Page 75 of The Winner's Kiss
“I thought—maybe Lerralen—but my father, he . . . I know what he’s like. So I thought—” She halted. He didn’t like the way her voice collapsed when she mentioned the general. “The Errilith estate. Livestock, meadows, trees. Water. It’d make sense. To him. I worried. Maybe you wouldn’t think of Errilith. Or you would and ignore it. But I hoped.”
He felt a flash of wild fear. To wander vaguely south . . . unsupplied, alone, practically unarmed . . . on a gamble. A guess. It shook him. “You don’t even have a map.” He tried to say nothing else. He worried that she’d see the extremity of what he felt and recoil from it.
“I’ve seen the right maps, before. I remembered. I—” Her face contorted.
“You don’t have to say.”
“Let me. I want to. I went to the villa. My house. After I left your suite. I didn’t mean to stay there so long. I’m sorry.”
“You’ve nothing to apologize for.”
“Yes. I was so sure. On the tundra, I blamed you. The blame: rotten inside me. But when I went home, I remembered. The prison wasn’t your fault. It was mine. It was his.”
Arin went cold. His suspicion took its final shape. “Your father.”
“Yes.”
“Your father betrayed you.”
“I wrote a letter to you when I was in the capital. So stupid, to put it all in writing. Every thing I’d done. The information I passed to Tensen. The way I worked against the empire. What I felt. My father read it. He gave it to the emperor.” She was weeping. “And I know, I know that it hurt him, that I broke something, that he felt it break. Maybe I wasn’t me anymore, to him. Do you understand? Not his daughter. Not anyone he knew. Just a lying stranger. But how could he? Why couldn’t he love me most? Or enough. Why couldn’t he love me enough to choose me over his rules?”
Arin pulled her onto his lap. He held her shaking form, tucked his face into the crook of her cold neck as she sobbed against him. He murmured that he loved her more than he could say. He promised that he would always choose her first.
She was exhausted, and she fell asleep quickly. Arin sat beside her for a few long moments after. Murder rose in his heart.
The general was out of reach, for now. But someone closer by would do.
He left the tent and didn’t have to go far. Roshar was waiting for him. “I hear we have an unexpected guest,” said the prince.
Arin clamped a hand down on his shoulder and drove him into the trees.
Roshar—oddly enough—made no sound until enough distance had been put between them and the army. When they wouldn’t be overheard, he said cautiously, “Arin, why are you . . . manhandling me?”
“You knew.”
“Specificity, please.”
“On the morning we left, you knew that her horse wasn’t in the stables. That’s why you saddled a horse and brought it to me: so that I wouldn’t notice that she was gone. You are a liar.”
“That’s not a lie.”
Silence.
“Arin, you are crushing me. Fine, yes, all right. I might have gently deceived you, in the name of your greater happiness. Is that really a lie? Or if it is, isn’t it a very, very small one?” He showed with his fingertip and thumb just how small.
“You don’t know what makes me happy.”
“I know that you’re not. I know that you’ve no sense of reason where she’s concerned. Maybe I did observe that Javelin wasn’t in his stall that morning. Maybe I knew how things would unfold: how you’d notice, and go tearing off after her, wherever she was, and my sister would learn of it. What would my soldiers think if I waited for you? Or if we marched south without you? It’d all fall apart. So yes, I lied. I’d do it again. My only other option was to watch you throw every thing away for the sake of someone who doesn’t even love you.”
Arin released him. He felt brutally gutted.
“You wanted the truth,” said the prince.
Arin thought of Cheat, Tensen, Kestrel. He wondered if some part of him was drawn to lies. What was it that made him so easy to deceive?
“Oh, Arin. Don’t look like that. I apologize.”
He stared at his friend, who was still his friend. It struck him that Roshar had gone quietly into the trees because if he had protested, his army would have cut Arin down.
