Page 156 of The Winner's Kiss
“No.”
“Just this one last thing.”
“You can’t ask me to help you kill yourself.”
He no longer looked at her.
“Why did you keep my letter?” she asked yet again.
“You know why.”
“What, regret?”
“That’s not the right word.”
“Then what?”
“There are no words.”
“Find some.”
“I can’t.”
“Now.”
He swallowed. “I want to. I didn’t know . . . how everything would become impossible. This is what happens when you destroy the thing most precious to you.”
“You chose to do it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He didn’t say, but his eyes became clear hard shells, and she knew that it hadn’t been only his code of honor that had made him tell the emperor of her treason. Her father had wanted to hurt her, because she had hurt him.
He said, “It didn’t seem real when I was doing it. Like I wasn’t awake.”
“Do you know,” she whispered, “what they did to me in the mines?”
He closed his eyes.
She described it. He let her. Water slid from beneath his eyelids.
“Kestrel,” he said finally. “You know that there is only one solution. I can’t be a father to you.”
“But you are.”
“There’s no place for me here. Am I to be a prisoner for the rest of my life?”
This had been discussed—loudly. Roshar was in favor of a public execution. Arin had lost his temper in a way that Kestrel hadn’t seen in a long time, had shouted back that the general’s fate was Kestrel’s choice alone.
“I don’t know,” Kestrel told her father.
There was a silence.
She said, “How can you not even ask for forgiveness?”
“Impossible.”
