Something in his mind began to burn. Arin saw again that pair of gloves in the flames. He remembered telling Roshar to burn the plains. You’re lucky the general didn’t do that to begin with.

Wait, wait. Why hadn’t he?

Because Kestrel had offered him a different plan. The poisoned horses. I can explain, she’d said to Arin. He’d refused to listen. I had no choice, she’d said. My father would have—

Tentatively, with a dread that hissed into him along its quick fuse, Arin imagined the disaster that didn’t happen and the one that did. He imagined fire and the plainspeople burning … or dead horses and an exodus south.

The kiss went cold on his lips. Arin was numb with understanding. He broke away from the queen.

Arin imagined Kestrel. He saw her considering a choice: fire and annihilation, or poison and survival. He knew what he’d choose. He began to wonder if Kestrel had made the very same choice.

He grew pale. He felt the blood leave him. His warring heartbeat was loud in his ears.

The queen was staring. He’d pulled away from her; he remembered doing that as if it were a lifetime ago. Arin couldn’t be sure if she’d touched him again after that. She wasn’t touching him now. She eyed him warily. He saw himself as she must: hunched, seeming suddenly ill. Or as if he’d been assaulted. Cuffed across the head, or knocked back like when the explosion in the kitchen yard had kicked the breath out of him. “Arin,” she said, “what’s wrong?”

Arin’s shoulder ached, his throat ached. He had been wrong, he had been kissing a lie. It would have sweetened, he would have kept doing it. He would have kept pretending the queen was Kestrel. But who was Kestrel? He’d been so sure, once. And then she’d appeared outside his besieged city walls with the emperor’s treaty in her hand and an engagement mark on her brow, and his certainty became a wretched, crippled thing. He’d been a fool, he had told himself as he stood in the snow outside his city, back to the wall, cold to the bone. He’d been a fool of the worst kind: the one who can’t see things for what they really are.

Arin raised a sudden flat hand, palm out, as if stopping someone. He remembered again how the siege had ended. But this time, he changed the way he saw it. This time, in his memory, he ignored that mark on Kestrel’s brow. He saw only what she held in her hand: the treaty. It had saved his life and spared his country. In his memory, Kestrel offered him the folded, creamy paper. He took it, he opened it. In his mind, he now saw a meaning in that treaty, and the way she had given it to him, that he hadn’t before. Sudden understanding made Arin’s hand fall, and clench.

“I need to leave,” Arin told the queen. “I need to leave right now.”

42

Kestrel looked like she’d been dipped in blood.

In the end, she hadn’t actually given any orders for her wedding dress to be altered. The water engineer had already changed her bet, and although Kestrel wasn’t sure if the emperor knew this, or what the consequences might be, she dreaded the malicious attention it would attract if she did anything more to upset the emperor’s plans. He expected her to wear red, so the dress was red after all, in stiff, glossy crimson folds of rich samite. It was heavy. Structured in the bodice—it hurt when Kestrel breathed too deeply—with full skirts whose pintucked shadows created even deeper shades of red, almost black. The train was bustled now, but when Kestrel entered the great hall it would pour in a river behind her.

The new dressmaker’s hands fluttered over Kestrel. “Is it too tight? Or … perhaps you’d like more embellishment? Crystals sewn onto the hem?”

“No.” It was the last fitting before the wedding—barely more than a week away. What Kestrel really wanted was for the dress to be burned.

“Oh, but you haven’t even seen it with the gold yet.” The dressmaker gathered handfuls of golden sugarspun wire and began to weave it through Kestrel’s braids and around her neck, trailing it in chilly patterns over her bare shoulders. The pain in Kestrel’s lungs grew worse. Her eyes burned.

“Isn’t that better? Isn’t it?” the dressmaker’s voice was high. “You are so beautiful!”

Kestrel suddenly heard the suppressed panic in the girl’s voice. Kestrel saw her reflection. She wasn’t beautiful. Her face was pinched and white, eyes shocked and wide. She looked ill. Kestrel pressed hands to damp eyes, pressed hard, and looked again. Kestrel didn’t know what the dressmaker saw in her expression, but she realized that whatever it was, the girl read it as her own doom. She was a late-hour replacement for Deliah: a simple seamstress elevated to the role of imperial dressmaker. The girl was afraid. Why wouldn’t she be afraid of Kestrel’s dissatisfaction? The last imperial dressmaker was dead.

Kestrel turned from the mirror to face the brown-haired girl. Kestrel stepped down from the block, careful of the hem, and gently rested a hand on the girl’s arm.

The new dressmaker quieted. “Do you like it?” she whispered.

“It’s perfect,” Kestrel said.

* * *

Her father was healed. He would leave the morning after the wedding to resume command of the eastern campaign. He would have left already if it weren’t for the emperor’s orders. Kestrel sometimes thought that the general would have stayed no matter what for her birthday recital and the wedding, but she tended to believe this only when not in his company. The moment he stood before her, his eyes increasingly restless, she knew that she’d been deluding herself.