Page 112 of The Winner's Kiss
The prince said, “My answer is no.”
He said, “You’re not the only one who suffers.”
He said, “You could do what the rest of us do.”
Roshar spurred his horse ahead.
Kestrel looked down the open road. A lone black bird cut across the sky like a crack in blue paint. She thought about the white salve in her saddlebag, the missing ring, and how much she longed to sleep easily, without dreams. Nothing in dreams can hurt you, her father had said—which was another way of saying that life can. But she hadn’t understood that as a child. Kestrel recalled the old comfort of her father’s words, and had a sense of herself as she had been.
That night, alone in her tent, she thought about the cruel cold of the tundra. Sulfur crumbling in her grip. The panic when her memory had begun to slip. The nighttime drug: soft, dense. The fear of dying far from home. No one would have mourned her. Sorrow: like marrow in the hollow of a bone.
It had been real. It still was.
But it wasn’t the whole of who she was.
Kestrel blew out the little lamp. In the dark, she recalled the road she’d traveled that day with its cloud of dirt.
You could do what the rest of us do.
She would keep going.
That night, she slept deeply. Afterward, she sometimes still wished for the nighttime drug, but it no longer held her in its power.
In this region, a variety of wheat flourished. Dull gold fields rattled softly. The grain, fully flowered, bent the stalks.
In the distance, Herrani harvested the fields. They were too old or too young for war. Other fields had been abandoned. Kestrel saw farms where chicken coops stood empty, smelling of sour straw. The animals had been slaughtered or carried away. A woven basket, left outside for months, had disintegrated into a spiky nest. When grasped, the handle came off.
The farms unnerved her. She would have preferred to say that it was because of the waste. Most of the wheat would rot on its stalks. But it wasn’t that. It was the buildings. The rare Herrani villa, with a columned portico and fluted arches. The wink of an atrium’s glass roof. More common: a splendid and newish Valorian manse, sprawling, flat-faced.
The slave quarters blistered in the sun. Paint peeled in long curls like an apple’s skin. Kestrel noticed, with queasy misgiving, that a little house lay near the slave quarters on each farm. At first, when she went with soldiers to forage for provisions to fatten the army’s supplies, she hadn’t known what the little houses were for. There had been no such house on her father’s property in Herran.
One day, she saw Arin see a small house. His eyes tightened. His expression went bleak.
She knew then that the houses had been for children. The memory came unwillingly, sticky and slow. She had to drag it out. When she did she understood that the knowledge had been the sort of thing she had once tried to unknow.
It had been the practice to take a baby from its enslaved mother once it was weaned and sell it to a neighboring farm. The mother would be distracted from her work, went the Valorian wisdom. Meanwhile, her master would purchase other children from other farms. These children forgot that anyone but their owners could lay claim to them, and were raised in small houses by an elderly slave. By now, such a child could be as old as ten years.
It had been commonly done in the countryside. In the city, not always. Some owners prided themselves on allowing their slaves to keep their children. Kestrel had once seen a Valorian lady coo over a Herrani child. The tiny girl had wobbled where she stood in the center of the parlor. Kestrel, who had come for tea, hadn’t noticed the girl’s mother at first, then had followed the toddler’s gaze to see a uniformed woman waiting in a shadowed alcove.
Kestrel’s father had made clear that there would be no slave children on his property. If babies were born, they were soon sold. None were purchased.
Each little house on each farm was a horror. Before—for years—she had let her mind close seamlessly, like an egg, around this wrong and other wrongs. They happened every day. It was life. But not her life.
Hers, an inner voice—sinister, upsetting—had sometimes disagreed.
Not hers.
Hers.
The words echoed now with the rhythm of Javelin’s hooves.
Kestrel could say that she’d learned that one’s life is also the lives of others. A wrong is not an egg, separate unto itself and sealed. She could say that she understood the wrong in ignoring a wrong. She could say this, but the truth was that she should have learned it long before.
The sky was frosted with stars. Kestrel found Arin seated near a fire, squinting as he retooled someone else’s leather armor. A buckle had come off.
“Can you see well enough?” She remained standing.
“No.” He pushed an awl through a strip of leather. “But there’s no time for this by day.” The army pressed as rapidly west as it could, though not as quickly as Kestrel would have liked. Roshar had warned against a forced march. Weary soldiers make for lost wars. Her father had often said the same.
