“You don’t believe in fate.”

“I believe that the land I won was for you. You are my fate.”

Guilt swelled in her throat. It made it hard to breathe, and she couldn’t hold his gaze any longer. But the instant her eyes fell from his, they darted quickly, helplessly, toward the moth.

Her father saw. He blinked. He peered at the painting’s frame. He frowned.

It was just a moth, Kestrel tried to tell herself. He couldn’t possibly guess what it meant.

She thought her father might say something. She readied herself to answer him. But in the end, all he did was silently flick the moth to the floor.

* * *

“The water engineer changed her bet,” Tensen said. “She and the emperor’s physician are working together.”

“I can’t meet with you again like this,” Kestrel said. “I’m going to be caught.”

Tensen was instantly worried. He asked for her reasons, but it wasn’t so simple as her father seeing the moth on the painting’s frame, which Tensen dismissed. It was that feeling of skating close to ruin. She’d felt this before, or something like it, when she had first begun playing Bite and Sting and didn’t know when to leave the table, or stayed because she needed to know what would happen next. She needed to see all the tiles turned, the play played, the final measurement of who had what and who had come short. She’d lost easily at first, especially against her father. Then she had learned.

“I just can’t,” she told Tensen.

He tried to flatter her. He appealed to her sense of good. He questioned her courage. He did everything but mention Arin, which he seemed to sense would end everything.

Tensen was a skilled player, too.

“Well,” he sighed, “you could keep your ears open, couldn’t you? If there’s something I need to know, tell your dressmaker.”

Kestrel was eager to leave the Butcher’s Row. She agreed to pass anything of note on to Deliah. She hurried away, the hem of her maid’s dress catching on her boothooks.

39

Temptation was the color white.

It was black ink, quivering at the point of a pen’s nib.

It was Kestrel, writing in her study. She wrote a letter to Arin. She wrote her reasons. She wrote her heart. Everything was inked in quick and heavy lines. Nothing was crossed out. It looked up at her: bare, black-and-white honesty.

That was temptation. But this was reality: the fire that burned low on the grate, despite the high spring weather, despite the nearing end of spring and the climb of days toward the Firstsummer wedding.

Reality was red. It was hot, hungry, snapping. It ate whatever Kestrel fed it. She burned the letter. Soon there was nothing left of the fire but cold, scaly black wood, lightly furred with ash. The letter lay in flakes. One page curled like a black shell.

Kestrel thought of the emperor. She thought of her father.

There was nothing left to read in the dead fireplace. Still, Kestrel took a poker and raked it through the ash to make sure.

* * *

Kestrel’s eighteenth birthday was fast approaching. Her birthday—and the piano recital the emperor had commanded—was less than a fortnight away. It would be the last official court gathering until her wedding two days following. She played ferociously for hours on end. Sometimes she heard her father’s watch chime: a light sound, as light as a smile. It always soothed her music. When Kestrel played for him, the melody ran sweet, sheer, and strong.

She had a dress fitting for the recital. The gown was a delicate affair of creamy lutestring silk, the lace sleeves short and loose. Kestrel stood still on the dressmaker’s block. Fleetingly, it occurred to her that the block was about the height of an auction block. She remembered Arin standing on one.

Kestrel wondered what it would be like if time could be unsewn, the threads ripped out and redone. She went back to the day of the auction, that first day, that sight of a slave stepping onto the block. She imagined everything differently. This time, she didn’t bid. He wasn’t for sale. Her father had never won the Herran War. Kestrel grew up in the capital instead. Her mother didn’t sicken, didn’t die. Kestrel saw the baby in her father’s arms, the one that she had been. In Kestrel’s reimagining of the world, that baby was exactly as her father had described.

Deliah knelt, floating the hem up. The silk puffed, then fell in scalloped folds. Deliah fussed with it. Kestrel’s maids grew bored and drifted into other rooms.

Then, quickly, quietly, Deliah said, “Do you have any news for me?”

Kestrel sharply glanced down at her. “No.”

“Tensen hopes that you will—soon.”

Kestrel said nothing, but Deliah nodded as if she’d spoken. The dressmaker looked somehow both disappointed and relieved. “Well,” Deliah said, “I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”

Did Kestrel know? She thought of when she sat to play Bite and Sting. When Kestrel turned the tiles, and flipped the blank sides onto their backs, and showed their faces and tallied their value, did she know? Sometimes the game went too quickly for Kestrel to understand exactly what she was doing. All she knew was that in the final play she would win.

Kestrel looked at Deliah. She wasn’t certain of winning anymore, or even of what she could possibly hope to win. She didn’t know what winning would mean.

Smoothly, she told Deliah, “Of course I do.”

* * *

There was a hunt in the mountain forest behind the palace. The hounds bayed. A few courtiers brought slaves to load their crossbows for them, which would have appalled Kestrel’s father, had he seen it. He’d chosen to stay behind.