Page 108 of The Winner's Crime
* * *
In her mind, Kestrel played the tiles.
The emperor.
The water engineer.
The physician.
A favor.
Herran.
Valoria.
She noted the new engravings. She arranged them in different orders. She sought a pattern and came up empty. She mixed the tiles again. But the emperor made it hard to think. She flipped his tile so she wouldn’t have to look at him.
Its other side, however, wasn’t blank. It showed her father’s face.
What game was this?
What did Kestrel think she was doing?
Hadn’t she lost enough? Hadn’t she done enough? She remembered Verex’s advice.
The riddle of the engineer and physician wasn’t hers to solve. She needed to stop.
Yes, stop playing, Kestrel, she told herself. Clear the bets, clear the table. Walk away from the game.
Now.
40
First, Arin made the molds. One, the size and shape of a child’s marble. The other, long and thin and cylindrical. He made two of each kind from fired clay and set the twinned halves aside. He heated lead in the forge’s fire until the metal oozed red.
Arin had been a blacksmith, but blacksmiths rarely work with molds. His clay molds cracked. Hot lead spilled. There was nothing to do but let everything cool into a misbegotten heap and shove it to the side.
It was maddening. And surprising, how Arin realized that he needed those hours in the forge, how work he was once forced to do was now his. He loved that feeling of making something. He smoothed fresh clay, curving it, hollowing it out with a measured tool. He watched new molds bake in the forge’s fire.
When they broke again, he almost didn’t mind. He would make more. One day, they would be right.
* * *
Arin had told the queen and her brother not to enter the forge. Roshar did anyway, his arm still heavily bandaged, the little tiger padding behind him.
“I think”—Roshar surveyed the disarray—“that you should have taken that dagger and been happy with it.”
Arin handed him a list. “Supplies.”
“My, how the lowly have risen. I’m not your messenger boy.” He read the list. “What do you want that for? What are you making?”
“Your queen’s something more.”
Roshar laughed. “She asked you for ‘something more’? I doubt that this”—he flourished the list at Arin’s latest disaster—“was what she had in mind.”
The tiger nipped Arin’s ankle. He gently nudged its face away. “Roshar, why are you here?”
“I’ve named the cub. I named him after you.”
