Page 91 of The Winner's Curse
Kestrel’s hand was smooth. Glistening, as if it had been oiled.
She drew it back. She changed. Arin saw her change, saw the happiness bleed out of her. She said, “What do I owe you for this?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly, confused. Didn’t he owe her? Hadn’t she fought for him once? Hadn’t he used her trust to upend her world?
Arin studied Kestrel, and realized that it wasn’t so much that she had changed but that she had slipped back into the same huddled anger that had tightened her shoulders the entire time she had been sitting next to Cheat.
Of course Kestrel was angry, having listened to a plot to destroy her people. But as soon as Arin assumed that this was it, his mind returned to that inscrutable look she had given him. He turned it over the way he might a seashell, wondering what kind of creature had lived inside.
He remembered that glance: the flick of brows, the tense line of her mouth.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
She seemed like she wouldn’t reply. Then she said, “Cheat will claim your ideas for his own.”
Arin had known that. “Do you care?”
A breath of disgust.
“We need a leader,” Arin said. “We need to win. How doesn’t matter.”
“You’ve been studying,” she said, and Arin realized he had quoted from one of her father’s books on warfare. “You’ve been taking texts from my library, reading about Valorian battle formations and methods of attack.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
She flipped an impatient hand.
He said, “It’s high time my people learned something from yours. You have, after all, conquered half of the known world. What do you think, Kestrel? Would I make a good Valorian?”
“No.”
“No? Not even when I have such ingenious strategies that my general would steal them?”
“And what are you, that you would let him?” Kestrel stood, straight-shouldered and slender, like a sword.
“I am a liar,” Arin slowly said the words for her. “Coward. I have no honor.”
There it was again. That look, livid with hidden things.
A secret.
“What is it, Kestrel? Tell me what’s wrong.”
Her face hardened in a way that told Arin he would get no answer. “I want to see Jess.”
The plant lay scraggly and limp on the table.
Arin wondered what, exactly, he had hoped it would make better.
* * *
Snow sifted onto the walk leading to the carriage. Kestrel was grateful for the plant Sarsine carried with her, but the evening had soured her thoughts, twisted her insides with anxiety. She thought of Cheat. She considered Arin’s plan—a cunning one, horribly likely to work.
It was more urgent than ever that she escape.
Yet how could she, in Arin’s courtyard, surrounded by Herrani who looked increasingly less like ragtag rebels and more like members of an army?
If she did escape, what would happen to Jess?
