The Winner's Kiss Read Free Page B

her out, their grips firm and wary, as if she might fight them.
    They had reason to worry. Once, Kestrel had knocked one of the men unconscious by striking his temple with the manacles on her wrists. The second guard caught her before she could run. The last time they’d opened her door, she’d flung the contents of the waste bucket in their faces and pushed past them. She’d sprinted, blind in the sudden daylight. She was weak. Her bad knee gave out and she hit the dirt. After that, the guards stopped opening the door at all, which meant no food or water.
    If they had decided to take her outside now, it was because they had arrived at their destination. For once, Kestrel didn’t struggle. Her dream had numbed her. She needed to see the place where her father had condemned her to live.
    The work camp was enclosed by a black iron fence the height of three men. Dead volcanoes loomed behind the two blocky stone buildings. The tundra stretched to the east and west: tattered blankets of yellow moss and red grass. It was chilly. The air was thin. Every thing smelled rotten.
    This far north, twilight had a greenish cast. A line of prisoners filed into the camp through an open narrow gate. Their backs were to Kestrel, but she caught a glimpse of one woman’s face in the pale green light. The expression frightened Kestrel. It was utterly blank. Although Kestrel had been following her guards quietly, those empty, glassy eyes made her dig in her heels. The guards’ hands tightened. “Keep moving,” one of them said, but the prisoner’s eyes—all of the prisoners’ eyes—were shiny mirrors, and Kestrel, although she’d known her destination in the north and had known that she, too, was a prisoner, only now fully realized that she was going to transform into one of these empty-faced people.
    â€œDon’t be difficult,” said a guard.
    She went boneless. She sagged in their grip. Then, as they bent and swore and tried to drag her upright, she abruptly straightened and rammed her head back into one man’s face, threw the other off balance.
    It was the least successful of her escape attempts. Stupid, to try anything just outside a camp that held scores of Valorian prison guards. But even as several of them swarmed out to help subdue her, she couldn’t think how she could have done anything else.
    Nobody hurt her. This was very Valorian. Kestrel was here to work for the empire. Damaged bodies don’t work well.
    After she’d been dragged inside the camp, she was shoved across the muddy yard and right up to a woman who looked Kestrel over with amused, almost friendly scorn. “Pretty princess,” she said, “what did
you
do to end up here?”
    Though now dirty and disheveled, Kestrel’s hair had been braided with aristocratic flair the day she’d been caught. She remembered slipping into the soft blue dress and seeing the spill of it across her lap when she’d sat at the piano on her last night in the imperial palace—when was this? Nearly a week must have passed, she thought. Had it been that long a time since she’d written that reckless, wretched letter? That
short
a time? How had she fallen so far so fast?
    Kestrel plunged again into that icy well of fear. She was drowning in it. She couldn’t even react when the woman drew the dagger from her hip.
    â€œHold still,” the woman said. With a few rapid slashes, she cut Kestrel’s skirts straight down between the legs. From her belt, the woman unhooked a loop of thin rope that hung next to a coiled whip. She cut the rope into several short lengths that she used to tie the slashed fabric to Kestrel’s legs, fashioning something like trousers. “Can’t have you tripping over yourself in the mines, can we?”
    Kestrel touched a knot at her thigh. Her breath evened. She felt a little better.
    â€œHungry, princess?”
    â€œYes.”
    Kestrel snatched what