But Tensen didn’t know what Arin knew. Tensen didn’t know how cynically Kestrel had sold herself to the person with the most power. He hadn’t seen her face above the sticky tavern table when she admitted her role in the murder of so many people.

Arin threw the gloves in the forge’s fire. They smelled like burning flesh.

Kestrel would never have his happiness.

* * *

Roshar came again some days later. “It looks like a big, metal reed.” He poked at the cooled object resting on one half of the opened mold. “I think I know what you’re doing, Arin. I think it won’t work.”

“I told you to stay away.”

“And didn’t I? Notice that this time I didn’t bring the tiger with me. Arin makes you nervous. As you see, I am attentive to your every wish, spoken or otherwise.”

“Then leave.”

“How did you ever survive, little slave, with that mouth of yours? Did you pray to your god of luck?” Roshar studied him, his gaze lingering on the left half of Arin’s face. The scar seemed to prickle under Roshar’s scrutiny. “You are luckier than I.”

Roshar was right, Arin shouldn’t have survived, not with his great skill for saying what he shouldn’t. Arin said, “Were you with Risha when she was taken?”

“No.” But it sounded like “yes.”

“Was that when you were enslaved?”

“I will kill you.”

“Why do you come here, if it’s not because I’ll say what no one else will?”

“What I want,” Roshar said, “is for you to accuse me. That is what no one else will do. Not my people, who think I’m the victim. And never, ever the queen.”

“Accuse you of what? Escaping when your sister didn’t? Surviving?” Gently, Arin said, “If that’s your crime, it’s mine, too.”

“Did you sell your sister?”

Arin recoiled. “What?”

“When the Valorians came for your country, did you trade her for something better? That’s what we did with Risha. Our little girl. So gifted, even that young, with a blade. No river reed dolls for her. No, her bedroom was a fencing salle. Her toy box was an armory. Our older sister saw it. She knew what to do.

“We’re twins, the queen and I. Did you know that? No? Well, if you cut off her nose and ears you’ll find that we look very much alike. But oh, the key difference of four minutes. She was born before me. She got the country. Not that I wanted it. I didn’t know what I wanted. But this is what I was: expendable.

“Tell me, Arin, the solution to this tempting conundrum. If you had a child assassin with lovely, innocent eyes, a princess your enemy was sure to snatch up if given the chance, what would you do? Would an idea cook in the heat of your mind? Maybe your older sister is the cunning one. She’ll tell you the way to topple the empire. You: middle child, only boy, what do you do? You explain things to your little sister. You ride with her into enemy territory. You pretend to be her servant. You make yourselves noticed. You are conspicuous. And when you’re captured, you let her go.” Roshar’s expression grew embittered, sly. “And then you wait. You wait, your queen waits, to see if Risha will put a knife in the emperor’s neck.”

It made unexpected sense to Arin. It explained Risha’s claim that she belonged in the palace. It explained her haunted look. But … “She was captured years ago. What is she waiting for?”

“Revenge, maybe, on a brother and sister who used her. After the first year, we thought that she was waiting for the right opportunity to kill the emperor. More years passed. Now … we think she’s become Valorian. Maybe that’s what happens after someone grows up and understands that she was betrayed by her own family.”

“You shouldn’t have told me this. Why did you tell me this?”

“Because I know that what I said about that dagger isn’t true. I knew, that day when they cut my face in your country, that you would never sell yourself. I could see it. You would never sell what’s dear to you. Look at you, Arin. You’re made of so many splendid, stupid limits.”

Arin saw, in his mind’s eye, the burning gloves, their curling fingers. He smelled that acrid reek. He remembered the Moth’s coded news. “I don’t think Risha is the empire’s friend.”

In his memory, flames shriveled the knots’ message: Have you secured the eastern alliance?

Roshar’s eyes were starving for news of his sister. Arin’s people were starving, having run through the hearthnut harvest more quickly than thought. And Arin was starving as he remembered how the gloves had burned. He was hungry. He was hungry for this: to put his trust where it belonged.

He drew Roshar’s attention to the long metal barrel on the worktable. “Let me tell you what this will do.”

* * *

It took time to complete the parts of the miniature cannon. There was a chamber at one closed end for a paper twist of black powder, which rested on an internal pan behind where one placed the little metal ball. Arin cut a short, stiff fuse. He inserted it into the black powder twist.

He knew how to work leather from his time in the Valorian general’s stables. He wrestled with stiff stuff used for saddles, making a packed leather handle for the end where the barrel would be lifted, leveled, and loaded with explosive. When Arin slid the barrel’s end into the slim, hard leather box, he thought, oddly, of his family gardener. Long before the Herran War, the gardener had bred trees in the orchard, inserting a slip of one tree into the thick stock of another.