4
Kestrel carried the Jadis coin with her everywhere. It was in her pocket on the day she surprised the prince in her music room.
She was drawn up short by the sight of Prince Verex sitting at a table set with the pieces of an eastern game. He glanced at her, then down at the marble pieces. A blush seeped into his cheeks. He toyed with a miniature cannon.
“Borderlands is a game meant to be played by two opponents,” Kestrel said. “Are you waiting for me?”
“No.” He dropped the gaming piece and shoved his hands under his arms. “Why would I be?”
“Well, this is my room.”
Within her first days in the palace, the emperor had given Kestrel a new piano and had had it installed here in the imperial wing, saying that this room’s acoustics were excellent. This wasn’t true. The room echoed too much. It sounded larger than it really was. Its stone walls were bare, the furniture stiff. Shelves were sparsely decorated with objects that had nothing to do with music: astrolabes, gaming sets, a clay soldier, collapsed telescopes.
“Your room,” Verex repeated. “I suppose everything in the palace is here for your taking. My father is giving you the empire. You might as well have my old playroom, too.” His shrug was tight-shouldered.
Kestrel’s gaze fell again on the clay soldier. She saw its chipped paint, its place of prestige in the center of a shelf. The room was a cold, uninviting place for any child. She recalled that Verex, too, had lost his mother at an early age.
Kestrel went to sit across from him. “Your father didn’t give me this room,” she said. “He probably hoped we would share this space and spend more time with each other.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“But here we are together.”
“You’re not supposed to be here. I paid one of your ladies-in-waiting. She told me you planned to spend the afternoon in the library.”
“One of my servants reports to you?”
“It seems that the general’s daughter, despite her reputation for being so very clever, thinks she’s immune to all the petty espionage a court is capable of. Not really that smart, is she?”
“Certainly smarter than someone who decides to reveal that he has her maid in his employ. Why don’t you tell me which maid, Verex, and make your mistake complete?”
For a moment, she thought he’d overturn the table and send the Borderlands pieces flying. She realized then what he’d been doing as he sat alone in front of the Borderlands set, a game that was the rage at court. The pieces were organized in a beginner’s pattern. Verex had been practicing.
It seemed that the hurt lines of his expression spoke in the clearest of words.
“You hate me,” Kestrel said.
He sagged in his chair. His messy, fair hair fell forward, and he rubbed his eyes like someone woken too early. “No, I really don’t. I hate this.” He waved a hand around the room. “I hate that you’re using me to get the crown. I hate that my father thinks it’s a brilliant idea.”
Kestrel touched a piece from the Borderlands game. It was a scout. “You could tell him that you don’t wish to marry me.”
“Oh, I have.”
“Maybe neither of us has much choice in the matter.” She saw his swift curiosity and regretted her words. She moved the Borderlands scout closer to the general. “I like this game. It makes me think that the eastern empire appreciates a good story as well as a battle.”
He gave her a look that noted a sharp change in subject, but said only, “Borderlands is a game, not a book.”
“Borderlands could be like a book, if one had constantly shifting possibilities for different endings, and for the way characters can veer off course into the unexpected. Borderlands is tricky, too. It tempts a player into thinking she knows the story of her opponent. Take the story of the inexperienced player. The beginner who doesn’t see traps being set.” Verex’s expression had grown softer, so Kestrel arranged the Borderlands pieces into an opening gambit and moved them into different patterns of play for two opponents, explaining how a perceived beginner might win a game by deliberately falling for a trap in order to set one of his own. When the green general finally toppled the red, Kestrel said, “We could practice together.”
Verex’s large eyes were suddenly too shiny. “By ‘practice,’ you mean ‘teach.’”
“Friends play games together all the time without thinking of it as practicing or teaching or winning or losing.”
“Friends.”
“I don’t have many.” She had one. She missed Jess terribly. Jess had gone to the southern isles with her family for her health. In the past, Jess would have gone to a charming little house her family owned by the sea on the warm southern tip of Herran, but the Midwinter Edict ordered Valorian colonists to surrender all property in Herran. The colonists were compensated by the emperor, and Jess’s parents had purchased a new house in the islands. But Kestrel read the homesickness in Jess’s letters. Kestrel wrote back. They wrote often, but letters weren’t enough.
Verex nudged the fallen red general with his green one, listening to the rocking tap of marble on marble. “Maybe we could be friends, if you could explain why you don’t tell my father that you don’t wish to marry me.”
But Kestrel couldn’t explain.
“You don’t want me,” Verex said.
She couldn’t lie.
“You claimed that you don’t have a choice,” he said. “What did you mean?”
“Nothing. Truly, I want to marry you.”
His anger returned. “Then let’s list the reasons.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “You seek the empire, and a husband you can manipulate as easily as these game pieces.”
“No,” she said, but why wouldn’t Verex believe his portrait of her: power-hungry, unfeeling? It was what Arin believed.
“You want a good laugh. So that at our engagement ball you can watch me lose at Borderlands while every single aristocrat and governor of the territories laughs with you.”
“A ball? All the governors? Are you sure? No one’s told me about this.”
“My father tells you everything.”
“He didn’t. I swear, I knew nothing of a ball.”
“So he plays games with you, too. My father is two-faced, Kestrel. If you think he adores you, you’d better think again.”
Kestrel threw up her hands. “You’re impossible. You can’t blame me for his favor and claim that I’m no more than an amusing toy to him.” She stood and went toward the door, for she saw that the brief peace between them had disintegrated, and her mind was reeling. An engagement ball. With all the governors. Arin was coming. Arin would be here.
“I wonder why my father didn’t tell you,” Verex said. “Could it be so that in catching you off guard, he could observe exactly what lies between you and the new governor of Herran?”
Kestrel stopped, turned. “There is nothing between us.”
“I’ve seen the Jadis coin. I’ve heard the rumors. Before the rebellion, he was your favorite slave. You fought a duel for him.”
She almost reached out to a bookshelf to steady herself. It felt as if she might fall.
“I know why you’re marrying me, Kestrel. It’s so that everyone will forget that after the rebellion, no one put you in a prison, not like every other Valorian in Herran’s city. You were special, weren’t you? Because you were his. Everyone knows what you were.”
Her vertigo vanished. She snatched the clay soldier off the shelf.
She saw instantly from Verex’s expression that she held something he cherished. She would smash it, she would smash it against the floor. She would break Verex like his father had broken him.
Like she had broken her own heart. Kestrel felt the pieces of her heart suddenly, as if love had been an object, something as frail as a bird’s egg, its shell an impossible cloudy pink. She saw the shock of its bloody yolk. She felt the shards of shell pricking her throat and lungs.
Kestrel set the soldier back on the shelf. She made certain her voice was clear when she spoke her last words before leaving the room. “If you won’t be my friend, you’ll regret being my enemy.”