Page 36 of The Winner's Kiss
Chapter 12
She swam out of the murk.
She was sore—shoulders and ribs and stomach especially. But the spasms that had racked her body were gone. Every thing was impossibly soft. The feather bed. Her thin shift. Clean skin. The tender give of the pillow beneath her cheek. She blinked, heard the short sweep of her eyelashes against the pillow’s fabric. Her hair lay loose, smooth. It had been disgusting when she’d arrived here. She remembered Sarsine working oiled fingers through it. “Cut it off,” Kestrel had said. She’d felt disjointed and eerie as the words left her dry lips, like she wasn’t really speaking but echoing something she’d already said.
“Oh no,” Sarsine had replied. “Not this time.”
Cut it off. Yes. There had been another time. Then, there’d been a tangle of myriad little braids beneath her fingers, and she’d hated the feel of them . . . because of the ghost of an unexpected plea sure . . . yet what kind of pleasure, and why it had vanished, her mind refused to say.
You might regret cutting your hair, a society lady like you, Sarsine had said in this other, earlier time.
Please. I can’t bear it.
Sarsine unsnarled the dense clumps left by the prison camp. The movement of fingers in Kestrel’s hair made her dizzy. She’d gagged, and was sick all over again.
Now, puzzling through this, Kestrel touched a ribbon of hair on the pillow. She’d lost track of its color in the prison.
Familiar. Dark blonde. A little reddish. It had been a more fiery hue when she was little. Warrior red, her father had said, tweaking a braid. She suspected that he’d been disappointed to see it darken over time.
She sat up—too swiftly. Her sight dimmed. She got light-headed.
“Ah,” said a voice.
Her vision cleared. Sarsine stretched up from a chair (dove-gray wood, upholstery the color of matte pearl. This, too: familiar) and padded to a small table that held a covered tureen. Sarsine ladled steaming broth into a cup and brought it to her. “Hungry?”
Kestrel’s stomach growled. “Yes,” she said, marveling at such a simple thing as normal hunger. She drank, and felt immediately exhausted. The cup hung limp in her hands. “How long?” she managed to say.
“Since you’ve been here? Two days.”
The windows were curtained and glowed with daylight.
“You’ve been fitful,” Sarsine said, “and very ill. But I think”—the woman touched Kestrel’s cheek—“that we’ve turned a corner.”
This woman was good, Kestrel thought. All brisk confidence. Firm, matter-of-fact, with an undercurrent of care. A crease of worry about the eyes. Genuine, maybe.
“You need some solid sleep,” Sarsine said. “Can you try?”
Kestrel liked this, too: how Sarsine knew that something that should be easy wasn’t easy. It was true that wake and sleep in the past days (two, she reminded herself) had been broken and shuffled. She glanced up into Sarsine’s eyes. Then stared. She saw clearly now what she hadn’t noticed before. Her heart thumped.
They were the exact same color. Gray, like fine rain. Heavy black lashes. His eyes.
Her mouth, too. Not quite the same shape. But the cut of the lower lip, the corner lifted in the smallest of smiles . . .
“Well?” Sarsine said gently, taking the empty cup, which had become heavier than stone.
Kestrel reached for Sarsine’s free hand and gripped it. She steadied under the unwavering gray gaze. Not right, part of her insisted. Not right to seek him in this woman’s face. To seek him at all. But Kestrel did, she couldn’t help doing it, and when sleep opened beneath her she wasn’t afraid to fall into it.
It was night when she woke again. The lamp burned low. A large shadow lurked in the chair. Long, trousered legs stretched out, boots still tightly laced. His dark head crooked awkwardly against the carved trim of the chair’s back.
Clean, asleep. Hard lines softer now. Face shaven. That scar.
He was too clean. Close enough that she could smell him. He smelled strange: vinegar and orange and . . . lye?
His eyes cracked open. Hazy for the length of one drawn breath. Then alert in the lamplight. He watched her watch him. He didn’t move.
Her rabbit heart beat fast. She flickered between distrust and trust and an emotion less easy to name.
“Go back to sleep,” he murmured.
