“You’re a slave,” the captain corrected, though the emperor had issued a decree that emancipated the Herrani. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes. I am.”
Kestrel had quietly drawn her dagger. If the captain kept his back to her, she might be able to do something. It didn’t matter that her combat skills were pitiful. She could stop him.
Maybe.
“And why,” the captain said to Thrynne in a gentle voice, “why were you listening outside that door?”
The dagger in Kestrel’s hand shook. She smelled the emperor’s perfumed oil on the captain. She forced herself close. The breakfast milk swam up her throat.
Thrynne tore his gaze from the captain to glance at her. “Money,” he said. “This is the year of money.”
“Ah,” said the captain. “Now we come to it. You were paid to listen, weren’t you?”
“No—”
The captain’s knife came down. Kestrel vomited, her dagger falling into the shadows. The sound of it hitting stone was lost in Thrynne’s shriek. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve; she was not looking, she was pressing hands to her ears. She barely heard the captain say, “Who? Who paid you?”
But there was no answer. Thrynne had fainted.
*
Kestrel took to her rooms like someone sick. Infected. She bathed until she felt boiled. She left her ruined dress where it lay, balled up on the bathing room floor. Then she climbed into bed, hair loose and damp, and thought.
Or tried to think. She tried to think about what she should do. Then she noticed that the feather blanket, thick yet light, quivered like a living thing. She was shaking.
She remembered Cheat, the Herrani leader. Arin had answered to him, followed him. Loved him. Yes, she knew that Arin had loved him.
Cheat had always threatened Kestrel’s hands. To break them, cut off fingers, crush them with his own. He had seemed obsessed with them, until he became obsessed with her in a different way. She felt it again: that cold roll of horror as she began to understand what he wanted and what he would do to get it.
He was dead now. Arin had gutted him. Kestrel had seen it. She’d seen Cheat die, and she reassured herself that he could not hurt her. Kestrel stared at her hands, whole and undamaged. They were not peeled and bloody meat. They were slim, nails kept short for the piano. Skin soft. A small birthmark near the base of the thumb.
Her hands were pretty, she supposed. Spread against the blanket, they seemed the height of uselessness.
What could she do?
Help the prisoner escape? That would require a strategy hinged upon enlisting the help of others. Kestrel didn’t have enough leverage over the captain. No one in the capital owed her favors. She didn’t know the court’s secrets. She was new to the palace and had no one’s loyalty here, not for help with such an insane plan.
And if she were caught? What would the emperor do to her?
And if she did nothing?
She couldn’t do nothing. Having done nothing in the prison had already cost too much.
This is the year of money, Thrynne had said. He had spoken the words as if they were meant for her. It was an odd phrase. Yet familiar. Perhaps it was as the captain had assumed: Thrynne was revealing that he had been paid to gather information. The emperor had many enemies, not all of them foreign. A rival in the Senate might have employed Thrynne.
But as the feather blanket stilled, transforming into a peaked field of snow over Kestrel’s tucked-in knees, she remembered her Herrani nurse saying, “This is the year of stars.”
Kestrel had been little. Enai was tending to her skinned knee. Kestrel hadn’t been a clumsy girl, but she had always tried too hard, with predictable bruised and bloodied results. “Be careful,” Enai had said, wrapping the gauze. “This is the year of stars.”
It had seemed such a curious thing to say. Kestrel had asked for an explanation. “You Valorians mark the years by numbers,” Enai had said, “but we mark them by our gods. We cycle through the pantheon, one god of the hundred for each year. The god of stars rules this year, so you must mind your feet and gaze. This god loves accidents. Beauty, too. Sometimes when the god is vexed or simply bored, she decides that the most beautiful thing is disaster.”
Kestrel should have found this silly. Valorians had no gods. There was no afterlife, or any of the other Herrani superstitions. If the Valorians worshipped anything, it was glory. Kestrel’s father laughed at the idea of fate. He was the imperial general; if he had believed in fate, he said, he would have sat in his tent and waited for the country of Herran to be handed to him in a pretty crystal cup. Instead he’d seized it. His victories, he said, were his own.
But as a child, Kestrel had been charmed by the idea of gods. They made for good stories. She had asked Enai to teach her the names of the hundred and what they ruled. One evening at dinner, when her father cracked a fragile dish under his knife, she’d said jokingly, “Careful, Father. This is the year of stars.” He had gone still. Kestrel became frightened. Maybe the gods were real after all. This moment was a disaster. She saw disaster in her father’s furious eyes. She saw it on Enai’s arm the next day, in the form of a bruise: a purple, broad bracelet made by a large hand.
Kestrel stopped asking about the gods. She forgot them. Probably there was a god of money. Perhaps this was the year. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t understand what the phrase had meant to Thrynne.
Tell him, Thrynne had said. He needs to know. The captain had assumed that Thrynne had meant himself. Maybe that was it. But Kestrel recalled the prisoner’s gray eyes and how he’d appeared to know her. Of course, he was a servant in the palace. Servants knew who she was without her knowing all their names or faces. But he was Herrani.
Say that he was new to the palace. Say that he recognized her from her life in Herran, when everything had been a series of dinners and dances and teas, when her greatest worry was how to navigate her father’s desire for her to join the military, and his hatred of her music.
Or maybe Thrynne recognized her from when everything had changed. After the Firstwinter Rebellion. When the Herrani had seized the capital and Arin had claimed her for his own.
He needs to know, Thrynne had said.
Slowly, as if moving tiny parts of a dangerous machine, Kestrel substituted one word with a name.
Arin needs to know.
But know what?