Page 33 of The Winner's Crime
“It’s late,” a maid said. “Shouldn’t you change into a new dress for the afternoon? What will you wear?”
Kestrel waved a hand in a gesture very much like one she’d often seen the emperor make. She hadn’t meant to do that. It upset her. “I don’t care,” she said curtly. “You choose.”
Her ladies-in-waiting bustled into action, putting away her furs and parading gowns. While the maids tutted over some fabrics and fingered others approvingly, Kestrel wondered what Jess would have chosen. She shoved that thought away.
But this was like discarding a Bite and Sting tile only to draw a series of worse ones. Because there was Arin, in the velvet balcony of her mind, and there was the Winter Garden, cold with his absence, and there were the pink and red berries and her awful advice to the emperor.
Kestrel knew what would happen after the eastern horses died.
She imagined the yellow-green waves of grass. The ticking zizz of grasshoppers. Horse carcasses rotting in the sun.
The plainspeople would starve. Their children would grow hollow. They would cry for horse milk. The plainspeople would move south on foot to their queen’s city in the delta. Many would fall in their tracks. Some would not get up.
This would happen. It would happen because of Kestrel. She had done this.
But wasn’t this better? Hadn’t the alternative been worse?
The alternative almost didn’t matter. It didn’t keep Kestrel from feeling a sick horror at what she’d done.
One of the maids shrieked.
The maid had opened another wardrobe. Masker moths were flying out. They beat against the lamps and spun up in panicked, gray spirals. Their dusty wings began to wink orange and rose as they blended into the tapestries.
“They’ve ruined the clothes!” A maid slapped moths out of the air. One hit the carpet and lay still. Its wings went red, tipped with white to match the carpet’s design exactly. Masker moths had the property of camouflage even in death.
Kestrel stooped and picked it up. The furred, lifeless legs clung to her. The red wings changed to match her skin.
The maids hunted the moths ferociously. Masker moths were a common household pest in the capital, and this wasn’t the first time they’d eaten into a wardrobe of expensive clothes. Judging by the number of moths, the larvae must have been fattening themselves on Kestrel’s silks for at least a week. The maids killed every last moth, crushing them against the walls. Masker moths left behind smears of no discernible color. Damaged wings lost their camouflage.
“Go, all of you,” Kestrel told her maids. “Fetch servants to clean out the wardrobe.”
None of the ladies-in-waiting thought to question why they all must go. No one asked why Kestrel couldn’t simply summon servants with the pull of a bell. They glared with satisfaction at the carnage of dusty wings, and left.
When she was alone, Kestrel opened the wardrobe wider and found a pelisse crawling with moth maggots. Using her dagger, she cut a swath of fabric where the larvae squirmed most thickly. She brought it to her dressing table, which was stacked with bottles of perfumes and oils and jars of cream. She took a pot of bath salts and dumped its entire contents out a window, then dropped the cloth and its larvae into the pot and stoppered it, but loosely, so that air would flow. To be sure, she hatched a cross into the cork’s center with her dagger’s point. Kestrel set the pot at the back of her dressing table and arranged the bottles to hide it.
She sat back in her dressing chair, thinking about the creatures feeding on the cloth in the pot. They were fat already. They’d become moths soon.
And when they did, she had a plan for them.
Kestrel went to her study, and wrote a letter to the Herrani minister of agriculture.
11
Kestrel set her cup on its saucer. “I didn’t ask to see you,” she said.
“Too bad.” Arin claimed the chair across from her table in the library in a manner unbearably familiar to her. It was as if the chair had always been his.
He slouched in his seat, tipped his head back, and looked at her from beneath lowered lids. The morning light fired his profile. “Worried, Lady Kestrel?” He spoke in Valorian, his accent roughening his voice. He always pronounced his r’s too low in his throat, so that when he spoke in her tongue everything came across as a soft growl. “Dreading what I’ll say … or do?” He smiled a grim little smile. “No need. I’ll be the perfect gentleman.” He tugged at his cuffs. It was only then that Kestrel noticed that they came too short on his arms and showed his wrists.
It pained her to see his self-consciousness, the way it had suddenly revealed itself. In this light, his gray eyes were too clear. His posture had been confident. His words had had an edge. But his eyes were uncertain. Arin fidgeted again with his cuffs as if there was something wrong with them—with him. No, she would have said. You’re perfect, she wanted to say. She imagined it: how she would reach out to touch Arin’s bare wrist.
That could lead nowhere good.
She was nervous, she was cold. Her stomach was a flurry of snow.
She dropped her hands to her lap.
“No one’s here anyway,” Arin said, “and the librarians are in the stacks. You’re safe enough.”
