Page 93 of The Winner's Curse
That night, Kestrel tried the locked garden door again. She pulled against the knob with all her strength. The door was massive. It didn’t even rattle.
She stood, shivering in the snow. Then she went back into her rooms and returned with a table, which she set against the wall in the far corner. She climbed onto the table, and was still nowhere tall enough to reach the top of the wall. She hoped the corner’s angles would give her hands and feet leverage to push upward.
The wall was too smooth. She slid back down. Even with a chair on top of the table, the wall was too high for her, and putting anything on top of the chair would be precarious. She was likely to fall onto the stones.
Kestrel climbed down and studied the garden in the lamplight thrown from her sunroom. She chewed the inside of her cheek, and was wondering whether books stacked on the chair on top of the table would make a difference when she heard something.
The grate of a heel against pebbles. It came from beyond the door, on the other side of the wall.
Someone had been listening.
Was listening still.
As quietly as she could, Kestrel took the chair down from the table and went inside.
* * *
Before Arin left for the mountain pass, during the coldest hours of the night, he found time to order that every piece of furniture light enough for Kestrel to move be taken from her suite.
34
As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin thought that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valorians also went to war because of love.
Arin loved those hours of waiting. The silent, brilliant tension, like scribbles of heat lightning. His city far below and behind him, his hand on a cannon’s curve, ears open to the acoustics of the pass. He stared into it, and even though he smelled the reek of fear from men and women around him, he was caught in a kind of wonder. He felt so vibrant. As if his life was a fresh, translucent, thin-skinned fruit. It could be sliced apart and he wouldn’t care. Nothing felt like this.
Nothing except—
And that was another thing war did. It helped Arin forget what he couldn’t have.
There was a skittering sound. It rattled through the pass, growing louder until one of Cheat’s messengers emerged and ran straight for the commander. Arin wasn’t far from Cheat’s side, but even if he had been he probably would have heard the boy’s gasp. “Coming,” he said. “They’re coming.”
After that, it was all buzz and haste. Checking that the cannons were properly packed, then checking again. Cutting fuses from long, thin coils of flammable cord. Huddling under the dun-colored cloth.
Arin peered through a hole cut into the sheet. His eyes burned from not blinking.
But of course he heard them before he saw them. The percussion of thousands of marching feet. Then the Valorian front lines emerged from the pass. Arin waited, and waited, for Cheat’s first shot.
It came. The cannonball ripped through cloth, drove through the air, and smashed into the cavalry. It split horses and people into chunks. Arin heard screaming, but he blocked it out.
The stone-colored sheets were gone—no need for them now—and Arin was heaving a ball into the gut of a cannon, firing, doing it again, hands black with powder, when a woman appeared at his side. She yanked at his sleeve. “Cheat is hurt,” she said.
The Valorians were firing back, arrows and crossbow quarrels piercing the air with terrifying accuracy. Arin sucked in a breath. He ran.
Arrows whistled past him.
He dove behind the boulders that partially shielded Cheat’s cannon. The man was stretched out on his back, face sprayed with black powder. Herrani clumped around him, staring down with shock.
“No!” Arin shouted at them. “Eyes on the Valorians, not him!” They startled, then returned to what they were doing, which was blowing as many holes as they could into the Valorian formations.
“Except you.” Arin grabbed the nearest man by his shirt. “Tell me what happened.” Arin crouched and patted Cheat’s arms, chest, looking for blood. “No wounds. Why are there no wounds?”
“He just fell back,” said the man. “When the cannon went off, the blast knocked Cheat off his feet. He must have hit his head.”
Arin’s laugh was wild. The first moment of battle, and the commander had gone unconscious. Hardly a good omen.
He dragged Cheat more securely behind the boulders and snatched a spyglass from the man’s pocket. It had been taken from the general’s villa. It was of fine quality.
A little too fine. Through it, Arin saw that the Valorian cavalry kept their seats and horses under control, even on a treacherously steep slope bombarded with cannon. They were advancing.
