*
“Give the dog away,” Kestrel told Verex. She had held the prince back on the palace lawn, its grass soft and fine, the green brightly pale. The other courtiers had gone ahead. “Find her a home far from the court. Find the right person.”
“You are the right person.”
Kestrel’s eyes stung. The puppy sat and happily chewed her paws.
Verex said, “This is my fault.”
Kestrel said no. She said that she could no longer look at this dog, this warm and perfect gift, without seeing it hurt. It was different to give something up than to see it taken away. The difference, Kestrel said, was choice. A limited freedom, but better than none. Or so she had thought when Arin had given her two keys to his guarded house. She had thought the same when she’d offered him his country, nailed and bound and screwed tight with certain conditions. Better than nothing. She’d thought this before, and thought it again, but she didn’t believe it anymore. Now she knew that to give something up was to have it taken away.
Kestrel said all this silently to herself. The words felt so loud inside her head that she almost forgot that she hadn’t actually spoken them. But then she looked again at Verex and saw him waiting, worried, and remembered what he’d said last. She shook her head: no.
Quietly, Verex said, “My father needs for you to love him best. He needs for you to love what he loves. There’s no room for anything else.”
“I know.”
“I’m not sure you do. Kestrel, your dressmaker is dead.”
The news dropped hard. It sank and hit bottom. Kestrel saw Deliah, the woman’s gray eyes lined with heavy lashes—Arin’s eyes—as she lifted the ivory hem of the dress. The fabric went sheer, then solid as it settled. The skirt had swelled like a lung, then sighed.
Fear came over Kestrel in a nasty, shimmering breathlessness.
“She was seen meeting with the Herrani minister of agriculture,” Verex said. “Later, the captain of the guard came for her. She killed herself with her own shears.”
Kestrel remembered Thrynne’s bloody fingers in the guttering prison light.
“The meeting with the minister wasn’t why the captain was sent,” Verex said. “That was an excuse. The real reason happened the day your governor left. The reason was the stitches on his face. Neat seams. Kestrel, don’t you remember how perfect they were? My father saw. That dressmaker’s loyalty to Arin was clear on his face.”
The puppy was licking Kestrel’s palm. Warm wet skin, cooling. Breath gently huffed into Kestrel’s hand. The sky was a feather blanket of clouds, save for one blue hole in the fabric. A blue cloud in a white sky.
The hole grew wider, bluer. It pulled itself open. It silently stretched, like Kestrel’s guilt, like the moment when she’d seen Arin’s sewn face, like her father’s gaze, drawn to the moth on the painting’s frame. Kestrel saw satin blue, the color of Jess’s dress. Powdered-sugar clouds, Kestrel thought. In her memory, Ronan handed her a cake. She tasted it. It ate into her tongue like poison.
Verex said, “You need to watch yourself. If you play against my father, you’ll lose. This kind of game isn’t about intelligence, Kestrel. It’s about experience. And you’re conflicted, and so … hurt that…” He shook his head. “Please, just don’t do anything reckless.”
“For how long?”
“You know.”
Kestrel rested her wet palm on the big puppy’s black skull. Mine, she thought. Then she lifted her hand away and told Verex to take the dog by the collar.
How long? Until the emperor was dead.
“Kestrel … one day, we could change things.”
She looked up from the dog and at Verex, at his long, thin frame, the hunched shoulders, the shock of pale hair, the large, liquid eyes.
She wondered what would happen if she took his free hand. She wondered if he would imagine that Risha, not she, held his hand, and if this was how Kestrel’s marriage to him would always be. She saw herself and Verex holding each other. She felt, almost, the kindness of it … and she felt, surely, its cruelty. Its claim on them. Its crime as they each pretended the other was someone else.
“I will never keep you from Risha,” she said.
“I wouldn’t do this to her,” he said. “If—”
There was no need to finish. They both knew what the emperor was capable of doing to the princess if Verex defied him.
“We could remake the world,” Verex said. “Would it be so bad, to rule the empire together?”
It had been a question Kestrel hadn’t allowed herself to ask. Now she did. The question kept asking itself, an echo with no answer.
“We can do this,” Verex said, “if we wait. If we’re careful. Kestrel, can you be careful?”
*
In her mind, Kestrel played the tiles.
The emperor.
The water engineer.
The physician.
A favor.
Herran.
Valoria.
She noted the new engravings. She arranged them in different orders. She sought a pattern and came up empty. She mixed the tiles again. But the emperor made it hard to think. She flipped his tile so she wouldn’t have to look at him.
Its other side, however, wasn’t blank. It showed her father’s face.
What game was this?
What did Kestrel think she was doing?
Hadn’t she lost enough? Hadn’t she done enough? She remembered Verex’s advice.
The riddle of the engineer and physician wasn’t hers to solve. She needed to stop.
Yes, stop playing, Kestrel, she told herself. Clear the bets, clear the table. Walk away from the game.
Now.