Page 86 of The Winner's Curse
There was a silence as long as a smile.
“Plot away, Kestrel. Survive. If I hadn’t lived, no one would remember my mother, not like I do.”
Kestrel could no longer deny sleep. It pulled her under.
“And I would never have met you.”
* * *
Kestrel was dimly aware of being lifted. She wound her arms around someone’s neck, buried her head against his shoulder. She heard a sigh, and wasn’t sure if it was hers or his.
There was the rocking motion of being carried upstairs. She was settled onto something soft. Shoes were pulled from her feet. A thick blanket drew up to her chin, and someone murmured the Herrani blessing for dreams. Enai? Kestrel frowned. No, the voice was all wrong for Enai, but who would say those words, if not her nurse?
Then the palm on her forehead was gone. Kestrel decided she would solve the puzzle later.
She slept.
* * *
The horse slipped on a scree of small rocks. Arin kept his seat as the animal floundered, then splayed its hooves and caught its balance.
Things would be even worse, Arin thought grimly, when he had to ride down instead of up the path. He had been searching for almost a full day. The little hope he’d had of finding the plant dwindled.
Finally, he dismounted. The mountain was a barren gray-brown, no trees, and he could see, up ahead, the treacherous gash the Valorians had poured through ten years ago. He saw a shimmer of metal. The weapon of a Herrani, clothes camouflaged as he or she—along with several others—guarded the pass.
Arin slipped behind an outcropping of rock, pulling his horse after him. He wedged the reins in a crack between two boulders. Arin shouldn’t be seen—and neither should his horse.
He ought to be up there, guarding the pass, or at least striving in some way to keep his country.
His. The thought never failed to thrill him. It was worth death. Worth almost anything to become again the person he had been before the Herran War. Yet here he was, gambling the frail odds of success.
Looking for a plant.
He imagined Cheat’s reaction if he could see him now, scouring the ground for a wrinkle of faded green. There would be mockery, which Arin could shrug off, and rage, which Arin could withstand—even understand. But he couldn’t bear what he saw in his mind.
Cheat’s eyes cutting to Kestrel. Targeting her, stoking his hatred with one more reason.
And the more Arin tried to shield her, the more Cheat’s dislike grew.
Arin’s hands clenched in the cold. He blew on them, tucked his fingers under his arms, and began to walk.
He should let her go. Let her slip into the countryside, to the isolated farmlands that had no idea of the revolution.
If so, what then? Kestrel would alert her father. She’d find a way. Then the full force of the empire’s military would fall on the peninsula, when Arin doubted that the Herrani could deal even with the battalion that would come through the pass in less than two days.
If he let Kestrel go, it was the same as murdering his people.
Arin nudged a rock with his boot and wanted to kick it.
He didn’t. He walked.
Thoughts chipped at his sanity, proposing solutions only to reveal problems, taunting him with the certainty that he would lose everything he sought to keep.
Until he found it.
Arin found the herb threading up through a patch of dirt. It was a pitiful amount, and withered, but he tore it from the ground with a fierce hope.
He lifted his eyes from his dirty hands to see that he had again come into view of the mountain pass. An idea robbed his breath.
