Page 148 of The Winner's Kiss
“Why?” The word burst from her lips.
His reply was gentle. “Why what, Kestrel?”
Her throat closed. Her eyes stung. She realized that she had forgotten the game . . . and that maybe this had been the emperor’s intention. She didn’t want to ask her question. Yet she couldn’t help it . . . or the hurt evident in her choked voice. “Why did he choose you over me?”
“Ah.” The emperor rubbed his dry palms together and templed them with a little pat. “You’ve provided me with an entertaining evening so far. I feel I owe you something in exchange. So: the truth. Trajan wasn’t my friend—not at first. He was necessary for what I wanted. Military prowess. Imperial expansion. I, in turn, was an opportunity for what he wanted, which was nothing less than for his daughter to one day rule the empire. An understandable ambition. Or perhaps our friendship didn’t begin there, after all. We’ve known each other since well before your birth. He’s a man of rare intelligence. There’s plea sure in finding one’s equal. Perhaps things began with that. As to how it has grown . . .” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s because he knows how I am with every one else, and knows that I’m not like that with him. I value Trajan. Ultimately, when he held your treasonous letter in his hand and saw how you had lied to him, the choice between me and you was the choice between someone who loves him and someone who didn’t.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks.
The emperor patted her frozen hand. “I suggest that we not discuss your father.”
He played his tile.
The air reeked of sulfur and scorched horseflesh. The screams were so many and so loud that Arin couldn’t really hear them. Just noise. His ears buzzed.
Valorians floundered in their blood on the broken road. Ranger arrows continued to furrow the sky. A blasted paving stone, Arin saw, had smashed into a Herrani soldier’s face. Her body lay half in the mud, half where the road had been.
Arin couldn’t spot the general. The Valorian army was vast. Only a few ranks of cavalry had been decimated in the blast.
Another unit of Valorian cavalry moved forward into position.
Kestrel was losing. Earlier, the emperor had delayed in order to unsettle her, to revel in it, to spear her like a worm and watch her writhe. Kestrel’s tactic of delay was different. She took as much time as possible to draw the game out. Earlier, she’d wanted the game to be over quickly. Now she needed more time.
The four shiny tiles in the boneyard winked at her. She knew their values. The wolf—she could use that if it were in her hand. Or even the bee.
Her frustration rose.
The tears had dried on her cheeks, the skin tight with salt. She couldn’t help returning to what the emperor had said about her father. The memory of how her father had told her that she’d broken his heart.
If he were here, she would howl at him. He had broken her heart, over and over, for years. He’d tried to force her into the mold of his own idea of honor. What he wanted her to be. Not what she was.
Kestrel felt her spine straighten.
Damn his devotion to honor.
When it came her turn to pull a tile, she didn’t choose any of the marked ones.
“Steady,” Arin called. His horse tossed its head. His vanguard still held formation: those few files of broad ranks, running across the road and up to the trees.
The Valorian cavalry nudged toward them, looking ready to tear through Arin’s ranks. Arin watched the cavalry shape into a wedge. The left and right sides would pull up in the clash, and would try to flank the center ranks of Arin’s army by galloping up alongside the road once Arin’s vanguard had collapsed.
Yes, said death. Good.
The emperor pulled a shiny tile. Kestrel bit back a sound, glancing away so that he couldn’t read her expression.
The windows had lightened. For the first time, she registered their intricate patterns of stained glass. In the dead of night, they’d looked black. Now they blushed with faint color. She saw what they would soon fully show. Flowers, gods, the prow of a ship. A bird’s flung-open wings.
This was an eastern room. When dawn came, it would be glorious.
The armies clashed. The center of Arin’s vanguard coalesced around him. But the edges—as planned—disintegrated, the soldiers appearing to retreat into the forest.
The left and right flanks of the Valorian cavalry hurtled straight into the open spaces along the road that the edges of Arin’s vanguard had hidden.
Valorian horses impaled their stomachs on the sharpened staves Arin had had driven into the mud.
The emperor set down a fox. He examined the game in play. “Things don’t look so good for you,” he told Kestrel.
A movement amid all the others—the torque of bodies, the muddy struggle, collapse, rise, murder—caught Arin’s attention. On the periphery of battle where gutted war horses flailed, there was some rabbitlike thing. He couldn’t look directly; he was too busy kneeing his horse out of the way of a rearing Valorian stallion’s plunging hooves. Then grappling with the stallion’s rider. Distracted, Arin seized the rider’s arm.
