Page 81 of The Winner's Crime
“Did you discuss her with the queen when we first entered that room?”
Roshar looked at Arin as if he were insane. “Of course not.”
“Then what took so long to tell the queen?”
“Your crimes. In loving detail.”
“No,” Arin said, “it sounded like a story.”
Roshar prodded a flask of water. “Clearly you didn’t know anything about our country, if you bothered to bring this.”
“Why won’t you tell me what you said?”
Roshar kept poking at the flask, making it rock against the table. Slowly, he said, “Maybe I did tell a story. Maybe it was about two slaves in a faraway land, and how one helped the other.”
“But I didn’t.” Arin remembered it again. He tasted the dirt in his mouth, felt the gravel under his cheek. He heard the cries. He felt his shame.
“You saved me,” Roshar said.
Arin was confused. At first he thought this was sarcasm. But there had been something open in Roshar’s voice, like yearning. Was Roshar reinventing what had really happened? Maybe he was imagining a version of the world where the Valorian’s knife had never cut his face. A fiction. A story with a happy ending.
“I’m sorry,” Arin said carefully. “I tried. But I couldn’t do anything.”
“You did. You saved the thing in me that decided I would run away again.”
29
“I want you to do something for me,” Kestrel’s father said.
Firstspring had come and gone. Kestrel had missed most of the celebrations to be with her father in his rooms, as she was every day. The only event she’d attended was the one at the orphanage, where the children had looked dubiously at the bright kites she offered. “They’re not the right color,” a little girl had said. “I want a black one.” Afterward, Verex had gone through the leftovers. “May I keep this?” He lifted a pink-and-green kite. “It’s my favorite,” he said. Kestrel had smiled.
Now she looked warily at her father as he lay in his bed. She waited to see what he would ask.
“I want you to go to the battling clubs in the city,” he said, “and recruit people to the military.”
Kestrel edged her chair away from the bed. The wooden squeak was loud. She toyed with a bit of embroidery on her sleeve and imagined that her disappointment was a thread that could be tied into knots and stitched down tight. During all the hours she had sat by her father, this was the first time he’d asked her for anything. What had she hoped he would ask?
Perhaps to be brought a glass of water. Or to be told what had happened to the dagger he’d given her. He couldn’t have missed its replacement. The emperor’s gaudy blade was right there in full view, strapped to Kestrel’s waist.
It seemed impossible to tell her father certain things unless he asked for them.
But some words came easy, because they were angry and had been said many times before. “I want nothing to do with the military.”
“Kestrel.”
“Look at what it’s done to you.”
“I will heal.”
“And the next time? You are going to keep fighting until the day you’re killed, and I have to set an empty plate at the table for my father’s ghost.”
“We don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Then you’ll leave me with nothing at all.”
“We need more soldiers,” he said. “The army is stretched too thin.”
“Then stop trying to take new territory.”
