11
Kestrel set her cup on its saucer. “I didn’t ask to see you,” she said.
“Too bad.” Arin claimed the chair across from her table in the library in a manner unbearably familiar to her. It was as if the chair had always been his.
He slouched in his seat, tipped his head back, and looked at her from beneath lowered lids. The morning light fired his profile. “Worried, Lady Kestrel?” He spoke in Valorian, his accent roughening his voice. He always pronounced his r’s too low in his throat, so that when he spoke in her tongue everything came across as a soft growl. “Dreading what I’ll say … or do?” He smiled a grim little smile. “No need. I’ll be the perfect gentleman.” He tugged at his cuffs. It was only then that Kestrel noticed that they came too short on his arms and showed his wrists.
It pained her to see his self-consciousness, the way it had suddenly revealed itself. In this light, his gray eyes were too clear. His posture had been confident. His words had had an edge. But his eyes were uncertain. Arin fidgeted again with his cuffs as if there was something wrong with them—with him. No, she would have said. You’re perfect, she wanted to say. She imagined it: how she would reach out to touch Arin’s bare wrist.
That could lead nowhere good.
She was nervous, she was cold. Her stomach was a flurry of snow.
She dropped her hands to her lap.
“No one’s here anyway,” Arin said, “and the librarians are in the stacks. You’re safe enough.”
It was too early for courtiers to be in the library. Kestrel had counted on this, and on the fact that if anyone did turn up and saw her with the Herrani minister of agriculture, such a meeting would excite little interest.
One with Arin, however, was an entirely different story. It was frustrating: his uncanny ability to unsettle her plans—and her very sense of self. She said, “Pressing where you’re not invited seems to be a habit with you.”
“And yours is to put people in their place. But people aren’t gaming pieces. You can’t arrange them to suit yourself.”
A librarian coughed.
“Lower your voice,” Kestrel hissed at Arin. “Stop being so—”
“Inconvenient?”
“Frankly, yes.”
His smile came: quick, true, surprised by itself. Then changing, and slow. “I could be worse.”
“I am sure.”
“I could tell you how.”
“Arin, how is it for you here, in the capital?”
He held her gaze. “I would rather talk about what we were talking about.”
She arranged her fingers along the studs that pinned green leather to the tabletop. She felt each cool, small, hard nail. The silence inside her was like those nails. What it held down was something sheer: a feeling like fragile silk, billowing up at the sound of his voice.
If she and Arin were to talk about what they had been talking about, that silk could tear free. It would float up. It would catch the light, and cast a colored shadow.
What color would it be, Kestrel wondered, the silk of what she felt?
What would it be like to let it go, let it canopy above her?
“It wasn’t a false question,” she said quietly. “I think the capital must be strange for you.”
Arin studied her, thoughtful now. “Is it that way for you?”
“It shouldn’t be.”
“You were raised in Herran. This isn’t your home.”
“It’s my country.”
Arin’s face closed along lines she knew well. He shrugged, the movement small and short. He helped himself to tea.
Hesitant, Kestrel asked, “Are they good to you here?”
A rising ribbon of steam curled around his face. He drank from the cup and lowered it, the gesture as fluid as that of any courtier. But his hand was a laborer’s hand, and the porcelain cup, painted with flowers and dipped in gold, looked out of place. Arin frowned at the cup. “Sometimes I think it was easier to be ignored. Here, no one ignores me. Even if they ignore me they don’t, not really. The way they don’t look feels like they’re staring. When I was a slave in Herran, no one ever looked at me. No one looks at a slave.” Arin set the cup on its saucer with an abrupt click. “Kestrel, when did I do it? I keep asking myself when I did the thing that was beyond your understanding. Was there one thing that made too many for you to forgive me? The lies—”
“I would have lied, too.”
“The Herrani rebellion. I plotted for months. I plotted against you.”
“I understand why.”
“Your friends, then. Your people. The poison. Benix’s death. Jess’s sickness. It was my fault. You blame me.”
Kestrel shook her head—not to deny his words, but because it wasn’t as simple as he’d said. “Sometimes I imagine that I’m you. I imagine your life. What we did to it. And I know what you did back. So yes, I blame you … and I don’t. If I’d been you, I would have done the same. I might have done worse.”
“Then what can’t you understand?” His voice grew hoarse. “Was it … the kiss? In my kitchen. Was that the unforgivable thing?”
“Arin.”
“I shouldn’t have.”
“Arin.”