HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Eight: A Fox at the Ford

By the fourth day, Kael had learned three things about being hunted.

Hunger makes you stupid. Fear makes you slow. And the worst of it is the quiet, because when nothing is chasing you, your mind goes back to the ravine.

He had not transformed again. He had been careful, breathing the way Orin taught him, letting the heat in his wrist rise and fall like a tide. But the memory of the red joy stayed with him like a bad taste. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the freckled boy's face. Please. Mother.

He ate the last of the dried mutton on the fourth morning. By noon, his hands shook. By dusk he found himself crouched in the bracken above a river ford, staring down at the lights of a roadside inn and trying to decide whether starving was worse than being caught.

The river was wide and slow, brown with silt, crossed by a stone ford where the main western road met a muddy track. A cluster of buildings huddled on the near bank: a smithy, a stable, a low timber inn with smoke pouring from its chimney. Beside the inn stood a post hung with paper. Kael could not read it from here. He did not need to. He had seen the notice at the last crossroads, nailed to a tree.

WANTED. BY ORDER OF HIS MAJESTY THE EMPEROR. A BOY OF SEVENTEEN YEARS, BEARING A MARK ON THE LEFT WRIST. REWARD: FIVE HUNDRED GOLD LIONS.

Under it, a rough charcoal drawing of a face. It looked nothing like him. It did not have to.

Five hundred gold lions. In Ashdown that would buy the entire mill.

"You're thinking too loudly," said a voice behind him.

Kael was on his feet with the sword half-drawn before he understood that someone had spoken. He spun.

A young man sat on a fallen log not ten feet away, one leg crossed over the other, peeling an apple with a small knife. He had not been there a moment ago. Kael was certain of it. He had been listening, and his ears had not caught a breath, a footstep, a rustle of leaves.

"Easy," the stranger said pleasantly. "If I meant harm, I'd have taken your purse while you were staring at the inn. You've got a hole in your left boot, by the way."

He was perhaps twenty, lean and quick-eyed, wearing a patched green coat and a satchel slung across his chest. His hair was the color of a rust-stained knife, swept back from a sharp, amused face. His eyes were amber, and when he smiled, which he did often, his teeth looked just a little too even. Fox, Kael realized. Everything about him gave it away, the quick economy of his movements, the way his gaze flicked everywhere at once, the faint curl of a tail beneath the long hem of his coat.

"Who are you?" Kael kept the blade between them.

"Sorrel. Dealer in information, procurer of small goods, friend to the destitute." He bit into the apple. "And you're the boy on the poster."

Kael's mouth went dry.

"Oh, relax. If I wanted the five hundred, I'd have whistled for those guards ten minutes ago." Sorrel waved the knife at the inn, where two gold-and-blue figures lounged by the stable door. "Besides, the poster is wrong in at least four places. It says you're tall. You're not. It says you're dangerous." A small, considering pause. "I haven't decided on that one."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course you don't." Sorrel's amber eyes dropped to Kael's left wrist, covered by a strip of torn cloak, then lifted again, bright and unhurried. "Which is why you're sitting in a ditch, in a stolen cloak, with no food, watching a Lion patrol, instead of eating at the inn like a sensible fugitive."

"They'll catch me."

"Not if you go in with me."

Kael hesitated. Every instinct he owned told him not to trust the stranger. But his stomach was a clenched fist, and the Lion soldiers were laughing at the stable door, and Sorrel was looking at him with an expression of such open, easy friendliness that it almost made him suspicious by itself.

"What do you want?" he asked.

Sorrel laughed, delighted. "Oh, that's the right question. You've got instincts." He tossed the apple core into the dark. "Here's what I propose. I get you across the river. Past the patrol, past the checkpoint on the western bank, all the way to the first real forest. Nothing flashy. A little forged paperwork, a little misdirection, a hot meal. In return, you owe me a favor."

"What kind of favor?"

"One I'll name later."

"That's not a deal. That's a blank page."

"That's what a deal is, my friend. Someone writes the first line." His smile didn't change, but something behind it sharpened. "I'll swear this much. The favor won't cost your life. It won't cost anyone you love. And it won't ask you to do anything you wouldn't do in your sleep, if you were the sort of person I think you are."

"And what sort of person is that?"

"The sort who went back for a wounded boy." Sorrel tilted his head. "Joren, wasn't it? I heard about the ravine. Nine dead hunters and one living man, left against a tree with a bandage. The whole eastern road is whispering about it." His voice softened a little. "You could have finished him. Most wouldn't have thought twice."

Kael said nothing. His stomach turned over.

"I'm not a good person, Wolf," Sorrel said. "But I know the difference between a monster and a frightened animal. I'd like to be on the right side of whichever one you turn out to be."

Wolf.

Kael's grip tightened on the sword. "I never said I was."

"No," Sorrel agreed, amiable. "You didn't."

The river hissed against the ford below them. Behind the inn's shutters, someone laughed. A smell of roasting meat drifted up the slope, thick and warm and almost unbearable. Kael felt his resolve starting to give.

"The patrol," he said. "How do we get past them?"

Sorrel's grin widened into something genuinely delighted.

"Ah," he said. "Now you're asking the interesting questions."

It took twenty minutes and a trick Kael would not have believed if he had not watched it happen.

Sorrel walked into the inn first, whistling. He emerged a quarter of an hour later with a loaf of bread, a flask of cider, and a sealed packet of papers he handed to Kael without comment. Then he crossed the yard to the guards at the stable door, introduced himself as a clerk of the Imperial Tax Office, and began complaining, loudly and without pause, about the state of the western road, the cost of horse feed, and the incompetence of whoever had designed their ledgers.

Within five minutes, both soldiers were helping him count something.

From the shadows by the smithy, Kael slipped across the yard in the confusion, cloak drawn over his head, clutching the packet to his chest. He passed within six feet of the soldiers. Neither looked up. A voice at the back of his mind kept screaming, run, run, run, and he kept his feet slow and his breath steady and counted the heat in his wrist, up and down, up and down.

He reached the far end of the ford without incident. He stood there in the dark, trembling, with the river at his feet and the bread already half eaten before he had noticed putting it in his mouth.

Sorrel caught up a few minutes later, whistling, and fell in beside him.

"Fake papers," he said. "Imperial Courier's Pass, signed and sealed. Good for any checkpoint between here and the Greywood."

Kael stopped chewing.

"Sorrel."

"Mm?"

"I never told you where I was going."

For half a heartbeat, no more, the Fox's step faltered.

Then he smiled again, easy as breathing. "Everyone knows where the Wolves went, my friend. West. Into the old forest, where they've been hiding since the war. It's the worst-kept secret on the continent." He shrugged, lightly, and patted the satchel on his chest. "Selling secrets is my trade. You think I wouldn't know the most expensive one of all?"

It was a good answer. It made sense. Kael wanted to believe it.

But he had spent three days with senses that had learned to catch the small, shuddering truths a body gives away. Sorrel's heartbeat had skipped, once, a tiny stumble, like a foot catching on a root. It was gone almost before Kael noticed.

He said nothing. But as they walked on into the dark, side by side, the Fox whistling a tuneless little song and the river shining behind them, he noticed one more thing.

Sorrel kept glancing at the pendant.

Not often. Not openly. A quick amber flick toward the silver disc beneath Kael's shirt, hidden but not hidden enough, the way a man glances at a coin he's sure is counterfeit and hopes he's wrong.

He knows what it is, Kael thought. He knew before I told him anything.

He shifted the sword on his belt, loosening it in the scabbard. It was not a threat. Not yet. But somewhere at the back of his mind, a very old and very patient part of him, the part that had listened to Orin's rules for seventeen years, was taking quiet note.

I'll keep him close. And I'll watch him.

"You're quiet," Sorrel said lightly.

"I'm tired."

"Of course you are." The Fox grinned, bright in the moonlight. "Don't worry, Wolf. By tomorrow night, you'll be sleeping under a roof. I'll see to it."

Kael did not answer. But he did not remove his hand from the sword.