The Winner's Kiss by Marie Rutkoski

Author:Marie Rutkoski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2016-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

They continued south. Arin kept his distance from her. Once or twice, she rode Javelin alongside his horse. It went badly. He didn’t know how to fix himself. He couldn’t accept this.

The first time she drew her horse up to him, he burst out, “For gods’ sake, you don’t even have armor.”

“I know you’re worried,” she said quietly.

“Your father wanted you to enlist. You fought him. Your music. You loved it more. You told me once that you didn’t want to go to war because you didn’t want to kill.”

“This is important to me.”

“You wouldn’t have done this before.”

“I know. I’ve changed.”

He heard the truth of this in a way he never had. She’d said this many times, even insisted on it: the woman he’d known was gone. He heard again his promise to her in his tent. He felt the absence of hers.

Yet it was wrong to feel hurt in the face of her larger grief, and the wrongness of it made him feel small. He looked at the sun in her hair, the ease of her seat in the saddle. Beyond her: a file of cavalry, an eastern pennant snapping blue and green. Fear choked him. It was hard to hear what she said next. A promise to be careful, to take no risks. It was so impossible and absurd to make any promise like that in war that he couldn’t even reply.

Eventually, she fell silent.

The next time, also on the road, he noticed her weaving Javelin through the ranks to approach him. He twitched his horse left and found a reason to be somewhere else. At night, he waited until she had pitched her tent. He made sure not to set his nearby.

She continued to glow at the edge of his vision. When camp broke at dawn, he’d catch sight of her bright hair, notice her talking effortlessly with the Herrani, or trying to learn Dacran from the easterners. He watched the soldiers’ wariness dissolve. They began to smile at her arrival, to like her despite themselves and her appearance: the very image of a Valorian warrior girl.

She kept close company with Roshar. Arin saw from afar the way the prince teased her. Heard her laugh. It squeezed a fist inside him. At dusk, the pair of them played cards. Roshar bled the air with a string of eastern curses when he lost.

On an evening when they were about ten leagues from Errilith, Arin came to Roshar’s tent, which was large enough to accommodate a small table, a set of canvas-backed chairs, and a collapsible bed woven in the style and colors of the nomadic plainspeople. The ticking had feathers, not straw, and the table offered roasted fowl, hulled red berries, and a bowl of eastern rice rendered a shocking orange by a spice Arin had tasted before, and found tangy, sweet, and a little bitter. There was a gourd of wine and two pewter cups. Two plates.

“And lo,” Roshar said from where he lounged in his teak chair with its swoop of green cloth.

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