Page 39 of The Winner's Crime
“That,” whispered the emperor, “isn’t what my librarians say.”
He pinched harder. The pain deepened. It drove into her fear. It pinned her feet to the floor.
“You disobeyed me, Kestrel. You disobeyed me twice.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
The emperor released her, his thumbnail bloody. “No, you’re not,” he said. “But you will be.”
13
Yet the emperor did nothing.
Kestrel’s dread grew. There was a half-moon scab and a stormy bruise on her inside elbow. That couldn’t be her only punishment.
Kestrel’s letters to Jess, filled with false cheer, went unanswered. It occurred to Kestrel that the emperor had intercepted the letters. But this, though it hurt, wouldn’t be enough for the emperor’s revenge. Something worse must come.
She’d seen the way he was with others. A soldier had recently been found guilty of desertion, and his high-society parents had pled for leniency. Desertion was a form of treason. The punishment for treason was death. Courtiers gossiped that maybe, just this once, the soldier would “go north”—meaning, to the tundra’s work camp. But the parents clearly hoped for even better than that. Their gold made its way to certain pockets. They regularly petitioned the emperor to release their son. The emperor had smiled and said he would see. It amused him to wait, and watch people twist on the knife of his waiting.
Kestrel felt the shame of her mistake. The instinctive guilt of being caught. And worse: a slippery, eel-like uncertainty in herself. What did she think she was doing, with her moths and treasonous promises to Tensen?
She thought about what her father would say if he knew.
She thought about the prison and Thrynne’s skinned fingers.
But maybe the emperor planned a punishment fit for a child, like barring Kestrel from the piano.
Maybe he would humiliate her at court.
Maybe the stolen letters were enough.
Kestrel’s bruise faded. The scab flaked away.
Uneasy, Kestrel finally decided that the emperor wouldn’t risk doing anything extreme to General Trajan’s daughter.
She dined with the emperor every day. He was slyly kind, even solicitous. He acted as if nothing had happened.
Kestrel stopped tensing herself for a blow that didn’t come.
Maybe it never would.
* * *
To Arin, the imperial palace was a big box of architectural tricks. It didn’t matter, though, how many dead-end hallways there were. He didn’t care about the dizzying array of chambers for leisure. He ignored the way that tight, winding staircases could split into several directions.
In the end, the palace was really just a building, and in every building servants were housed in the same place: the worst.
So when Arin went looking for Kestrel’s dressmaker, she wasn’t hard to find. He took staircases down. He went into the dark. He followed musty air. Insufferable heat. The kitchen’s fires. Sweat and fried onion smells.
The Herrani servants were helpful. Too helpful. Their eyes were shining. They would have shared anything with him. Their faces fell to be asked so little as the whereabouts of a dressmaker. Even the slaves from various conquered territories, whose languages Arin didn’t speak, and who worked in tense and arcane hierarchies with the newly freed Herrani, watched Arin with expressions approaching awe.
Arin’s failure felt hot within him. It was a kind of poison, steeping steadily. The Herrani servants asked to be told the story of how Arin had brought a mountain down on Valorian troops. How had he saved Minister Tensen during that assault on a country estate? Was it from a crossbow quarrel, or a thrown dagger?
The stories were worthless. Everything Arin had done, from the Firstwinter Rebellion to his last stand against the Valorian general, had changed nothing. His people still belonged to the empire.
“Deliah,” Arin reminded the Herrani gathered in the largest kitchen. “Where is she?”
Her workshop was in a nicer section of the palace, on the ground floor in a room with enough light to make the bolts of fabric glow. When Arin entered, Deliah was sewing, her lap heaped with rich, wine-dark cloth. Her mouth was full of straight pins. She removed them slowly, one by one, when Arin asked his question.
