Page 92 of The Winner's Curse
Sarsine ducked into the carriage. Kestrel was about to follow when she glanced over her shoulder at the house. It shimmered darkly, glazed by the evening snow. Kestrel saw the architectural whorl that was her suite of rooms on the building’s east side. The tall stone rectangle was her rooftop garden, though it seemed double its width.
The door.
Kestrel remembered the locked door in her garden and realized several things.
The door must lead to another garden that mirrored hers. This was why that high wall appeared twice as wide from the outside.
That other garden connected to the west wing, which glowed with windows as large as those in her suite, with the same diamond-pane details.
Most important, the roof of the west wing sloped downward. It ended over a room on the ground floor that might have been the library or parlor.
Kestrel smiled.
Arin wasn’t the only one with a plan.
* * *
“Only for Jess,” Kestrel told the Herrani healer, and didn’t care that dozens of people were dying at her feet. She dogged the healer, unwilling to risk that one leaf might go to someone else, even though she saw other faces she recognized under the violet mask of the poison.
She chose Jess.
When the drink was prepared and tipped into Jess’s mouth, the girl gagged. Liquid trickled down her chin. The healer calmly caught it with the rim of the bowl and tried again, but the same thing happened.
Kestrel took the bowl from the healer. “Drink this,” she told her friend.
Jess moaned.
“Do it,” Kestrel said, “or you’ll be sorry.”
“What a lovely bedside manner you have,” Sarsine said.
“If you don’t drink,” Kestrel said to Jess, “you’ll be sorry, because you’ll never have the chance to tease me again, to see how I want too much and do such foolish things to get it. You’ll never hear me say that I love you. I love you, little sister. Will you please drink?”
A click came from Jess’s throat. Kestrel took it to be assent, and set the cup to her lips.
Jess drank.
Hours passed. The night deepened. Jess gave no hint of recovery, Sarsine fell asleep in a chair, and somewhere Arin was readying for a battle that could come as early as the dawn.
Then Jess inhaled: a thin, watery breath. But better. Her eyes cracked open, and when she saw Kestrel she rasped, “I want my mother.”
It was what Kestrel had whispered to her once, when they were little girls sleeping in the same bed, their feet cold and soft and touching. Kestrel held her friend’s hand now and did what Jess had done for her then, which was to murmur soothing things that were barely words and more like music.
Kestrel felt the feeble pressure of Jess’s fingers against hers.
“Don’t let go,” Kestrel said.
Jess listened. Her eyes focused, and widened, and woke up to the world.
* * *
“You should tell Arin,” Sarsine said later in the carriage.
Kestrel knew that she wasn’t talking about Jess. “I won’t. Neither will you.” Disdainfully, she said, “You’re afraid of Cheat.”
Kestrel didn’t add that she was, too.
* * *
