The mist burned off the causeway an hour before noon, and the whole lake seemed to hold its breath.Kael stood at the foot of the water gate with the clans around him and a Wolf's sword on his back. He had not meant to wear it. Edda had pressed it into his hands at dawn without a word, and he understood why. Nobody would take a prince seriously who walked out barehanded. It still felt like a costume.Ahead of them the causeway ran out across the water, a long white road, wet and shining. At its midpoint stood a small square of flagstones, wider than the rest, where the old tolls had once been paid. Someone had set up a table there. The Matriarch's servants had carried out the ledger on a velvet cushion, as if it were a crown."Remember," Sorrel said at his shoulder. "Don't speak until the Law has been read. Don't look at the Emperor for longer than a breath. And if anything goes wrong...""I know.""Do you?""Run." Kael tried to smile. "Preferably toward the Bears."They walked out to

They argued until the lamps burned low.The round hall had never held so many people. Bears filled the corners like boulders. Wolves crowded the doorway. Fox scribes sat along the wall with their pens moving, recording everything, and at the long table the three clans sat shoulder to shoulder with a Lion captain, a Lion prince, and a Lion princess who had not said a word in an hour.Kael sat at the table's edge with Orin's note in his fist, listening to the room come apart."We march at dawn," Greymantle said for the fourth time. "I do not say we attack. I say we move a thousand axes to the causeway and make him count them. Cassian is a careful man. Careful men do not hold a prisoner against that.""He holds the prisoner against us," said Ysolde. "That is the whole of his purpose. If we move, he can say we are the aggressors.""He already says that.""He says it to his soldiers. I would like him to say it to a field full of Bears and have them see for themselves that it is false." She

Aurelia was awake before Sorrel finished knocking.She had not been asleep. She had been lying on the glass bed in the dark with her mother's letter open on her chest, reading the same line over and over until the words stopped meaning anything. Do it gently. At the first soft tap on the door she was on her feet with her boots in her hand."They're moving," said the Fox, from the threshold. His face was white in the lamplight. "The cavalry. Kael says they're riding north.""North." She dragged on her boots. "Toward what?""Ashdown. The cottage. Orin's note said the stone is still in the hearth." He swallowed. "Your father wants the letter."She stopped with one boot half laced.The one thing he has never been able to burn. She had seen it in her father's face on the causeway, the way he had looked at Kael, not with hatred but with a terrible, patient hunger, as though the boy were a locked door. She had thought it was the prince he feared. It had never occurred to her that it was the

They came to the hills above Ashdown at dusk on the third day, and Aurelia saw at once that it was not the village Kael had described.He had spoken of it in pieces over the long road, a mill with a creaking wheel, a market square full of carts, a widow who crossed the street to avoid him, a girl with a sharp tongue. A small, grey, ordinary place. She had built it in her head as a cluster of thatched roofs and chimney smoke.What lay below them now was a camp.Torches ringed the valley in a tight, orderly circle. Gold-and-blue banners hung limp over every road. Soldiers stood on the bridge, at the mill, in the empty market square, and where the last fence gave up and the forest began, a great black scar still marked the earth. Around it, two hundred men with picks and shovels swarmed over the ruin like ants on a carcass, and by torchlight the stones of a cottage foundation were being lifted out one at a time and flung onto a growing heap.Kael did not say anything. He sat on the borro

The charcoal burners of Sootwater had been gone for years, but their huts still stood in a ring around a black clearing deep in the Greywood. Mara had led them there in the dark without once looking back. "My da brought me here for the autumn burn when I was small," she said. "Nobody comes here. Even the Lions say the trees are wrong."They were a little wrong. The oaks leaned in close, and the air smelled of old smoke and wet leaves. But the huts had roofs, and there was a spring, and by midnight sixty-three villagers were packed into the turf-walled shelters with their children asleep in their laps. Nobody spoke above a whisper. Nobody lit a fire.Aurelia knelt in the smallest hut with Kael's head on her knee and a rolled coat under his shoulders.He had not woken. Nine bolts lay in a bloody heap by the door, and Widow Harrow was packing the last wound with a poultice that smelled of moss and vinegar. The old woman worked with quick, sure hands, her headscarf crooked and her mouth s