The Winner's Crime by Marie Rutkoski Read Free Book Online Page B

to
    escort her to a tea party. Pride had kept him from wincing as
    he moved. The fi ery stripes on his back split and bled. She
    wouldn’t see, he would not let her see, he would not give
    her the satisfaction.
    Nonetheless, he searched for a sign that she’d even
    heard of the fl ogging. His gaze raked her face, fi nding noth-
    ing there but a discomfort to be so scrutinized.
    She didn’t know. He was certain he would have been
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    able to tell. Guilt was an emotion she was bad at hiding.
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    Across the distance, where she was sitting on a bro-
    cade divan, teacup and saucer in hand, she dropped his
    CRIME
    gaze, turned to a lord, and laughed at something he had
    ’S
    said.
    Her innocence was maddening.
    She should know. She should know what her steward
    THE WINNER
    had done. She should know it to be her fault whether she’d
    given the order or not— and whether she knew or not. In-
    nocent? Her? Never.
    He pulled the high collar of his shirt higher to hide a
    lash that had snaked up his neck.
    He did not want her to know.
    He did not want her to see.
    But:
    Look at me, he found himself thinking furiously at her.
    Look at me .
    She lifted her eyes, and did.
    The memories were strange, they were a network of lashes,
    laid one on top of the other, burning traces that might have
    resembled a pattern if it wasn’t clear that they had been left
    by a wild hand with no restraint. The lashes were lit with
    feeling.
    He was stinging, stinging.
    “Arin,” Tensen said during their meeting with the Her-
    rani trea sur er, who was even grimmer than usual, “where is
    your head? You’ve heard nothing I’ve said.”
    “Say it again.”
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    “The emperor has had a new coin minted to celebrate
    SKI
    O
    the engagement.”
    Arin didn’t want to hear about the engagement.
    “I think that you should see it,” Tensen said.
    Arin took the coin, and didn’t see what ever it was that
    MARIE RUTK
    Tensen thought he should see.
    Tensen told him the story of Jadis.
    Arin dropped the coin.
    He remembered.
    He remembered changing.
    He saw Kestrel give a fl ower to a baby everyone else ig-
    nored. He watched her lose cheerfully at cards to an old Val-
    orian woman whom society giggled about, not even bothering
    to hush their words, for she was too senile, they said, to
    understand.
    Arin had stood behind Kestrel during that card game.
    He’d seen her high hand.
    He saw her honesty with him. She off ered it like a cup
    of clear water that he drank deep.
    Her tears, glinting in the dark.
    Her fi erce creature of a mind: sleek and sharp- clawed
    and utterly unwilling to be caught.
    Arin saw Kestrel step between him and punishment as
    if it meant nothing, instead of everything.
    “Arin?” Tensen called through the memories.
    Arin remembered the sunken days after he’d seen her
    last, after she’d handed him her emperor’s decree of Her-
    rani freedom and told him about her engagement. “Congrat-
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    ulate me,” she’d said. He hadn’t believed it. He had begged.
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    She had’nt listened. “Oh, Arin,” Sarsine said to him during
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    the time when he wouldn’t leave the rooms Kestrel had
    lived in. “What did you expect?”
    CRIME
    Grief. It had all come to this.
    ’S
    “Arin,” Tensen said to him again, and Arin could no
    longer ignore him. “For the last time, are you going to the
    capital or not?”
    THE WINNER
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    6
    OFFICIALS AND ARISTOCRATS BEGAN TO
    arrive in the capital in preparation for the ball. Every day
    more sets of fi ne horses were brought into the imperial
    stables, limping from the bitter