Arin was sore. His raked shoulders were padded with gauze, and he was tired, achingly tired from the journey back, from the shock of the plainspeople when he and Roshar had stumbled to the camp with a tiger cub, from how easily they had agreed to move camp once they saw the danger of tigers breeding nearby. How they’d fed Arin when he hadn’t wanted to eat. And then there had been Roshar’s fascination with the tiger’s carcass, the way the prince had inspected the slack jaws to pronounce that the broken teeth were an old injury, and thank the goddess for that, he’d said, or they would have had no chance at all. “I would have lost my arm at the very least,” Roshar had said. As it was, his arm was a bloody mess. It had been cleaned, stitched, and dressed in the camp. “Looks like you’ll have to get me and the cub home all by yourself,” Roshar had said cheerfully. So Arin had paddled downstream while Roshar slept, having numbed his arm with a lighter dose of the same drug he’d once used to knock out Arin. The drugged ring was a cunning thing. He’d pricked himself with it, then eyed Arin’s torn shirt and raked shoulders. “Sorry,” he’d said. “None for you. You’ve got to row.”
Arin swore at him.
Roshar smiled. “Watch your mouth,” he’d said, and closed his eyes.
Arin’s shoulders had burned and bled as he paddled. The cub unhappily paced the canoe the entire way to the queen’s city. The boat wobbled as the animal moved, and moved again, and found its uncertain footing, and cried.
“Wait,” the queen said again to Arin. She left Roshar’s side, crossed the room, and offered something. It gleamed on her uplifted palm: Kestrel’s dagger. “Thank you,” said the queen. She tried to give it to him.
“I don’t want it.”
The hand that held the dagger faltered.
Arin said, “You know what I want.”
The queen shook her head. “No alliance.”
Arin remembered the suffocating fear as he lay trapped beneath the tiger’s paws. The fear had squeezed his gut. It had robbed his breath. It was the familiarity of that fear, not just the fear itself, that had done it. This was how he had felt for months, for years: pinned down by the empire.
In his mind, Arin shrank the dagger on the queen’s palm. He made it the size of a needle. Easy to ignore. Easy to lose.
He saw again how Roshar had tossed Risha’s tiny weapons into the castle dollhouse.
He saw an eastern crossbow, so small compared to a Valorian one.
The tiger cub, its little teeth bared.
His own country, helpless before the empire’s massive army, their engineers, their black flags, their black rows of cannon, their seemingly limitless supply of black powder.
Arin saw, suddenly, an idea.
It took shape inside him. It was small. Compact, hard, mobile. It grew behind his eyes until he blinked, and saw again what was actually there before him in Roshar’s suite. Not a memory, or a fear, or an idea. Just a dagger on the queen’s palm.
How much damage, really, could one dagger do?
“Get that thing away from me,” Arin told the queen. “I want a forge, and I want to be left alone.”