“The east doesn’t make allies. The east is the east. They don’t like outsiders.”
“I’m not asking for your advice.”
“Apparently not. Because if you were, I would remind you that people who go to that country rarely return, and those who do aren’t the same.”
“I could use a change.”
Tensen studied him. “You were out all night. I wonder what has inspired this decision of yours.”
“Tensen, we’re already at war. We need to face facts. Herran will have to fight free of the empire, and we’re no match for it. The east might be.”
“It’s illegal for a foreigner to enter Dacra.”
“I’m no ordinary foreigner.”
Tensen cupped his hands and opened them wide as if scattering seeds to the floor. It was the Herrani gesture of skepticism.
“Don’t doubt me,” Arin said.
“It’s not you I doubt, but the idea. It’s not safe.”
“Nothing’s safe. Staying here isn’t safe. And going home is useless. You asked me when we first came here what I would choose, myself or my country.”
“That’s true,” Tensen said slowly. “I did.”
“This is my choice.”
“A choice like that is easy when you don’t really know what it will cost.”
“Whether it’s easy or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s mine.”
Tensen pursed his lips. The loose flesh of his neck sank gently beneath his lowered chin. Abruptly, he leveled his gaze and met Arin’s. Tensen pulled the gold ring from his finger. “Take this.”
“I can’t take that.”
“I want you to.”
“It was your grandson’s.”
“That’s why I want you to take it.”
“Tensen. No.”
“Am I not allowed to worry for you?” Tensen didn’t look at the ring in his outstretched hand. He kept his eyes on Arin. “You’ll go east no matter what I say. If you won’t take my advice, the least you can do is honor an old man’s gift by accepting it.”
Still reluctant, Arin took the ring. It fit on his smallest finger.
“Off you go, then.” Tensen patted the strapped trunk with deliberate lightness, in a way that avoided the emotion of the moment and yet also didn’t, because the avoidance was evidence of Tensen’s difficulty. He no longer looked at Arin directly. It made Arin wish he hadn’t accepted the ring. It made him remember his mother’s emerald. It made him wonder which pain was greater: to give up something precious, or to see it taken away. In a flash that he would have resisted if he could, Arin remembered Kestrel in the tavern, her lips bitten white as he’d accused her. She had looked cornered. She had looked trapped.
No, caught. That’s how the guilty look.
“Stop in Herran on your way east,” Tensen said, and Arin was glad to be torn away from his thoughts. “I have a job for you.” The minister told Arin about the hearthnut harvest.
“Where’d you get this information?” Arin asked.
Tensen smiled.
“You met with the Moth,” Arin said. “Outside the palace. That’s why your shoes smell like fish.”
“I should have cleaned them,” Tensen said mournfully.
Arin tried to imagine Risha talking with Tensen on the wharf, or maybe in the Butcher’s Row, but failed. “When was this meeting? It’s almost noon. You weren’t in the state room this morning.” Neither had been Kestrel.
Arin was suddenly furious with himself. He knew exactly which way his thoughts were going. He couldn’t believe it. Even now, even when he knew what Kestrel had done, even when he’d heard her admit it, heard it from her very lips, Arin’s mind kept playing its favorite sick game. It noted that Risha certainly hadn’t smelled like fish. Not like Tensen. How conveniently Arin’s imagination ignored the possibility that Risha might have spoken with Tensen and then changed her shoes before going to the state room. No, Arin’s unruly mind didn’t care for that logical explanation. Instead it presented Arin with the image of Kestrel in her maid’s dress. Meeting with Tensen. Telling him secrets.
“Stop,” Arin snapped. Tensen closed his mouth, his expression puzzled. “Just stop.” Arin pressed his fingers to his temples. He rubbed hard. “You don’t have to tell me where you were or when. I don’t need to know.”
“Arin, have I made you angry?”
“No.”
“Why are you angry?”
“Only at myself.” Arin’s hand shifted to pinch the bridge of his nose, his thumb digging into the corner of his closed left eye. He ignored how it made the scratched eyelid smart. He wanted that image of Kestrel to go away. “It’s stupid.” Arin felt worn out. He’d been ill, hadn’t slept. His body was very heavy.
“Gods, Arin, sit down. You look ready to fall asleep on your feet.”
Yes, the tired mind plays tricks. Arin knew that. His hand dropped from his face. He found a chair, sat, and felt better. More focused. “I went into the city last night,” he told Tensen. “I asked the bookkeeper about bets on the wedding dress. The chief palace engineer knows how to play the odds.”
Tensen listened to Arin explain what he had learned from the bookkeeper. “So if the emperor paid the senator for his secret trip to Herran with a golden bet,” Tensen said, “it’s possible that the water engineer is profiting from some similar favor.”
“Look into it.”
“I will, but what would you have me do with what I learn? Sending a message to you in the eastern queen’s city is impossible.”
“There’s the temple island,” Arin said. Dacrans worshipped one god, and since all were free to worship her, foreigners were allowed to dock at a holy island off the country’s southern coast. It was a great center of trade. “You can send a message there.”
“Even so, we’d risk the message falling into unfriendly hands. Messenger hawks can be captured, codes broken—”
“First someone would have to realize he’s looking at a code.” Arin produced the sack of spooled threads. “Do you remember Favor-Keeping?”
The hours lengthened. The time for the midday meal came and went, and Arin and Tensen ignored their gnawing hunger as they sorted out the threaded code, how each color would represent a person, as did the Favor-Keeper’s ball of strings throughout the years of slavery. Arin tied a different number of knots for each letter of the Herrani alphabet. He braided meaning into the way one color would cross another, and in the end he held something that looked like a piece of trim that could be sewn on the cuff of a sleeve and worn openly. A new fashion. To most eyes, it would look like nothing more than decoration.
Black was the emperor. Yellow, the prince. Tensen chose green for himself. “Here.” Arin had handed him the spool of gray. “For your Moth.” He added, “For Risha.”
Tensen smiled.
It wasn’t until they had assigned a color for almost every key courtier that Tensen said slowly in a way Arin would remember, “Don’t you want a thread for Lady Kestrel?”
“No. I don’t.”
*
From Kestrel’s windows that day, she saw banners on the barbican rise and blow toward the sea with a wind that must have been warm. A fine rain—not snow—blurred the view. Firstspring would come sooner than Kestrel wanted. Then Firstsummer, and the wedding.
Alone, she shook dead masker moths from their envelope of paper onto a mosaic marble table. She’d given half of her moths to Tensen in the market, in case he wanted to leave one for her on the painting in the gallery.
Kestrel watched moths change to match the mosaic. Then she pushed one with a delicate finger and watched it change again.
She felt a surge of anger at the moths for hiding so well. She resisted an urge to crush them.
Couldn’t she try to explain herself to Arin? Last night, Kestrel had been ready to tell him everything. She still could.
Uncertain, Kestrel swept the moths back into their packet.
Deliah came. Kestrel had forgotten that she was supposed to be fitted for a day dress. The Herrani woman pinned around her. Kestrel watched the window mist with rain.
Deliah paused in her pinning. “I think you should know that Arin left today. He sailed when the wind rose.”
Kestrel’s gaze flinched away. She looked again toward the window as if she would be able to see the harbor, and beyond that, the waves, and on the waves, a ship. But all Kestrel saw were the battlements of the palace. The rain had stopped. It had lifted its gray veil. The sky was clean now, and brutally clear.