She said, “We were friends in Herran, weren’t we, for a time?”

Arin’s reply was hoarse. “Yes.”

“Was what I did the act of a friend?”

“No,” he whispered.

“Yet I did that, and then supposedly arranged this salvific treaty. It doesn’t make much sense, Arin.”

“It makes sense,” he said, “if you changed your mind.”

She raised one brow. “That’s a dramatic change indeed.”

He was silent.

Kestrel’s fear, which she had briefly managed to squeeze shut, opened again. It spread.

She was afraid of failing in this lie. She was afraid of succeeding. And she was, she realized with a horrible clench of the heart, very afraid of her father.

Arin faced Kestrel fully: unblinking, eyes gray as a wind-torn sky, the scar livid against his drawn cheek. “It was a dramatic change,” he said, “but you made it. I know you did.”

Kestrel closed the lid over the keys. Something was coming that she couldn’t control. The game was changing, and her best option now was to leave. She rose.

Arin stopped her. “I’m not nothing to you. I heard what you were playing.”

She tried to laugh. “I don’t even remember what I was playing.” Arin’s hand was on her arm. She stepped away from his touch. What must her father think? She glanced at the screen. She stared at the door. It didn’t open.

“Why are you doing this?” Arin demanded. “Stop lying. I heard your music. And I know. You bargained with the emperor for the treaty.”

She heard a faint, scratching sound. Had she imagined it? It was the sound of a sword drawn from its sheath in a hidden room. “I didn’t.”

Arin blocked her path.

“Let me go.” Her voice sounded like it was falling apart.

“This is what I think: that there is no change more dramatic than you agreeing to marry when you have never—never—wanted to marry anyone.”

“We’ve already discussed the many incentives to my marrying the prince.”

“Have we discussed them all?” He dragged a hand through his dirty hair. “Kestrel, I feel like I’m going mad. That I’m seeing things—or not seeing things. Just tell me. Did you … are you … marrying the prince because of me? Was it … part of some kind of deal you made with the emperor?”

The silence wasn’t just Kestrel’s. It was her father’s, too.

She sucked in a sharp breath. She could say this. She could do it, she promised herself, because she would make it better later. She would take it all back very, very soon.

Gently, Kestrel told him, “That sounds like a story.”

Arin hung back, eyes uncertain, and despite his insistence that he knew what she had done, Kestrel sensed how new his belief was. How fragile. Yes, it could break. With just the right amount of pressure in the right place, it would crack like a mirror. Kestrel saw something in Arin that she’d never seen in him before, something unbearably young. She saw, for a moment, the boy Arin must have been. Right around the eyes. A softness. A yearning. There, in the lines of his sensitive mouth. There, to show her how to strike hardest.

“This isn’t one of your Herrani tales with gods and villains and heroes and great sacrifices,” she said. “I loved those stories when I was little. I’m sure you did, too. They’re better than real life, where a person makes decisions in her best interests. Reality isn’t very poetic, I know.” She shrugged. “Neither is the sort of arrogance that encourages someone to think that so much revolves around him.”

Arin looked away. He stared at the piano, its strung insides exposed under the propped-open lid.

She walked around him in a slow circle, sizing him up. “I wonder what you believe could compel me to go to such epic lengths for your sake. Is it your charm? Your breeding?”

His eyes cut to her. She paused, letting her gaze trace his scar. He tensed. She made her mouth curl. “Not your looks, surely.”

His jaw tightened.

Thorns pricked her throat, she ached with self-disgust. Yet she forced her smile to grow. “I don’t mean to be cruel. But these ideas of yours are so unbelievable. And frankly, a little desperate. Like a fantasy. Hasn’t it occurred to you that you’re just seeing what you want to see?”

“No.”

But she’d seen him waver. “You must realize that you’ve been telling yourself a story. Arin, we’re too old for stories.”

His voice came low. “Are we?”

“I am. Stop being a child. It’s time you grew up.”

“Yes.” The word was slow. His tone was unexpectedly filled with something Kestrel recognized as wonder at the same moment that the recognition cramped her stomach. She knew that sound. It was the voice of someone for whom a cloud of confusion has been lifted. It was clarity, and the strength that returns with it.

“You’re right,” Arin said. When he faced her again she saw no shadow of that boy. It was as if she’d dreamed him. “I misunderstood,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

Formally, even clinically, Arin touched three fingers to the back of Kestrel’s hand. Then he left, and closed the door behind him.

44

The door’s thud echoed loud. A toxic fear ate at Kestrel. Even as doubt grew, and hinted that her strategy was the wrong one, or that no strategy could mend what she’d just done, Kestrel clung to the most important rule her father had taught her: Deal with danger before it deals with you.