The Winner's Curse by Marie Rutkoski

Author:Marie Rutkoski [Rutkoski, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2014-03-03T22:00:00+00:00

25

The walk to the orange grove had helped Kestrel’s knee, if nothing else. The stiffness had eased, and she forced herself to walk more every day. Soon she had only the barest of limps, then none at all. She returned to her music, let her fingers fly, let wild notes riddle her mind until she couldn’t think. It was bliss not to think, not to remember the cold orange grove, and what she had said and done and asked and wanted.

Kestrel played. She forgot everything but the music unfurling around her.

* * *

The day before Firstwinter, the Valorian housekeeper delivered a muslin-wrapped package to Kestrel. “From the dressmaker’s,” she said.

Kestrel held the package and almost seemed to see a gleam through the muslin.

She set it aside.

That evening, a slave brought a note from her father. There is someone here who wishes to see you.

Ronan, perhaps. The thought didn’t make her glad. It came and went and didn’t touch her, except when she realized that it hadn’t touched her and that it should have.

There was something wrong with her. She should be glad to see her friend. She should hope Ronan was more than that.

We are not friends, Arin had said.

But she would not think of Arin.

She dressed for dinner with care.

* * *

Kestrel recognized the man’s voice drifting down the hall from the dining room, but couldn’t place it at first. “Thank you for not requisitioning my ship,” he was saying. “I would have lost a great deal of profit—maybe even the ship itself—if the empire had borrowed it for the war effort.”

“Don’t thank me,” said Kestrel’s father. “If I had needed it, I would have taken it.”

“Not big enough for you, Trajan?” the voice teased. Kestrel, hovering outside the door, suddenly knew who it was. She remembered being a little girl, a gray-haired man’s easy smiles, sheaves of sheet music brought to her from far-off territories.

“On the contrary, Captain Wensan,” she said, entering the room. The men rose from their seats. “I believe my father has not taken your ship for the military because it is one of the best, loaded with cannon, and he doesn’t like to leave the harbor unprotected when he leaves tomorrow.”

“Kestrel.” The captain didn’t take her hand in greeting, but rested his briefly on her head, as one did with a beloved child. She felt no disappointment that he, and not Ronan, was their guest. “You overestimate me,” Wensan said. “I’m a simple merchant.”

“Maybe,” Kestrel said as the three sat at the table in their expected places, her father at the head, she at his right, the captain at his left. “But I doubt the two decks’ worth of ten-pound cannon are there for decoration.”

“I carry valuable goods. The cannon keep pirates away.”

“As do your crew. They have quite the reputation.”

“Fine fighters,” her father agreed, “though they don’t have the best memory.”

The captain gave him a keen glance. “You can’t possibly have heard about that.”

“That your crew can’t remember the code of the call

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