10
Kestrel crept into bed at dawn, footsore from dancing. She hung her unbuckled dagger on its hook on the bedpost. She shivered, more from fatigue than cold, as she got beneath the blankets next to Jess. The other girl lay sleeping, curled on her side.
“Jess,” Kestrel whispered. “I broke your necklace.”
Jess gropingly stretched out her hand and caught Kestrel’s. “I’ll make you another one,” she murmured. Eyes still shut, she frowned. “I saw him at the ball.”
“Who?” But Kestrel knew who, and Jess slipped back into sleep.
*
An elite group of courtiers and visiting dignitaries were invited to join Kestrel for hot chocolate in the Winter Garden the morning following the ball. White and gray furs muffled the ladies, while the men favored sable, except for the occasional rakish youth who sported the rusty striped fur of an eastern tiger. Braziers burned throughout the garden’s open patio, which was bounded at the southern end by an evergreen hedge maze.
Kestrel had arrived late, and alone. Despite the meager rest, she’d woken up a few hours after dawn because her body knew that she needed to. Jess still slept. Kestrel dawdled in her preparations, changing her dress twice, hoping that Jess might stir. But she didn’t, and Kestrel was reluctant to wake her. Finally, she left the suite.
Although the footmen in the Winter Garden should have announced Kestrel’s presence upon her arrival, she bribed them not to. She pulled her white furs more closely about her face and walked alone through a pathway of trees with sprays of pink and red berries. They were poisonous—yet beautiful, sprinkled like bright musical notation against the black bars of branches. Through the trees, Kestrel watched the party and listened.
Many complained about their dancing blisters. “I’ll plunge my bare feet right into the snow, to numb them!” cried a colonial lady from the southern isles.
“Oh no,” smiled a naughty young man. “Let me warm them instead.”
The entire scene looked pretty and fun … and fake. Who knew if that flirty young man even liked the lady—or if he liked ladies at all. Kestrel wasn’t the only person at court who planned to marry someone she didn’t want.
Kestrel could see the emperor seated in the patio’s center next to the largest brazier, surrounded by senators. At the far end of the patio, near the hedge maze, Verex hunched over a Borderlands table. His back was to Kestrel. The eastern princess sat across from him, her expression gentle as she executed a merciless move.
The Herrani hadn’t been invited to this exclusive event. Kestrel needn’t worry about meeting Arin’s gaze … or not meeting his gaze.
Then again, he might come anyway. It would be like him to turn up uninvited.
Wouldn’t it?
Kestrel found that she had come close to a tree. Her hands were on its bark. It was silver; smooth and papery in places, rough in others. She had been running fingers over the bark’s striations and knots the way she’d seen blind people come to understand an object. When she thought of this, she realized that she was trying to understand whether she wanted to see Arin here in the Winter Garden or not. And that was a fool’s question. It was pure, punishing foolishness, the mere consideration of either possibility, when she had already decided that neither should matter.
So it did not matter that her short nails had found a split in the bark. It did not matter that she was nervous as she peeled away a strip of bark in one long curl. Or that she was unhappy, unrolling the strip like a scroll with a blank message she couldn’t read.
Then she looked at the bark and thought of Thrynne’s stripped skin. She dropped the bark. It fluttered to the ground. Kestrel lifted her eyes and saw the emperor again.
She emerged from the poison trees. Her footfalls were quiet on the path. The first group of courtiers, clustered around a brazier, didn’t notice her arrival.
Lady Maris, the Senate leader’s daughter, was murmuring something that unleashed flurries of breathless giggling from her friends.
“—they all looked like that, I’d free them, too,” Maris was saying. “Or make him my slave.”
Kestrel deliberately stepped on a fallen twig. It snapped.
Maris glanced up. Her friends went pale and their laughter died, but Maris’s eyes were defiant. “Chocolate, Lady Kestrel?” she offered. “It’s hot.”
“Yes, thank you.” Kestrel joined the ladies. They made room, edging away.
Maris lifted the chocolate pot from its stand over the brazier and poured for Kestrel, who accepted the tiny cup and sipped. It wasn’t until the chocolate scalded her tongue that Kestrel knew the exact degree of her anger. It simmered: dark and bitter and somehow even sweet. Kestrel smiled. “Lady Maris, your father is looking very well. He’s so tan. Has your family been somewhere sunny?”
“Oh, don’t talk to me about it!” Maris gave a little dramatic mew. “It is too, too horrible!”
The other ladies relaxed, relieved that Kestrel seemed to have no interest in being vengeful. And why should she? their expressions seemed to say. It had been a bit of harmless gossip. In fact, Lady Kestrel ought to be pleased to hear compliments about the Herrani governor. It couldn’t have been so bad being his captive, now could it? The ladies saw quite another side to that Jadis coin.
Kestrel watched them think this through, and shrug their furred shoulders, and drink their chocolate.
“Can you believe that my father sailed to the southern isles without me?” Maris said. “A luxury trip to blue skies while his only child languishes here in winter. Though you can be sure that if I had gone, I would never have let the sun darken my skin. It makes one look so coarse! Like a dockworker! Really, what was my father thinking?”
Kestrel shouldn’t have asked Maris about the Senate leader. She should steer clear of everything to do with him. She had sworn not to embroil herself any further in Herran’s affairs.
And yet, she had gotten angry. She was angry still.
And yet, the Senate leader was tan.
And yet, this was unusual.
Her mind kept returning to this detail, like a thumb rubbing a flaw in a bolt of silk, or that papery bark of the poison berry trees.
But so what if the Senate leader was tan? A trip to the southern isles explained it. She told herself once more to leave the matter alone.
Yet she didn’t.
“The southern isles have many delights,” Kestrel said. “Surely your father brought you gifts?”
“No,” said Maris. “The wretch. Oh, I love him, I do, but couldn’t he have spared one little thought for me? One little present?”
“He brought you nothing? But the southern isles have linen, perfume, sugar, silver-tipped tea…”
“Stop! Don’t remind me! I can’t bear it!”
“Poor thing,” one of her friends said soothingly. “But just think, Maris. Now your many suitors have more choice in gifts to please you.”
“They do, don’t they? And they should please me.”
“Is that what fashionable young men do in the capital?” Kestrel asked. “Give gifts?”
“Oh, yes … though they often ask for something in return.”
“A kiss!” cried a lady.
“Or an answer to a riddle,” said another. “Riddles are very popular. And the answer is always love.” Which made sense, given that the court was full of young people who had chosen to marry rather than serve in the military. By the time they turned twenty, every Valorian had to fight for the empire or begin giving it babies. Future soldiers, her father would say. The empire must grow, he’d add, and Kestrel would wonder if this was the working of every general’s mind, or only her father’s: to see something as soft as a baby and imagine it grown hard enough to kill. And then Kestrel would shrink from the thought of becoming like her father, and he would know that he had said the wrong thing, and then they would both say nothing.
“No, I’ve heard other riddles,” said a girl, drawing Kestrel back to the conversation. “Ones with different answers: a mirror, a candle, an egg…”
“I like riddles,” said Kestrel. “Tell me one.”
“There is a riddle that I simply cannot figure out,” said the lady sitting next to Maris. “It is: I leap without feet to land, my cloth head is filled with sand. I have no wings, yet try to fly … what am I?”
Kestrel helped herself to some cream. She wasn’t angry anymore. The truth was that she, like her father, knew how good it felt to cut with certain weapons. She took a whitened sip of chocolate, the cream cool and pillowy against her lips. “Maris knows the answer to that riddle,” she said.
“I?” said Maris. “Not at all. I cannot guess it.”
“Can you not? The answer is a fool.”
Maris’s smile wilted. There was a silence broken only by the delicate clink of Kestrel setting her cup on the tray. She gathered her white furs about her and swept away.
She noticed the eastern princess making a move at Borderlands. Her rider hopped over Verex’s pieces to kill an engineer. Verex laughed. The sound surprised Kestrel. He sounded so happy. Kestrel would have gone to their table, to find out once and for all just what kind of player the princess was, and why Verex had laughed as he had. But the emperor caught Kestrel’s eye. He beckoned her toward him.