Marie Rutkoski

A dagger wants flesh, her father would say. Find it.

Someone was coming through the velvet.He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel__ balcony__lose, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against frame. He held the sweep of it high, at the level of his gray eyes, which were silver in the shadows.He was here. He had come.Arin.

He told himself a story. Not at first. At first, there wasn__ time for thoughts that came in the shape of words. His head was blessedly empty of stories then. War was coming. It was upon him. Arin had been born in the year of the god of death, and he was finally glad of it. He surrendered himself to his god, who smiled and came close. Stories will get you killed, he murmured in Arin__ ear. Now, you just listen. Listen to me.

It dropped ice to the bottom of his stomach. He thought of the ruined bodies he'd seen, including the ones he himself had ruined. He realized that he had somehow expected that he'd never have to think again about the way people damage other people. The night of the invasion. Kestrel's back. His own. Roshar's scarred face. His own.

I can't - Kestrel, you must understand that I would never claim you. Calling you a prize - my prize - it was only words. But it worked. Cheat won't harm you, I swear that he won't, but you must...hide yourself a little. Help a little. Just tell us how much time we have before the battle. Give him a reason to decide you're not better off dead. Swallow your pride.""Maybe it's not as easy for me as it is for you."He wheeled on her. "It's not easy for me," "You know that it's not. What do you think I have had to swallow these past ten years? What do you think I have had to do to survive?""Truly," she said, "I haven't the faintest interest. You may tell your sad story to someone else."He flinched as if slapped. His voice came low: "You can make people feel so small.

Come closer, and I will tell you."But he forgot. He kissed her, and became lost in the exquisite sensation of his skin becoming too tight for his body. He murmured other things instead. A secret, a want, a promise. A story, in its own way.

It was different to give something up than to see it taken away. The difference, Kestrel said, was choice.

An emotion clamped down on her heart. It squeezed her into a terrible silence. But he said nothing after that, only her name, as if her name were not a name but a question. Or perhaps that it wasn__ how he had said it, and she was wrong, and she__ heard a question simply because the sound of him speaking her name made her wish that she were his answer.

She__ felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.

She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. ____ going to miss you when I wake up,_ she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He was a dream.__on__ wake up,_ he said.

Yet he understood that there are some things you feel and others that you choose to feel, and that the choice doesn't make the feeling less valid.

He'd believed it. She couldn't believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.

She looked at the boy. He knew her weakness for storytelling. And it was, after all, only a story. Still, she wished he had chosen a happier one.