The Winner's Curse(65)

“You,” Arin said. “You know it.”

“I do.”

She didn’t. She had, however, a good guess. She had a limited range of possibilities—all the birds in “The Song of Death’s Feathers”—and the memory of the way Captain Wensan had looked at the kestrel plate. She would have bet gold on which code he would have chosen for the evening of the ball. Kestrel could read an expression as if looking through shifting water to see the grainy bottom, the silt rising or settling, the dart of a fish. She had seen Wensan making his decision like she could see the suspicion in Arin’s eyes now.

Her certainty wavered.

Arin. Didn’t Arin disprove her ability to read others? For she had thought him truthful in the carriage. She had thought that his lips had moved against hers as if in prayer. But she had been wrong.

Arin tugged Kestrel out of the harbormaster’s house. The door slamming shut behind them, Arin marched her to the far end of an empty pier. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

“I think you have had quite an intimate knowledge of my household. What’s delivered, what letters leave. Who comes, who goes. I think you know that Captain Wensan dined at our house the night before this one.”

“He was your father’s friend,” Arin said slowly.

“Whose ship brought my mother’s piano from the capital when I was a child. He was always kind to me. And now he’s dead. Isn’t he?”

Arin didn’t deny it.

The moonlight was dimming, but Kestrel knew that Arin could see the sorrow seep into her face.

Let him see it. It served her purposes. “I know the password,” she said.

“You would never reveal it.” Clouds blotted the moon, casting Arin’s features into shadow. “You’re taunting me. You want me to hate myself for what I’ve done. You will never forgive me, and you certainly won’t help me.”

“You have something I want.”

The cold dark seemed to pour around them.

“I doubt it,” Arin said.

“I want Jess. I will help you seize the ships, and you will give her to me.”

The truth can deceive as well as a lie. Kestrel did want to barter for the chance to help Jess, or at least be by her side if death came. Yet Kestrel also counted on this truth to be so believable that Arin wouldn’t see that it disguised something else: that she needed at least one fishing boat to remain in the harbor.

“I can’t just give her to you,” Arin said. “Cheat will decide what happens to the survivors.”

“Ah, but you seem to be entitled to special privileges. If you can claim one girl, why not two?”

His mouth twisted in what looked like disgust. “I’ll arrange for you to see her as soon as I can. Will you trust my word?”

“I have little choice. Now, to the purpose. You told Cheat that you went to the ball to collect information from the harbormaster’s slave. You will share that information with me.”

“That’s not why I went to the ball.”

“What?”

“There is no information. I lied.”

Kestrel raised one brow. “How very surprising. Didn’t you just make a promise and ask me to trust your word? Really, Arin. You must sort out your lies and your truths or even you won’t know which is which.”

Silence. Had she wounded him? She hoped so.

“Your plan to seize the ships is solid enough,” she said, “but you’ll need to finesse a few important details.” She told him what she had in mind. She wondered if Arin knew that accepting her help would increase his people’s suspicion that they were lovers, that he was collaborating with a Valorian who didn’t necessarily have their best interests at heart. She wondered if he knew that if he achieved his objective tonight, the winning would be undermined by the way he had won it.

Arin probably did. He must know that there was no such thing as a clear win.

But Kestrel doubted that he would guess that Captain Wensan had taught her how to sail. Even if Arin somehow knew that she could, she thought his mind was too occupied to notice that a fishing boat was her best chance of escape to the capital.

When she saw the opportunity to flee, she would take it. She would bring the hounds of the empire howling down on this city.





29



Arin had worked on the harbor before. He’d been sold out of the quarry into another forge, and when his second blacksmith master had died, Arin was part of the goods divided by the heirs. His name was still listed as Smith, but he had hidden the skills of that trade from his new owners and was sold at a loss to the shipyards. He had never sailed, yet he knew a Herrani ship when he saw it. He had dry-docked them along with other slaves, had hauled on ropes to tip the massive things onto their sides at low tide. Then he had waded in the mud to scrape the hardened sea life off the hull, shards of barnacles flaking around him, cutting skin, hatching thin red lines. He remembered the taste of sweat in his mouth, water oozing up his calves, and everything quick, so quick, so that the slaves could drag on the pulleys and flip the boat again and clean its other side before the tide rose.