Her half-asleep self said: Arin let you go because a Valorian invasion was inevitable. At least this way, he knows when to expect it.
Kestrel heard music, and it called her a liar.
Liar, the bell rang.
And kept ringing, and ringing, until Kestrel wrenched awake and out of the cabin to see the cup and spoon clanging.
Against a vicious green sky.
Green storm.
Waves vomited over the deck. Kestrel had lashed herself to the tiller and could do little more than hang on, watch the wind shred the sails, and hope she was still pointed west as the boat sheered off crests of water and pitched down, and sideways, and down.
Arin let you go so that you would die, just like this.
But even dizzy, her mind saw no sense in that.
Kestrel worked again through the words she was supposed to say, spun them out from her like knitting she had seen slaves do. She tested the words’ fabric, their fiber, and knew she couldn’t speak them.
She would not.
Kestrel swore by Arin’s gods that she would not.
No wind. She couldn’t see much. Salt water had bleared her eyes. But she heard the boat scrape against something. Then came voices.
Valorian voices.
She stumbled off the boat. Hands caught her, and people were asking questions she didn’t fully comprehend. Then one made sense: “Who are you?”
“I am Lady Kestrel,” she croaked. Unbidden—wretched, wrong—all the words she had memorized poured out before she could shut her mouth. “General Trajan’s daughter. Herrani have taken the peninsula…”
39
She woke when someone dribbled water past her lips. She came instantly alive, begging for more as it was doled out in excruciatingly small sips. Kestrel drank, and thought of things whose beauty was raw and cool.
Rain on silver bowls. Lilies in snow. Gray eyes.
She had done something, she remembered. Something cruel. Unforgivable.
Kestrel forced herself up on her elbows. She lay on a large bed. She still saw badly, but well enough to observe that the softness cushioning her body was a fur so rare and valuable its animal had been hunted nearly to extinction, and that the man who held a cup of water wore the robes of the Valorian emperor’s physician.
“Brave girl,” he said. His smile was kind.
Kestrel saw it and understood that she had succeeded. She had reached the capital, had been recognized and believed.
No, she tried to say. I didn’t mean it. But her mouth didn’t work.
“You’ve been through an ordeal,” the doctor said. “You need to rest.”
There was an odd taste on her tongue, a faint bitterness whose taste turned into a numb feeling that prickled down her throat.
A drug.
The numbness held her down until sleep took over.
She dreamed of Enai.
Kestrel’s sleeping self knew that this was not real, that the dead are gone. But she longed to sidle near Enai, to shrink into a small girl and not glance up, not search the woman’s face for the blame that must be there.
Kestrel wondered how Arin’s ghost would look at her.
He would stalk her dreams. He would show visions of himself killed in battle. He would make his mouth a mockery of the one she knew. His eyes would fill with hate.
That was how one looked at a traitor.
“You’ve come to curse me,” Kestrel told Enai. “There is no need. I curse myself.”
“Sly child,” Enai said, as she had done when Kestrel had been naughty. But this was not the same thing, Kestrel wanted to say, as stuffing sheet music into the rafters of Rax’s practice room and pulling them down to read when she was alone and supposed to be drilling herself in combat. It was not the same thing as a sharp word. A prank played.
Kestrel had bought a life, and loved it, and sold it.
Enai said, “A story, I think, to make you feel better.”
“I’m not sick.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I don’t need a story. I need to wake up.”
“And do what?”
Kestrel didn’t know.
Enai said, “Once there was a seamstress who could weave fabric from feeling. She sewed gowns of delight: sheer, sparkling, sleek. She cut cloth out of ambition and ardor, idyll and industry. And she grew so skilled at her trade that she caught the attention of a god. He decided to acquire her services.”
“Which god is this?”
“Hush,” Enai said. In that way of dreams, Kestrel found herself in her childhood bed, the one carved with hunting animals. Enai sat by her, shoulders elegant and straight in lines Kestrel had always tried to imitate. The woman continued her story. “The god came to the seamstress and said, ‘I want a shirt made of solace.’
“‘The gods have no need of such a thing,’ said the seamstress. The god looked at her.