The Winner's Kiss Read Free

didn’t belong.
    She might even be married to the Valorian prince by now. She was playing her games at court. No doubt winning. Maybe her father would write to her from the front and ask for more of the same excellent military advice she had given him when she’d condemned hundreds of people in the eastern plains to starvation.
    Arin used to clutch his head in disgusted wonder at how fascinated he’d once been by the daughter of the Valorian general. He used to sting at her rejection. Now, though, the thought of Kestrel gave him a cold relief. Ice on a bruise.
    Gratitude. Because she meant nothing to him. Wasn’t that a gods-given gift, to remember her and feel nothing? Or if he felt something, it was really no more than the way it was to touch his scar and marvel at its long ridge, the nerve-dead skin. Arin knew that some things hurt forever, but Kestrel wasn’t one of them. She was a wound that had finally healed clean.

Chapter 2
    She had no one to blame but herself.
    As the wagon trundled north, Kestrel stared at the changing landscape through the barred window. She watched mountains give way to flat lands with patches of dull, reddish grass. Long-legged white birds picked their way through shallow pools. Once, she saw a fox with a white chick dangling from its teeth and Kestrel’s empty stomach clenched with longing. She would have gladly eaten that baby bird. She would have eaten the fox. Sometimes she wished she could eat herself. She’d swallow everything—her soiled blue dress, the shackles on her wrists, her puffy face. If she could eat herself up, there’d be no trace left of her or the mistakes she had made.
    Awkwardly, she lifted her bound hands and knuckled her dry eyes. She thought that maybe she was too dehydrated to cry. Her throat hurt. She couldn’t remember when the guards driving the wagon had last given her water.
    They were deep into the tundra now. It was late spring—or no, Firstsummer must have already come. The tundra, frozen for most of the year, had come alive. There were clouds of mosquitoes. They bit every bare inch of Kestrel’s skin.
    It was easier to think about mosquitoes. Easier to look at the low, sloping volcanoes on the horizon. Their tops had blown off long ago. The wagon angled toward them.
    Easier, too, to see lakes of astonishingly bright green-blue water.
    Harder to know that their color was due to sulfide in the water, which meant they were nearing the sulfur mines.
    Harder to know that her father had sent her here. Hard, horrible, the way he had looked at her, disowned her, accused her of treason. She’d been guilty. She had done every thing that he believed of her, and now she had no father.
    Grief swelled in her throat. She tried to swallow it down. She had a list of things to do—what were they? Study the sky. Pretend you’re one of those birds. Lean your forehead against the wagon’s wall and breathe. Don’t remember.
    But she never could forget for long. Inevitably, she remembered her last night in the imperial palace. She remembered her letter confessing every thing to Arin.
I am the Moth. I am your country’s spy,
she’d written.
I have wanted to tell you this for so long.
She’d scrawled the emperor’s secret plans. It didn’t matter that this was treason. It didn’t matter that she was supposed to marry the emperor’s son on First-summer’s day, or that her father was the emperor’s most trusted friend. Kestrel ignored that she’d been born Valorian. She’d written what she felt.
I love you. I miss you. I would do anything for you.
    But Arin had never read those words. Her father had. And her world came apart at the seams.
    Once there was a girl who was too sure of herself. Not everyone would call her beautiful, but they admitted that she had a certain grace that intimidated more often than it charmed. She was not, society agreed, someone you wanted to cross.
She