Page 6 of The Winner's Kiss
Most of the escape attempts on the road north to the tundra had prob ably been doomed to fail. Still, Kestrel couldn’t help hoping that her first effort might ultimately be the best. As desperate, perhaps, as the others, but maybe more likely to work. On her first morning in the wagon, the guards had stopped to water the horses. Kestrel had heard the voice of a Herrani. She’d whispered to him, pushing a dead masker moth through the bars of her window. She could still feel the moth between her fingertips, its furred wings. Part of her hadn’t wanted to let it go. Part of her thought that if she kept the moth, she might somehow reverse her mistakes. She would have said different things to Arin as he stood in her music room. It had been only the day before. She’d sat at the piano, smoothing hands over her blue skirts, feeding him lies.
Kestrel held the papery moth. Then she dropped it into the Herrani’s waiting hand. Give this to your governor, she said. Tell Arin that I—
She hadn’t managed more. The guards had seen her reaching out to the Herrani through the bars. They’d let the Herrani go after a rough search seemed to prove that Kestrel had not, in fact, given him anything. Had the moth dropped to the ground? Had it simply been too camouflaged for the guards to notice it? Kestrel hadn’t quite been able to see through the window.
But if that Herrani man went to Arin and reported what had happened, wouldn’t Arin be able to understand what she’d done and where she’d been exiled? She listed the pieces of the story in her mind. A moth: the symbol of Arin’s anonymous spy. A prison wagon headed north. Even if that Herrani man along the road didn’t know who Kestrel was, he’d still be able to describe her to Arin, wouldn’t he? At the very least he could report that a Valorian woman had given him a moth. Arin would figure things out. He was quick, cunning.
And blind.
I would do anything for you, she’d written in the letter her father had found. But that part, despite feeling true when she’d scrawled it on the page, had been a lie. Kestrel had refused Arin. She hadn’t been honest with him, not even when he’d begged. She’d pretended she was empty and careless and cruel.
He’d believed it. She couldn’t believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.
She squashed her sneaking hope that Arin might discover what had happened and come to her rescue. That was a terrible plan. It wasn’t a plan at all. She could do better than that.
All the food was drugged. The water, too. On her first morning in the camp, Kestrel ate in the yard with the other prisoners, who were slack-faced and didn’t speak, even though she’d tried to talk with them. As she filed out of the camp with them in an orderly line, Kestrel felt the drug hit her heart. Her blood roared.
They entered the mining area at the base of the volcanoes. Kestrel couldn’t remember having walked the path to arrive here. She also didn’t care that she didn’t remember. This distant awareness of not caring brought a bump of plea sure.
It was a relief to work. The urge to move, to do, rode high. Someone—a guard?—gave her a double basket. She eagerly began to fill it, prying crumbly yellow blocks of sulfur from the ground. She saw tunnels that led below a volcano. The prisoners who went there carried pickaxes. Kestrel was made to work out in the open. She gathered—the realization was plucked like a stone from the rushing river of the drug—that she was too new to be trusted with an ax.
All the guards carried looped whips attached to their belts, but Kestrel didn’t see them being used. The guards—they could not be Valoria’s best and brightest, if commissioned to serve in the worst corner of the empire—were content to keep a lazy eye on the prisoners, who obeyed directions easily. The guards talked among themselves, complaining about the smell.
The boiled egg odor was very strong here. She noticed this without being bothered by it or by the sweat that stained her dress even as she shivered hard (was it very cold, or was this just the nature of the drug?). She loaded each of the two baskets attached by a flexible pole that she heaved up onto her shoulders. The weight felt good; it was so good to dig and lift and carry and dump and do it all over again.
At some point she staggered under the baskets. She was given water. Her marvelous strength returned.
By twilight, she was hollowed out. Her good sense returned. She refused the food served when the prisoners had filed through the black iron gate and into the yard.
“This food is different,” said the silver-braided guard from yesterday, whom Kestrel understood to be in charge of the female prisoners. “Last night I gave you a taste of how nice it’d be to work, but from now on you’ll get a dose of something different at night.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Princess, no one cares what you want.”
“I can work without it.”
“No,” the woman said gently, “you can’t.”
Kestrel backed away from the long table with its bowls of soup.
“Eat, or I’ll force it down you.”
The guard had told the truth. The food contained a different drug, one with a metallic scent like silver. It made everything slow and dark as Kestrel was led into her prison block and to her cell.
“Why doesn’t the empire drug all its slaves?” Kestrel mumbled before she was locked up.
The woman laughed, the sound murky, underwater. “You’d be surprised how many tasks require a mind.”
Kestrel felt foggy.
“New prisoners are my favorites. We haven’t had one like you in a long time. New ones are always entertaining, at least while they last.”
Kestrel thought she heard the key turn. She dropped into sleep.
She tried to eat and drink as little as she could get away with. She remembered the guard’s words . . . until, in fact, she no longer remembered them and avoided full meals simply out of the awareness that the drugged food changed her and she didn’t like it. She’d tip her bowl of soup out onto the muddy prison yard when no one was looking. She crumbled bread and let it fall from her hands.
Still, she was hungry. She was thirsty. Sometimes, she ignored her nagging worry and filled her belly.
