gone, and he didn’t care.

He saw who was playing. The lines of her face were illuminated. She frowned slightly, leaned into a surging passage, and dappled a few high notes over the troubled sound.

Night had truly fallen. Arin wondered if she would lift her eyes, but wasn’t worried he would be seen in the garden’s shadows.

He knew the law of such things: people in brightly lit places cannot see into the dark.

Yet again, the steward stopped Kestrel before she could leave the villa. “Going into the city?” he said, blocking the garden door. “Don’t forget, my lady, that you need—”

“An escort.”

“The general gave me orders.”

Kestrel decided to irritate Harman as much as he did her. “Then send for the blacksmith.”

“Why?”

“To serve as my escort.”

He started to smile, then realized she was serious. “He is unsuitable.”

She knew that.

“He’s sullen,” Harman said. “Unruly. I understand he broke curfew last night.”

She did not care.

“He simply does not look the part.”

“See to it that he does,” she said.

“Lady Kestrel, he is trouble. You are too inexperienced to see it. You don’t see what’s right in front of you.”

“Do I not? I see you. I see someone who has ordered our blacksmith to make hundreds of horseshoes over the two weeks he has been here, when his primary value to us is weapons making, and when only a fraction of the horseshoes made can be found in the stables. What I do not see is where those surplus shoes have gone. I imagine I might find them on the market, sold for a nice profit. I might find them transformed into what is no doubt a lovely watch.”

Harman’s hand went to the gold watch chain that trailed out of his pocket.

“Do as I say, Harman, or you will regret it.”

Kestrel could have sent Arin to the kitchens upon their arrival at Jess’s house. Once indoors, she had no official need of an escort. But she told him to remain in the parlor while she and Jess sat, drinking chilled osmanth tea and eating hibiscus cakes with peeled oranges. Arin stood stiffly against the far wall, the dark blue of his clothes blending with a curtain. Yet she found him hard to ignore.

He had been dressed to society’s expectations. The collar of his shirt was high, the mark of Herrani aristocratic fashion before the war. All male house slaves wore them. But they did not, if they were wise, also wear expressions of obvious resentment.

At least his long sleeves hid the muscle and scars that showed a decade’s worth of labor. This was a relief. Kestrel thought, however, that the slave was hiding more than that. She watched him out of the corner of her eye. She had a theory.

“The Trenex cousins are at it again,” said Jess, and began describing their latest feud.

Arin looked bored. Of course he would, as someone with no understanding of the Valorian conversation. Yet Kestrel suspected he would look the same way even if he were following everything said.

And she thought that he was.

“I swear,” Jess continued, fiddling with the earrings Kestrel had bought that day in the market. “It’s only a matter of time before one of the cousins is dead and the other must pay the death-price.”