Page 154 of The Winner's Kiss
“Tssah,” Arin hissed in sympathy when he found the abscess. The horse tried again to tug away, but he punctured the sealed wound, which instantly dribbled black pus. He worked on opening the abscess, then pressed the rest of the pus out. “Bring that bucket closer, will you?”
“Oh, certainly. I live to please.”
Arin lowered the hoof into the bucket’s hot water. The horse, already in pain, stamped, splashing the water as she reared her head, but Arin grabbed the halter and brought her head down, soothing her as he watched the foot to make sure it stayed in the bucket.
“Arin, why are you so transparent? Whenever you worry, you start fixing things. Draining nasty gunk from a hoof is the least of it. I don’t know what’s worse, watching you do that or knowing how hard it will always be for you to keep yourself to yourself.”
Arin stroked the horse’s neck. She stamped again, but began to calm.
“We won,” Roshar said, “and Kestrel is fine. We’ve discussed this. That poison is highly toxic.”
“But she’s not back.”
“She will be. You need to seize your political moment. If you don’t, someone else will.”
Arin squinted at him. “You call me ‘transparent’ as if that’s a bad thing, but I don’t need to make a speech for my people to see what I am.”
Roshar shut his mouth. He looked ready to say something else, then didn’t, because Kestrel and Risha rode into camp.
Chapter 41
The army moved at a slow pace toward the city, some on foot, and many wounded. Kestrel stayed away from the wagons that carried them. “I can’t see him,” she told Arin when the army paused to rest. But part of her wanted to use this time to see her father.
“You don’t have to,” Arin said. In the silence that followed, as they walked away from the wagons, fragments of every thing he had told her gained shape and terribly vivid color: her father’s severed arm, Arin’s lost vengeance, the letter that she hadn’t even recognized when Arin gave it to her.
It was a moment before Kestrel realized that a jittery energy had come over Arin. He was biting his lower lip and his hands were making stunted gestures as if he were trying to speak but couldn’t. Finally, he said, “You asked for his death. I didn’t do it. Should I have? Did I do the wrong thing?”
A gentle feeling flowed into her. She caught his erratic hands and held them between hers. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
That letter.
She read and reread it, in the high summer grasses on the sides of the road, at night by lamplight. The pen’s ink had aged, gone brownish. She imagined her father reading under the sun during the campaign. Spots of the paper had a waxy transparency. The residue of oil, used to polish a weapon? Her father liked to clean his own dagger. She searched for meaning in the smudges of dirty fingerprints under certain words, but nothing, really, was evidence of anything except the urgent scrawl of her own handwriting. The bottom half of the letter was warped with rusted blood, the final sentences lost. Kestrel couldn’t remember what she’d written there. Like a worn map, the letter folded instantly under the slightest pressure.
The paper looked quiet in her hand, tucked in on itself. Kestrel wanted to reach through time and comfort the girl who’d written it, even if the only comfort she could offer would be understanding. She wanted to imagine a different story, one where her father read the letter and understood it, too, and returned it to his daughter, telling her that she should never have had to write anything like that. I love you. I’d do anything for you, the letter said, and it was hard for Kestrel to keep from crumpling the paper in her fist when she realized that these words were what she had always wanted her father to say to her.
Three days from the city, the army had made camp for the night. Kestrel went to the healers’ tent.
Her father noticed the moment she entered. He flinched, then met her gaze, and she didn’t know what was right to feel—the sort of soft, heavy comfort that touched her at the sight of her father, simply because he was her father, or the rage in her chest, or how she wanted to mourn his maimed arm, and wanted to tell him that he deserved it.
“Why did you keep my letter?” she asked.
He said nothing.
She asked again.
He turned his face from her.
She kept asking until she heard her voice crumbling and thought that Risha had been wrong when she’d said that forgiveness was like mud, as if it could take what ever shape you needed.
It was hard; it was stone.
She walked away from the tent.
Verex said that he and Risha were leaving. They wanted to ride to the eastern plains, and maybe sail from Dacra’s eastern coast to see what lay in the unexplored waters beyond. He had no wish to inherit the empire. He asked that rumors of his death be spread.
He saw Kestrel’s fallen expression. “You think I should go back to the capital instead, and become emperor.”
“Honestly, I don’t want you to go anywhere. I’ll miss you.”
