Roshar was waiting alone outside his tent. Kestrel saw what the soldier had meant about Roshar’s face. She’d grown used to the prince’s mutilations; she rarely noticed them anymore. But now an emotion so scored his features that his face became pure in its damage: a mask of loss, twisted with anger and shame.
Arin went to him, eyes wide with concern. He spoke swiftly in Dacran. What was wrong? What had happened?
“My sister won’t speak with me.” Roshar cleared his throat. “Not without you.” His gaze flicked from Arin to Kestrel. “Both of you.”
Then Kestrel remembered that Roshar had more than one sister.
The three of them entered the tent, the prince last, shoulders tight, eyes roaming everywhere except to where Risha stood near the tent’s center, her Valorian braids gone. Her black hair was cut close to the skull in the eastern style, her eyes rimmed with royal colors, her limbs lithe. The air in the tent was hot and dense.
“Sister,” Roshar began, then faltered.
She ignored him. Her gaze went to Kestrel, who didn’t understand the young woman’s presence here, or the animosity toward her brother, whom Risha must not have seen since having been taken hostage by the empire as a child.
“I’ve come to bargain,” Risha said.
Visibly hurt, her brother said, “I would give you anything.”
“Not with you.”
“I am so sorry. Risha, little sister—”
“I trust you,” she said to Arin. “As for this one”—she tipped her chin at Kestrel—“Verex holds her in high regard.”
Roshar said, “I regret every day since I saw you last.”
“What do you regret most? This?” She gestured at his mutilations.
“No.”
“How you let our older sister persuade you?”
“Yes.”
“Or when you saw the Valorians take me.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe it was when you explained to a child that she wouldn’t be gone long, that she must pretend to be surprised when she’s taken hostage. All she has to do is kill one man.”
Kestrel felt Arin’s tension, the way he looked at the prince. Arin’s worry was plain, his hands still at his sides yet slightly open, as if his friend might shatter and Arin needed to be ready to catch the pieces.
“Could it be so hard to kill a man?” Risha continued. “Especially when we consider her talent. Look at the little girl’s grace. Her skill with a blade. A prodigy, surely. Never before seen in one so young. Yes, the assassination of the Valorian emperor should be easy for her.”
Then Kestrel understood.
Roshar said, “I regret it all.”
“I have wondered, over the years, whether you were weak to let my sister rule you, or simply stupid.”
“I didn’t think—”
“About what would happen to me after I killed the emperor? Brother, I thought about it when I walked the halls of the imperial palace. When I learned their language. Played childhood games with their prince. I thought about what the Valorians would do to the little girl who murdered their emperor.”
A pressure tightened Kestrel’s lungs. Her father, when he had refused to be her father anymore, had transformed into something else. A block of opaque glass, maybe. She wanted to heft the weight of his betrayal and show it to Risha, to ask if it looked and weighed the same as what the princess carried, if it ever got any lighter, or could diminish like ice.
Yet Kestrel also saw the ruined expression in Roshar’s eyes. Maybe she shouldn’t pity him, yet she did.
Arin said, “Name what you want.”
Risha settled into a teak chair. “I will never kill Verex’s father. But”—she flipped her hand at the three of them—“you could, with my help. Get rid of the emperor, and you can win this war without open battle.”
“Wait,” Kestrel said. Cautious, focused now, she said, “You’re not even supposed to be here. Verex said you were safe at court.”
At the sound of Verex’s name, some of the anger left Risha. “Verex had left. There was nothing to hold me there. I escaped.”
“And found your way here? So easily?”
The princess shrugged. “It’s not hard to find safe passage if you’re willing to kill for it.”
In Herrani, Arin asked Kestrel, “What are you thinking?”
She noticed the switch in language and recognized that Arin believed it was safe to speak in Herrani, but she didn’t risk an answer in front of Risha. She didn’t say that General Trajan could have sent the embittered eastern princess with tempting bait. Kestrel feared a trap. “What kind of help are you offering?”
“I can give you a location where the emperor will be, separate from the army, with a light guard.”
“How did you come by this information?”
“The court.”
Kestrel didn’t like this. It was too easy. “You still haven’t said what you want out of this bargain.”
Risha kept her eyes on Arin. “Promise that Verex won’t be hurt. Protect him.”
Startled, defensive, Arin said, “I don’t wish the Valorian prince any harm.”
But Roshar’s face changed … and Kestrel suddenly realized why. “No,” she told him, her voice rising. “You musn’t. His death wouldn’t serve you. You should want him to inherit the empire. He’d be a friend to the east.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Roshar said. “Our queen will smash the empire to pieces if she can. Killing the emperor might win the war. Verex might become a political ally. But if he inherits Valoria, that country will always be a threat to us … and to you, Arin.”
“Someone else would step into Verex’s place,” Kestrel argued. “If the prince died, the senate would elect a new emperor.”
Arin’s gray eyes went flat. “It’d be the Valorian general.”
Roshar shrugged. “Unless we eliminate him as well. Knock down all the principal pieces in Borderlands, and what’s left for your opponent? Surrender.”
“You forget an important piece in this game,” Risha said. “Me.”
Roshar’s shoulders tensed. Kestrel felt a growing disquiet.
“Verex and I would marry,” said the princess.
“An alliance between east and west,” Roshar said slowly.
Kestrel sought Arin’s gaze. When he met her eyes she couldn’t read them.
“Not so good for you, little Herrani,” Roshar told Arin. “Your peninsula would get lost in the middle.”
The risk had always been there, even if they won the war: that Herran would be retaken by the west, or dwindle into the east. But now Kestrel saw it as if seeing the future: how a marriage between the empire and Dacra could lead to one power ruling the entire continent. Herran would vanish.
“Decide,” Risha said, “or I leave. My information for Verex’s safety. Yes or no.”
Arin met Kestrel’s gaze. Grim mouth, hooded eyes asking whether this was worth it.
She thought about the emperor’s hand on her father’s shoulder.
The key Verex had sent to the northern prison.
A friend. A good heart.
But Roshar wasn’t wrong.
Kestrel knew what her father would choose, in her place. She realized that she’d come to rely on his voice in her head, that it had saved her on the battlefield. Even now, the very thought of his advice was soothing … even as being so soothed repulsed her.
It didn’t matter what her father would choose. She was not her father.
“Yes,” Kestrel said. “I agree.”
“Then I do, too,” said Arin.
Roshar gazed at his hands. “No one can promise anyone’s safety. Never. Much less in war.”
“We can promise to try,” Arin told him. “And you can shield him from the Dacran queen.”
Roshar nodded, but distractedly, with a disbelieving wince, as if someone had presented him with a portrait where his features were whole, his mutilations erased, and he had no words to express how wrong this vision of him was.
* * *
“I overheard the senate leader say that if Valoria succeeded in seizing the beach, the emperor would move inland with a small contingent and take the Sythiah estate,” Risha said.
“The manor there is luxurious,” Arin said, “but it has nothing strategically interesting for the emperor or the army. Vineyards. The grapes won’t even be ripe this time of year. There’s little to be gained in terms of supplies. The estate is north of the road to the city; not convenient as a base for attack.”
Kestrel, however, knew the emperor. “But the manor is beautiful?”
Arin lifted one shoulder. “The stained-glass windows were well known, before the war. There are rooms that seem to be made of colored light. Or so it was said. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen it.”
“The emperor enjoys beauty.”
Arin’s hand twitched, as if he’d meant to touch, compulsively, the scar that ran deep into his left cheek, but had stopped himself in time. It wrenched Kestrel’s heart to see him remember how he’d been attacked by the emperor’s minion, his face sliced open.
She hadn’t been there when it happened. Still, she saw it now as if she’d been a bystander: paralyzed, robbed of sound, her throat raw. Bones like lead.
And she saw herself in her suite in the imperial palace, dressed in red, her shoulders laced with golden wire. Kestrel had forgotten this. It came to her: the tight, gorgeous bodice. Folds of crimson samite. The emperor had selected her wedding dress. He had selected her, had cut her from the cloth of her home, then stitched her into place beside his son. He had embroidered how she’d look and who she’d become. I have chosen you, Kestrel, and will make you into everything my son cannot be. Someone fit to take my place.
It was difficult for Kestrel to move, as if she had indeed become a cloth doll, the stitches drawn tight. She touched Arin’s arm, felt how the muscles had hardened. “You think that he seeks only to destroy.”
“Yes,” he muttered.
“Beauty moves him. He destroys it only when he can’t possess it.”
I asked myself, the emperor whispered in her ear, whether it was really possible that you might betray your country so easily, especially when it had been practically given to you.
“He loves to shape things.” A remembered helplessness shrouded her. The prince and his sister faded in her vision, were present but unimportant. She felt strange; her blood prickled as if something were growing inside her. “Every piece in place, arranged to his satisfaction. It’s why he enjoys games. You know, don’t you, how a game with a perfect line of play becomes beautiful?”
Yes. A growing thing. Thorny. A briar.
Arin’s expression changed. She saw how he read her stillness. She wondered if she’d gone pale. Anxiety stole over his features. “Kestrel, can I have a word with you?”
Outside the tent, night had come.
He cupped her face in his hands. “You don’t look right.”
“I’m fine.”
“No. You look like a part of you has disappeared. Like you’re not really here. Like”—his hands fell away—“you do when you’re plotting something.”
Which was how Kestrel realized that she was plotting something. That growing briar inside her was an idea.
“Kestrel.”
She blinked, then noticed the hurt shape of his mouth. Arin said, “Tell me.” She started to speak. He cut through her first words. “No deceiving,” he said.
“I wouldn’t.”
“Not again. After everything. Don’t keep me in the dark.”
“Arin, for someone who wants me to tell him something, you’re doing an excellent job of not letting me speak.”
“Oh.” Rubbing a forefinger and thumb into his eyes, he gave her a rueful look. “Sorry.”
“Risha could be a trap. We’ve no proof of her true allegiance, and while I know she cares for Verex, this might only make her firmly on Valoria’s side. This story of the emperor at the Sythiah manor could be a distraction. Worse, it could lure us into an ambush. But I also believe that the emperor would leave the battlefield to stay in a luxurious manor known for its stained-glass windows. He’s let my father fight his battles for two decades. As Verex said, the emperor is here only for show. Valoria is likely to win this war—and given our loss at Lerralen, its path to seize Herran’s city is reasonably easy. Having destroyed some of their black powder helps us, but they still have the greater numbers and their tactical position is strong. Why should the emperor not quit the army camp for a feather bed and a view of the vineyards? It would be like him.”
“Then I’ll lead a small team there. Assassinate him. Death will guide me.”
“No. I have a better plan for how to win this war.”
She told him what she had in mind, then returned to the tent to ask Roshar for his help.