Page 92 of The Winner's Crime
“I can’t,” Kestrel said miserably.
“Then leave.”
But Kestrel couldn’t move.
“Go away, Kestrel. I don’t want to see you again.”
* * *
Kestrel sat before the piano in the stark palace music room. The row of keys looked blankly back.
Jess knew.
Kestrel sank one hand down into a violent chord. And there it was again, that odd, troubling echo, the one that always made her music sound as if it were listening to itself. She took her hand away. Her body became rigid, her bones grimly set. Maybe she would have been able to do what she usually did, which was to forget the echo. Maybe she would have stormed right into the music. But she was held tight by a feeling she’d never had.
She didn’t want to play.
Kestrel left the piano. She considered the room. What would make the acoustics sound right? Tapestries on the walls? Kestrel thought about this. She thought hard, hard enough to ignore how desperately she had wanted Jess to understand.
Kestrel was inspecting a shelf and wondering whether the acoustics would be better if she filled the shelves with more books when she saw it. At the back of one of the high shelves set into the wall, there was no wooden panel. The other shelves had wooden backs.
This one had a screen. A cunningly painted screen, with realistic knots of wood and darker grain.
Kestrel came close. She stood on her toes and shifted a barometer out of her way. She tapped the metal screen.
Echo.
There was some kind of chamber on the other side of the wall. Behind the painted screen was a place where someone could see what Kestrel did, could hear what she played, could hear anything she said to someone else in this room.
This room, which had been Verex’s, and which the emperor had given to her.
Kestrel came down on her heels.
The emperor loved his games.
Kestrel frantically revisted every moment she’d spent in the music room. Had she ever made a mistake? Let slip something she shouldn’t have? She didn’t think so. No, no one could have seen anything wrong.
Deviant.
Treasonous.
Kestrel backed away. Someone could be watching her even now.
She left the room. She scoured the hallway outside for a way inside the hidden space. She ran fingers over the hallway’s carvings until the center of a wooden flower gave way under her touch, and a panel slid aside.
The secret room was empty and small and dark and cold. The screen gave a view of her piano and most of the brightly lit room, but not the door. Kestrel stared at where she had been sitting.
She turned once more to face the hidden room. It looked almost ordinary. Plain, clean. Not dusty. But it smelled airless and dank. Like a prison.
34
Kestrel stayed close to her father. He could walk well enough but tired easily, so she challenged him to Borderlands games played in his suite, though most of the court spent whole days out of doors in the blue weather, opening parasols against the sun. There had never been such a spring, the courtiers exclaimed. The Firstsummer wedding was sure to be glorious.
When Kestrel played Borderlands with her father in his suite, they usually moved their pieces in silence. But one day, not long after she had seen Jess, her father shifted his infantry forward in reckless fashion.
“Why are you exposing your soldiers?” Kestrel asked.
His brows lifted. “Are you criticizing my line of play?”
