Page 84 of The Winner's Kiss
Arin’s horse nosed past her to reach the stream. She looked up, expecting to see its rider, but Arin wasn’t there.
She found him sitting far off on a knoll overlooking the slopes that curved and gentled down. The village sat in the distance like a gray pebble.
Arin glanced up as she approached. One tree shadowed the knoll, a laran tree, leaves broad and glossy. Their shadows dappled Arin’s face, made it a patchwork of sun and dark. It was hard to read his expression. She noticed for the first time the way he kept the scarred side of his face out of her line of sight. Or rather, what she noticed for the first time was how common this habit was for him in her presence—and what that meant.
She stepped deliberately around him and sat so that he had to face her fully or shift into an awkward, neck-craned position.
He faced her. His brow lifted, not so much in amusement as in his awareness of being studied and translated.
“Just a habit,” he said, knowing what she’d seen.
“You have that habit only with me.”
He didn’t deny it.
“Your scar doesn’t matter to me, Arin.”
His expression turned sardonic and interior, as if he were listening to an unheard voice.
She groped for the right words, worried that she’d get this wrong. She remembered mocking him in the music room of the imperial palace (I wonder what you believe could compel me to go to such epic lengths for your sake. Is it your charm? Your breeding? Not your looks, surely).
“It matters because it hurts you,” she said. “It doesn’t change how I see you. You’re beautiful. You always have been to me.” Even when she hadn’t realized it, even in the market nearly a year ago. Then later, when she understood his beauty. Again, when she saw his face torn, stitched, fevered. On the tundra, when his beauty terrified her. Now. Now, too. Her throat closed.
The line of his jaw hardened. He didn’t believe her.
“Arin—”
“I’m sorry for what happened in the village.”
She dropped her hand to her lap. She hadn’t been conscious of lifting it.
“That shouldn’t have happened,” Arin said.
The crowd’s anger toward her had been unsettling, but not surprising. It wasn’t only that that troubled him. “What exactly did happen? With the mother and her baby.”
He tunneled fingers through his hair and rubbed the heel of his hand against his brow. “A misapprehension.”
“That you’re god-touched?” Kestrel had heard the rumors.
“No, that’s true. I am.”
She stared.
“But I don’t think the mother would be happy if she knew which god.” He glanced at her, catching her surprise. “My twentieth nameday was on the winter solstice.” The start of a new Herrani year. “But I’m older than that by the way Valorians reckon time. I was born nearly two full seasons before. My mother waited to name me. It was her right, the priests didn’t disagree. The nameday is meant to celebrate not only the baby, but also the mother’s recovery. Women recover differently, so the mother decides when. But in the year I was born, each new mother found a reason to wait until the year turned. You know, don’t you, the way we mark time? Each year belongs to one god in the pantheon of the hundred, each hundred years measures an era. The sign of each god rules once every hundred years. My year—my birth year—belonged to the god of death.”
“Arin,” she said slowly, seeing his anxiety, “do you think you’re cursed?”
He shook his head.
“Your mother named you in the following year. That’s your year, then, isn’t it? Herrani celebrate the nameday, not the birthday. It shouldn’t matter when you were born.”
“It matters.”
“Why?”
“My whole family. I survived. There’s a reason.”
“Arin—”
