Read The Winner's Crime for Free Online Page B

mother at an early
    age.
    Kestrel went to sit across from him. “Your father
    didn’t give me this room”, she said. “He probably hoped
    we would share this space and spend more time with each
    other.”
    “You don’t really believe that.”
    “But here we are together.”
    “You’re not supposed to be here. I paid one of your
    ladies- in- waiting. She told me you planned to spend the
    afternoon in the library.”
    “One of my servants reports to you ?”
    “It seems that the general’s daughter, despite her repu-
    tation for being so very clever, thinks she’s immune to all
    the petty espionage a court is capable of. Not really that
    smart, is she?”
    “Certainly smarter than someone who decides to reveal
    that he has her maid in his employ. Why don’t you tell me
    which maid, Verex, and make your mistake complete?”
    -1—
    For a moment, she thought he’d overturn the table and
    0—
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    send the Borderlands pieces fl ying. She realized then what
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    he’d been doing as he sat alone in front of the Borderlands
    set, a game that was the rage at court. The pieces were or-
    CRIME
    ga nized in a beginner’s pattern. Verex had been practicing.
    ’S
    It seemed that the hurt lines of his expression spoke in
    the clearest of words.
    “You hate me,” Kestrel said.
    THE WINNER
    He sagged in his chair. His messy, fair hair fell for-
    ward, and he rubbed his eyes like someone woken too early.
    “No, I really don’t. I hate this .” He waved a hand around
    the room. “I hate that you’re using me to get the crown. I
    hate that my father thinks it’s a brilliant idea.”
    Kestrel touched a piece from the Borderlands game. It
    was a scout. “You could tell him that you don’t wish to
    marry me.”
    “Oh, I have.”
    “Maybe neither of us has much choice in the matter.”
    She saw his swift curiosity and regretted her words. She
    moved the Borderlands scout closer to the general. “I like
    this game. It makes me think that the eastern empire ap-
    preciates a good story as well as a battle.”
    He gave her a look that noted a sharp change in sub-
    ject, but said only, “Borderlands is a game, not a book.”
    “Borderlands could be like a book, if one had constantly
    shifting possibilities for diff erent endings, and for the way
    characters can veer off course into the unexpected. Bor-
    derlands is tricky, too. It tempts a player into thinking she
    knows the story of her opponent. Take the story of the in-
    experienced player. The beginner who doesn’t see traps
    being set.” Verex’s expression had grown softer, so Kestrel
    —-1
    arranged the Borderlands pieces into an opening gambit
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    and moved them into diff erent patterns of play for two op-
    SKI
    O
    ponents, explaining how a perceived beginner might win a
    game by deliberately falling for a trap in order to set one of
    his own. When the green general fi nally toppled the red,
    Kestrel said, “We could practice together.”
    MARIE RUTK
    Verex’s large eyes were suddenly too shiny. “By ‘practice,’
    you mean ‘teach.’ ”
    “Friends play games together all the time without think-
    ing of it as practicing or teaching or winning or losing.”
    “Friends.”
    “I don’t have many.” She had one. She missed Jess ter-
    ribly. Jess had gone to the southern isles with her family for
    her health. In the past, Jess would have gone to a charming
    little house her family owned by the sea on the warm south-
    ern tip of Herran, but the Midwinter Edict ordered Valo-
    rian colonists to surrender all property in Herran. The
    colonists were compensated by the emperor, and Jess’s par-
    ents had purchased a new house in the islands. But Kestrel
    read the homesickness in Jess’s letters. Kestrel wrote back.
    They wrote often, but letters weren’t