The Winner's Curse(41)

Sleep settled on her like velvet.

Then the dawn came, clear and cold. Kestrel’s peace had vanished. She pulled on a dressing gown and hunted through a wardrobe for her ceremonial fighting garb. Her father ordered a new set every year, and this year’s was buried behind dresses. But they were there: black leggings, tunic, and stiff jacket. A worm of misgiving ate through her as she looked at the clothes. She left them where they were for the moment.

It wasn’t that she feared the duel, Kestrel thought as she shut the wardrobe door. She didn’t balk at first blood, which could be no worse than she had received in training sessions. She didn’t dread losing to Irex. Defeat at a duel brought no shame in the eyes of society.

But Kestrel’s reasons for fighting might.

Does society talk about him? Enai had asked. Kestrel pressed a palm against the wardrobe door, then rested her forehead against her fingers. Society would talk about Arin now, if they hadn’t before. She imagined news of the duel spreading among Irex’s guests, who must have been shocked and enthralled by the details. A mistress to fight on behalf of her thieving slave? Had it ever been done?

Obviously not.

She could expect an audience at the duel. What would she tell them? That she sought to protect a friend?

Her easy sleep had been a lie. Nothing was easy about this.

Kestrel straightened. The challenge to duel had been issued, received, and witnessed. There was no dishonor in losing, but there was in cowering.

She pulled on a simple dress, intending to visit the barracks, where she hoped to confirm that her father wouldn’t return from his training session before the next day. Kestrel knew she couldn’t keep the duel a secret. Even her father couldn’t fail to hear the gossip this would stir. Still, she would prefer for him to arrive after the fact.

When she opened the outermost door to her suite, she found a slave in the hallway, her arms drooping under the weight of a small chest.

“Lady Kestrel,” she said. “This just arrived from Lord Irex.”

Kestrel accepted it, but her hands had gone limp with the realization of what the box must hold. Her fingers could not close.

The chest dropped to the hallway’s marble floor, spilling its contents. Gold pieces spun and rolled, ringing like small bells.

Irex had sent the death-price. Kestrel didn’t need to count the coins to know that they numbered five hundred. She didn’t need to touch the gold to remember what she had won from Irex at Bite and Sting, and to think that he might become a better player someday, if he understood the psychology of intimidation enough to pay a death-price before a duel had begun.

She stood motionless, washed by acid fear. Breathe, she told herself. Move. But she could only stare as the slave chased the errant coins and another girl came down the hall to help refill the chest.

Kestrel’s foot moved forward. Then another step, and another, and she was ready to run from the sight of spilled gold until a memory sliced through her mindless panic. She saw Irex’s dimpled smile. She felt his hand gripping hers. She saw weapons on walls, him flipping a Bite and Sting tile, his boots crushing Lady Faris’s lawn, heel digging a divot of grass and dirt. She saw his eyes, so dark they were almost black.

Kestrel knew what she had to do.

She went downstairs to the library and wrote two letters. One was to her father, the other to Jess and Ronan. She folded them, stamped the wax seals with her seal ring, and put the writing materials away. She was holding the letters in one hand, the wax firm yet still warm against the skin, when she heard footsteps beating down the marble hall, coming closer.

Arin stepped inside the library and shut the door. “You won’t do it,” he said. “You won’t duel him.”

The sight of Arin shook her. She wouldn’t be able to think straight if he continued to speak like that, to look at her like that. “You do not give me orders,” Kestrel said. She moved to leave.

He blocked her path. “I know about the delivery. He sent you a death-price.”

“First my dress, and now this? Arin, one would think you are monitoring everything I send and receive. It is none of your business.”

He seized her by the shoulders. “You are so small.”

Kestrel knew what he was doing, and hated it, hated him for reminding her of her physical weakness, of the same failure that her father witnessed whenever he watched her fight with Rax. “Let go.”

“Make me let you go.”

She looked at Arin. Whatever he saw in her eyes loosened his hands. “Kestrel,” he said more quietly, “I have been whipped before. Lashes and death are different things.”

“I won’t die.”

“Let Irex set my punishment.”