41
He kissed her. Her mouth parted beneath his. Her hands were on him, and it was curious, it felt alien. He relaxed—shouldn’t he relax? She seemed to think he should.
He remembered his hunger. Not for this. But she gave, and he took, and gave back, even while knowing what he really wanted instead. He didn’t want to want it, and the thought of Kestrel, of that monstrous want—so stupid, so wrong—made him stop. He pulled away. He gritted his teeth once, hard, in a held breath, bright fury at himself.
“Arin?” said the queen.
He kissed her again, more deeply. This time, he lost himself in it a little. It filled him. It pulled him away from himself. That was good. He was tired with the way he had been. He forgot it all.
Except … he remembered other kisses, other times. It was impossible not to.
This was the truth: in his mind, Kestrel touched his scarred face. This was her mouth moving against his. This was the truth: what he imagined was a lie. The truth and the lie held him tight.
It made him think. The queen leaned into him, brushing his bruised shoulder, and he winced. He recalled his own soot-covered face after firing the weapon. What had Arin thought earlier? That he looked like he’d been in a fire.
Something in his mind began to burn. Arin saw again that pair of gloves in the flames. He remembered telling Roshar to burn the plains. You’re lucky the general didn’t do that to begin with.
Wait, wait. Why hadn’t he?
Because Kestrel had offered him a different plan. The poisoned horses. I can explain, she’d said to Arin. He’d refused to listen. I had no choice, she’d said. My father would have—
Tentatively, with a dread that hissed into him along its quick fuse, Arin imagined the disaster that didn’t happen and the one that did. He imagined fire and the plainspeople burning … or dead horses and an exodus south.
The kiss went cold on his lips. Arin was numb with understanding. He broke away from the queen.
Arin imagined Kestrel. He saw her considering a choice: fire and annihilation, or poison and survival. He knew what he’d choose. He began to wonder if Kestrel had made the very same choice.
He grew pale. He felt the blood leave him. His warring heartbeat was loud in his ears.
The queen was staring. He’d pulled away from her; he remembered doing that as if it were a lifetime ago. Arin couldn’t be sure if she’d touched him again after that. She wasn’t touching him now. She eyed him warily. He saw himself as she must: hunched, seeming suddenly ill. Or as if he’d been assaulted. Cuffed across the head, or knocked back like when the explosion in the kitchen yard had kicked the breath out of him. “Arin,” she said, “what’s wrong?”
Arin’s shoulder ached, his throat ached. He had been wrong, he had been kissing a lie. It would have sweetened, he would have kept doing it. He would have kept pretending the queen was Kestrel. But who was Kestrel? He’d been so sure, once. And then she’d appeared outside his besieged city walls with the emperor’s treaty in her hand and an engagement mark on her brow, and his certainty became a wretched, crippled thing. He’d been a fool, he had told himself as he stood in the snow outside his city, back to the wall, cold to the bone. He’d been a fool of the worst kind: the one who can’t see things for what they really are.
Arin raised a sudden flat hand, palm out, as if stopping someone. He remembered again how the siege had ended. But this time, he changed the way he saw it. This time, in his memory, he ignored that mark on Kestrel’s brow. He saw only what she held in her hand: the treaty. It had saved his life and spared his country. In his memory, Kestrel offered him the folded, creamy paper. He took it, he opened it. In his mind, he now saw a meaning in that treaty, and the way she had given it to him, that he hadn’t before. Sudden understanding made Arin’s hand fall, and clench.
“I need to leave,” Arin told the queen. “I need to leave right now.”