She swam out of the murk.
She was sore—shoulders and ribs and stomach especially. But the spasms that had racked her body were gone. Everything was impossibly soft. The feather bed. Her thin shift. Clean skin. The tender give of the pillow beneath her cheek. She blinked, heard the short sweep of her eyelashes against the pillow’s fabric. Her hair lay loose, smooth. It had been disgusting when she’d arrived here. She remembered Sarsine working oiled fingers through it. “Cut it off,” Kestrel had said. She’d felt disjointed and eerie as the words left her dry lips, like she wasn’t really speaking but echoing something she’d already said.
“Oh no,” Sarsine had replied. “Not this time.”
Cut it off. Yes. There had been another time. Then, there’d been a tangle of myriad little braids beneath her fingers, and she’d hated the feel of them … because of the ghost of an unexpected pleasure … yet what kind of pleasure, and why it had vanished, her mind refused to say.
You might regret cutting your hair, a society lady like you, Sarsine had said in this other, earlier time.
Please. I can’t bear it.
Sarsine unsnarled the dense clumps left by the prison camp. The movement of fingers in Kestrel’s hair made her dizzy. She’d gagged, and was sick all over again.
Now, puzzling through this, Kestrel touched a ribbon of hair on the pillow. She’d lost track of its color in the prison.
Familiar. Dark blonde. A little reddish. It had been a more fiery hue when she was little. Warrior red, her father had said, tweaking a braid. She suspected that he’d been disappointed to see it darken over time.
She sat up—too swiftly. Her sight dimmed. She got light-headed.
“Ah,” said a voice.
Her vision cleared. Sarsine stretched up from a chair (dove-gray wood, upholstery the color of matte pearl. This, too: familiar) and padded to a small table that held a covered tureen. Sarsine ladled steaming broth into a cup and brought it to her. “Hungry?”
Kestrel’s stomach growled. “Yes,” she said, marveling at such a simple thing as normal hunger. She drank, and felt immediately exhausted. The cup hung limp in her hands. “How long?” she managed to say.
“Since you’ve been here? Two days.”
The windows were curtained and glowed with daylight.
“You’ve been fitful,” Sarsine said, “and very ill. But I think”—the woman touched Kestrel’s cheek—“that we’ve turned a corner.”
This woman was good, Kestrel thought. All brisk confidence. Firm, matter-of-fact, with an undercurrent of care. A crease of worry about the eyes. Genuine, maybe.
“You need some solid sleep,” Sarsine said. “Can you try?”
Kestrel liked this, too: how Sarsine knew that something that should be easy wasn’t easy. It was true that wake and sleep in the past days (two, she reminded herself) had been broken and shuffled. She glanced up into Sarsine’s eyes. Then stared. She saw clearly now what she hadn’t noticed before. Her heart thumped.
They were the exact same color. Gray, like fine rain. Heavy black lashes. His eyes.
Her mouth, too. Not quite the same shape. But the cut of the lower lip, the corner lifted in the smallest of smiles …
“Well?” Sarsine said gently, taking the empty cup, which had become heavier than stone.
Kestrel reached for Sarsine’s free hand and gripped it. She steadied under the unwavering gray gaze. Not right, part of her insisted. Not right to seek him in this woman’s face. To seek him at all. But Kestrel did, she couldn’t help doing it, and when sleep opened beneath her she wasn’t afraid to fall into it.
* * *
It was night when she woke again. The lamp burned low. A large shadow lurked in the chair. Long, trousered legs stretched out, boots still tightly laced. His dark head crooked awkwardly against the carved trim of the chair’s back.
Clean, asleep. Hard lines softer now. Face shaven. That scar.
He was too clean. Close enough that she could smell him. He smelled strange: vinegar and orange and … lye?
His eyes cracked open. Hazy for the length of one drawn breath. Then alert in the lamplight. He watched her watch him. He didn’t move.
Her rabbit heart beat fast. She flickered between distrust and trust and an emotion less easy to name.
“Go back to sleep,” he murmured.
She closed her eyes. Her rabbit heart slowed, curled up in its warren, and seemed to become fully itself: warm fur, soft belly. A thrum of breath in the dark.
* * *
When she woke again, the curtains were wide open. Midday. Yellow light. The pearl-colored chair was empty.
An unpleasant bolt shot through her. She didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but it made her feel small.
She pushed herself up. A mirror stood on a nearby dressing table. Kestrel slipped from the bed: hollow, unsteady. The dressing table and its chair weren’t so nearby after all. The distance between her and them yawned wide. When she reached the chair, she dropped down into it.
The girl in the reflection looked so shocked that Kestrel’s first instinct was to touch her. To reassure. Fingertips met. The mirror was cool.
“Planning on breaking it?” said a voice.
Kestrel’s hand fell, and her gaze jerked away to find Sarsine standing behind her in the open doorway. Kestrel hadn’t been alone after all. The woman’s expression had the thoughtful cast of someone who’d been watching for a while. She carried a bundle of fabric in her arms.
“That’s not me,” Kestrel said.
Sarsine draped the fabric (a dress) over the back of the pearl-gray chair. She came close and rested a hand on Kestrel’s shoulder—warmly, yet at a careful distance from the raised marks she could probably see on Kestrel’s back through her shift.
Kestrel glanced again at the too-thin girl with the sunken eyes. Cracked lips. The knobs of her clavicle.
“Here,” Sarsine said, and gathered Kestrel’s hair. She wove a quick, practical braid.
“He did that,” Kestrel said suddenly. He had braided her hair, before. That (that?) was the unnamed, lost pleasure she had tried to remember. He had taken his time. A sensual slowness. The brush of his thumb against the nape of her neck. Mesmerizing. Then later, the next morning: all those little braids transformed into miserable knots.
“What?” Sarsine tied the braid with a ribbon.
“Nothing.”
Sarsine met her eyes in the mirror, but said only, “Come, let’s get you dressed.”
“To do what?”
“To look more like yourself.” Sarsine pulled her to her feet.
The dress was too loose. But it fit well in the shoulders and was the perfect length. The fabric. That pattern of sprigged flowers. “This is mine.”
“Yes.”
“But this isn’t my home.”
Sarsine’s fingers paused in their buttoning. “No.”
“Then what am I doing here? Where did you get this?”
Sarsine fastened the last button. “How much do you remember?”
“I don’t know.” She was frustrated. “How am I supposed to know how much ? For that, I’d have to know what I’ve forgotten. You tell me.”
“Better if you asked someone else.”
Kestrel knew whom she meant. There it was again: his fingers sliding through her hair. It was true, what she’d suspected on the tundra was true. A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise.
“No,” Kestrel told Sarsine. “I trust you.”
Sarsine knelt to put slippers on her feet. “Why?”
“You don’t want anything from me.”
“Who says I don’t? A maid might seek any number of things from her mistress.”
“You’re not my maid.”
Sarsine glanced up.
“Why are you doing this?” Kestrel asked. “Why are you kind to me?”
Sarsine dropped her hands to her skirted lap. She worried a thumb over the opposite palm. Then she got to her feet and helped Kestrel to a full-length floor mirror. Kestrel, fully tired now, and confused by a number of conflicting things, let herself be led.
“There,” Sarsine said, once Kestrel stood before the reflection. “You look almost like a proper Valorian lady. That’s what you are. When I first saw you, I hated you.”
Kestrel stared at herself. She didn’t see what was worth hating. She didn’t see much of anything. Just a shadow of a girl in a nice dress. She whispered, “Am I despicable?”
Sarsine’s smile was sad. “No.”
There was a silence that Kestrel didn’t want to break, because it seemed, for that moment, that there was a downy safety in not deserving hatred. Maybe she didn’t need to be anything else. Maybe it was all a person needed to be.
Sarsine said, “Almost eleven years ago, your people conquered this country. They enslaved us. You were rich, Kestrel. You had everything you could want. You were happy.”
Kestrel’s brow furrowed. She recognized some of what Sarsine had said, saw it far off, hazy in the distance. But …
It was want, she realized. And happy.
“I don’t know every detail,” Sarsine said. “What I do know is that last summer, you bought Arin in the market.”
“So it’s true.”
“You won him at an auction and brought him to your house. But the auctioneer, a man called Cheat—”
Kestrel felt an ugly pang.
“—wanted you to win. Arin did, too. Your father is the highest-ranking general in the Valorian army. Arin was a spy for the Herrani rebellion. He was crucial. Nothing could have been done without him. Or you. You gave him useful information, though you didn’t mean to. You wouldn’t have done it if you’d understood what Arin was after and what he’d do with what you told him. Valorians were attacked all over the city, taken by surprise, killed. Your friends, too.”
Tears on dead skin. A girl in a green dress. Poisoned purple lips. Kestrel swallowed.
“After the rebellion,” Sarsine said, “you were brought here.”
Kestrel’s voice came out strangled: “A prisoner.”
Sarsine pursed her mouth, but didn’t deny it. “You escaped. I’m not sure how. The next thing we knew, the Valorian army was here and we were under siege. But you came and presented Arin with a treaty.”
Heavy paper beneath her thumb. Snow floating onto her cheeks. White paper, white snow, white heart.
“It offered us our independence as a self-governed territory under the emperor’s rule. It seemed too good to be true. It was. Several months later, people in this city began to fall ill. I did, too. We were being slowly poisoned by tainted water from the aqueducts. The emperor wanted to kill us without risking any of his soldiers’ lives. We know this—and stopped it—because of you. You were passing information to Tensen, Arin’s spymaster in the capital. Arin didn’t know who Tensen’s source was. Tensen refused to name her, and instead called her by a code name: the Moth.
“You were caught. A Herrani groom in the mountains brought news that a woman in a prison wagon bound for the tundra had given him a moth and asked him to give it to Arin. Arin went for you. Here you are.”
Kestrel’s teeth were set, her shoulders stiff. She didn’t remember most of what Sarsine had said, wasn’t sure what to make of the few vague images that pulsed in her mind. She fought fatigue. “That’s crazy.”
“Implausible, I know.”
“A story.” Kestrel groped for the way to say it. “Like something out of books. Why would I do such things?”
It was you, she’d told him on the tundra. You’re the reason I was in that prison.
Yes.
Flatly, Kestrel said, “I sound very stupid.”
“You sound like the person who saved my life.” Sarsine touched three fingers to the back of Kestrel’s hand.
Kestrel remembered what that gesture meant. The knowledge opened inside her. The gesture was Herrani. It meant gratitude, or apology, or both.
She plucked at the loose dress. Her thoughts whirled. Her eyelids were heavy, lowering. She tried to imagine her former self. Enemy. Prisoner. Friend? Daughter. Spy. Prisoner again. “What am I now?”
Sarsine held both of Kestrel’s hands. “Whatever you want to be.”
What Kestrel wanted to be was asleep. She wavered to the nearest piece of furniture—a divan, but the blackness came too quickly for her to see it for what it was. It was just an object that wasn’t the floor. She surrendered herself to it and sank swiftly into sleep. A cushion. A drawn coverlet. A dress that had been hers.
* * *
Someone had moved her back into her bed. Not Sarsine.
It was dark, but a low-lit lamp had been left. The chair was empty.
She lay curled on her side. Her back had healed into a dull ache. A few deep grooves stung. On the tundra, she hadn’t noticed pain much while the drugs were still in her. Then they weren’t, and the sickness and craving had been worse than anything else.
The ache gnawed through her back, coming up through her heart. She eyed the empty chair.
It occurred to her that after the last time, when she’d woken in the night, he’d decided to keep a better distance.
It occurred to her that the cold, small thing she felt was abandonment.
Which should have made her queasy with anger at her own confusion. Who was she, that she would strike the person who had saved her, and then feel bereft at his absence?
She wasn’t a person, really, but two. The Kestrel from before and the one now, each grating against the other like halves of a split bone.
She turned onto her other side, faced the wall, and reached to touch, for the first time, the ridges on her back. Wincing flesh. Long, clotted scales. Repulsed, she withdrew her hand and tucked it close to her breast.
Go back to sleep, she commanded herself.
She didn’t need the nighttime drug anymore. Not exactly. Yet the thought of it made her throb with longing. If offered a cup, she’d gulp it down.
* * *
The following day (at least, Kestrel thought it was the following day. It seemed entirely possible that she might have slept straight through more than one night), Sarsine helped her walk to the breakfast room. The table bore ilea fruit, bread, tea, milk, a set of iron keys, and one other item, muslin-wrapped. Large. A clunky-looking shape. Set right next to the keys at the head of a plate.
“For you,” Sarsine said.
“Is it Ninarrith?” The word came to her, alien in her mouth. From the ancient Herrani tongue, she remembered, which was so old that it was its own language. No one spoke it, though a few words lingered. Before the war, Herrani used to give each other gifts on Ninarrith. A holiday.
“Not yet.” Sarsine peered at her.
“What?”
“It’s an odd thing for you to remember.”
“I can remember some things.”
“It’s been eleven years since we’ve celebrated Ninarrith.”
“What does the word mean?”
“It’s two words, joined together. For ‘hundred’ and ‘candles.’ The holiday marks the last day the gods walked among us. We celebrate the hope of their return.”
Kestrel pulled at the memory, drew it out, thick and slow. “My nurse. She was Herrani. I celebrated with her in secret.” She wondered what would have happened if they’d been caught. Fear puddled in her heart. But there was no one to catch her now, no one here who’d punish her. “I loved her.” Yet she couldn’t remember the woman’s name anymore. Kestrel’s fear condensed into loss. She tried to smile, felt it waver.
“The tea will get cold.” Sarsine bustled unnecessarily with the pot, and Kestrel was grateful to have a moment for her expression to be whatever it was without the burden of someone else’s gaze.
She told Sarsine, “I’d like to celebrate Ninarrith with you.”
“If we’re here come then,” the woman said darkly, but shook her head when Kestrel peered at her. “Go on. Take them.”
The keys were heavy.
“They’re for the house,” Sarsine said. “A full set.”
Their weight on her palm. Something she thought she should remember.
She set the keys aside. “And this?” She ran a finger down a crease in the muslin of the clunky, wrapped thing.
Sarsine lifted her brows—a little sardonically, Kestrel thought, although the edge of the woman’s expression appeared less to do with Kestrel and more to do with a knowledge Sarsine had and Kestrel didn’t. The black brows, their quality of curbed cynicism, dry amusement … again Kestrel recognized him in her. He’d looked at Kestrel like that, before. She wondered why she felt comfortable with Sarsine and not with him, and if that ease was despite the resemblance, or because of it.
“See for yourself,” Sarsine said.
It was a dagger, bright beneath the opened muslin. Nestled in its scabbard, hooked to a slim belt. The leather of the belt was sturdy yet supple, not made with any particular elegance but with an eye for durability and comfort. There were few holes for the buckle’s tongue: a sign that the maker was assured of the belt’s fit. The scabbard, like the belt, was clean and strong in design, not given to the fanciful, though the ferrule was more severely pointed than Kestrel had seen before (yes, she realized. She knew daggers well). Not so sharp that it’d be likely to hurt the bearer, but pointed enough to do damage if the scabbard were gripped in the fist and driven into an opponent. And the scabbard wasn’t entirely without decoration. Just below its throat was a symbol: two rings, one fitted inside the other, distinguishable only because the raised texture of each was different. The symbol was echoed on the dagger’s hilt, in the round of the pommel, which was weighted enough to kill if brought down on certain parts of the skull. The hilt—Kestrel wrapped her fingers around it—was a perfect fit for her hand, cross guards hooked to protect the fingers.
She pulled the blade free. It was very Valorian. Save for the straightened point and that unknown symbol, its every element showed the Valorian style, from the hooked cross guard to the double edge to the blade’s beveled shaft. The steel’s faint blue hue showed its quality, but Kestrel would have known it anyway. The dagger felt light in her grip, agile. Beautifully forged. Balanced. Fine in its proportions. Made by a master.
Kestrel touched a thumb to its edge. Blood sprang to the skin. “Gods,” Kestrel said, and sucked at the cut.
Sarsine laughed. “A convert now, are you?”
Kestrel was startled. She’d forgotten about Sarsine. She frowned, unsure why she’d said what she had. It had been the kick of instinct. Or maybe someone else’s instinct, rooted inside her, inhabiting a hidden space that made it feel natural for her to invoke gods she didn’t believe in. She pushed the blade back in, set the whole thing back on the table with a thunk.
“Why are you giving this to me?” The keys she understood. She was not meant to be a prisoner here, but a guest. More than a guest, if she read the gift rightly. Guests don’t have access to their host’s every room.
But the dagger …
“I could kill you with this,” she said. “Right now.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Sarsine still looked amused. “You’re hardly in fighting form.”
“That’s not the point.” It was starting to upset her a little, the keys and the dagger together. The way each gift, in its own way, showed a trust absolute.
“The thinking,” Sarsine said carefully, “was that you shouldn’t feel defenseless.”
Kestrel opened her mouth, then shut it, not realizing until then that this was how she had felt, and that the first emotion that had claimed her after falling under the visual spell of the dagger was a sense of security.
Sarsine said, “We—”
Kestrel looked at her sharply.
“I’m not worried that you’ll hurt someone else,” Sarsine said. The phrasing of the words indicated exactly what the worry had been—or maybe still was.
“I see.” Her mouth thinned. “I don’t need a dagger for suicide. But I wouldn’t do it. I’m no coward.”
“No one,” Sarsine said, “thinks that you are a coward.”
Kestrel took the sheathed dagger onto her lap, gripped it with both hands. It felt irrevocably hers. It would pain her to give it back. She thought from the way Sarsine looked at her that the other woman understood this. Kestrel relaxed her hold. The dagger was hers, and it was all right. She was trusted with a weapon, and that was right, too.
Sarsine drank her milk.
Kestrel said, “Is this dagger like the dresses?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“It was made for me. Do you have other things of mine from before, like the dresses? Like this?”
Sarsine hesitated, as if she wanted to speak but the words lodged in her throat. Finally, she said, “Your piano.”
The instrument rose before her eyes: black, massive, too large for her heart, which suddenly strained with desire. “Where?” she managed.
“Downstairs, in the salon.”
The surge of remembered music. The arch of her fingers. Glittering notes.
“I want it,” Kestrel said. “Now.”
“Honestly, I’m not sure you’d make it down the stairs.”
“But—”
“You could be carried, though not by me.”
“Oh.”
“You’re not that light.”
Kestrel was silent.
“Shall I arrange for it?”
She knew whom Sarsine would ask. “No.”
“Then eat your breakfast.”
She did, without another word.
* * *
Sometimes she’d step gingerly out onto her memory and it would creak and sway beneath her like a bridge that couldn’t bear her weight. She’d retreat into what she knew best: the prison. There, she’d learned to love the earth beneath her cheek. Dry, cool. The sunless smell of it. The way it heralded sleep. She’d drink the nighttime drug. She’d swallow and swallow. Then she’d drift, and love the guard who led her, and love the moment right before sleep, because it was only a moment, and in one mere moment she wouldn’t have to think about how she’d given in—and given up. She’d never had any other kind of life. This was all there was.
Sleep was there. It shoved her down. Pressed her lungs. The drug crept soft fingers across her mouth and shaped it into a loose smile.
* * *
No one stayed with her anymore at night. Not Sarsine. Not him. And she didn’t need company, she was no child. She wasn’t frightened by nightmares, or by the way she couldn’t remember them after she woke, like now.
Her fingers trembled as they reached for the low-burning lamp on the bedside table. She took the lamp. The keys. She pulled on a robe and made her way through the suite, through the sunroom, and out onto the rooftop garden. Her feet were bare on the egg-shaped pebbles. The darkness was velvety, and warm enough that Kestrel knew that she shouldn’t be cold.
She should know whether it was cold or warm.
She should know whether it was normal to be nervous. Would her pulse race like this if she were still the same person she used to be?
She tried the heavy keys on the ring until she found the one that fit into the door set into the opposite wall of the garden. Opened it. Saw another garden, just like hers. She tried to walk on the pebbles without making noise. Failed. It occurred to her that the pebbles were there for the very purpose of making noise. She thought about this, about why someone might want to hear another person coming, and this distracted her from the forgotten nightmare that seemed to have snapped her in two.
She felt like she was both her body and her shadow, like she was her own ghost.
She had done all this before. Had opened those doors, had crossed these twin gardens.
His sunroom was dark.
She opened its door anyway. Moved past the potted plants. Lamp lifted, she found the door to his suite. The hallway. Her footfalls were silent now, treading plush carpet. A set of silent rooms. The furnishings masculine in a way that didn’t look like what he would have chosen, yet suited him. Or what she knew of him.
Which was little.
The lamp lowered. She wasn’t sure what she was doing. Maybe she wanted to frighten him awake, to rip him out of sleep. Make him feel the way she’d felt when she’d woken minutes ago. She imagined screaming into his sleeping ear.
Or what if she woke him a different way? She seemed to see herself as if looking at a painting of a girl from a tale, kidnapped by a creature who showed his true form only at night. The girl held the lamp over the bed. Crept closer. A drop of hot oil fell to his bare shoulder. He woke.
Maybe Kestrel had come for answers. He had them … or pretended that he did.
Maybe this was a very bad idea.
She entered the room that she knew must be his bedroom.
It was empty. The bed was large and neatly made.
The windows, she realized now, were all shut. The air was stale. No one had been in this suite for days.
Her arm was tired. Her whole body was. She set down the lamp, the keys.
She touched the pillow. It was just a pillow. She touched the blanket. A blanket. The bed: a bed. Nothing more and nothing less than the thing she needed now. She sank into the bed. She told herself that she didn’t care what it meant that she did this.
She lay on her stomach because she no longer slept on her back. She pressed her face into the pillow. His scent was there. She was stupid to have come, yet didn’t have the strength to leave.
The ghost of him between the sheets. The shadow of her old self curled into the shadow of him.
* * *
Kestrel woke at dawn because she’d always woken at dawn in the prison. She saw where she was. She felt flat. The light was pink and pretty. Insulting.
It was habit, she told herself. That’s why she’d come here last night. There’d been no mystery, no tangle of reasons to untangle. It was simple. She’d gotten used to sleeping next to him on the tundra. She had been cold and he had been warm. Habits die hard. That was all.
But she felt humiliated when she slipped from his bed. This time, she did remember what she had dreamed.
She straightened the sheets and made everything as it had been. She made sure there was no trace of her presence when she left.
* * *
“So you’re his sister,” Kestrel said, some days later.
Sarsine had coaxed her into her suite’s sunroom. Kestrel’s skin looked amber in the light. As the heat sank in, she realized that she wasn’t sore anymore, except in the worst places. She wore the dagger. It rested against her thigh.
“No.” Sarsine laughed. “Nor his lover.”
Kestrel frowned, uneasy. She didn’t understand the laugh or Sarsine’s quick leap to something that hadn’t even been suggested.
“It’s what you asked when I first met you,” Sarsine explained. She blew a cooling ripple into her tea. “‘Sister, or lover?’ I’m his cousin.”
“Where is he?”
Sarsine made no reply—not, Kestrel thought, because she had no intention of giving one, but because she was finding her words, and in that pause Kestrel remembered his empty suite and no longer wanted to know the answer to her question. She shoved a new one into its place. “Why not his lover?”
Sarsine choked on her tea.
“Cousins sometimes marry,” Kestrel said.
“Arin? Gods, no.” She was still coughing.
Kestrel didn’t like her own impulse to keep opening and closing and opening again the subject of him.
“I love him,” Sarsine said, “but not like that. I was an orphan. My mother’s brother took me into his home. Arin’s parents were kind to me. His sister wasn’t. And Arin…” She shook droplets of spilled tea from her fingers, then stopped, thinking. “As a child, he was a little world unto himself. A reader. A dreamer. Skinny thing. Whenever I managed to convince him to come out of doors, he’d squint like he’d never seen the sun. But he’d come out to please me.
“I was in the countryside with my nurse when the Valorians conquered this city. My parents had an estate south of here. It was thought that I’d want to choose some of my things to be brought here before the country house was closed. The Valorian general—your father—attacked the city first. The countryside after. My nurse and I had tried to close up my parents’ house and hide inside. The shutters were ripped open.
“I don’t know what became of my nurse. I never saw her again. I was forced to work on my family farm. There’s work even a ten-year-old can do. Then I was sold to another country estate. It hurt to leave, though it had hurt to stay.
“I could make myself do what was wanted. Not everyone can. Arin couldn’t. Never for very long. But I wasn’t tied to a whipping post. I was good and sweet and I did things that maybe, in the end, were worse than punishment. One of my masters decided, eventually, to bring me to the city.
“Before the war, on my last day before I left this house to drive into the countryside with my nurse, Arin gave me a flower he’d pressed. It was pink, spread in a fan. I put it in a locket. I got into the carriage. Later, I lost the locket, lost the flower. But I remember it.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Sarsine looked at her in the too-strong light. “So that you will understand me.” She added, “And him.” She paused again. “You asked where he is.”
“I don’t care where he is.”
“He’s been away. He’s just come back.”
After these words, Sarsine abruptly took her leave.
The obviousness of Sarsine’s hint to go see him so annoyed Kestrel that she nearly did nothing. The annoyance grew, became larger than life. If Sarsine had put that pressed flower in Kestrel’s hand, she would have crushed it in her fist, would have been glad to see the arrowed pink flakes. She felt exactly the same as when she’d woken in his empty bed.
Ultimately, it was anger that got Kestrel to her feet and out the door.
* * *
As she strode down the hallway that led from his sunroom, and then into another chamber, she heard muffled thumps coming from the recesses of his suite. A short, metallic clatter. Quieter sounds.
Silence.
Then the quality of the silence seemed to shift. It changed the way a thought does: from soft idea to exploration to firm decision.
To footfalls, coming toward her.
Her pulse jumped. She had frozen in place. She held on to her anger … and somehow lost it when he appeared at the threshold of the room she had entered. He didn’t look like she’d expected. Boots off, jacket half undone. Grimy. Unshaven, the scar a white line cutting into the black.
Startled, he stared. Then smiled a little. The smile was sweet. It was so different from what she felt that it surprised her how two people in the same room could feel such different things. As she thought about this difference, it became clear to her that she no longer knew what she felt.
She recognized the rusted smears on his skin. It was easier to focus on this. Simpler to decode. She remembered that earlier, metallic clatter. He had come from war.
“Did you win?” she asked.
He laughed. “No.”
“Why is it funny that you lost?”
“It’s not that. It’s just … the question is very much like you.”
She lifted her chin, felt her body go hard again. “I’m not her. Not anymore. I’m not the person that you—” She shut her mouth.
“That I love?” he said quietly.
She made no reply. He looked down, rubbed at his dirty hands.
“Excuse me,” he said. He moved to leave the room, then hesitated, one finger on the curved wooden ripple of the doorjamb. “I’m coming back.” A note in his voice made her realize that it had been obvious to him that he’d come back, and that it hadn’t been to her, and that his pause had been from the understanding that what was obvious to him wasn’t obvious to her. “One moment. Please don’t go.”
“All right,” she said, surprising herself.
He left. Nervousness swarmed inside her.
She refused to be ruled by nervousness. That refusal held her there a little longer. Then: the realization that despite the way he’d looked, he’d had a kind of gentleness. It gentled her, and even if this was exactly what he had hoped, she found it hard to resent someone for being gentle.
She was still thinking about this when he returned. His jacket was changed for a fresh shirt. Soft shoes. Hands and face clean. A scrolled paper tucked under his arm. He unrolled it onto a small, octagonal table (delicate, with worked legs. For two. A breakfast table).
The paper was a map. “We lost Ithrya Island,” he said, pointing south. “It’s uninhabited, but…” He pressed a palm down on the buckling paper and looked up at her. “Do you want to know this?”
“Is there something wrong with me knowing?”
“No. But you might not like it. My people are at war with your people.”
Her people were the ones who’d held her captive. They had hurt her. She crossed her arms over her chest. “So?”
“Your father—”
“Don’t talk about my father.”
Her pulse was high again, stammering in her ears. His dark brows had gone up—his hand, too. The palm had risen off the map, fingertips still pinned down. His skin was clean, but the fingernails were ringed with black. Odd. She concentrated on that. As she did, she evened out. It calmed her to concentrate, and to find his blackened nails familiar. At least she could recognize familiarity, even if she couldn’t translate it. She said, “You didn’t wash your hands very well.”
He glanced down at his hand. It came entirely off the map. The paper curled up. “Oh.” He swept a thumb once across his nails. “That. That doesn’t come out for a long time.” His eyes went, strangely, to the dagger at her hip, then darted away, making her think that he was thinking of the battle he’d just been in.
She said, “Does losing this battle mean you’ll lose your war?”
“Maybe.”
“How many did you kill?”
He shrugged. He didn’t know.
“Does it bother you?”
He met her eyes. Slowly, he shook his head.
“Why not? Do you like killing?”
“They want my country.”
“So you do like it.”
“Lately, sometimes.”
“Why?”
“There are many reasons.”
“That’s no answer.”
“But you are one of my reasons, Kestrel. You don’t want to hear that. I think you might be pushing me to say something that will make you leave.”
This gave her pause. She thought of how painstakingly she had neatened his bedsheets to erase her presence.
“I don’t—” The words caught in her throat. She let herself sit at the table and studied a symbol carved onto its surface. The symbol of a god, probably. The Herrani had many. “I don’t understand why I’ve forgotten so much.”
“You were drugged.” There was something unspoken in his voice.
“You think it’s more than that.”
He took the other chair, but sat at a distance, his body turned from her, directed toward an eastern window, face in profile, scarred side hidden. As he spoke, it occurred to her that maybe he, too, felt like two people, that maybe everybody does, and that it’s not a question of whether one’s damaged, but of how easily or not that damage is seen.
She studied him. Captor, rescuer, culprit.
He kept talking. She began to listen. It was a terrible story, told softly, never stopping. He barely paused for breath. As he described the night of the Valorian invasion and himself as a child, she began to see how natural the reflex of self-blame was for him. Ingrained. Insidious.
You’re the reason I was in that prison.
Yes.
It occurred to her that he might have taken blame he didn’t deserve.
It occurred to her that she had already guessed this even before he’d begun telling his nakedly awful story.
And that maybe she had been cruel.
This thinking was not the same as trust. Still, she listened. After he finished, she listened to his silence.
He spoke again. “Maybe, for you, it’s not just the drugs. Maybe … there are things that you can’t bear to remember.” He glanced into her eyes, then away, and she saw that it wasn’t because he was afraid of letting her see how he could or could not bear his memories, but because he was afraid of what her own lost memories might be, and didn’t want to show this fear, for fear of frightening her.
She said, “I didn’t choose to forget.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. It wasn’t a false smile, but only as true as it could be. He spoke lightly, like some joke had been played upon them both. “I don’t choose to remember.” He shifted to face her fully. “May I ask you a question?”
She thought about it. She wasn’t sure.
“I’m not asking for information,” he hastened to say. “I don’t want anything. Or, I suppose I do want something, but it’s to understand. That’s different, isn’t it, from asking for a favor, or … an emotion?” He stopped, blocked by the difficulty of holding himself to honesty and finding the way language fails, sometimes, to get honesty right. “Maybe it’s not different. You don’t have to answer.”
“Just say it.”
“You’ve not wanted me to talk about what you can’t remember. Not to ask. Not to tell. You’re…” He didn’t say the words. Kestrel thought them anyway. Angry. Terrified. “Is it because you really don’t want to hear it, or … because you don’t want it to be me who tells you?”
“I want to ask a question of my own first.”
This took him aback. “Of course.”
“On the tundra, you said that it was your fault that I was in prison.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“How…?”
“Did you tell someone I was spying for Herran?”
He recoiled. “No. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t do that.”
“What exactly did you do?”
“I…”
“I have the right to know.”
“You lied,” he burst out. “You lied to me, and I believed you. I didn’t ask you to risk yourself. I never wanted you to do any of what you did. I never would have wanted this.” His mouth was tight, eyes wide: flooded with something hot and rich and hurt. “I had so many chances to see what you were doing. And I didn’t. I didn’t stop you. I didn’t help you. I despised you.”
She said, “I lied.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me my lies.”
“Gods.” He raked a hand through his hair. “You lied about the treaty. You agreed to marry someone else so that I could have a piece of paper. You tried to help the eastern plainspeople, yet let me think that you were responsible for their deaths. The way you acted. Selfish. Horrible. You worked for my spymaster and you lied about that, too, and he lied to me, and it makes me hate him now. I hate myself for not seeing it. He knew. He let you. You committed treason, Kestrel. How could you do that? You should be dead.” His voice lowered, dug in deep. “The worst—I don’t know—the worst is that you lied about—” He stopped himself, drawing a ragged breath. “You lied for a very long time.”
There was a silence. Slowly, Kestrel said, “I did all that for you.”
He flushed. “Maybe you had other reasons.”
“That’s the one you care about.”
“Yes.”
She warred with what to say. It was strange to talk about reckless choices she didn’t remember. It helped to see his anger, the way it blistered the surface of things. It was a relief not to be alone in her anger. It was folly, what her old self had done, but brave, too. She could see that. She could see how he saw it, and how it made things worse for him.
Easier, though, for her: to know she hadn’t always been this husk of a vanished person. Then harder, to glimpse who she’d been. She saw the great difference between that person and the one sitting in a chair because she was too weak to stand. Emotions whirlpooled inside her. “Your question.”
“Never mind.”
“I’ll tell you.”
He shook his head. “Not necessary.”
“It is you. It’s true, I haven’t wanted it to be you who tells me things I can’t recall. Not you.” She saw his flinch, and the effort to hide it. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Who are you, that you get to know so much about me that even I don’t know? Why do you get to tell me who I am? How did you get so much power? I have none. It’s not fair. You are unfair.” Her voice broke. “I am unfair.”
His expression changed. “Kestrel.”
She held her breath until her lungs ached. She couldn’t speak. Here was the truth, it peeled itself open: she was the reason she was in that prison. She had made some fatal, unknown mistake. Arin looked like a good culprit, but he wasn’t the right one.
She was. It had been her fault, hers alone.
He reached across the table. His warm hand dwarfed hers. She saw it through her swimming vision. Those black-rimmed nails.
Blacksmith.
A sudden understanding held her still. She became aware of the weight of the dagger at her hip. Her sight cleared. She looked at Arin. He looked young. And too careful, and worried, and uncertain, and … something new was emerging, she saw it. It changed the quality of his expression the way light changes everything. A small sort of hope.
“Maybe,” he said, “we could try being honest with each other.”
She wondered what was in her expression that hope would grow in his. She wondered what he saw. “Arin,” she said, “I like the dagger.”
He smiled.