Page 20 of The Winner's Kiss
Arin’s hand twitched against the pillow. His legs twisted the sheets.
He opened his eyes. The moon was large and yellow in the window. He wondered how the moon would look from the rooftop gardens, and he suddenly was in the gardens—both of them at the same time, even though the eastern garden and the western one were separated by a locked door. The smooth stones were cold under his bare feet. He was somewhere between sleeping and waking. Then he forgot this realization and was fully inside the dream without knowing that he was.
He heard someone’s footfalls on the other side of the garden wall. But he was on both sides, in both gardens: his and Kestrel’s. He was alone. He was still. He was not making that sound.
Again, he heard the gravel scatter. But no one else was there.
The night sky unfolded. Someone was snipping its threads. It came down on him in panels of silk. The blue of it covered his eyes, filled his mouth. His ribs spread wide. He was drowning. He was trying to drink the cloth. His throat yearned for it even as his lungs collapsed.
He startled awake. The sheets were damp. His breath came short.
The dream deteriorated. He had only images of blue silk. On his eyes. In his mouth, too.
He sat up straight. His bed was washed in moonlight.
His mind flickered with the memory of the last time he’d seen Kestrel. The spill of her blue dress over the piano bench.
He made himself go back to sleep.
In the morning, he vaguely knew that he’d had a nightmare. Then he frowned, uncertain that “nightmare” was the right word. He tried to remember it. He had flashes: the sensation of drowning, the sense that he had wanted to drown. Something blue.
Arin suddenly remembered enough to wish that he hadn’t. He shoved the dream from his mind. As is the way with fragile thoughts, the cobwebby threads spun away. They became nothing . . . or almost nothing. They became a feeling he could no longer explain as he cupped water from the basin to his mouth. The feeling drifted, not a thought or a memory anymore, just a flutter of unease.
He went to Sarsine’s room for breakfast. The suite had been hers as a girl, decorated according to the orders of Arin’s sister, whose own suite was closed off, curtains drawn.
Sarsine set her cup in its saucer. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” He’d come to talk, but found that he didn’t know what to say and didn’t really want to say anything after all.
“You have shadows under your eyes. The god of sleep does not love you.”
Arin shrugged. He peeled a summer fruit, the little knife moving quickly in his hand. The fruit’s violet flesh dented and dripped. It smelled fragrant, dusky, sweet. Familiar. A perfume. On the skin, right at the base of her throat.
He dropped the fruit to his plate, no longer hungry.
Sarsine took it from him and ate, sucking her thumb to get the juice. “Aren’t you pleased that some of us are well enough to harvest fruit?”
He focused his attention. “Yes, but . . .”
“Not well enough to fight.”
“I don’t want you to fight.”
“Not me, perhaps.” She drank her tea.
“Could you oversee a project?”
She raised her black brows.
He pulled folded pages from the inside pocket of his light jacket. They described in detail how he’d made the miniature cannon: the process for making the molds for the barrel and ball, the dimensions, the way to fit the barrel into a leather stock.
Sarsine examined the pages. “How many do you want?”
“As many as you can have made.”
He went quiet. She let him be. He ate a bit of bread, then caught himself staring at Tensen’s ring on his smallest finger. He wondered why his spymaster had lied to him.
Tensen had promised the Moth her anonymity. That had been clear from the first. Then Tensen had seemed to backtrack on that promise—or to let it fall under the weight of his greater promise of loyalty to Arin. Tensen had named Risha as his clever spy.
