The Winner's Curse(63)

“Tell me,” she said to Arin. “Tell me what happened at the ball.”

His face was lit with firelight. The burning barracks of the city guard, though not close to the docks, had collapsed into an inferno. The sky around it had an ashy orange halo. “Ronan is fine,” Arin said.

Kestrel’s breath hitched—his phrasing of words could mean only one thing. “Jess.”

“She’s alive.” Arin reached for Kestrel’s bound hands.

She jerked away.

Arin paused, then glanced at the Herrani circling them, well within hearing. They regarded her with open hatred and him with suspicion. He grabbed her wrists and tightened the knots. “She’s sick,” he said curtly. “She drank some of the poisoned wine.”

The words trembled through Kestrel, and as much as she told herself not to show anything to anyone, especially not to Arin, never him, she couldn’t help that her voice sounded stricken. “Will she live?”

“I don’t know.”

Jess is not dead, Kestrel told herself. She will not die. “And Benix?”

Arin shook his head.

Kestrel remembered Benix turning away from her at the ball. The way he had lowered his eyes. But she also remembered his belly laugh, and knew she could have teased him into admitting his wrong. She could have told him that she understood how fragile one felt when stepping out of line and into society’s glare. She could have, if death hadn’t robbed the chance to mend their friendship.

She would not cry. Not again. “What of Captain Wensan?”

Arin frowned. “No more questions. You’re strategizing now. You’re no longer asking after friends, but stalling me or seeking an advantage I can’t see. He was no one to you.”

Kestrel opened her mouth, then closed it. She had her answer—and no desire to correct him or show anything more of herself.

“I don’t have time to give you a list of the living and the dead, even if I had one,” said Arin. He cast a quick glance at the armed Herrani, then flicked his hand in an order for them to follow. Those who hadn’t already dismounted their horses did so now and moved toward the small building near the centermost docks, the one that housed the harbormaster. As they drew closer, Kestrel saw a new group of Herrani dressed in the clothes of dock slaves. They encircled the building. The only Valorians in sight lay dead on the ground.

“The harbormaster?” Arin asked a man who seemed to be this new group’s leader.

“Inside,” the Herrani said, “under guard.” His gaze fell on Kestrel. “Tell me that’s not who I think it is.”

“She doesn’t matter. She’s under my authority, just as you are.” Arin shoved open the door, but not before Kestrel caught the defensive set to his mouth and the distaste on the other man’s face. And while Kestrel had already known that the rumors about her and Arin must have been as disturbing to his people as to hers, only now did that knowledge take a shape that felt like a weapon.

Let the Herrani think she was Arin’s lover. It would only make them doubt the intentions and loyalty of the man Cheat had called his second-in-command.

Kestrel followed Arin into the harbormaster’s house on the pier.

It smelled of pitch and hemp, since the harbormaster sold goods as well as working as a kind of clerk, noting in his ledger which ships came and went, and were docked at each pier. The house was stocked with barrels of tar and coils of rope, and the shipyard smell was stronger than even that of the urine that stained the harbormaster’s pants.

The Valorian was afraid. Although the last several hours had already shaken Kestrel’s sense of what she had believed, this man’s fear shook her yet again, for he was in his prime, he had trained as a soldier, his role on the docks was similar to that of a city guard. If he was afraid, what could that mean to the rule that a true Valorian never was?

How could the Valorians have been so easily surprised, so easily taken?

As she had been.

It was Arin. Arin, who had been a spy in the general’s household. Arin, whose sharp mind had been whittling away at a secret plan, carving it with weapons made on the sly, with information she had let slip. Who had dismissed her concerns about the captain of the city guard’s suicide, which could not have been a suicide but a murderous step toward revolution. Arin had waved away the oddity of Senator Andrax selling black powder to the eastern barbarians, and of course Arin had, for he had known that it had not been sold, but stolen by Herrani slaves.

Arin, who had set hooks into her heart and drawn her to him so that she wouldn’t see anything but his eyes.

Arin was her enemy.

Any enemy should be watched. Always identify your opponent’s assets and weaknesses, her father had said. Kestrel decided to be grateful for this moment, crammed into the harbormaster’s house with twenty-some Herrani, and fifty more waiting outside. This was a chance to see whether Arin was as good a leader as a spy and a player at Bite and Sting.