HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Forty-Three: The Captain's Coat

Lord Cressin did not attack.

That was what Aurelia could not stop thinking about, afterward. He stood in the lane in the thin lamplight with his notebook open and two hundred men spread behind him in the dark, and he spoke to the chapel door as though he were paying a call. He had brought a camp stool. A servant unfolded it for him. He sat down on it, crossed his legs, and waited for someone to answer.

Aurelia stood just inside the door with her ear against the wood. Kael had come down from the bell tower in a single leap and now stood beside her, his hand on the Wolf's sword. Tavian was at the other side of the frame. Nobody breathed.

"Highness," called Cressin. "I am so sorry to disturb you at this hour."

She did not answer.

"I shall be brief. I have two hundred of the Regency's finest soldiers around this building. I have eleven hounds. I have every alley and every roof for a quarter mile, and I have been told by a very reliable source that the chapel has a single cellar door, which is bricked up, and no other exit." A small, tidy cough. "I mention this only so we may skip the part where we pretend otherwise."

Kael's eyes met hers. A source. She saw him think it. Someone told him. But there was no time to ask who.

"I do not want to hurt anyone," Cressin went on. "That is the truth. I was never fond of violence. I take notes." His voice was light and reasonable. "His Majesty the Emperor is quite well. He asked after you this afternoon. He said, and I wrote it down because I thought you would like to hear it, tell Aurelia I would like to see her."

Her heart gave a great sick lurch.

"He's lying," Tavian whispered.

"Maybe not," she whispered back. "Maybe it's true. And that's what makes it work."

"Here is what the Regent offers," said Cressin. "The Princess and Captain Tavian will walk out of that door, unarmed, and will be conducted to the palace with every honor. Rooms. Servants. A reunion with their father. The Wolf and his companions will surrender the grey cloak he carries, and the Wolf will be taken to the Hall on the longest night, alive and unharmed, to answer the clans' questions."

"Unharmed," said Kael, almost to himself.

"The rest of your party will be released at the city gates. I give my word." A pause. "You have until dawn. It is a generous offer, and I would not like to see it wasted."

The stool creaked. The servant folded a blanket over his knees.

"I shall wait right here," said Lord Cressin. "Do take your time."

They held council in the nave, in whispers, around the crate with the single lantern.

"He's lying about the Emperor," said Sorrel flatly. "About everything. The moment you walk out, you're in a cell. And Kael's in a worse one."

"He might not be lying about Father," said Aurelia.

"Highness..."

"I know." She pressed her hands against her eyes. "I know. But I keep thinking, what if he's alive? What if he's asking for me?"

Nobody answered.

It was Tavian who said it, very quietly. "Rell. If we go out there, Oswin gets the cloak, the prince, and the Princess in one night. There's nothing left to stop him."

"I know that too."

"Then we can't go."

"We can't stay." She looked up. "The dawn's four hours off. After that, he'll burn us out."

"There's the cellar," said Ket.

They all turned.

She had been crouched by the broken altar, with the small iron key in her fist and her bow across her knees. She did not look up. She was running her thumb along the key's ridged edge, absently, the way someone does when they have decided something.

"Tavian said it's bricked up. But I found it this afternoon, while you were talking. The bricks are loose at the bottom. They've been pulled out and put back. Someone's used it recently." She lifted her head. "I think it goes to the old drains."

"The drains are watched."

"Not the ones under the old quarter. They're nine hundred years old. They go under the river and come up in a hundred places." Her dark eyes were steady. "My mother used to say the Wolf kings built them. Every old Wolf house in Solhaven has a way into them. I think Grist knew that, and I think that's how Tavian got in."

"He found the cellar," said Aurelia, slowly.

"I was running," said Tavian. "I never looked for the drains. I just went where the wall was weak." He blinked. "I thought I'd found a rat hole."

"A rat hole that's saved us all," said Sorrel, rising. "I'll go and look."

It was real. They found it twenty minutes later, behind a heap of mouldering pews: a low arched mouth in the cellar wall, no taller than a man's shoulder, with a few loose bricks on the ground beside it. Cold air breathed out of it, smelling of river mud and old stone. A narrow passage ran away into the dark.

"Three at a time," Sorrel said, with his head and shoulders inside. "It slopes down. There's a stream at the bottom. I can hear it." He backed out, grinning. "I think it comes up near the old tanneries. About half a mile."

"Half a mile," said Aurelia. "With eleven hounds above ground."

"The salt," said Kael.

Everyone looked at him.

"Sorrel's got a barrel's worth in his pack. Habit." He gave a tight smile. "If we leave a trail of it, in the passage, and over the cellar floor, they'll lose us at the mouth."

"I do have a lot of salt," said Sorrel, with dignity.

"Then it's a plan." Aurelia drew a breath. "But it only works if Cressin doesn't know we've gone. If he sees the chapel quiet, he'll send men in. Within the hour."

"We need someone at the door," said Tavian.

"Someone he'll believe."

The words hung in the lamplight. And in the dark behind them, quite calmly, Captain Ilsa Renn said:

"That'd be me."

Aurelia turned.

Renn stood in the shadow of the broken pulpit, with her arms crossed and her weathered face perfectly composed. She had taken off her helmet. Her short grey hair stood up in tufts. She looked, Aurelia thought, like someone who had made up her mind a long time ago and was only waiting to be asked.

"No," said Aurelia.

"I haven't said what."

"You'll go to the door and pretend to be me. In my coat. With my ring." Her voice shook. "I won't. I won't do that."

"It's a good plan."

"It's a terrible plan. He'll see through it in a minute."

"A minute's plenty. Give me an hour at the door and I'll hold him till dawn." Renn's mouth twitched. "He's expecting a surrender, Highness. A hooded figure, in a Lion coat, walking out with an escort of three lancers, in the dark. He won't see the face. He'll see the ring. He wants to believe."

"They'll kill you."

"They might." She said it matter-of-factly. "They might not. He wants prisoners. I'm a captain of the imperial guard, and I know where every troop in this city is posted. I'm worth a good deal more alive." A dry shrug. "And if I'm wrong, well. I've lived forty-one years. I fought at the Greenwater, and I thought I knew what for. I'd like to find out I was right about something."

"You were never wrong about me," said Aurelia, and her voice broke.

"I know." Renn took a step forward. She did not touch her. She never did. She simply stood very straight, in the lantern light, with her hands at her sides, and looked at the girl she had followed across half a continent. "You asked me a question in a Bear vault. Did you know? And I told you the truth. Do you remember what you said?"

"I said, thank you."

"Aye. I've been turning it over ever since." The Captain's face softened. "It was the first time in my life anyone in that family said it and meant it. I've been well paid, Highness. More than I deserve."

Aurelia could not speak. She stood in the dim nave with her fists clenched at her sides, and felt the whole weight of it come down. A woman who had never wanted anything but to do her duty, asking for the only gift that could be given.

"Dace, Brin, Orrel," said Renn, without turning her head.

Three young lancers stepped out of the shadows. They were barely twenty. They had followed her from Solhaven to Lanternreach and back, through a river ford and a burning village and a hundred miles of hostile country, and not one of them had asked why.

"Captain," said the tallest.

"You'll want to go with the Princess."

"No, Captain."

"That's an order."

"Then we'd like to respectfully ask to disobey." His voice shook, very slightly. "We swore to the crown. Nobody's explained who's wearing it. But we swore to you, Captain, in the barracks, the first day. We'd like to stand by that."

Renn closed her eyes. For a moment something moved across her stern face, too fast to name.

"You're fools," she said, hoarsely.

"Yes, Captain."

"Every one of you."

"Yes, Captain."

"Good." She opened her eyes. "I'd hate to die with sensible men."

It took ten minutes. Aurelia would remember every one.

She took off her coat, the plain grey Lancer's coat, three sizes too large, and put it around Renn's broad shoulders. She turned up the collar. She drew the hood low over the Captain's brow. Then, slowly, she drew her father's signet ring off her finger, the small gold lion with the crooked ear, and held it out.

"I can't."

"It's only a ring."

"It's your name."

"It was my father's." She pressed it into Renn's palm and folded the callused fingers around it. "I don't want it any more. I think I'd like to give it to someone who deserves to carry it."

Renn looked down at the ring. Something shook in her throat.

"Highness," she said. It was the last thing she said in that tone. Then she straightened, and bowed, a perfect soldier's bow, and Aurelia saw that her hands were trembling.

"Go well, Ilsa."

"And you." A rough breath. "Look at the soldiers."

"I will."

"Good girl."

She turned to the door. The three young lancers fell in behind her, two on one side, one on the other, with their swords sheathed and their heads high. Renn put her hand on the bar. She did not look back.

Aurelia could not watch. She turned away, and Kael caught her arm, and she buried her face against his shoulder for the space of three heartbeats, because it was all the time she could spare.

Then she lifted her head, wiped her eyes, and followed Ket into the dark.

The drain smelled of river mud and old stone, and it was colder than anything she had ever known.

They went in a line, bent double, with Sorrel at the front and Ket close behind, a thin grey lantern hooded in her hand. The passage sloped steeply down. Water ran in a shallow channel at their feet, bitterly cold, and the walls were slick with something she did not want to name. Every few yards, Sorrel scattered a pinch of salt from a pouch at his belt. It glittered faintly in the lantern light like a trail of stars.

Behind them, a long way off, she heard the chapel door open.

It was a tiny sound, muffled by earth and stone. A creak. A murmur of voices. Cressin's, light and polite. Then another voice, deeper, rougher, saying something she could not catch. Then silence.

She's doing it, thought Aurelia. She's out there. She's walking toward him in my coat, and he thinks it's me.

She kept moving.

They had gone perhaps three hundred yards when the hounds began to bay.

It came from above, far overhead, hollow and distorted by the stone. Eleven voices at once, deep and ugly. A sudden scrabble of claws on the cellar floor. A man's shout. And then, clearly, in a high carrying voice that she knew like her own, the word:

"Search the chapel!"

Aurelia stopped dead.

"He knows," said Tavian, hoarsely.

"He knows it's a trick. He'll go through the cellar." Kael's voice was tight. "The hounds will follow us."

"The salt," said Sorrel.

"It might not be enough."

"It's all we have." The Fox's face, in the lantern, was white and fierce. "Run."

They ran.

They came up in a tannery yard, under a stinking black sky, with their lungs burning and their boots full of river water. A ladder, a trapdoor, a stack of hides. Sorrel pushed the hatch up and looked out. Then he beckoned, and they climbed, one by one, into the night.

Aurelia stood in the dark with her hands braced on her knees, gasping.

The old quarter lay spread around them, a warren of leaning roofs and chimneys. Behind them, half a mile away, rose the squat ruin of the Chapel of the Mourning Sun, a black shape against the faint glow of the city. A great crowd of torches had gathered at its feet. She could see them moving. She could hear a single long horn.

And as she watched, a thin spiral of smoke began to rise from the chapel roof.

It climbed slowly at first, pale against the stars. Then, with a rushing gold flare, flame broke out along the ridge-pole, and the whole old building lit up like a lantern.

"No," whispered Aurelia.

"They've fired it," said Tavian. His voice cracked. "They've burned the chapel. They'll say it was the Wolf."

"Ilsa..."

"I know."

"She's in there. She, they, they went to the door..."

"Rell." He caught her by the shoulders. "They went to the front door. They walked out. If Cressin wanted a prisoner, he's got one. He wouldn't burn the place with her in it."

"He might."

"He wouldn't." But he did not sound sure.

She did not argue. She could not. She stood in the stinking yard with the smoke in her eyes and the roar of the fire in her ears and watched the place where she had hidden for one night turn into a column of flame, and it came to her, very coldly, that she had just watched someone choose for her.

I'd hate to die with sensible men.

"We have to go," said Kael, softly, at her ear.

"I know."

"She did it so we could."

"I know." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. It left a streak of soot. "I know. I know."

She did not move.

And then, thin and faint and far away on the cold night wind, drifting over the roofs from the direction of the burning chapel, came something that was neither a horn nor a shout. It was a voice. A single rough voice, cracked with age and smoke, raised in a song.

It was a soldier's song. Aurelia had heard it a hundred times, in the barracks yard, at the great parades, on the long road from the Bear passes. It was about a lion who walked into a river and came out a lamb. Her mother had taught it to her brother. Her brother had sung it, off-key, on the road north.

It went on for two verses.

On the third, other voices joined it. Three young ones, high and wavering. Then more, from the dark, from the far side of the torches, one and two and a dozen, rough and uncertain, as though men who had been told never to sing it were finding they had not forgotten the words.

Tavian made a sound like a man struck.

"The soldiers," he whispered. "The ones around the chapel. They're singing."

Aurelia stood very still.

She did not know whether Renn was alive. She did not know whether the smoke was a funeral pyre or merely a fire, or whether, in the confusion of that burning dark, a battered old Captain in a Princess's coat had walked out of a ruin and into the arms of two hundred men who did not know what to do with her. She only knew that on a night when the Regent had meant to bring the city to heel, the Lion soldiers of Solhaven had stopped, and listened, and begun to sing.

Look at the soldiers, Renn had said.

She was looking.

Beside her, Kael took her hand. The mark under his cuff burned warm and steady in the dark, and she held on to it.

"Two days," he said quietly.

"Two days."

"We'll need a lot more than a drain."

"I know." She straightened. Her face was wet and filthy and perfectly steady. "Let's go and find a gatekeeper."