Page 152 of The Winner's Kiss
Those light brown eyes, on him.
There was that.
That one thing that Kestrel shared with her father.
Arin heard himself speak. His voice sounded far away, as if some part of him had left this road and was as high as the sun, looking down on the half that he had left on earth.
He said, “Kestrel asked me to do this.”
For she had.
Arin was a boy, a slave, a grown man, free. He was all of this at once . . . and something else, too. He realized it only now, as he plunged his sword down toward the general’s throat.
He hadn’t been blessed by the god of death.
Arin was the god.
Chapter 40
But he stopped.
Regret wasn’t the right word for what he felt later. Disbelief, maybe. Sometimes, even years after the war, he’d tear out of sleep, sweating, still trapped in the nightmare where he had butchered the father of the woman he loved.
But you didn’t, she would tell him.
You didn’t.
Tell me. Say it again. Tell me what you did.
Trembling, he would.
His brain had been a glass ball. Nothing in it but echoes. His mother’s scent. Father’s voice. How Anireh’s gaze had held him from across the room, and her eyes said, Survive. They said, Love, and I’m sorry. They said, Little brother.
And then silence. It became silent in Arin’s head as he stood on the road. He stopped hearing voices. He thought about how it had seemed strange that Risha would plot the emperor’s death, yet refuse to kill him herself. Arin understood now. He knew how it was to have no family: like living in a house with no roof. Even if Kestrel were here, and begged him—Let your sword fall, do it, please, now—Arin wasn’t sure that he could make her an orphan.
And he wasn’t sure that she would beg that if she were gazing down as he did on the graying face of her dying father, the man’s eyes sky-bright as he tried to speak, his remaining hand fumbling against his chest, just above his heart.
A throbbing radiance burned inside Arin; he hadn’t realized the pitch revenge could reach, how murder could come this close to desire.
He felt his eyes sting, because he knew what he was going to do.
He didn’t want to be here. He wondered why we can’t remember when our mothers carried us inside them: the dark and steady heart, how it was the whole of the world, and no one harmed us, and we harmed no one.
Arin thought that if he didn’t kill this man his memory of his mother would fade. It already had, over time. Someday she would be as far away as a star.
But he couldn’t do it.
He had to do it.
Tell me what you did.
Arin dropped his sword, dropped to his knees, yanked the woven baldric from the fallen man’s shoulder, and used it to make a tourniquet to save the person he hated most.
After the battle, and after Roshar had accepted the Valorians’ surrender, when Arin was sick with worry because Kestrel hadn’t yet returned from Sythiah, he went to the healers’ tent.
The general was asleep, his cauterized arm swathed in bandages, his armor removed. A drug had been forced down him. It had been a violent scene. Even now, asleep, the man was under guard and bound in chains at the ankles, his remaining hand strapped tight to his side.
Arin tugged at his hair until his scalp hurt. If Kestrel wasn’t back by noon he was going to ride to Sythiah. His brain was crawling in his skull, his stomach was a shriveled lump.
