Marie Rutkoski

You could speak with him.”

Risha snorted. “You mean forgive. Forgiveness is so . . . squishy. Like all this mud.”

Kestrel thought of her father’s fire-lit face on Lerralen beach.

“It drags you down,” Risha said. “You know this.”

She had an uneasy feeling of not knowing what Risha would say next, but already not wanting to hear it.

“You, who seek your own father’s death.”

Her worst trait. Her best trait.

The desire to come out on top, to set her opponent under her thumb.

A streak of pride. Her mind ringed with hungry rows of foxlike teeth.

The stained-glass windows glowed, and something eased open inside Kestrel. As color seeped into the room, she felt an unexpected wish.

She wished her father were here.

You, who seek your own father’s death.

But she didn’t, she found that she couldn’t, no matter how he had hurt her. She wished that he could see her play, and win. That he could see what she saw now.

A window is just a window. Colored glass: mere glass. But in the sun it becomes more. She would show him, and say, love should do this.

And you too, she would tell him, because she could no longer deny that it remained true, in spite of every thing.

I love you, too.

And then silence. It became silent in Arin’s head as he stood on the road. He stopped hearing voices. He thought about how it had seemed strange that Risha would plot the emperor’s death, yet refuse to kill him herself. Arin understood now. He knew how it was to have no family: like living in a house with no roof. Even if Kestrel were here, and begged him—Let your sword fall, do it, please, now—Arin wasn’t sure that he could make her an orphan.

And he wasn’t sure that she would beg that if she were gazing down as he did on the graying face of her dying father, the man’s eyes sky-bright as he tried to speak, his remaining hand fumbling against his chest, just above his heart.

A throbbing radiance burned inside Arin; he hadn’t realized the pitch revenge could reach, how murder could come this close to desire.

He didn’t want to be here. He wondered why we can’t remember when our mothers carried us inside them: the dark and steady heart, how it was the whole of the world, and no one harmed us, and we harmed no one.

Arin thought that if he didn’t kill this man his memory of his mother would fade. It already had, over time. Someday she would be as far away as a star.

But he couldn’t do it.

He had to do it.

Tell me what you did.

Arin dropped his sword, dropped to his knees, yanked the woven baldric from the fallen man’s shoulder, and used it to make a tourniquet to save the person he hated most.

The paper looked quiet in her hand, tucked in on itself. Kestrel wanted to reach through time and comfort the girl who’d written it, even if the only comfort she could offer would be understanding. She wanted to imagine a different story, one where her father read the letter and understood it, too, and returned it to his daughter, telling her that she should never have had to write anything like that. I love you. I’d do anything for you, the letter said, and it was hard for Kestrel to keep from crumpling the paper in her fist when she realized that these words were what she had always wanted her father to say to her.

She kept asking until she heard her voice crumbling and thought that Risha had been wrong when she’d said that forgiveness was like mud, as if it could take what ever shape you needed.

It was hard; it was stone.

Kestrel thought that maybe she had been wrong, and Risha had been wrong, about forgiveness, that it was neither mud nor stone, but resembled more the drifting white spores. They came loose from the trees when they were ready. Soft to the touch, but made to be let go, so that they could find a place to plant and grow.

ving that the sound meant danger. Then he saw the glowing faces of people thronging the streets and thought, Ah, happy. Which made him happy, and as Kestrel smiled at him from her seat on Javelin, a pink petal clinging to her cheek, it occurred to him that he might have to grow comfortable with happiness, because it might not abandon him this time.