HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Four: The Last Wolf

The Emperor's Council met in a round chamber at the top of the Tower of Sunrise, where the windows looked out over the whole sprawl of Solhaven.

Aurelia had been allowed to sit in on council sessions since her sixteenth birthday. A ruler learns by watching, her father said. So she sat in the shadow of a pillar with a folded cloth in her lap, as she always did, and pretended to be bored by tax disputes and grain tariffs.

She was not bored this morning. Nobody was.

A man stood in the center of the chamber, still in his travel-stained blue coat, hair plastered flat with sweat. His boots had left dust across the polished marble. Dorrin Hask, a minor tax assessor from a village no one had heard of, had ridden two days without rest, and he looked as though he might fall over if anyone breathed on him.

"Tell it again," said Emperor Cassian.

He sat on the black stone throne with his hands folded, his face composed. The whole council watched him: twelve lords in gold-trimmed robes, three generals, the Master of Coin. No one coughed.

"Majesty, I swear on the Sun, I saw it with my own eyes." Hask's voice cracked. "A boy, perhaps seventeen. A village boy. A wagon was running down a hill toward a child, and he caught it. He caught it with his bare hand and held it, Majesty, eight hundred pounds of grain, and the wagon stopped. And there was a mark on his wrist, a crescent, broken along the lower edge—"

"What color was the light?"

The Emperor's voice was mild. Almost casual.

Hask blinked. "Majesty?"

"The mark. You said it glowed. What color?"

"I, yes, Majesty. Silver. Silver-white." The assessor swallowed. "But I don't believe I said it glowed, Majesty. I hadn't gotten to that part."

The chamber went very still.

Aurelia felt the stillness settle on her skin like cold water. She watched her father's face, and nothing in it moved. Not a muscle. Not an eyelid. It was the stillness of a man who has just made a small mistake and is deciding, in a heartbeat, how best to bury it.

"Servants talk," Cassian said. "Rumors travel faster than riders. It is a detail from the old stories." He lifted one hand, dismissing the point. "Go on."

But Aurelia had been watching her father's face for seventeen years, and she knew what she had seen. Not surprise. Never surprise.

Recognition.

"It cannot be," said General Marek Vale.

He was a squat, scarred man with a voice like gravel in a bucket, the commander of the Emperor's hunters, and he had fought at her father's side in the war. "The Wolf line is dead. We burned the royal house to its foundations. We counted the bodies, Majesty. Every one."

"Evidently someone miscounted."

"The Moon-mark was carried by the royal blood and no other. If the boy bears it, then—"

"Then the last Wolf is alive, General." Cassian said it quietly, and the words dropped into the room like stones into a well. "And we have been sleeping seventeen years while he grew."

A ripple went through the lords. Someone muttered a prayer. A young noble near the window had gone pale as paper.

Aurelia sat frozen behind her pillar.

The last Wolf.

Her whole life, she had been taught a simple story. The Wolf royal house had been wiped out in the war. Every king, every queen, every prince and child. The line ended. That was why the empire had been needed. That was why the Lions had been asked to rule, because there was no one left to take the throne.

Extinct, her tutors had said. Not a drop of the blood remains.

But you did not say the last about a line that had ended. You said it about a line that had survived, if only by a thread. You said it about something you had known, or feared, or half-expected for years.

The last Wolf. Not a Wolf. Not a pretender. Not a boy playing at ancient myths. Her father had said it as one speaks of a man whose name one knows well.

She pressed her nails into her palm to keep her face still.

"Find him," the Emperor said.

"Alive, Majesty?" asked General Vale.

"Alive if possible." A pause, so brief that Aurelia nearly missed it. "Dead boys cannot be questioned."

"And if he resists?"

"Then you will do what is necessary." The Emperor rose. The light from the east windows caught his silver mane and turned it to fire. "You will take two hundred riders and the war-hounds. You will leave at dawn. Hask will guide you to the village. Burn it if you must. No Wolf is to reach the mountains, the Fox territories, or any of the old strongholds. If he reaches the clans, this empire may not survive the year."

Burn it if you must.

Aurelia felt, for the first time in her life, the smallest cold flicker of fear of the man she loved most in the world.

"You're overthinking it," said Tavian.

They stood on the terrace outside her chamber, long after the council had broken up. Below them the capital glittered with evening lamps. A trumpet sounded from the barracks courtyard, and she could hear the clatter of men and horses preparing for an early departure.

"He asked about the color of the light before Hask told him," she said. "Tavian, how would he know that?"

"Everyone knows the old Wolf legends. The glowing mark, the silver fire. Nursemaids tell them to children."

"I wasn't told those stories as a child. Were you?"

He hesitated, and that was answer enough.

"No one was," she said. "The Wolf stories were forbidden after the war. I asked our nurse about them once, and she begged me never to ask again. So how does Father know what color a Wolf's mark glows?"

"Because he fought them." Tavian ran a hand through his hair, suddenly looking much younger than nineteen. "Rell, he was there. He saw things. Maybe he saw the mark on someone in the war. Maybe he saw it light up." He gave a strained laugh. "You're looking for a conspiracy where there's a simple explanation. Father is a general. Generals remember."

"Then why seal the archives?"

He went quiet.

"Why seal the records of a victory? Why say the last Wolf if the line was extinct? Why order two hundred riders and a pack of war-hounds for one boy in a village?" She turned to him, her voice low and fierce. "Do you know what Hask said, when he thought no one was listening? When he left the chamber? I was behind the door. He said, I only saw him lift a wagon. I didn't know I was reporting a ghost."

Tavian stared at her.

"Ghost," she repeated. "As if the Wolf prince had already been dead for years, and had no business coming back."

For a long moment her brother said nothing. When he spoke, it was in the careful voice of a man picking his way through a dark room.

"Father is not a cruel man."

"I know."

"He is not. Whatever happened seventeen years ago, he did what he had to do to keep this empire together. I believe that. I have to."

"I know," Aurelia said again, more gently. "I believe it too. I just want to understand it."

He looked away, out over the city, and she saw his jaw working. "Don't dig, Rell," he said at last. "Please. There are things in this family that are better left buried."

It was almost exactly what their father had told her in the archive stairwell.

She said nothing. Beneath her ribs something small and stubborn had begun to burn, not defiance, not rebellion, only a plain, quiet need to know. She had always been the loyal daughter. She still was. But loyalty was not the same as blindness, and she was starting to suspect that someone in her family had been counting on her not to see the difference.

She did not sleep that night.

At the first grey of dawn, she went to her window and watched the riders gather in the courtyard far below: two hundred of them in gleaming armor, banners fluttering, hounds straining on their chains. General Vale rode at the front on a huge black warhorse. Dorrin Hask hunched beside him, looking sick.

The gates swung open. The column rode out through the Avenue of Suns, between the empty parade stands and the marigold petals still scattered in the road, and the sound of their hooves rolled over the sleeping city like thunder.

Aurelia stood at the glass until the last banner was gone.

The last Wolf.

If there had been a last, then once there had been others. A first, a second, a third. A whole house of kings and queens and children, who had been burned to their foundations and counted dead. Someone had been the second to last. Someone had stood in that final room, in that final hour, and been the reason the Wolf line was declared extinct.

And her father had been there.

He knew exactly who.