Page 69 of The Winner's Crime
“Do you think that why really matters?”
“Don’t you?”
“Verex, I’ve done something horrible.” The puppy’s ribs rose and fell as Kestrel told Verex about her plan to poison the horses of the eastern plains, and why she’d suggested it.
He was silent. One hand twitched in the straw. Kestrel thought he meant to take the puppy away from her, but he didn’t.
She said, “I’ve heard that you don’t agree with the war in the east.”
“My father says I’m soft. He’s right.”
“You must blame me all the more.”
“For being hard?” He brushed his fair hair out of his eyes so that he could see her better. “Is that what you think you are?”
“If I hadn’t suggested poison, maybe the plains wouldn’t have been burned after all. Maybe our army would have done nothing.”
He gave a cynical laugh.
She said, “If I’d never talked with your father, at least whatever did happen wouldn’t have been my fault.”
“I’m not sure that not knowing is the same thing as innocence.” He leaned back into the rustling, smelly straw. “I think that you did the best that you could. Risha will think so, too, when I tell her.”
“No. Don’t tell her. Please.”
“I tell her everything,” he said simply.
Kestrel’s gaze fell again to the puppy. She wondered what it would be like to be able to tell someone everything. She stroked the soft creature. “Will it live?”
“I hope so.”
A quick, hot liquid streamed through Kestrel’s fingers. She yelped. The puppy’s urine trickled down her sleeve.
Verex widened his already large eyes. “That was lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“That’s not all puppies do, you know. It could have been worse.”
Kestrel smiled. “That’s true,” she said. “You’re right.” Her smile grew, and became a laugh.
* * *
Her maids were horrified. They ran a bath and practically stripped the clothes from her. But Kestrel nursed that floating feeling of forgiveness Verex had given her. It buoyed her in the warm bath.
She asked to be alone.
The bath cooled. Her hair, water-dark, lay flat and sleek over her breasts like armor.
Arin had changed her. It was time to admit that.
Kestrel stood in the bath. The water sheeted from her. She wrapped herself, oddly and unreasonably shy with her own nakedness.
What kind of change had Arin wrought?
She thought back to last summer, and how it had felt as if he were thumbing her eyes wide open to see her world. She thought about the puppy, velvety blind, and her wish never to have heard any plan for the eastern plains, so that she wouldn’t bear any responsibility for what had been done.
Kestrel thought that she needed to open her eyes wider.
