Page 100 of The Winner's Kiss
“Yes.”
“How did you choose which code to use?” Arin asked.
“The officer had counters in his tent, which was unusual, unless he was in charge of accounting for the army’s supplies, and that’d be done at the main camp where supplies are kept. I remembered a numeric code. He could have been using counters to help him write in it.”
“Or,” said Roshar, “your father will read the note, see one code when he expects another, and will send someone to the station, where there’s a dead body.”
“If so,” Arin said, “then we’re no worse off than we were before.”
“Oh yes, we are. The general will know the letter’s a ploy, and will do the opposite of what we want. He’ll ignore the main road. He’ll take back roads through the forests where our guns would be of dubious use and we wouldn’t have the advantage of height. You know this.”
Arin shut his mouth, glancing uneasily at Kestrel. Yes. He had known this, as had she. She felt worse for his effort to make her mistake seem smaller. He knew its true size.
Roshar leaned back in his creaking chair. His eyes slid from Arin to Kestrel, black as lacquer, the green lines around them fresh. “Can you tell me anything more cheerful than all this?”
“My letter mentioned nothing about a plan to use plague bodies as a defensive attack during a siege. I had to say that to the officer, to make him keep his distance. But once he was dead that lie wasn’t necessary. Now the manor can seem to be an even easier and more appealing target.”
“If your father takes the bait.”
“She did what she could,” Arin said.
The numbing properties of the ointment on the cut in her thigh were wearing off. She rubbed at the bandage, studying its interleaving, and tried to swallow her sense of failure, which grew worse to hear Arin defend her.
“I know,” Roshar said, “but our force is small enough as it is. We can’t be in two places at once. He’s going to move on Errilith. I don’t want to fight a defensive battle. We can’t afford it. If conflict happens here, we’d have the height of the hills, but they’ve got the numbers to fan out and flank us. What I liked about the plan of attacking them on the road was the chance to pen them in, to pin them down so that they can’t move.”
“Then trust her.”
Kestrel glanced up at Arin.
Roshar said, “Sending that coded letter was a desperate gamble.”
“It was her desperate gamble,” Arin said. “That’s why I think it will work.”
They were to break camp at dawn. Kestrel watched Arin dis appear among the supply wagons. She went to the river, washed the blood and sweat from her, then changed the shredded trousers, which had been the scout’s, for the pair she’d worn when she’d ridden south. She did not think very much. She watched leaves bend in the wind and show their pale underbellies. There was the rushing water. The cicadas’ metallic rasp.
She walked back to the center of camp.
Arin had set up a wet grinder and was, it seemed, going progressively through the spare arms stored in a wagon, inspecting each blade. He frowned at a sword and held it down at an angle to the grinder, setting its stone in motion. The sound was harsh.
Then his gaze flicked up. He saw her, and the grinder stopped.
She approached. “There are Dacran smiths in this camp. Other people can do this.”
“Not well enough.” He spread oil on the blade to polish it. His fingers glistened. “I like doing it.” Arin held out his oiled hand. “May I?”
For a moment she didn’t understand what he wanted, then she drew the dagger he’d made for her and gave it to him.
Arin looked it over—surprised, pleased. “You take good care of it.”
She took it back. “Of course I do.” Her voice was rough and wrong.
He peered at her. Friendly, he said, “Yes, of course. Is there a saying for it? ‘A Valorian always polishes her blade.’ Something like that.”
“I take care of it,” she said, suddenly both miserable and angry, “because you made it for me.” She hadn’t liked his surprise. She disliked herself for causing it, for the knitted confusion of her feelings, for the way she’d grown smaller to hear Arin defend her to Roshar, not simply because of the force of her sense of failure, but also because she’d asked Arin to trust her and now he did, unwaveringly, yet he’d asked her to love him and she offered nothing. She swung between the solid certainty of attraction and the apprehension of more.
I love you, she’d told her father. A plea, an apology, and also simply itself: eighteen years of love. Was it really nothing? So worthless?
Yes, it had been. She’d seen this when her father had lifted her clutching hands and pushed her away. She’d seen it in the dirt floor of her prison cell. Heard it in the sound of her soiled dress ripped open along its back.
