Marie Rutkoski

Kestrel said no. She said that she could no longer look at this dog, this warm and perfect gift, without seeing it hurt. It was different to give something up than to see it taken away. The difference, Kestrel said, was choice. A limited freedom, but better than none. Or so she had thought when Arin had given her two keys to his guarded house. She had thought the same when she’d offered him his country, nailed and bound and screwed tight with certain conditions. Better than nothing. She’d thought this before, and thought it again, but she didn’t believe it anymore. Now she knew that to give something up was to have it taken away.

Of all the lessons you could have learned as empress, the most important would have been this: loyalty is the best love.”

It would be a blessing to forget.

After all, what was there to remember?

Someone she never could have had. Friends dead or gone. A father who did not love her.

The cup tipped. Water ran over her tongue, cool and delicious. She forgot the pain, forgot where she was, forgot who she’d been, forgot that she had ever been afraid of forgetting

Foolish. If she felt dingy and small, it was her own fault for comparing herself where no comparisons could be made. She’d seen a mirror.

Kestrel missed her, remembered and missed her at the same time, which made her wonder if memory is always a kind of missing.

“An eastern liquor. Roshar gave it to me. He said that if you drink enough of it, the dregs start to taste like sugar. I suspect a prank.”

“But you’ve no head for drink.”

He looked as startled as she felt. “Of all the things, you remember that.”

To hide from her would break him. Simple things, so apparent, so not anything other than what they showed themselves to be.

And they love you. They think you’re some holy gift from your gods. Very nice work, I must say.”

“I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“Even better. Makes it seem more authentic. Convenient, you understand, when sending people to their death

Her voice was a mere thread. “How would you be?”

He thought of the wrongness of loss, how as a child he’d step right into it, and fall, and then would blame himself not only for every thing he hadn’t done when the soldiers had invaded his home, but also for his fathomless grief. He should see the gaping holes in his life. Avoid them. Step carefully, Arin, why can’t you step carefully? Mother, father, sister. What could you say about someone who walked daily into his grief and lived at the bottom of its hole and didn’t even want to come out?

He remembered how he’d begun to hate himself. The sculpting of his anger. He thought about how certain words mean themselves and also their opposites, like cleave. Come together, split apart. He thought about how sorrow limns the places where parts of you join. Your past and present. Loves and hates. It sets a chisel into the cracks and pries. He wanted to say this, yet worried. He feared saying the wrong thing. He feared that his anger for her father might twist what he wanted to say. And he wasn’t sure, suddenly, if he should answer her question . . . if by answering it he might, without meaning to, push his own loss into the place of hers, or make hers look like his.

“The mother knew whose blessing she sought,” she said. “It can’t be that hard to guess your age, give or take a year. Which god ruled your nameyear?”

“Sewing.”

She squinted, then laughed.

He smiled a little, yet said, “You shouldn’t laugh.”

She laughed harder.

“Actually, I sew quite well.”

“Perhaps. But you don’t exactly seem like the god of sewing’s chosen one. The baby’s mother knew what she asked for.”