Marie Rutkoski

In war, her father sometimes said, you might live, you might die. But if you panic, death is the only outcome.

“Stories,” she blurted. “The mosaic told stories, didn’t it?”

“Yes, old ones.”

“I’ll tell them to you.”

His eyes cracked open. He didn’t remember closing them. “You know those tales?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t. This became clear as she began to tell them. She knew bits and pieces, cobbled together in ways that would have made him smile if smiling didn’t hurt. “You,” he breathed, “are such a faker.”

“Don’t interrupt.”

Mostly pure invention. She remembered the images—it pleased him, how vividly she knew the temple floor’s details. Which god curled around which, or how the snake’s tongue forked into three. But the stories she told had little to do with his religion. Sometimes they didn’t even make sense.

“Do this again,” he said, “when I have strength to laugh.”

“As bad as that?”

“Mmm. Maybe not. For a Valorian.”

“You’re wrong. He loves me.”

Saying those words made him look so alone. He reminded her of sails curved by the wind, full and yet empty at the same time. She found that she was jealous of his god. The sudden jealousy held her so hard in its grip that she couldn’t breathe.

“It’s true,” Arin insisted.

She saw then that she had hurt him, that his god’s love was all the more precious to him because of his fear that he would find it nowhere else.

“We could reach Lerralen by nightfall,” she said, “if we press the horses. Will you come with me?”

“Ah, Kestrel, that’s something you never need to ask.”

You could speak with him.”

Risha snorted. “You mean forgive. Forgiveness is so . . . squishy. Like all this mud.”

Kestrel thought of her father’s fire-lit face on Lerralen beach.

“It drags you down,” Risha said. “You know this.”

She had an uneasy feeling of not knowing what Risha would say next, but already not wanting to hear it.

“You, who seek your own father’s death.”

Her worst trait. Her best trait.

The desire to come out on top, to set her opponent under her thumb.

A streak of pride. Her mind ringed with hungry rows of foxlike teeth.

The stained-glass windows glowed, and something eased open inside Kestrel. As color seeped into the room, she felt an unexpected wish.

She wished her father were here.

You, who seek your own father’s death.

But she didn’t, she found that she couldn’t, no matter how he had hurt her. She wished that he could see her play, and win. That he could see what she saw now.

A window is just a window. Colored glass: mere glass. But in the sun it becomes more. She would show him, and say, love should do this.

And you too, she would tell him, because she could no longer deny that it remained true, in spite of every thing.

I love you, too.

And then silence. It became silent in Arin’s head as he stood on the road. He stopped hearing voices. He thought about how it had seemed strange that Risha would plot the emperor’s death, yet refuse to kill him herself. Arin understood now. He knew how it was to have no family: like living in a house with no roof. Even if Kestrel were here, and begged him—Let your sword fall, do it, please, now—Arin wasn’t sure that he could make her an orphan.

And he wasn’t sure that she would beg that if she were gazing down as he did on the graying face of her dying father, the man’s eyes sky-bright as he tried to speak, his remaining hand fumbling against his chest, just above his heart.

A throbbing radiance burned inside Arin; he hadn’t realized the pitch revenge could reach, how murder could come this close to desire.

He didn’t want to be here. He wondered why we can’t remember when our mothers carried us inside them: the dark and steady heart, how it was the whole of the world, and no one harmed us, and we harmed no one.

Arin thought that if he didn’t kill this man his memory of his mother would fade. It already had, over time. Someday she would be as far away as a star.

But he couldn’t do it.

He had to do it.

Tell me what you did.

Arin dropped his sword, dropped to his knees, yanked the woven baldric from the fallen man’s shoulder, and used it to make a tourniquet to save the person he hated most.