Page 15 of The Winner's Crime
He did not want her to know.
He did not want her to see.
But:
Look at me, he found himself thinking furiously at her. Look at me.
She lifted her eyes, and did.
* * *
The memories were strange, they were a network of lashes, laid one on top of the other, burning traces that might have resembled a pattern if it wasn’t clear that they had been left by a wild hand with no restraint. The lashes were lit with feeling.
He was stinging, stinging.
“Arin,” Tensen said during their meeting with the Herrani treasurer, who was even grimmer than usual, “where is your head? You’ve heard nothing I’ve said.”
“Say it again.”
“The emperor has had a new coin minted to celebrate the engagement.”
Arin didn’t want to hear about the engagement.
“I think that you should see it,” Tensen said.
Arin took the coin, and didn’t see whatever it was that Tensen thought he should see.
Tensen told him the story of Jadis.
Arin dropped the coin.
He remembered.
He remembered changing.
He saw Kestrel give a flower to a baby everyone else ignored. He watched her lose cheerfully at cards to an old Valorian woman whom society giggled about, not even bothering to hush their words, for she was too senile, they said, to understand.
Arin had stood behind Kestrel during that card game. He’d seen her high hand.
He saw her honesty with him. She offered it like a cup of clear water that he drank deep.
Her tears, glinting in the dark.
Her fierce creature of a mind: sleek and sharp-clawed and utterly unwilling to be caught.
Arin saw Kestrel step between him and punishment as if it meant nothing, instead of everything.
“Arin?” Tensen called through the memories.
Arin remembered the sunken days after he’d seen her last, after she’d handed him her emperor’s decree of Herrani freedom and told him about her engagement. “Congratulate me,” she’d said. He hadn’t believed it. He had begged. She hadn’t listened. “Oh, Arin,” Sarsine said to him during the time when he wouldn’t leave the rooms Kestrel had lived in. “What did you expect?”
Grief. It had all come to this.
“Arin,” Tensen said to him again, and Arin could no longer ignore him. “For the last time, are you going to the capital or not?”
6
Officials and aristocrats began to arrive in the capital in preparation for the ball. Every day more sets of fine horses were brought into the imperial stables, limping from the bitter ride down winter roads. Although Kestrel had pointed out the difficulties of bad travel conditions for their guests, the emperor apparently thought this was unimportant. He had invited them; they must come. Fires were laid to warm palace guest suites that would be lived in for quite some time: after the ball, there would be parties and events right up until the wedding.
