The Winner's Crime Read Online Free PDF

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    peaked fi eld of snow over Kestrel’s tucked- in knees, she re-
    membered her Herrani nurse saying, “This is the year of
    stars.”
    Kestrel had been little. Enai was tending to her skinned
    knee. Kestrel hadn’t been a clumsy girl, but she had always
    tried too hard, with predictable bruised and bloodied results.
    “Be careful,” Enai had said, wrapping the gauze. “This is
    the year of stars.”
    It had seemed such a curious thing to say. Kestrel had
    asked for an explanation. “You Valorians mark the years
    by numbers,” Enai had said, “but we mark them by our
    gods. We cycle through the pantheon, one god of the
    hundred for each year. The god of stars rules this year, so
    you must mind your feet and gaze. This god loves acci-
    dents. Beauty, too. Sometimes when the god is vexed or
    simply bored, she decides that the most beautiful thing is
    disaster.”
    Kestrel should have found this silly. Valorians had no
    gods. There was no afterlife, or any of the other Herrani
    superstitions. If the Valorians worshipped anything, it
    was glory. Kestrel’s father laughed at the idea of fate. He
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    said, he would have sat in his tent and waited for the
    SKI
    O
    country of Herran to be handed to him in a pretty crys-
    tal cup. Instead he’d seized it. His victories, he said, were
    his own.
    But as a child, Kestrel had been charmed by the idea
    MARIE RUTK
    of gods. They made for good stories. She had asked Enai
    to teach her the names of the hundred and what they
    ruled. One eve ning at dinner, when her father cracked a
    fragile dish under his knife, she’d said jokingly, “Careful,
    Father. This is the year of stars.” He had gone still. Kestrel
    became frightened. Maybe the gods were real after all.
    This moment was a disaster. She saw disaster in her father’s
    furious eyes. She saw it on Enai’s arm the next day, in the
    form of a bruise: a purple, broad bracelet made by a large
    hand.
    Kestrel stopped asking about the gods. She forgot them.
    Probably there was a god of money. Perhaps this was the
    year. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t understand what the phrase
    had meant to Thrynne.
    Tell him, Thrynne had said. He needs to know . The
    captain had assumed that Thrynne had meant himself.
    Maybe that was it. But Kestrel recalled the prisoner’s gray
    eyes and how he’d appeared to know her. Of course, he
    was a servant in the palace. Servants knew who she was
    without her knowing all their names or faces. But he was
    Herrani.
    Say that he was new to the palace. Say that he recog-
    nized her from her life in Herran, when everything had
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    been a series of dinners and dances and teas, when her
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    greatest worry was how to navigate her father’s desire for
    her to join the military, and his hatred of her music.
    CRIME
    Or maybe Thrynne recognized her from when every-
    ’S
    thing had changed. After the Firstwinter Rebellion. When
    the Herrani had seized the capital and Arin had claimed
    her for his own.
    THE WINNER
    He needs to know, Thrynne had said.
    Slowly, as if moving tiny parts of a dangerous machine,
    Kestrel substituted one word with a name.
    Arin needs to know .
    But know what?
    Kestrel had questions of her own for Thrynne. She would
    seek a way to help him, and to understand what he had
    said— but this meant seeing Thrynne alone . . . and that
    required the permission of the emperor.
    “I’m ashamed of myself,” she told the emperor the next
    morning. They were in his private trea sury. His note ac-
    cepting her request to see him, and naming this room for
    the meeting, seemed to have been made with good grace.
    But he was silent now, inspecting a drawer pulled out of
    a wall honeycombed from fl oor to ceiling with them. He