The rain began the next morning and showed no signs of letting up. Mud sucked at Arin’s boots as he helped Kestrel ready her horse. The rain intensified, dropping down like little stones.
Arin squinted up at it. “Terrible day to ride.” He hated to see her go.
She wiped water from her face, glancing over at Risha, whose head was tipped back under the rain, eyes closed. “Not for everyone,” Kestrel said, “and the rain will make it less likely a Valorian scout will notice that a small band is riding from camp.”
True. The middle distance was a gray fog. Arin raked dripping hair off his brow. He tried to be all right. His nerves sparked the way a blade does against the grinder.
Kestrel touched his cheek. “The rain is good for us.”
“Come here.”
She tasted like the rain: cool and fresh and sweet. Her mouth warmed as he kissed her. He felt the way her clothes stuck to her skin. He forgot himself.
She murmured, “I have something for you.”
“You needn’t give me anything.”
“It’s not a gift. It’s for you to keep safe until I return.” She placed a speckled yellow feather on his palm.
The rain fell in a veil behind her.
* * *
The ground oozed. Mud splattered Arin’s trousers as he helped load a supply wagon. He was worried, he kept thinking about the Bite and Sting set in Kestrel’s saddlebag, and the mud made his work sluggish. He grew frustrated.
Oh, I don’t know, said death, slightly smug. I like the mud.
Arin stopped what he was doing. You do?
There was no reply other than the rain.
Arin considered his army. He considered the general’s. A strategy slowly formed, one that released an emotion close to pleasure. It was, he realized, the promise of revenge: right at the tips of his fingers.
* * *
In the prince’s tent, the rain loudly percussive against the canvas, Roshar studied the map marked by Arin.
“Your people will fight better in the rain,” Arin said.
“The rain might end by the time our army is in position.”
“But the mud will remain. Think of that heavy Valorian armor the higher ranks wear. We wear leather. Most of them will flounder.”
“Not on a paved road.” Roshar wasn’t challenging Arin’s strategy, just prodding it to test its solidity. “Their cavalry is superior. The general will take into account the soggy terrain on either side of the road. Armed infantry fares worse than horses in mud. They’ll try to flank us with cavalry.”
“Yes.” Arin tapped the map where he’d made notches on the even ground that bordered the road and ran open and smooth to the forest on either side. “Exactly.”
* * *
“What is it like,” Kestrel asked Risha as they rode, “to be gifted with weapons?”
Coolly, the princess said, “You’ve no proof that I am.”
But Kestrel remembered an archery contest on the palace lawn, and how Risha aimed arrows with studied mediocrity until one final arrow punched so hard into the target’s center that it drove through the canvas halfway up its shaft. “I used to wish I were talented that way. Then I didn’t. Now I do again.”
Risha shrugged. “It’s gained me little.”
“Roshar was even younger than we are when he brought you into Valorian territory. When you were captured.”
“Betrayed.”
“You didn’t agree to go with him?”
The princess shifted in her saddle. “I was a mere child, and eager to prove myself. Children seek to please. They try so hard. My brother and sister used that against me.”
“Roshar has suffered for it.”
“And so?” Risha twisted in the saddle to meet Kestrel’s gaze. The princess’s eyes burned, her brown skin was sleek with rain, her full mouth pinched.
“You could speak with him.”
Risha snorted. “You mean forgive. Forgiveness is so … squishy. Like all this mud.”
Kestrel thought of her father’s fire-lit face on Lerralen beach.
“It drags you down,” Risha said. “You know this.”
She had an uneasy feeling of not knowing what Risha would say next, but already not wanting to hear it.
“You, who seek your own father’s death.”
* * *
The bodies lay tumbled in a ditch not far from the Sythiah vineyards.
The rain had washed away any tracks. Still, Kestrel understood the story.
It leached into her: how the emperor’s company had seized the manor and dragged the Herrani who lived there out onto the grounds. Forced them forward. A girl in the ditch had lost her shoe. Her little foot was black with mud. The shoe … Kestrel searched for it in the rain, feeling a growing panic and need, as if finding a lost shoe could blot away the image of ashen corpses, the way a dead woman still gripped the child’s hand. The inching insects. A shoe could take away the smell, the rot of it strong in the rain. A shoe could keep down the bile that rushed up Kestrel’s throat.
But when she found the shoe, stuck in the root of a tree, the inner leather sole still held the shape of the girl’s foot. Kestrel could feel its imprint.
The shoe took away none of the horror. It planted it deep in the bottom of Kestrel’s belly, as solid as a grown man’s kick.
* * *
They crouched in the stubby vineyards with the other five Dacran soldiers. Risha eyed the manor’s kitchen yard, the house’s weakest entry point. Several of the house’s windows glowed through the night rain.
Kestrel licked her sour lips and gripped the satchel. She imagined the game tiles rattling inside their velvet bag.
She remembered dining with the emperor. A dessert served with a disintegrating sugar fork. How encounters with him had always felt like that: as though every tool at her disposal was crumbling in her grasp. She remembered how, on the imperial palace grounds, after a hunt, she’d realized that the emperor would steal or maim her dog simply because she loved it. My father needs for you to love him best, Verex had said.
You need to watch yourself, he’d said.
If you play against my father, you’ll lose.
A light hand touched her arm. “I don’t know you well,” Risha’s voice was low. “But I know what Verex has told me about you, and what I see for myself. You don’t need to be gifted with a blade. You are your own best weapon.”
Kestrel stared back at Risha, who was almost pure shadow—a mere glint of eyes. Kestrel felt a slow, slight throb, a shimmer in the blood. She knew it well.
Her worst trait. Her best trait.
The desire to come out on top, to set her opponent under her thumb.
A streak of pride. Her mind ringed with hungry rows of foxlike teeth.
Later, at dawn, when the emperor pulled Kestrel’s dagger from its sheath and touched its tip to her throat, she remembered that Sythiah’s manor had always been a trap. The question had only been whether it was a trap she set for the emperor, or one that she’d fall into.
Kestrel touched Risha’s hand. “Thank you.”
The seven of them moved through the dark to the house.
* * *
The dawn broke bright. Clear sky. A sheen of water wavered over the road toward Lerralen, deeper in the cracks between paving stones.
Arin and Roshar had moved the army as quickly west as they could. They had reached the location Arin had chosen.
The first task: to unload the hundreds of sharpened staves Arin had ordered made.
The second: to drive them into the sodden earth bordering the road.
The third: to set their last sacks of gunpowder on the road. A snug and deadly little bundle.
And the fourth: to wait, to try not to think about Kestrel, about how she must have already reached Sythiah by now, and might have already played Bite and Sting against the emperor, and had won or lost.
* * *
The seven of them wound their way through the night-shadowed corners of Sythiah’s manor. Risha moved with ethereal fluidity, and when they encountered a pair of Valorian soldiers stationed in a hallway, her knife split their skin as smoothly as if cutting through cream. The Valorians made no sound. It was quiet enough to hear the drip of blood.
They accessed the upper floors and began checking bedrooms. Kestrel knew where they’d be situated—Herrani architecture usually had bedrooms face east or west. Risha crept in alone, her posture stiffening with annoyance when the other Dacrans made as if to accompany her. She let out a low hiss. They didn’t follow.
She’d return, her blade wetter than before.
“Enough of this,” she whispered.
“We must go quietly,” Kestrel reminded her. “We need to get to the emperor’s room without waking the entire house. We can’t fight them all.”
Risha snorted. “I can.”
The princess’s impatience wore thin. The next time they encountered Valorian guards—again, a pair of them—she let a Dacran soldier shoot one of them with a crossbow, but pulled the other Valorian out of the quarrel’s path at the same time that her other hand came down on the woman’s mouth.
Risha touched her knife to the fragile skin beneath the woman’s wide eye. “Stay silent,” Risha whispered, “and you’ll keep your eyes. Lead us to the emperor’s suite.”
The soldier led them to a broad door made of tiger maple, the wood smooth in the Herrani style, with little carving other than the rippled doorjamb. An oil lamp glowed in the hallway’s sconce, its stained glass casting a jeweled light over the wood’s natural stripes.
“Here?” Kestrel asked. Light glowed through the door’s keyhole.
The woman nodded.
Risha killed her. The body slumped. Blood welled up to Kestrel’s boots. She made herself remember the girl’s lost shoe, the Bite and Sting set, Arin’s scar, the way he heard the god of death because he believed he had no one else, the small houses in the wheatfields, the baring of her back to the cold tundra air, the way she had hoped that the nighttime drug would make her forget.
“Open the door,” she whispered.
One of the Dacran men, selected by Roshar for his skill at this, knelt and unfolded a leather-wrapped set of tools, then he inserted two of them—long and thin, like knitting needles—into the keyhole. He poked, then levered the tools until they heard the soft clunk of the lock’s tumblers releasing.
He eased the door open—softly, as if his hand were no more than a small gust of wind.
Risha first, and Kestrel behind her, they entered the suite’s antechamber.
They were attacked by the emperor’s personal guard, who had been waiting as they’d listened to the clicking of the picked lock.
* * *
Arin set the army into formation on the western road. He made the vanguard’s ranks broad, running across the road and the bordering wet earth, all the way up to the trees. Behind the vanguard, the center ranks were confined to the road.
Roshar’s horse flicked its tail, shifting. The prince eyed the forest. “Those trees turn this place into something resembling a ravine. We won’t have much room to maneuver.”
“Neither will they.”
The morning light was sheer and fresh, as pale as the flesh of a lemon. Arin imagined squeezing it down his throat. It would taste like how he felt: stingingly alive.
* * *
Kestrel couldn’t count them, couldn’t see how the guards carved open the bodies of the Dacran soldiers, couldn’t fathom Risha’s speed, the way the princess had shoved Kestrel against a wall, creating a halo of safety around her. The snick of Risha’s knife against a windpipe. Her swivel and dance. Unerring strike. Counter. Bodies thumped to the floor.
“Hold,” someone called. “I want to see.”
The Valorians pulled back. Risha’s knife flicked blood as it arced through the air. She had no intention of obeying the voice. Kestrel caught her arm. The princess spun, her face frustrated, as if she’d been listening to a voice whose last words had been lost in the interruption.
The emperor stood at the threshold where the antechamber flowed into the rest of the suite, his posture light and easy. For a moment, there was no sound but the rain on the roof. “You,” he said wonderingly as his gaze found Risha.
Then Kestrel.
His eyes widened in delight. “And you.”
He laughed.
* * *
The day blazed. The sun seemed to soar into the sky, all the way to its height.
Arin waited.
Nothing.
Waited.
Nothing.
He touched the hard leather shell of his armor. Hidden beneath it: his chest. His lungs. Skin. A speckled yellow feather tucked inside his tunic pocket, right above his heart.
Forget the feather, death said. You are the road.
The sun.
The sky.
The horse beneath you.
Comforted, Arin said, The gods used to walk among us.
True, said death.
Why did you leave?
Ah, sweet child, it was your people who left us.
* * *
“Lady Kestrel, you look like a dirty little savage. What are you doing here?”
She tried to speak.
“Did you hope to murder me in my sleep?”
Her throat was too dry.
“Maybe you’ve come for court gossip. Surely the barbarian princess has told you everything of interest. No?”
Kestrel swallowed. She saw her hand gripping her dagger. The knuckles were white knobs.
“You want news of your father, I imagine. Let me tell you. He doesn’t mourn you.”
Kestrel heard the emperor as if from far away.
Doesn’t miss you.
He never did. You remember how little time he spent at home. How awkward he became in your company. You had to beg him to stay in the capital. Oh yes, I heard. And here, a secret for you: he was relieved when you were sent north. I saw how a burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
He looked lighter.
Younger.
Free.
The emperor looked from her to Risha to the Dacran soldiers, dead on the bloody floor.
“You’re resourceful, Kestrel, I’ll give you that. You’ve survived the mines, the tundra, the war … thus far. You’ve made”—his gaze flicked again to Risha—“interesting allies. But my guard outnumbers you both, and it will take an instant for me to rouse the entire house. I don’t have many regrets, but my decision to imprison rather than kill you smacks of squeamishness … or, shall I say, an unnecessary concern for your father’s well-being. Do you know, he hasn’t mentioned you once since he told me of your treason?”
“He wouldn’t, no matter what he feels.”
“Regardless,” the emperor said softly, “I could have you killed right now and he’d never know. And if he did, why would he care? What would the life of one dishonorable would-be assassin mean to him?”
“I didn’t come here to murder you.”
He bit back a thin smile.
She said, “I came to challenge you.”
“Oh?”
“One game of Bite and Sting. If I win, you’ll end the war. Leave. Cross the sea with every last Valorian. Never return.”
The emperor made a surprised half laugh of a sound. He lightly traced the deepest line of his brow, then unfolded his hand in a flourish. “What would I gain, should I win?”
“What you like. Whatever I can give you.”
He tapped one finger to his lips, considering. “That’s not much.”
“I’m sure you can think of something.”
“And if I agree, and lose? You’d trust me to keep my word?”
“A Valorian honors his word.”
“Yes,” he said, drawing out the word. “He does.”
“Risha goes free, no matter what the outcome.”
“I’ll wait here,” said the princess. “With your guards, if you like.” She gave them a disdainful look, making clear that she thought little of their chances of survival if she chose to finish what she’d started. “Until the game is done.”
Kestrel said, “We play in private.”
“You set quite a lot of terms,” the emperor said, “but this particular one I wouldn’t have any other way.”
“So you agree?”
“I confess, I’m curious.”
“Do you agree?”
“A fair warning. I’m better at this than you are.”
“We shall see.”
* * *
Arin heard a crash in the trees.
A Herrani scout. He ran to Arin, his face shiny with sweat.
The Valorians were coming.
* * *
The emperor led her to his bedroom. The summer hangings on the bed were gauzy, the sheets disturbed. She could see the dent left in a pillow by his head. The room smelled of his oils: powdery pepper, bitingly sweet balsam. Rain tapped the black windowpanes.
“Wash your face,” he said.
There was a mirrored basin in the corner. Kestrel did as ordered, though her face wasn’t particularly dirty. She was startled by the stranger in the glass and tried not to stare at herself. She caught a glimpse of shocked, light eyes, made lighter by tanned and freckled skin. A strong face.
She folded the towel and joined the emperor where he stood near an octagonal table. He had produced a bottle of wine and two glasses.
“I’ll serve,” she said, which made him give her a sleek look of amusement. She poured the red wine, but neither of them touched their glasses, and they both knew that the other suspected that some sleight of hand had poisoned the cup.
“Disarm,” he said.
“I will if you do the same.”
He unbuckled his dagger and set it gently, yet heavily, on the table. Her fingers fumbled as she undid hers.
The dagger Arin had made her looked plain next to the emperor’s—but strong, like her unexpected face in the mirror.
“Interesting.” The emperor stroked it where it lay. “A new acquisition? Perhaps this will be my prize when I win.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“I haven’t decided what I want.”
She opened the satchel, set the velvet bag of tiles on the table, and moved to sit.
“Not yet.” He held out his hand. She gave him the satchel, which he examined. Satisfied that it contained nothing else, he dropped it to the floor, then said, “You’ll have no objection, I’m sure, if I make certain that you hide no weapons on your person.”
Her skin prickled. “I give you my word that I don’t.”
“The word of a traitor is hardly to be trusted.”
So she stood rigid as his hands moved over her unarmored body. They didn’t linger, except when he pressed his fingers to her throat, and then pressed harder to feel her pulse jump and run.
He said, “You’re welcome to do the same to me.”
“No.”
“Are you sure?” He seemed to dare her to admit that she didn’t want to touch him.
“I trust you.”
“Well then, little liar, let’s play.”
* * *
The approaching Valorian army shone in a silver river under the sun.
Arin looked through a spyglass. He couldn’t find the general.
There was a thin, whistling whine.
Arin lowered the spyglass.
The whine stopped.
A cry of pain.
An arrow, studded into a Herrani soldier’s throat.
More arrows sped through the air. Valorian Rangers were shooting at them from the trees on either side of the road.
* * *
They sat. Kestrel, her back to the bed, loosened the velvet bag’s tie and poured the tiles onto the table.
She reached to mix the tiles, but as she had thought he might, the emperor stopped her. “Let’s confirm that this set is standard, shall we?” he said.
He checked the tiles to account for their values. When he saw that the set showed the proper amount of each Bite and Sting tile, he turned them onto their faces and mixed them. His face was calm, but his gestures were eager. He touched each tile, but barely. He wanted to get to the game.
Kestrel studied his smooth expression. He didn’t seem to notice that four ivory tiles were shinier than the rest. The gloom of the late hour helped. He drew his tiles.
Her stomach clenched to see the four shiny tiles left in the boneyard, from which she and the emperor would pull tiles throughout the game.
She drew her own hand. Arin had warned her that when she had a high chance of winning, her very lack of tells showed her confidence. I don’t think most people notice, he’d said. Your expression doesn’t change. You’ve no tic or gesture. I just get the sense that there’s an energy inside you I can’t reach, and that if I did, it’d strike like lightning.
She tried not to think about her plan, worrying that even the mere thought of it would show on her face. She felt her expression harden as clay does in a kiln.
Play, Kestrel.
She set down her first tile. The emperor did the same.
She found herself praying to Arin’s god. Please, let this be over soon.
But she heard no answer.
* * *
“Stand your ground,” Roshar shouted as arrows drove into the army. Eastern crossbows fired into the trees.
Roshar ordered Xash, his second-in-command, to lead a company into the forest to the left of the road. Roshar would take another company to the right. “We’ll take care of the Rangers. You,” he said to Arin, “take command of the road.”
Arin snagged the prince’s shoulder. “You’ll get bogged down in the mud. The Rangers will shoot everyone down on the open land before you reach the trees.”
“Not much choice. Continue to return fire. The Dacran archers are plainspeople. They’re good.”
“They’re not gods.”
“They will be, to protect their prince.”
Then Roshar was gone, and Arin snapped his attention back to the road, because the enemy was upon them, thundering down the road, almost here, almost here.
Here.
* * *
As they played, the rain lessened and stopped. The glasses of wine sat untouched. The boneyard still held the four shiny tiles hidden among the others.
It was the emperor’s turn. He reached for a tile, then paused, too much drama in his movements. He wasn’t truly hesitant, or even pretending to be hesitant, but rather making an open mockery of hesitancy that he knew she’d recognize as such.
“Play your tile.” Her voice grated.
“I’m thinking.”
She said nothing.
“Don’t you want to know what I’m thinking?” He leaned back in his chair, his short, silvered hair a bright bristle in the lamplight. The emperor passed his fingers over his mouth with enough pressure to pull slightly at the slack skin of his cheeks. His touch explored the grooves age had made near his mouth, and he seemed pleased.
Then she saw that his gaze had shifted to her hands.
They were trembling. She pressed them down against the table.
“I’m thinking about what I’ll claim from you when I win,” he said. “The particularly appealing part of the deal you struck is the openness of your offer. ‘Whatever you like.’”
She wished she’d phrased things differently, though she didn’t know what else she would have said, since part of what had made him agree to the game was his anticipation of the pleasure of what he was doing now.
“I could make you bring Arin of Herran to me,” the emperor said. “He’d surrender, for you.”
The world deadened.
“I never finished what I started with that boy’s face.” The emperor pushed the hilt of Kestrel’s dagger with one finger.
The sound it made, though small, scraped down her spine.
“Or perhaps it’s not his face that appeals to me most. We could see what might be done with yours.”
Silence.
“No, Lady Kestrel?”
His gaze drifted over her shoulder. He continued to speak, voice soft as his list continued, and Kestrel’s mind jumped between thinking that he chose to name the things that would torment her most, and meant none of it, or that he did mean it and wanted her to hope that he didn’t, and that this hope was his most delicious form of brutalization.
Her heart was loud in her ears. This wasn’t working. She’d made a grave mistake in coming.
“But of course,” the emperor finally said, “with such an offer as you made, I could exact it all.”
* * *
Arin ordered his vanguard to fall to the sides of the road.
The black powder sacks were lit.
The Valorian cavalry reared back from what they saw too late.
The sacks burst under their hooves. Chunks of paving stone exploded into the air.
* * *
“Do you forfeit your turn?” Kestrel asked.
“Not at all.”
“You’re afraid to play.”
“We both know,” he said, “which of us is afraid.”
She reached for her wine glass and drank.
“I do admire your love for a gamble.” He took her cup and drank from it as well. “I was simply thinking out loud earlier. There’s no harm in thinking.”
“I have my own thoughts. I am wondering why my father ever respected you.”
The emperor set down the cup. “He’s my friend.”
“Yet you say the things that you say.”
“He’s not here, and if he were, he wouldn’t care.”
“Yes, he would.”
The emperor scrutinized her. “You don’t look like him. Except the eyes.”
“Why?” The word burst from her lips.
His reply was gentle. “Why what, Kestrel?”
Her throat closed. Her eyes stung. She realized that she had forgotten the game … and that maybe this had been the emperor’s intention. She didn’t want to ask her question. Yet she couldn’t help it … or the hurt evident in her choked voice. “Why did he choose you over me?”
“Ah.” The emperor rubbed his dry palms together and templed them with a little pat. “You’ve provided me with an entertaining evening so far. I feel I owe you something in exchange. So: the truth. Trajan wasn’t my friend—not at first. He was necessary for what I wanted. Military prowess. Imperial expansion. I, in turn, was an opportunity for what he wanted, which was nothing less than for his daughter to one day rule the empire. An understandable ambition. Or perhaps our friendship didn’t begin there, after all. We’ve known each other since well before your birth. He’s a man of rare intelligence. There’s pleasure in finding one’s equal. Perhaps things began with that. As to how it has grown…” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s because he knows how I am with everyone else, and knows that I’m not like that with him. I value Trajan. Ultimately, when he held your treasonous letter in his hand and saw how you had lied to him, the choice between me and you was the choice between someone who loves him and someone who didn’t.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks.
The emperor patted her frozen hand. “I suggest that we not discuss your father.”
He played his tile.
* * *
The air reeked of sulfur and scorched horseflesh. The screams were so many and so loud that Arin couldn’t really hear them. Just noise. His ears buzzed.
Valorians floundered in their blood on the broken road. Ranger arrows continued to furrow the sky. A blasted paving stone, Arin saw, had smashed into a Herrani soldier’s face. Her body lay half in the mud, half where the road had been.
Arin couldn’t spot the general. The Valorian army was vast. Only a few ranks of cavalry had been decimated in the blast.
Another unit of Valorian cavalry moved forward into position.
* * *
Kestrel was losing. Earlier, the emperor had delayed in order to unsettle her, to revel in it, to spear her like a worm and watch her writhe. Kestrel’s tactic of delay was different. She took as much time as possible to draw the game out. Earlier, she’d wanted the game to be over quickly. Now she needed more time.
The four shiny tiles in the boneyard winked at her. She knew their values. The wolf—she could use that if it were in her hand. Or even the bee.
Her frustration rose.
The tears had dried on her cheeks, the skin tight with salt. She couldn’t help returning to what the emperor had said about her father. The memory of how her father had told her that she’d broken his heart.
If he were here, she would howl at him. He had broken her heart, over and over, for years. He’d tried to force her into the mold of his own idea of honor. What he wanted her to be. Not what she was.
Kestrel felt her spine straighten.
Damn his devotion to honor.
When it came her turn to pull a tile, she didn’t choose any of the marked ones.
* * *
“Steady,” Arin called. His horse tossed its head. His vanguard still held formation: those few files of broad ranks, running across the road and up to the trees.
The Valorian cavalry nudged toward them, looking ready to tear through Arin’s ranks. Arin watched the cavalry shape into a wedge. The left and right sides would pull up in the clash, and would try to flank the center ranks of Arin’s army by galloping up alongside the road once Arin’s vanguard had collapsed.
Yes, said death. Good.
* * *
The emperor pulled a shiny tile. Kestrel bit back a sound, glancing away so that he couldn’t read her expression.
The windows had lightened. For the first time, she registered their intricate patterns of stained glass. In the dead of night, they’d looked black. Now they blushed with faint color. She saw what they would soon fully show. Flowers, gods, the prow of a ship. A bird’s flung-open wings.
This was an eastern room. When dawn came, it would be glorious.
* * *
The armies clashed. The center of Arin’s vanguard coalesced around him. But the edges—as planned—disintegrated, the soldiers appearing to retreat into the forest.
The left and right flanks of the Valorian cavalry hurtled straight into the open spaces along the road that the edges of Arin’s vanguard had hidden.
Valorian horses impaled their stomachs on the sharpened staves Arin had had driven into the mud.
* * *
The emperor set down a fox. He examined the game in play. “Things don’t look so good for you,” he told Kestrel.
* * *
A movement amid all the others—the torque of bodies, the muddy struggle, collapse, rise, murder—caught Arin’s attention. On the periphery of battle where gutted warhorses flailed, there was some rabbitlike thing. He couldn’t look directly; he was too busy kneeing his horse out of the way of a rearing Valorian stallion’s plunging hooves. Then grappling with the stallion’s rider. Distracted, Arin seized the rider’s arm.
Not a rabbit.
Much too large for a rabbit.
Still, that impression of something—someone—out of place. A softness. An innocence.
Arin felt the arm pop from its shoulder.
The rider screamed, but Arin wasn’t paying attention. He impatiently killed the Valorian. He’d seen, now, what that strange movement far off to the side of the road was, among the bloody staves.
It was Verex. He was struggling to free his leg, trapped beneath the body of his fallen horse.
He was easy prey.
Arin saw his soldiers see the prince … but not see him as a prince, not as the one they were warned not to kill.
This, a prince?
Covered in mud, his only visible feature that straw-colored Valorian hair, Verex tugged, all thin limbs and terror. He didn’t see the Dacran archer’s taut bow, arrow nocked and drawn.
Arin was too far away. He shouted No, but the word was lost in the roar of war.
The archer aimed, and released her arrow.
* * *
“I almost wish I’d lose,” the emperor mused. “It’d be a novel experience. Is it wrong for me to hope that, at least, this game will last longer? Improve, Kestrel, or this will be over too soon.”
Kestrel reminded herself that there are ways to lose even if one holds the highest hand. She played her tile.
* * *
Helpless, Arin watched the arrow slice a low, true path toward Verex. It struck him, glancing off his metal armor. Undaunted, the archer nocked another arrow.
Get down, Arin willed as he tried to force his way to the edge of the road. He’d never reach Verex in time. Use your horse as a shield. But Verex, who now saw how the cloud of danger around him had condensed to the point of an arrowhead, froze.
Arin’s gaze swiveled back to the archer, whose face underwent a curt shift of emotion just after she loosed the arrow. Her expression slackened with horror.
Arin saw what she saw: Roshar, hurtling toward the Valorian prince and into the path of the arrow.
Roshar flattened Verex into the mud. The arrow sailed over his shoulder.
Then Risha’s brother raged at the stunned Valorian, dragged him out from under the horse, and hauled him toward the cover of the trees.
* * *
They were both silent now, playing in concentration. The emperor reached for a second shiny tile.
The stained-glass windows glowed, and something eased open inside Kestrel. As color seeped into the room, she felt an unexpected wish.
She wished her father were here.
You, who seek your own father’s death.
But she didn’t, she found that she couldn’t, no matter how he had hurt her. She wished that he could see her play, and win. That he could see what she saw now.
A window is just a window. Colored glass: mere glass. But in the sun it becomes more. She would show him, and say, love should do this.
And you too, she would tell him, because she could no longer deny that it remained true, in spite of everything.
I love you, too.
* * *
After Roshar and Verex had vanished into the trees, Arin stopped thinking. He rarely did, in battle. It was easier to give himself over. The pressure inside was a good one. His body obeyed it.
The staves had ruined the Valorians’ strategy. It was impossible to flank Arin’s army, which became a solid column that thrust up the road. The edges of Arin’s vanguard began to work forward, fighting to reach the unprotected, muddy sides of the road on which the Valorians stood. With a little luck, Arin would flank them.
When his sword cut an enemy open, Arin thought that he would have chosen no other god to rule him, that none of the hundred could please him so well.
A gift, he thought.
This is nothing, death said. Did I not make you a promise? Have you not kept faith with me, in hopes of this very moment? See, see what I have for you.
Arin looked.
Just a few paces away, unhorsed, helmet gone, stood General Trajan.
* * *
This was taking too long.
It was full dawn. The stained windows were wild now, lurid with color. Kestrel had reached the end of her line of play. She held a worthy hand, yet dreaded exposing her tiles to the emperor.
It didn’t matter what tiles she held. All that mattered was that the game was over, and that the emperor appeared relaxed, lids half-lowered in anticipation, his dark eyes liquid.
“Show me,” he said.
* * *
Arin spurred his horse forward. The general saw him and stood tall. Arin’s mind went blank, he heard nothing, not even death, and he should have been listening, because at the last possible moment, the general fell to one knee and drove his sword deep into the chest of Arin’s horse.
* * *
As slowly as possible, Kestrel turned her last tile.
Four spiders.
The emperor didn’t smile. She almost wished that he had. He closed his eyes once, and when he opened them their expression was even worse than his smile.
He displayed his winning hand.
Four tigers.
* * *
Arin was thrown from his shrieking horse. His head rang against the road.
And rang, and rang.
* * *
Perspiration glimmered on the emperor’s upper lip. He touched it, glanced at his fingers strangely, then returned his attention to Kestrel.
She scraped her chair back.
He swept her dagger from the table and had it up to her throat in one swift movement. He pricked the skin; a tiny trickle of blood.
She’d been stupid, her plan had been stupid, a fool’s gamble, yet her mind kept scrabbling for an idea, something else, anything else that could reverse her mistake or make happen what should have already happened.
“Don’t take defeat too badly,” he said. “If it’s any consolation, I had no intention of ever fulfilling my agreement, even if you’d won. But the pleasure of the game was great. Now. Sit.”
Her legs gave out beneath her.
“Let’s discuss what you owe.”
* * *
Arin felt the hum of metal in the air.
He rocked his body out of its path, heard the general’s sword strike the road.
Arin shoved himself to his feet.
* * *
The emperor lowered back into his seat. Kestrel stared at his winning hand, light-headed with fear.
“Does the sight of this trouble you?” Her dagger still in one hand, the emperor turned his tiles facedown. Then he paused, frowning at their backs. He touched one of the two shiny ones, then flipped Kestrel’s hand over, studying her tiles’ backs. He found, in the boneyard, the two remaining marked tiles. “What is this?”
She made an involuntary sound.
He batted the air as if at an invisible insect. Colored light beamed into the room. The four tiles shone clearly.
“You cheated?” he muttered. “How could you cheat and still lose?”
* * *
Arin swung at the general, who cut the blow wide, deflecting it easily, holding it in a semi-bind that forced Arin’s sword low. Arin’s guard was open. The general was quick, his parry swift. The man’s steel was so sharp that Arin didn’t feel, at first, when it cut him.
* * *
The emperor licked his dry lips. He turned over the two marked tiles in the boneyard. A wolf. A snake. “These are good tiles. Why would you mark tiles and not take them for yourself?” He swallowed. The knot of cartilage in his throat bobbed.
Kestrel saw him begin to understand.
His body began to understand, too.
He lunged for her.
* * *
The sword nicked the side of Arin’s neck just below the ear. It would have taken off his head if he hadn’t recoiled in time.
Arin had been looking at the general’s face without really seeing it. He saw it now. He saw that the man knew exactly who he was, and that he longed for Arin’s death almost as much as Arin longed for his.
* * *
The emperor knocked over the wine. He seized up against the table, hand clamped around Kestrel’s dagger.
She stepped back from the table as he shuddered against it. She felt a relief so deep that it didn’t even feel like relief. It plunged straight into exhaustion.
“I lied,” Kestrel told him.
The emperor tried to push himself upright. She thought he might be trying to do something with the dagger, but his arm had gone rigid. It thumped into the spilled red wine.
“I lied when I said I hadn’t come to murder you.”
His eyes were wide, stark.
“It never mattered whether I won or lost the game,” Kestrel said. “Only how long the poison would take to kill you. It comes from a tiny eastern worm. In its purest form, the poison is clear. It dries to a shine. I painted it onto four Bite and Sting tiles. You touched them.”
Foam dribbled from his locked mouth.
His breath rasped. It became glottal, the sound of bubbles popping.
Then it ended.
* * *
Arin struck back.
As they fought, viciously silent words thudded in his blood: Mother, father, sister. Kestrel.
Arin didn’t care that the blows his sword hammered against the man’s metal body were useless, that there was no art to this, that nothing would pierce the armor, that a few smashed buckles where the general’s armor joined was no victory. He could see too little of the man’s flesh, couldn’t reach it, and he desperately wanted to make him bleed. If he couldn’t carve into the general, Arin would bludgeon him. He’d beat until something broke.
The buckles, death said.
Arin shifted the path of his sword in midswipe and curved it down toward the elbow of the general’s sword arm, aiming right for where the broken buckles of the general’s arm guard flapped loose.
Arin sheered the man’s arm off at the elbow.
Blood pumped onto Arin. If the general made a sound, Arin didn’t hear it. He was warm and wet.
The general fell. He lay blinking up at the sun, at Arin, his eyes glazed, mouth moving as if speaking, but Arin heard nothing.
For a moment, Arin faltered.
But there was nothing of her in this man, this enemy at his feet. Arin drew back his sword—more power than necessary for the death blow. He wanted to pour himself into this act.
Vengeance: wine-dark, thick. It flooded Arin’s lungs.
Those light brown eyes, on him.
There was that.
That one thing that Kestrel shared with her father.
Arin heard himself speak. His voice sounded far away, as if some part of him had left this road and was as high as the sun, looking down on the half that he had left on earth.
He said, “Kestrel asked me to do this.”
For she had.
Arin was a boy, a slave, a grown man, free. He was all of this at once … and something else, too. He realized it only now, as he plunged his sword down toward the general’s throat.
He hadn’t been blessed by the god of death.
Arin was the god.