The Winner's Kiss Read Free Page A

keeps her heart in a porcelain box,
people whispered, and they were right.
    She didn’t like to open the box. The sight of her heart was unsettling. It always looked both smaller and bigger than she expected. It thumped against the white porcelain. A fleshy red knot.
    Sometimes, though, she’d put her palm on the box’s lid, and then the steady pulse was a welcome music.
    One night, someone else heard its melody. A boy, hungry and far from home. He was—if you must know—a thief. He crept up the walls of the girl’s palace. He wriggled strong fingers into a window’s slim opening. He pulled it open wide enough to fit himself and pushed inside.
    While the lady slept—yes, he saw her in bed, and looked quickly away—he stole the box without realizing what the box held. He knew only that he wanted it. His nature was full of want, he was always longing after something, and the longings he understood were so painful that he did not care to examine the ones that he didn’t understand.
    Any member of the lady’s society could have told him that his theft was a bad idea. They’d seen what happened to her enemies. One way or another, she always gave them their due.
    But he wouldn’t have listened to their advice. He took his prize and left.
    It was almost like magic, her skill. Her father (
a god,
people whispered, but his daughter, who loved him, knew him to be wholly mortal) had taught her well. When a gust of wind from the gaping window woke her, she caught the thief’s scent. He’d left it on the casement, on her dressing table, even on one of her bed curtains, drawn ever so slightly aside.
    She hunted him.
    She saw his path up the palace wall, the broken twigs of fox-ivy he’d used to clamber up, then down. In some places the ivy branches were as thick as her wrist. She saw where it had held his weight, and where it hadn’t and he’d almost fallen. She went outside and tracked his footprints back to his lair.
    You could say that the thief knew the moment she crossed his threshold what he held in his tightening fist. You could say that he should have known well before then. The heart shuddered in its cool white box. It hammered inside his hand. It occurred to him that the porcelain—milky, silken, so fine that it made him angry—might very well shatter. He’d end up with a handful of bloody shards. Yet he didn’t relinquish what he held. You could imagine how he felt when she stood in his broken doorway, set her feet on his earthen floor, lit up the room like a terrible flame. You could. But this isn’t his story.
    The lady saw the thief.
    She saw how little he had.
    She saw his iron-colored eyes. Sooty lashes, black brows, darker than his dark hair. A grim mouth.
    Now, if the lady had been honest, she would have admitted that earlier that evening as she’d lain in bed, she’d woken for the length of three heartbeats (she had counted them as they rang loud in her quiet room). She’d seen his hand on her white-covered heart. She had closed her eyes again. The sleep that had reclaimed her had been sweet.
    But honesty requires courage. As she cornered the thief in his lair, she found that she wasn’t so sure of herself. She was sure of only one thing. It made her fall back a little. She lifted her chin.
    Her heart had an unsteady rhythm they both could hear when she told the thief that he might keep what he had stolen.
    Kestrel woke. She’d fallen asleep. The floor of the moving wagon creaked beneath her cheek. She hid her face in her hands. She was glad that her dream had ended where it did. She wouldn’t have wanted to see the rest, the part where the girl’s father discovered that she’d given her heart to a lowly thief, and wished her dead, and cast her out.
    The wagon stopped. Its door rattled. Someone set a key into its lock. It grated. Door hinges squealed and hands reached inside. The two guards hauled