The Winner's Kiss by Marie Rutkoski

horse’s bridle and dragged them both to a stop.
    She was sick all over the tundra’s moss and bracken. He held her hair away from her face. Some part of her that apparently cared didn’t know how he could stand to touch her. He wasn’t clean, but she was beyond filthy.
    He gave her water. She swished it, spat it out, drank, then eyed the canteen in her shaking fingers. She appreciated that he’d come well supplied—for three people, even—but he kept producing things she needed, and packing them away when she didn’t, and building fires and leading the way and doing
every thing
, that she almost wished he wouldn’t.
    â€œWhy don’t you hold on to that.” He nodded at the canteen.
    Her fingers tightened around it. “Don’t condescend to me.”
    He touched his scar. “I didn’t mean to.”
    She got back on her horse. “Let’s go,” she told him.
    Nightfall presented a new set of issues.
    â€œThere’s only one tent.” He cleared his throat. “But there are three bedrolls.” He waited—to see, she thought, if she’d insist that he sleep outside, but she felt that that would be admitting too much, even as she refused to consider exactly what she would be admitting. So she gave him a curt nod.
    He didn’t build a fire, which made her think he was still worried they might be seen. “We should be traveling by night,” she said, “and sleeping by day.”
    He shook his head. He didn’t look at her.
    â€œI’m wide awake,” she insisted.
    â€œYou should try to sleep. Things should be normal for you.”
    This, if the pattern of the day was any proof, should have made her wild with irritation. But his expression as he unloaded the folded tent was slow and heavy. His hands were busy. His eyes, though, were quiet. Silver in the dark. Shining. Like water.
    â€œAll right.” She huddled, arms tight around her knees. She tried to stop her bones from rattling. She didn’t want to be sick again. She turned so that she wouldn’t see him, and listened to the sounds of him setting up the tent.
    Even in the tent, with the heat of him barely an arm’s length away, she was desperately cold. She longed for her nighttime drug. She could taste its metallic flavor on her tongue.
    He’d already given her all the spare clothes he had. That first night, after the horses came, he’d opened a pack near the body of his friend and pulled out a coat. He’d stuffed her limp arms into it. She had recognized that it was his by the way that it smelled. Her own clothes seemed to have been cut from a sack: dun-colored, long sleeves, trousers. She hadn’t been wearing this her whole time in the prison. She’d remembered this as he’d bundled her and she’d drowsed in the gorgeous haze of her nighttime drug. She remembered when her clothes had changed and why. She could still feel the buttons of her dress popping open along her back. A rash of cold and terror as the air hit her skin. The pain. But the drug was soft and she was sleeping then and what did clothes matter, anyway?
    Now she was nowhere near sleep. She was a curled worm under a mound of cloth. He’d tucked the second bedroll over her, then got out of his and gave her that, too. There was nothing left for him to give her.
    His voice came through the dark, hesitant. “Kestrel . . .”
    â€œI wouldn’t be cold if I were asleep,” she said through jittering teeth. “I need to sleep.”
    A pause. “I know you do.”
    â€œGive me something to sleep.”
    â€œI don’t have anything like that.”
    â€œYes, you do.”
    A longer pause this time. “I don’t.”
    â€œYou have that ring.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œUse it.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI want you to.”
    â€œI don’t really know how to use it. It could kill you.”
    â€œI don’t