HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Forty-Four: A Hundred and Ten Steps

The news about Renn came at dawn, from a fishwife, for the price of a cup of tea.

Sorrel brought it back to the loft above the tannery where they were hiding, grinning in a way that made Aurelia want to hit him. "Alive," he said. "I swear it. A captain of the imperial guard, in a Princess's coat, taken alive at the burning chapel and carried to the palace cells on a hurdle. Three lancers with her. The whole street's talking about it. They say the soldiers on the cordon wouldn't hit her."

Aurelia sat down on a sack of hides and put her face in her hands.

Kael did not say anything. He crouched beside her and waited. After a while she wiped her eyes, nodded once, and stood up.

"Right," she said. "The gatekeeper."

The east wall of the palace ran along a quiet, steep lane where nobody lived. High stone, no windows, a drainage ditch full of black water. The postern sat at the bottom of it, a low iron-bound door with a lamp over it, and next to the postern, rising out of the wall like a cut tooth, stood the east tower.

Kael lay on a rooftop opposite with Ket beside him, watching it through a gap in the tiles.

"Twenty men inside," said Ket, very quietly. "Two on the door. Four on the stair. Fourteen asleep or playing dice. I counted the shifts yesterday."

"You counted."

"Someone had to." She did not take her eyes off the door. "Tavian said the cell is on the fourth floor. Is the key for that?"

"No. It opens the stair." Kael turned the small iron key in his fingers. "Orin said the Keepers' Stair starts at the postern. But it runs inside the east wall. Right beside that tower." He frowned. "A hundred and ten steps. That's a lot of wall. If there's a door anywhere on the way..."

"There's one."

He looked at her.

"Grist told Tavian," said Ket. "The third time. He said, the stair has a landing for every tower, in case a Keeper needs to hide. He said the east tower's landing is behind the old tapestry on the fourth floor." Her mouth twisted. "He didn't say it was where he'd be sitting."

"He wanted to be found."

"Yes." She finally turned her head. "He's been trying to be found for fifteen years."

They went in by the postern at the third hour after noon, while the changing guard was still arguing about dice.

Sorrel did it. He walked down the lane in a gaudy merchant's coat with a cask on his shoulder, singing something filthy and cheerful, and stopped beside the guards to ask whether a gentleman might lose a few coppers on a fair game. Within a minute he was sitting on an upturned bucket with six men crowded round him, losing very badly, and not one of them looked at the wall.

Kael slid past them in the shadow of the lamp. Ket was a breath behind him, thin and silent as smoke. At the foot of the postern door, behind the gatekeeper's empty lodge, a low iron grille was set into the stone. Kael fitted the key. It turned with a soft, oiled click.

"Kept oiled for seventeen years," Ket murmured.

"Someone loved this lock."

They stepped through, and the dark closed over them.

It was a narrow spiral, barely wide enough for his shoulders, cut into the thickness of the wall. The steps were worn smooth in the middle, as though countless feet had passed. The air was dry and cold. It smelled of stone and old lamp oil, and faintly, strangely, of lavender.

Count, Orin had said. Don't trust the dark.

He counted.

At twenty he stopped worrying about his breathing. At forty his thighs ached. At sixty a faint grey light began to show through a crack above, and he could hear voices on the other side of the wall, a man laughing, a door slamming, the clink of a cup. They were inside the east tower's thickness, climbing past its rooms. A single stone's width of masonry between them and twenty armed Lions.

"Landing," said Ket, behind him.

It was a small flat space at the head of a short flight, no larger than a closet. A narrow slit let in a bar of light. Opposite it stood a low arched door of black oak, with a ring for a handle and a thin line of gold at the bottom.

Kael set his palm flat against it. The heat in his wrist stirred, then settled.

"He's there," he said. "I can hear him. Alone."

"What's he doing?"

"Humming."

She almost laughed. "He does that."

"You've never met him."

"I've heard about him from three different people." Her hand was on the ring. It shook, once. "Open it."

He pressed his shoulder against the oak, and it swung inward on silent hinges, into a stuffy, lamp-lit room.

It was a cell, but it had been furnished with some care.

There was a narrow bed with a patched quilt. A table with a teapot, a cup, and a book. A window with a rusty bar, looking out over the east roofs, and under it a very large man in a grey coat, sitting on a stool with his back to the door, peeling an apple with a small knife.

He did not turn around.

"I wondered whether it would be tonight," he said. His voice was deep and quiet and perfectly steady. "I did leave the door off the latch. It seemed a courtesy."

Ket stood absolutely still.

"You're early, I think. The Hall isn't till tomorrow. But I'd be a poor host to complain." The big man laid the apple down. He turned on the stool, slowly, with a small wince as his bad leg shifted. "Come in. Close the door. They can hear through that panel, though I don't think they've ever listened."

He was sixty or near it, heavy-shouldered and lined, with thinning grey hair and a pair of pale, mild eyes like an old dog's. A faded scar ran across one palm. He looked at Kael, and at the silver crescent glowing under his cuff, and his face did something complicated.

"The boy with the moon," he said softly. "You have your father's chin."

"Mace," said Ket.

The big man's eyes moved to her.

He did not speak for a long time. The lamp flickered. A spoon clicked against a cup, far down in the tower. And Kael, who could hear everything, heard the old man's heart do something it had not done in fifteen years. It stopped, and started again, painfully, like a wheel on a bad axle.

"You've got her eyes," said Tobiah Grist. "Gods, you've got her eyes."

"Don't you say that."

"No." A tremor ran through his huge frame. "No. I won't." He rose, and Kael saw that he was taller even than Greymantle, and that he was shaking. "What's your name?"

"Ket."

"Ketra." He said it like a prayer. "She said you'd be called that. Said it was a name for someone quick."

"You don't get to say her name either."

"I know." He lowered his head. "I know I don't."

"Tell me," said Ket.

It was not loud. Her bow hung loose at her side, and she was standing very straight, and the small iron key was clenched so tight in her left hand that blood showed between her fingers.

"Tell me what she said. The last thing. Tell me, and then I'll decide."

The old man looked at her. Then, slowly, with difficulty, he lowered himself back onto the stool, and laid his scarred hands on his knees, and began.

"She came to the postern fifteen years ago, in the dead of winter. I was the gatekeeper by then. Thirteen years in the post. I had a quiet life and a limp and a name that wasn't mine, and I thought it was over." A thin breath. "I opened the door at dawn, and there she was. Thin as a rail. Snow in her hair. Her face was older than I remembered."

"You knew her."

"We were pickets together. At the western ford. She was twenty-two. I was thirty-eight." His mouth quirked. "I taught her how to bank a fire. She taught me never to play dice with a scout."

"And?"

"She said, Mace, it's time." His voice cracked. "She'd walked from the Greywood. She said she'd left her daughter with the old Wolves at the split oak, and now she wanted to settle what we'd both left undone. She said, you and I saw it. If we stand up together, they'll have to listen. She asked me to come with her to the great hall and say it in front of the Council."

"What did you say?"

"I said yes."

Ket drew a short breath.

"I did. I said yes, and I meant it. I wept. I sat on the doorstep of that lodge and held her hand and said thank you, over and over, because I'd waited thirteen years for someone to ask." He pressed his palm against his eyes. "And then she went to sleep on my cot, and I sat by the stove with a cup of tea. And the fear came."

Nobody moved.

"It came slowly. At first I only thought, what will they do to us? Then I thought of my wife, who didn't know. My daughter, who was nine. I thought, I'll lose it all. And I told myself I'd only go and ask someone's advice." His voice dropped. "There was a man at the palace. A young secretary, new to the post, who'd been kind to me. He ran errands for the Chamberlain. I thought he might know what to do."

"Oswin," said Kael.

"No. His clerk. A boy named Cressin."

The world went very still.

"I went and told him. A woman at my door, a Wolf, with a story about the Greenwater." He raised his head. His face was grey. "I thought he'd help. He said, wait here, I'll fetch his lordship. And when I came back to the lodge, my hands shaking, the door was open. And she was gone."

"Gone," said Ket.

"Dead. They'd taken her in the night. Three men, with a sack." His voice broke at last. "I found her cloak in the snow, and the cot overturned, and a smear on the step. I was told in the morning, very politely, that the Chamberlain would like me to dispose of a body. That if I did it quietly, I would keep my post, and my wife would never hear."

Ket made a small sound.

"I should have gone to the river." He was weeping openly now, silently, the great shoulders shaking. "That's what they wanted. A sack and a current. But I couldn't. I carried her out to the postern in the dark, and I pried up the first flagstone under the threshold, with my knife and my bare hands, and I put her there."

"Under the door."

"Under the very door I let her in by. I told myself it was so no one would find her. But I think, truly, it was so I could never leave her." He wiped his face. "I've sat on that stone every night for fifteen years. Every dusk, before I lock the gate, I put my hand on it."

The silence went on a very long time.

Kael did not look at Ket. He felt, in his own chest, a slow terrible tightening, and the mark on his wrist had gone cold. He thought of the red haze, and the ravine, and a freckled boy who had said please. He thought, this is what it feels like from the other side.

"What did she say," said Ket.

"Child..."

"Her last words. You said you'd tell me."

Mace wiped his eyes. He fumbled in the breast of his coat, and drew out something small, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. He unfolded it on his palm, with great care.

It was a bone toggle, no longer than a thumb, carved into the shape of a crouching wolf. The edges were rubbed smooth. A hole had been drilled through its middle, and a little scrap of green thread still hung in it.

"She gave me this," he said. "The night she came. She said, if anything happens, give it to Ket. Tell her I carved it myself, in the cold, the winter before. Tell her the wolf is her." His voice was a ruin. "I've kept it fifteen years. I've kept it dry."

Ket did not move.

"And there was one more thing. After they took her. In the snow, outside the lodge. I found it scratched into the wall by the door, in her hand, with a nail. She must have done it as they dragged her." The old man's mouth shook. "It was only four words."

"What did it say?"

"Tell Ket I'm coming."

Ket made a sound that Kael would never forget. It was not a sob. It was smaller, rawer, a creak of something breaking that had been held a long time. Her knees buckled. She did not fall. She went down in a slow controlled crouch, with the bow clattering on the stones beside her, and covered her face with both hands.

I'm coming back. A two-year-old in a mother's collar. A woman at an oak in the snow. Before spring.

Tell Ket I'm coming.

Kael knelt beside her. He did not touch her. He only stayed there, close, as Aurelia had stayed with him in the hut at Sootwater, and waited.

It was Mace who moved. He rose with painful slowness and knelt too, on the cold floor, with his bad leg stretched out behind him, and held out the toggle in both hands.

"I'm not asking you to forgive me," he said. "I'd never ask that. I only wanted you to have this. And to tell you where she is. And to say I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Every day. I'm so sorry."

Ket lowered her hands.

Her face was wet and fierce and devastated. She looked at the old man, at the great grey ruin of him, kneeling on the stones with a scrap of bone in his palms. She looked at the toggle. And very slowly, she reached out and took it.

"I should kill you," she said.

"Yes."

"I came here to."

"I know."

"I've wanted to for fifteen years. I didn't know your name, but I wanted to." She turned the little wolf over in her fingers. "And I find I can't. I don't even want to." Her voice cracked. "That's the worst part. Why can't I want to?"

"Because you're her daughter," said Mace gently. "She couldn't either. I think that's why she came to me."

Ket laughed. It was a terrible, ragged sound. Then she was weeping again, and he put one huge scarred hand on her hair, very lightly, and she let him.

They stayed in the cell until the afternoon light had dimmed.

When Ket finally stood, she was grey with exhaustion, and her eyes were swollen almost shut. But her back was straight. She tied the green thread around her wrist, the little bone wolf against her pulse, and looked at Kael.

"He comes with us," she said.

"Ket..."

"He says it in the Hall. All of it. In front of the whole Council, with Cressin standing there." Her voice was flat and iron-hard. "He'll tell them who took the clerk's money. He'll tell them whose men carried the sack." She turned her head. "You'll do that. Won't you?"

"I will," said Mace. "Gladly."

"And then you'll go to the stone."

"Yes."

"And I'm going to dig her up, myself, and carry her home."

"I'll help you."

"No. You'll stand there and watch." She looked at him, and for the first time Kael saw something other than grief in her face. It was the beginning of something harder and quieter, a thing that might one day, if she let it, become mercy. "That's the first part of your sentence."

He bowed his head.

Kael stood, and went to the arched door in the wall. He laid his ear against the oak, listening to the tower. Twenty men. A shift change in an hour. A great many footsteps on the stairs, an unusual number. A rising murmur of voices from below.

"Something's happening," he said. "In the palace. They're gathering."

"The Hall," said Mace. He rose, wincing. "They're setting the long tables for tomorrow. The whole place has been in an uproar since noon."

"Does the Emperor attend?"

The old man hesitated. And something crossed his face, something quick and furtive and almost, absurdly, amused.

"Ah," he said. "I'd wondered whether anyone would ask."

"Ask what?"

"Where he is." He lowered his voice, though no one could hear. "They've been saying he's at a country house. Or under guard. Or dead. I've heard all three." A faint, dry smile. "I'm the only one who knows. And I think I'm the only one who's been laughing."

Kael's stomach turned over.

"Where?"

"He walked out of his apartments two nights ago, in his dressing gown, with a lamp." Mace shook his head slowly, as if still unable to believe it. "I was in my lodge, with the stove lit. There was a knock at the postern. A soft one. I thought it was a drunk. I opened the door, and there stood the Emperor of the Lions, barefoot, with a mason's chisel in his hand."

"What?"

"He said, Gatekeeper, I'm told there's a stair." The old man's eyes were bright. "I said, Majesty, who told you that? And he said, My daughter. And then, very quietly, I would like to go up and put something right."

Kael stared at him.

He thought of a tall grey man standing at the edge of an empty hole in a ruined cottage, saying I would like to go home now. He thought of a girl with a plain coat and a ring on her finger, telling him about a throne with its name scraped off.

"I gave him the second key," said Mace. "I've kept two, you see. One for the stair. One for the door at the top." He smiled, slow and wondering. "I haven't seen him since. But I've had a message every morning, tucked under the postern. Four words, scratched with a nail."

"Which words?"

The old man looked at Ket. At the bone wolf on her wrist. At the grey cloak hanging from Kael's shoulder, and the thin gold line of afternoon in the window, and the great pale palace beyond, waiting.

"The chisel is not enough," said Tobiah Grist. "Send the boy."