The Winner's Curse by Marie Rutkoski Read Free Book Online

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.

 
    9
     
    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