The Winner's Kiss (47 page)

A gentle feeling flowed into her. She caught his erratic hands and held them between hers. “No,” she said. “You didn't.”

That letter.

She read and reread it, in the high summer grasses on the sides of the road, at night by lamplight. The pen's ink had aged, gone brownish. She imagined her father reading under the sun during the campaign. Spots of the paper had a waxy transparency. The residue of oil, used to polish a weapon? Her father liked to clean his own dagger. She searched for meaning in the smudges of dirty fingerprints under certain words, but nothing, really, was evidence of anything except the urgent scrawl of her own handwriting. The bottom half of the letter was warped with rusted blood, the final sentences lost. Kestrel couldn't remember what she'd written there. Like a worn map, the letter folded instantly under the slightest pressure.

The paper looked quiet in her hand, tucked in on itself. Kestrel wanted to reach through time and comfort the girl who'd written it, even if the only comfort she could offer would be understanding. She wanted to imagine a different story, one where her father read the letter and understood it, too, and returned it to his daughter, telling her that she should never have had to write anything like that.
I love you. I'd do anything for you,
the letter said, and it was hard for Kestrel to keep from crumpling the paper in her fist when she realized that these words were what she had always wanted her father to say to her.

Three
days from the city, the army had made camp for the night. Kestrel went to the healers' tent.

Her father noticed the moment she entered. He flinched, then met her gaze, and she didn't know what was right to feel—the sort of soft, heavy comfort that touched her at the sight of her father, simply because he was her father, or the rage in her chest, or how she wanted to mourn his maimed arm, and wanted to tell him that he deserved it.

“Why did you keep my letter?” she asked.

He said nothing.

She asked again.

He turned his face from her.

She kept asking until she heard her voice crumbling and thought that Risha had been wrong when she'd said that forgiveness was like mud, as if it could take what ever shape you needed.

It was hard; it was stone.

She walked away from the tent.

Verex said that he and Risha were leaving. They wanted to ride to the eastern plains, and maybe sail from Dacra's eastern coast to see what lay in the unexplored waters beyond. He had no wish to inherit the empire. He asked that rumors of his death be spread.

He saw Kestrel's fallen expression. “You think I should go back to the capital instead, and become emperor.”

“Honestly, I don't want you to go anywhere. I'll miss you.”

His brown eyes warmed. “I'll visit. Risha, too. She wants
to
train you in your weapon of choice until you feel properly dangerous.”

Kestrel opened her mouth to say that'd be a useless effort, but then it struck her that it might not be, and whether it was or wasn't didn't matter as much as the happiness the offer gave her. “I like her, too.”

They were leaning against the trunk of a very broad tree near the encampment. White spores from its flowering branches floated down. She wondered if a Herrani would think this the sign of a god, and if so, which one.

“I'm sorry,” she told Verex.

He knew what she meant. “I had no love for my father. He certainly had none for me.”

“Still.”

“I'm not sure what else you could have done. If anything . . .” He slouched against the bark. “I feel worst about being relieved.” A spore landed on the tip of his boot, then floated away. In a low voice, he added, “And a bit of a coward. I worry that if I became emperor, I'd become like him.”

“Not you. Never.”

“And guilty, because I'm abandoning a country that might collapse on itself. It's not clear who'll rule now.”

“I bet you have some ideas. I can think of a few senators who'd claw their way to power. Or the captain of the guard. I don't remember every one at court, though, or who owes whom, or bears a grudge. You could give me a clearer picture, and I could . . . well, keep an eye on the situation in the capital.”

He raised his brows. “A spy again, Kestrel?”

“Spymaster, maybe.”

He
picked up a thin, fallen twig and snapped it into tiny sticks.

“I think Arin needs one,” she said.

“You'd be the best. I wish, however, that you didn't always risk yourself. You're too fond of a gamble.”

She shrugged helplessly. “I am who I am.”

Affection tinged his smile. Then he sobered and said, “I used to believe I could stomach taking my father's place. But Risha would be miserable. I would, too.”

Kestrel, suddenly fierce, said, “Then be happy.”

“I will,” he said, “if
you
will.”

Feathery white fluff came down from the tree as he described the political intricacies of the Valorian court, and then told her about how the puppy he'd given her at court had grown into an enormous, sweet-tempered dog living with a family in the foothills of the Valorian mountains. There were small children who adored her, even when she chewed their shoes. Maris—a young courtier Kestrel had intensely disliked until she found that actually, she didn't—had married well and was gleefully smug about it. As for Jess, Verex said that she had gone to the southern isles at the start of the war. “I wish I knew more,” he said.

Kestrel longed to see her. She wondered if she ever would, and if they could mend the things wrong between them.

“I saw you go to the healers' tent the other day,” Verex said.

“He won't talk with me.”

“Try again.”

When
Risha and Verex left, two days before the army would reach the city, Kestrel kept her smile as she kissed their cheeks. At first it was hard to be strong in that way, and not let the farewell overwhelm her. But then she noticed Roshar, who had avoided his little sister since her return as if afraid of her, lingering nearby. Risha approached him and whispered something Kestrel couldn't hear. Roshar's expression eased. He didn't speak in reply; he simply clasped Risha's hands and kissed them.

Kestrel thought that maybe she had been wrong, and Risha had been wrong, about forgiveness, that it was neither mud nor stone, but resembled more the drifting white spores. They came loose from the trees when they were ready. Soft to the touch, but made to be let go, so that they could find a place to plant and grow.

She went to the tent again.

This time, her father spoke before she could. “Give me your dagger.”

Hot tears rushed to her eyes. “Don't you dare.”

“Unbind my hand. Give me your dagger.”

“No.”

“Just this one last thing.”

“You can't ask me to help you kill yourself.”

He no longer looked at her.

“Why did you keep my letter?” she asked yet again.

“You know why.”

“What, regret?”

“That's not the right word.”

“
Then
what
?”

“There are no words.”

“Find some.”

“I can't.”

“Now.”

He swallowed. “I want to. I didn't know . . . how everything would become impossible. This is what happens when you destroy the thing most precious to you.”

“You
chose
to do it.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He didn't say, but his eyes became clear hard shells, and she knew that it hadn't been only his code of honor that had made him tell the emperor of her treason. Her father had wanted to hurt her, because she had hurt him.

He said, “It didn't seem real when I was doing it. Like I wasn't awake.”

“Do you know,” she whispered, “what they did to me in the mines?”

He closed his eyes.

She described it. He let her. Water slid from beneath his eyelids.

“Kestrel,” he said finally. “You know that there is only one solution. I can't be a father to you.”

“But you
are.
”

“There's no place for me here. Am I to be a prisoner for the rest of my life?”

This had been discussed—loudly. Roshar was in favor of a public execution. Arin had lost his temper in a way that
Kestrel
hadn't seen in a long time, had shouted back that the general's fate was Kestrel's choice alone.

“I don't know,” Kestrel told her father.

There was a silence.

She said, “How can you not even ask for forgiveness?”

“Impossible.”

“Ask.”

For a long time, he said nothing. “I can't ask for something no one could give. I ask for mercy.”

Her vision blurred, and Kestrel knew that forgiveness and mercy would take years for them both, and that she needed every single minute of that time.

She said that she still loved him, because it was true. He owed her better answers than the ones he had given, and even if he never had them, it was her right to keep asking. She would never give him her dagger. “I tried so hard to live in your world,” she told him. “Now it's your turn to live in mine.”

Chapter 42

Arin should have expected it, but somehow didn't.

So many flowers. All the summer blooms must have been cut from the gardens, which would be naked for weeks. When the army came through the gate, a roar vibrated the stone walls, and Arin flinched in surprise, hands tightening on the reins, for the tiniest moment believing that the sound meant danger. Then he saw the glowing faces of people thronging the streets and thought,
Ah, happy.
Which made him happy, and as Kestrel smiled at him from her seat on Javelin, a pink petal clinging to her cheek, it occurred to him that he might have to grow comfortable with happiness, because it might not abandon him this time.

Then Kestrel's head turned, and he saw her survey the Dacran-Herrani army unfurled behind them in Lahirrin's main street, a tension in the line of her mouth. She said, “I'm not sure it's wise to bring all the soldiers within the city walls.”

“
This is every one's victory. Every one must be honored.”

“I know.”

“But?”

“Our eastern allies outnumber us.”

He knew what she was getting at. “They always have.”

“If they want this country, it'd be easy for them to take it . . . especially from within the city walls.”

Arin glanced at Roshar, who'd ridden ahead to meet the queen. “I trust him.”

“Yes, I know.”

Arin paused his horse. Javelin stopped, too. Flowers flurried down around them. He said, “It would hurt me to suspect him.”

“That's why I do it for you.”

A cloth dropped onto his head from above, from a window of one of the tall, narrow homes near the market. Startled, blind, Arin tugged it from his face, his horse shying beneath him.