Page 5 of The Winner's Kiss
If they had decided to take her outside now, it was because they had arrived at their destination. For once, Kestrel didn’t struggle. Her dream had numbed her. She needed to see the place where her father had condemned her to live.
The work camp was enclosed by a black iron fence the height of three men. Dead volcanoes loomed behind the two blocky stone buildings. The tundra stretched to the east and west: tattered blankets of yellow moss and red grass. It was chilly. The air was thin. Every thing smelled rotten.
This far north, twilight had a greenish cast. A line of prisoners filed into the camp through an open narrow gate. Their backs were to Kestrel, but she caught a glimpse of one woman’s face in the pale green light. The expression frightened Kestrel. It was utterly blank. Although Kestrel had been following her guards quietly, those empty, glassy eyes made her dig in her heels. The guards’ hands tightened. “Keep moving,” one of them said, but the prisoner’s eyes—all of the prisoners’ eyes—were shiny mirrors, and Kestrel, although she’d known her destination in the north and had known that she, too, was a prisoner, only now fully realized that she was going to transform into one of these empty-faced people.
“Don’t be difficult,” said a guard.
She went boneless. She sagged in their grip. Then, as they bent and swore and tried to drag her upright, she abruptly straightened and rammed her head back into one man’s face, threw the other off balance.
It was the least successful of her escape attempts. Stupid, to try anything just outside a camp that held scores of Valorian prison guards. But even as several of them swarmed out to help subdue her, she couldn’t think how she could have done anything else.
Nobody hurt her. This was very Valorian. Kestrel was here to work for the empire. Damaged bodies don’t work well.
After she’d been dragged inside the camp, she was shoved across the muddy yard and right up to a woman who looked Kestrel over with amused, almost friendly scorn. “Pretty princess,” she said, “what did you do to end up here?”
Though now dirty and disheveled, Kestrel’s hair had been braided with aristocratic flair the day she’d been caught. She remembered slipping into the soft blue dress and seeing the spill of it across her lap when she’d sat at the piano on her last night in the imperial palace—when was this? Nearly a week must have passed, she thought. Had it been that long a time since she’d written that reckless, wretched letter? That short a time? How had she fallen so far so fast?
Kestrel plunged again into that icy well of fear. She was drowning in it. She couldn’t even react when the woman drew the dagger from her hip.
“Hold still,” the woman said. With a few rapid slashes, she cut Kestrel’s skirts straight down between the legs. From her belt, the woman unhooked a loop of thin rope that hung next to a coiled whip. She cut the rope into several short lengths that she used to tie the slashed fabric to Kestrel’s legs, fashioning something like trousers. “Can’t have you tripping over yourself in the mines, can we?”
Kestrel touched a knot at her thigh. Her breath evened. She felt a little better.
“Hungry, princess?”
“Yes.”
Kestrel snatched what was offered. The food vanished down her throat before she even registered what it was. She gulped the water.
“Easy,” said the woman. “You’ll get sick.”
Kestrel didn’t listen. Her manacles jangled as she tipped the canteen to drain the last drop.
“I don’t think you need these.” The woman unlocked the manacles. The weight dropped from Kestrel’s wrists. Each wrist, now bare, bore a raised welt. Her hands felt disturbingly light, like they might float away. They didn’t look like they belonged to her. Grimy. Nails jagged. A nasty, infected graze over two knuckles. Had she really once played music with those hands?
Her skin prickled. Her stomach cramped—she had eaten and drunk too quickly. Kestrel tucked her hands under crossed arms and hugged them to her.
“You’ll be fine,” the woman said soothingly. “I hear that you’ve been somewhat of a troublemaker, but I’m sure you’ll settle down in no time. We’re fair here. Do as you’re told and you’ll be treated well enough.”
“Why . . .” Kestrel’s tongue felt thick. “Why did you call me princess? Do you know who I am?”
The woman clucked. “Child, I don’t care who you are. Soon enough, neither will you.”
Kestrel’s scalp was crawling. She had the odd and yet vivid idea that tiny beetles were marching in her veins. She looked down at her hand, half expecting to see moving bumps beneath the skin. She swallowed. She wasn’t frightened anymore. She was . . . what was she? Her thoughts streamed by in a blur: a magician’s trick with colored rags, a long line of them pulled out of the mouth, hand over hand . . .
“What did you put in the food?” she managed to say. “The water?”
“Something to help.”
“You drugged me.” Kestrel’s pulse was so fast she couldn’t feel each heartbeat. They blurred into a solid vibration. The prison yard seemed to shrink. She stared at the woman and tried to focus on her features—the broad mouth, the silvered braids, a slight tilt to the eyes, the two vertical wrinkles between her brows. But the woman’s smile was far away. Her features grew vague, unfinished. They pulled and drifted apart until Kestrel became convinced that if she reached out, her fingers would go right through the woman, whose smile broadened.
“There,” the woman said. “Much better.”
Kestrel didn’t know how she’d gotten inside the cell. She was consumed by an urge to move. Before she realized it, she was pacing the short space, hands opening and closing. She couldn’t stop. Her pulse thrummed in her ears: loud and high and soaring.
The drug wore off. She was spent. She sort of remembered that she’d paced for what might have been hours, but now that she was aware of the size of her cell—her wardrobes in the imperial palace had been larger—the memory didn’t seem possible. But her feet ached, and she saw that she’d worn down the thin soles of her elegant shoes.
Her heart felt like lead. She was cold. She sat in a heap on the dirt floor, looking at bright mold on the stone walls: a host of tiny green starfish. She touched the knots on the ropes that tied the cut-up dress to her legs. The gesture made her feel more like herself.
