The Winner's Kiss

No, it didn’t hurt anymore to think about Kestrel. He’d been a fool, but he’d had to forgive himself for worse. Sister, father, mother. As for Kestrel . . . Arin had some clarity on who he was: the sort of person who trusted too blindly, who put his heart where it didn’t belong.

The man wrote his message.
Are you really a boy, like Xash says? the god asked Arin. You’ve been mine for twenty years. I raised you.
The Valorian signed the scrap of paper.
Cared for you.
The message was rolled, sealed, and pushed into a tiny leather tube.
Watched over you when you thought you were alone.
The captain tied the tube to a hawk’s leg. The bird was too large to be a kestrel. It didn’t have a kestrel’s markings. It cocked its head, turning its glass-bead eyes on Arin.
No, not a boy. A man made in my image . . . one who knows he can’t afford to be seen as weak.
The hawk launched into the sky.
You’re mine, Arin. You know what you must do.
Arin cut the Valorian’s throat.

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 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.”

Arin thought of Cheat, Tensen, Kestrel. He wondered if some part of him was drawn to lies. What was it that made him so easy to deceive?

The cannons held their breath. Vanguard crashed into vanguard. She saw the collision happen a few ranks ahead. The spurt of blood. Hideous masks of fear and hatred. An arm shorn from the shoulder. Bodies shoved from horses, crumpled into the sand beneath hooves. And the cruelty of what she couldn’t see.

He wondered if he, too, was tempted by cunning. Maybe he was drawn as well to the biggest gamble.

He hadn’t been blessed by the god of death.
Arin was the god.

It was grief. It was the horror of someone who’d been dealt a winning hand, had bet her life on the game, and then proceeded (deliberately?) to lose.

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.

Kestrel thought that maybe she had been wrong, and Risha had been wrong, about forgiveness, that it was neither mud nor stone, but resembled more the drifting white spores. They came loose from the trees when they were ready. Soft to the touch, but made to be let go, so that they could find a place to plant and grow.

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.

She’d wanted to put her fear inside a white box and give it to Arin. You, too, she would tell him. I fear for you. I fear for me if I lost you.

I would do anything for you, she’d written in the letter her father had found. But that part, despite feeling true when she’d scrawled it on the page, had been a lie. Kestrel had refused Arin. She hadn’t been honest with him, not even when he’d begged. She’d pretended she was empty and careless and cruel.
He’d believed it. She couldn’t believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.

He didn’t smile. He cupped her face with both hands. An emotion tugged at his expression, a dark awe, the kind saved for a wild storm that rends the sky but doesn’t ravage your existence, doesn’t destroy every thing you love. The one that lets you feel saved.

Harder to know that her father had sent her here. Hard, horrible, the way he had looked at her, disowned her, accused her of treason. She’d been guilty. She had done every thing that he believed of her, and now she had no father.

But how could he? Why couldn’t he love me most? Or enough. Why couldn’t he love me enough to choose me over his rules?”

Kestrel hadn’t known until she saw her father’s face how much she still loved him.
Wrong, that she felt this way. Wrong, that love could live with betrayal and hurt and anger.

Her love for him closed within her like a fist. Nervous, bruised. She despised it. Wasn’t it the love of a beaten animal, slinking back to its master? Yet here was the truth: she missed her father.

Arms folded across his chest, Arin walked to the end of the pier. “Did you have to bring the tiger?”
“I kept him hungry during the journey here, just for you,” Roshar said. “Go give him a nice snuggle, won’t you? He’s come all this way to see you. The least you could do is give him one of your arms to eat. Too much? What about a hand? At least some fingers. Arin, where’s your hospitality?”

“Please understand. When I look at you as if you’re crazy, it’s not that I judge you for your insanity.”

“You could offer her a seat,” Arin said.
“Ah, but I have only two chairs in my tent, little Herrani, and we are three. I suppose she could always sit on your lap.”

“How do I look in the dark?”
Startled, Arin glanced at him. The question had had no edges. It wasn’t sleek, either. Its soft, uncertain shape suggested that Roshar truly wanted to know. In the fired red shadows, his limbs looked lax and his mutilated face met Arin’s squarely. The heavy feeling that Arin carried—that specific sadness, nestled just below his collar bone, like a pendant—lessened. He said, “Like my friend.”
Roshar didn’t smile. When he spoke, his voice matched his expression, which was rare for him. Rarer still: his tone. Quiet and true. “You do, too.”