Page 101 of The Winner's Kiss
She thought of the hawk, which must have winged its way to her father by now. She imagined it slewing around trees, dropping down. Talons closing around his upraised fist. Her father unrolling the coded message. The trap she’d set for him.
Walk into it, she willed.
You have a mind for strategy, he’d said once.
Come see, then.
See what I can do to you. See what you have done to me.
“Kestrel.” Arin’s voice was hesitant. She realized how she must look. Hand clenched on the dagger’s hilt, a storm in her face. When he started to speak, she cut him off. “Do you have more of that salve?”
“Oh.” He fumbled under the leather apron he wore over his clothes and pulled the small pot from his pocket. “I should have given it to you earlier. I . . . was distracted. I forgot.”
She took it and left.
Usually she enjoyed her tent. It was private, which made her recall that she’d always felt watched, before the prison. In the capital, certainly. Even in Herran, when it had been a colony. Privacy was a relief. The circle of rough canvas cocooned her. It glowed or dimmed with the passage of the sun.
Now, however, as she heard the noises of camp (people talking in two different languages; horses and birds and insects and the brrr of the grinder), she felt as she had on the first day Arin had pitched her tent: lonely.
Kestrel removed her trousers and unwrapped the bandage. It was damp and heavy from the river.
The cut wasn’t bleeding. It didn’t hurt that much. She spread ointment onto the cut anyway. When it numbed, she thought of the prison’s nighttime drug. Her chest throbbed with a slow pang. She missed the drink’s taste, and what it did to her.
She painted the cream down her thigh where Arin had touched her. The skin went numb.
Kestrel bandaged herself again and tried to envision the morning, when she’d break down her tent, break camp, and strike south to attack her father.
Chapter 27
They split their forces once more. A contingent was sent to Errilith’s manor to make it look ready for a siege. If Kestrel’s father trusted the coded note, he’d run scouts ahead to gather information on the manor.
Roshar sent most of the supply wagons there. All of their cannons, too: a risk.
“Fast and light.” He spoke as if this were an entertaining choice and not a dangerous necessity to leave their main artillery behind. But stealth was necessary (as much as a small army could be stealthy). Speed was important, too, and the terrain was bad for hauling anything. They’d need to work their way south through the forest and up to the hills overlooking the main road.
“I’m worried about the trees,” Kestrel said to Roshar at the end of the first day of their move south. Irrielle birds hunted overhead, swirling into a black fingerprint against the violet sky. Kestrel flicked a playing card to the grass. A rabbit was roasting on a spit over the nearby fire, its skin a crackled brown. Arin slid a knife into it, separating the flesh. Too pink. He added sticks of resinous sirrin wood to the fire. They caught instantly, blazing blue.
“Worried, how?” Roshar glanced at his cards and groaned.
But Arin, who’d been watching their game without taking part, had already guessed what Kestrel was thinking. “We need the trees for cover,” he said, “but they’ll make it hard to use the guns. We won’t have much hope of hitting targets on the road below.”
“Better cut them down.” Roshar took his turn. “The wood’s undergrowth might be enough to screen us if we lie low.”
Kestrel clicked her teeth; an eastern, irritated sort of sound.
“You learned that from me,” the prince said, pleased. “Now tell the truth. Did you mark the cards?”
Coolly, she said, “I never cheat.”
“We can’t cut the trees down,” Arin said.
“Concentrate,” Kestrel told the prince, sweeping up the card he’d tossed down.
“To be clear, I’m letting you win. I let you win all the time.”
“Obviously we can’t cut them down,” she said. “My father will notice a sudden swath of felled trees. We might as well paint a sign telling him we’re there.”
“Or . . .” Arin said.
