Page 96 of The Winner's Crime
“Fool.”
“I prefer to think of myself as an optimist.”
She clicked her teeth: a Dacran way to say no. It was an impatient noise. Arin had heard it used with children. “Herran has nothing to offer us but lives,” the queen told him. “I would pack your people into the front lines. When we win, I would take your country and make it mine. The word we want for you is not optimist. Nor, I think”—she appraised him—“fool. It is desperate.”
The rain must have stopped. The pipes hushed.
She said, “I would be, too. I would ask what you ask. But I would offer more. Then I would negotiate better terms of an alliance.”
He thought of that emerald earring he’d paid into the bookkeeper’s hand. He thought not about what it was, but what it had meant. He held the value in his mind, its pricelessness, and he cast about for an idea of what could match it. “Tell me what I can give you.”
She lifted one shoulder in a delicate shrug. “Something more.”
“Tell me what that is.”
“I will know,” she said, “when you give it to me.”
* * *
Arin and Roshar rowed up the river. Soft dawn hardened into bright day. The castle was at their backs, then gone. Reeds on the banks tapped a light tattoo against each other, and swarms of enormous dragonflies rippled like flags alongside the canoe.
Roshar steered. When they’d set off from the city, Arin had noted the crossbow slung across Roshar’s back, and a set of throwing knives at his hips. Arin had asked if Roshar expected resistance from the plainspeople who had made camp upstream. Roshar had blithely said, “Oh, this is for river beasties,” and looked coy. Then, though Arin hadn’t pressed him, Roshar added, “If you must know, I’m going to hunt a nice poisonous snake and make you eat it. You do like to ruin a surprise.”
The canoe slowed. Roshar had paused, so Arin lifted his oar, too, and glanced behind him. Roshar was looking into the reeds. His mutilated nose made his profile jarringly flat.
The current started to push them downstream. They took up their oars again.
There was something about the day—the tempo of the reeds, the dipping of the oars, the dragonflies’ brrr, and even Roshar’s stunted profile—that opened something inside Arin. If he had had to put what he felt into words, he would have perhaps said that it was a kinship with the moment.
He began to sing. For himself, for the day, for the way it made him feel. It had been a while. It felt good to push that music up and into the world, to feel how the initial heft of it lightened on his tongue. The song floated out of him.
He wasn’t thinking. He wasn’t thinking about her. But then he thought about how he wasn’t thinking about her. The song became lead. He shut his mouth.
There was a silence.
Finally, behind him, Roshar spoke. “Don’t let my sister hear you do that, or she won’t let me kill you.”
Arin didn’t look back. Then he said, “When I was leaving the capital, I saw Risha.”
The canoe angled its direction. Roshar had stopped rowing again. “Does everyone there call her that, or just you?” When Arin glanced questioningly over his shoulder at the prince, Roshar said, “Her name is Rishanaway. That’s what strangers should call her. Risha is her little name.”
Arin wasn’t sure if this was what Risha had asked to be called by the court, or what they had decided to call her. He remembered what she’d said to him on his last day there. Reluctantly, but firmly, because he thought Roshar should know, Arin said, “She told me that her place was in the palace.”
Arin saw regret on Roshar’s face, and loss … but also relief. Arin didn’t understand it. As he found himself questioning whether the queen and her brother wanted their stolen sister returned, he realized that some furtive part of him had been wondering whether that would have been enough to secure the alliance his country needed. If he had brought Risha with him to Dacra, would that have been the queen’s “something more”? How would Risha have been most valuable to Herran—as Tensen’s Moth, or as a bargaining chip with the Dacran queen?
Arin checked himself. These were questions Kestrel would ask. Kestrel knew exactly how to calculate what someone was worth. His lips curled in sudden disgust.
“Pleasant thoughts for both of us, I see,” said Roshar. “Oars in the water now, little Herrani, or we’ll never make the camp before nightfall.”
* * *
The day had gone orange. It hadn’t rained once.
“Nearly there,” Roshar said.
“Why do the plainspeople have to move camp?”
“They don’t have to, but this particular tribe has camped upstream of an agricultural village with crops. The villagers have complained that the water flowing downstream to them is contaminated. My sister wants these refugees to move into the city with the rest.”
