She went swiftly through the dark house, her feet bare and noiseless on the tiles, the carpet, the steps. Up one flight, hand skimming the balustrade. At the landing, her palm spun around the newel. She went left. She knew Arin’s home well.
Knew it now, knew it then. She felt time layer. The present slipped over the past.
She’d never taken this path before. But she’d thought about it.
She flipped through the keys, found the right one, set it into the outermost door of Arin’s suite, and opened it.
She stepped into white light. It startled her, seemed hallucinatory, impossible, as if she’d dropped into a silver pond. But then she glanced up and saw a skylight above the entryway. The moon hung low and large. Though the oil lamp sconces were unlit, the hallway was almost as bright as day. At the other end of it: darkness.
A brief clinking sound came from the recesses of the suite.
She drew closer to the shadowed end of the hallway, passed through a dark receiving room. She barked her thigh against a console table and swore under her breath.
Another hallway, a turn. Then … a soft glow. A lamp.
A liquid sound. A muffled thump. Glass on wood?
She stepped into the lamplit room.
Arin looked up from where he sat. His fingers tightened around the glass in his hand. He stared.
She flushed, realizing that she’d forgotten to throw a robe over her thin nightdress.
Or had she forgotten? Had she not decided in some way too quick for thought that this was exactly what she’d wanted? She glanced down at the shift’s hem, which hit just below the knees. The cloth was as sheer as melted butter. Her flush deepened. She saw the expression on Arin’s face.
He glanced away. “Gods,” he said, and drank.
“Exactly.”
That brought his gaze back. He swallowed, winced, and said, “It’s possible that I’ve lost any claim to coherent thought, but I’ve no idea what you mean.”
“Those gods of yours.”
His dark brows were lifted. His eyes had grown round. The glass in his hand was a tumbler, the liquid a thumb’s width high and deep green. It looked like the blood of leaves. He cleared his throat. Hoarsely, he said, “Yes?”
“Did you pray to them?”
“Kestrel, I am praying to them right now. Very hard, in fact.”
She shook her head. “Did you pray to your”—she rummaged through her memory—“god of souls?” She was ready to believe in a supernatural reason. It would explain his power over her.
He coughed, then gave a short, rasping laugh. “That god doesn’t listen to me.” He set the tumbler next to the carafe on the table. He paused, thinking. In a new, slow tone, he said, “Except perhaps now.” He dropped his cheek into an open palm and rubbed fingers into one closed eye. He nodded at the chair across the table from him. “Would you like to sit?”
Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure she actually wanted to get closer to him. Her pulse had gone erratic. “I’m fine here.”
“I’d really rather.”
“If I make you uncomfortable, why don’t you leave?”
He laughed again. “Ah, no. No, thank you. Here.” He slid the glass across the table. The remaining liquid sloshed but didn’t spill. When she sat, curious (what would the blood of leaves taste like?), he said, “You might want to try only a bit first.”
“That’s not wine.”
“It decidedly is not.”
“What is it?”
“An eastern liquor. Roshar gave it to me. He said that if you drink enough of it, the dregs start to taste like sugar. I suspect a prank.”
“But you’ve no head for drink.”
He looked as startled as she felt. “Of all the things, you remember that.”
She had remembered something else, too, as she’d tried to sleep. She’d come to ask him about it, but the words stuck in her throat. Instead, she appraised him. “You seem clear-minded enough.”
“It’s early. Still, I don’t know. This conversation feels just shy of a delusion.”
She fiddled with the glass. “I want to understand a few things.”
“Ask me.”
She wasn’t yet ready to share what she remembered. She set the glass down. “What did you tell the queen?”
“I told Inisha about you.”
“What, exactly?”
He hesitated. “I’m afraid to say.”
“I want you to.”
“You might leave.”
“I won’t.”
He stayed silent.
She said, “I give you my word.”
“I told her that I belong to you, and no other. I said that I was sorry.”
She couldn’t help the rush of pleasure … and jealousy. His words did make her want to leave. She felt so unalterably his. It was bewildering, because she didn’t know him, not really, and he knew two halves of her that she couldn’t fit together.
He was waiting for her to speak. He was so still. She realized he was holding his breath.
She said, “That’s political suicide.”
He smiled a little.
“How did she respond?”
“She said, ‘You overestimate your importance.’”
“Is that why you’re drinking?”
“Kestrel, you know why I am drinking.”
She looked into the shadowed corners of the room. Talking with him was like having a flower unfold inside her chest, then close up tight. Creep open. Collapse in on itself. Voice low, she said, “Why do you call her Inisha? That’s not her name.”
“It’s … her little name.” The pause made Kestrel think that he’d been translating a Dacran term in his mind before speaking it, but also that he’d been translating her question, and recognizing the implied intimacy it exposed between him and the queen. He held Kestrel’s eyes. “There never would have been anything between her and me if I’d known the truth about you. I should have known it. I can’t forgive myself for not knowing it. As it was … yesterday, in the garden, you asked if I used her for political gain. I didn’t. I used her to forget about you. You probably don’t want to know that. It’s ugly. But I must tell you, because there’s been too much hiding. More would break me.”
She looked at the green liquor left in the glass. It was green. It was liquid. This was a glass. To hide from her would break him. Simple things, so apparent, so not anything other than what they showed themselves to be. She dipped a finger into the liquor’s dregs and touched it to her tongue. It burned.
Arin made a sound.
She glanced up. She didn’t know where her voice had gone. She was nervous. Her flesh was resonant with the knowledge of what she wanted to understand and what she’d come here to find out. It was much riskier than what she’d already asked. She stood.
He watched her pace toward him.
She stopped just short of his chair and looked down at him. Her loose hair slipped over her shoulder. “I remember something. I’m not sure if it happened or not. Will you tell me?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“I remember lying with you on the lawn of the imperial palace’s spring garden.”
He shifted. Lamplight pulsed over his face. He shook his head.
“I remember finding you in your suite.” This memory was coming to her now. It had a similar flavor as the last one. “I promised to tell you my secrets. You held a book. Or kindling? You were making a fire.”
“That didn’t happen.”
“I kissed you.” She touched the hollow at the base of his neck. His pulse was wild.
“Not then,” he said finally.
“But I have before.” There was a rush of images. It was as if the melody she’d imagined while lying in the dark had been dunked in the green liquor. All the cold stops gained heat and ran together. It was easy to remember Arin, especially now. Her hand slid to his chest. The cotton of his shirt was hot. “Your kitchens. A table. Honey and flour.”
His heart slammed against her palm. “Yes.”
“A carriage.”
“Yes.”
“A balcony.”
Breath escaped him like a laugh. “Almost.”
“I remember falling asleep in your bed when you weren’t here.”
He pulled back slightly, searched her face. “That didn’t happen.”
“Yes it did.”
His mouth parted, but he didn’t speak. The blacks of his eyes were bright. She wondered what it would be like to give her body what it wanted. It knew something she didn’t. Her heart sped, her blood was lush in her veins.
“The first day,” she said. “Last summer. Your hair was a mess. I wanted to sweep it back and make you meet my eyes. I wanted to see you.”
His chest rose and fell beneath her hand. “I don’t know. I can’t—I don’t know what you wanted.”
“I never said?”
“No.”
She lowered her mouth to his. She tasted him: the raw burn of liquor on his tongue. She felt him swallow, heard the low, dry sound of it.
He pulled her down to him, tangled his hands in her hair, sucked the breath from her lips. She became uncertain whose breath was whose. He kissed her back, fingertips fanning across her face, then gone, nowhere. Then: a light touch along the curve of her hip, just barely. A stone skipping the surface of the water. “Strange,” he murmured into her mouth.
She wasn’t listening. She was rippling, the sensation spreading wide. Stone on water, dimpled pockets of pressure. The wait for the stone to finally drop down.
Suddenly she knew—or thought she knew—what he found strange as he traced where a dagger should have been. To see a part of her missing. She felt her missing pieces, the stark gaps. She was arrested by the thought (it pierced her, sharp and surreal) that she had become transparent, that if he touched her again his hand would go right through her, into air, into the empty spaces of who she was now.
She didn’t want to be empty, didn’t want to vanish. She wanted to be whole.
She said, “I want to remember you.”
An emotion flared in his face. He braced her hips, tugged her closer. His lids were heavy, eyes dark. His mouth was a wet gleam. She didn’t recognize his expression. It was new. She leaned in and drank the newness of him.
Their kiss turned savage. She made it so. She felt his teeth, reveled in the sure knowledge that it had never been like this between them. Yet at the same time, she felt each kiss they’d shared before, felt them live inside this one. His mouth left hers, rasping down her neck. He buried his face in her skin.
She sought his mouth and found that he tasted different now. She was tasting the taste of her skin on his mouth. Coppery. She dipped her tongue into it again.
“Kestrel.”
She didn’t answer him.
“This is a bad idea.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
He pulled away, closed his eyes, and dropped his head to press his brow against her belly. She felt rich with the words he muttered against her nightdress. His mouth burned through the cloth.
His chair scraped back. He no longer touched her. “Not like this.”
“Yes. Exactly like this.” She tried to find the words to express how this helped, how he somehow mapped the country of herself, showed the ridges, the rise and valley of her very being.
“Kestrel, I think that you’re … using me a little.”
She stopped, unpleasantly startled. It occurred to her that what he’d said was another version of what she’d been struggling to say.
“It’s not, ah, a hardship.” He gave a rueful smile. “It’s not that I don’t want—” She’d never heard him stammer. Even with her untrustworthy memory, she knew this. You’re easy to know, she wanted to say. Memories of him came quickly. It didn’t hurt, not as much as she’d feared before, on the tundra, or in his empty bed. At least, it didn’t hurt anymore. It was better. Better than … other things.
A faceless horror. A monster. Inside her. It thickened, grew into a featureless, blunt shape. She wouldn’t touch it. She’d go nowhere near it.
Arin had been right, that day when he’d suggested that there was something too horrible for her to remember.
“It’s not enough,” he said. It took her a moment to realize he was continuing his refusal and not responding to her thoughts, which were so loud in her head that she felt as if she’d shouted them.
She said, “What would be enough?”
Color mounted in his face.
“You can tell me,” she said.
“Ah,” he said. “Well. Me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I want … you to want me.”
“I do.”
He pushed a hand through his rough hair. “I don’t mean this.” He gestured between them, his hand flipping from her to him. “I…” He struggled, knuckled his eyes, and let the words come. “I want you to be mine, wholly mine, your heart, too. I want you to feel the same way.”
Her stomach sank. She’d sworn to herself not to lie to him.
He read her answer in her eyes. He dimmed, and said nothing either. But he brushed hair from her face, lifting away strands that had caught in her eyelashes and between her lips. His fingertip painted a slow line over her lower lip. She felt it down her spine, in her belly. Then his hand fell away, and she felt alone.
“I leave tomorrow morning with Roshar,” he said. “It’ll be some time before I return.”
An ember of hurt. An old feeling, as old as her whole life. She was always being left. War always won. She saw herself: a little girl, holding up a level, sheathed sword nearly as long as she was tall. Her arms ached. She must not drop it. The man on the horse would take it soon. He glanced down, and she wondered if he was waiting to see how long she could hold the blade steady. He smiled, and her twinned heart—the girl, the woman, her past, her present—burst with pride and sorrow and rage.
“Take me with you,” she told Arin.
A shadow crossed his face. “No. Absolutely not.”
“I can help. I know my father’s system of running scouts, his tactics, codes, formations—”
“No.”
“You don’t have the right to choose for me.”
“It won’t happen.” He caught his anger, became aware of it as well as hers, and said more gently, “It’s too dangerous.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“I can’t lose you.” Grief slashed through his voice. “Not you, too.”
The story he had told her about the night of the invasion flickered in his eyes, darkening them.
Her father had done this to him. She remembered her father, felt the memory squeeze her—a crunch, a creak of bone—and then seemed to feel how Arin guessed where her mind had gone. She felt what the direction of her thoughts did to him.
She had begged her father to let her go to war with him. He’d promised that one day she would, but then she had grown and no longer wanted what he wanted, and wanted him to stay instead, and he wouldn’t.
Arin’s story and hers twisted together into patterns she couldn’t follow. Their silence grew.
Quietly, Arin said, “I’ll stay.”
Her eyes flew to him. It was so unexpected that she was shaken out of her thoughts.
“If you want,” he said. “I could stay. We’d be together.”
“If you stay here while the Dacrans march south to fight your war, the alliance will crumble.”
He studied his hands.
“Unless you do it for the queen.”
He gave Kestrel a reproachful look.
“Then you can’t,” she said.
“Do you want me to stay?”
Kestrel wondered if every question is a way of putting yourself at the mercy of someone else. “It would cost you too much.”
“Think about it. Will you think about it? We’re to leave at dawn. Meet me then at the brook, the one near the horse paths, to tell me what you’ve decided.”
Her answer should be no, yet she couldn’t make herself say it.
“Meet me anyway,” he said, “even if it’s to say goodbye. Will you wish me well?”
Kestrel saw the ripped grass of the battlefield, stained with gore. Him: broken, bloody. Skin ashen. His blank gaze fixed on something she couldn’t see. His light gone.
Stay, she almost said. Then an invisible hand clamped down over her mouth and warned again about the political consequences. Either way, Kestrel read his doom. Death in battle, or the slower death of the alliance collapsing and the empire’s victory.
Tears welled in her eyes. She turned so that he wouldn’t see them.
“Won’t you wish me well?” Arin asked.
“I will. I do.”
He seemed uncertain. “If I don’t see you at dawn, I’ll take it to mean that you want me to go.”
“I’ll be there,” she told him. “I promise.”