HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Fourteen: What the Empress Hid

Aurelia reached Solhaven on the ninth day, braced for a summons.

None came. The gates opened for her as they always had. The guards saluted. Marigold petals from the anniversary parade had long since been swept from the Avenue of Suns, and the city went about its business under a pale autumn sky as though nothing in the empire had changed.

That was what frightened her. General Vale's rider must have arrived days ago.

At the palace steps, the Chamberlain bowed and said only, "His Majesty is occupied until tomorrow, Highness. He asks that you rest from your journey and attend him at dawn."

"At dawn," she repeated.

"In the throne room, Highness."

Not the study, where he spoke to her as a father. The throne room, where he spoke as an Emperor.

She thanked the Chamberlain, and went upstairs, and did not rest.

"You look dreadful," said Tavian.

He was sprawled across the window seat in her chamber, boots on the cushions, a half-eaten pear in his hand. He had clearly been waiting some time. Under his usual lazy smile, she noticed, he looked as though he had not slept either.

"Hello to you too."

"Father's been in the war room for two days. He had Vale's report read aloud three times." He bit the pear. "You pulled down a gallows, Rell. In front of the army."

"Yes."

"Was it worth it?"

"Eleven people are alive who wouldn't be." She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled off her boots. "So yes."

He was quiet for a moment. "I'd have done the same," he said, to her surprise. "I'd like to think so, anyway. I'm not sure I'd have had the nerve." He turned the pear in his hand. "What's he going to say to you tomorrow?"

"I don't know."

"You can still lie. Say Vale misread the situation. Say you were tired. He'd want to believe you."

"I won't."

"I know." A wry half-smile. "That's what worries me."

She looked at her brother's face, so like their father's, and thought of what Harl had said in the pit. The king gave no order to strike. She wanted desperately to tell Tavian everything. The slate tablets, the date, the arrow from the mist. But she remembered the strain in his voice on the terrace. Don't dig, Rell. She was not sure what he would do with the truth. She was not sure he knew what he would do either.

"Tavian," she said carefully, "how much do you remember about Mother?"

His face changed. It was small, only a flicker, like a hand closing around something fragile.

"Why?"

"Because I don't remember her at all." The words came out smaller than she meant. "I was five. I have a smell, lavender and old paper. A voice singing something. That's all. Father never talks about her, and the servants go quiet whenever I ask."

"She died of fever."

"I know. That's what everyone says." She took a breath. "Was she like me?"

Tavian stared at the pear. For a long moment the room was silent except for the creak of the weathervane on the roof.

"She was nothing like you," he said finally. "She was gentler. She laughed more." He swallowed. "But she asked questions. Constantly. Father used to say she could find a flaw in a perfect circle. They argued about it, sometimes, behind the study door. Not shouting. Never shouting. Just..." He gestured, helpless. "Long, quiet arguments. And afterwards he'd look tired, and she'd look like she'd won something."

"What did they argue about?"

"I was seven, Rell." But his eyes had gone distant. "The last year, it was always the same thing. A word. I never understood it. She kept saying the ford. And Father kept saying Liora, enough."

The ford.

Aurelia's fingers tightened on the quilt.

"Are her rooms still locked?"

"The solarium? Yes." He frowned. "Why?"

"Because I'd like to see them."

"Father had everything sealed after the funeral. No one's been inside in twelve years." Tavian sat up slowly. "You can't, Rell. Not now. Not the night before he..."

"He's already decided what to do with me. Another locked door won't make it worse." She stood. "Do you have the key?"

He did not answer at once. He dropped the pear core on the sill, wiped his hands, and looked at her with an expression she could not read.

Then he reached into his collar and drew out a thin silver chain.

Dangling from it was a small iron key.

"I took it the day she died," he said, very quietly. "I was seven. Nobody noticed. I've never used it. I didn't think I could." He pulled the chain over his head and held it out. "I'm coming with you."

The solarium lay in the quiet west wing, at the end of a corridor where no servant ever walked.

The door opened with a groan of old hinges. Beyond it lay a round room beneath a glass ceiling, now grey with dust and grime. The light that filtered through was dim and soft, like light seen through water. Furniture stood shrouded in white sheets. Dead plants slumped in their pots. Along one wall, shelves of books rose to the ceiling, every spine faded to the same pale tan.

The air smelled of lavender, faint as breath.

Aurelia stopped on the threshold. Her chest felt suddenly too tight.

"That's her," Tavian said, behind her, hoarse. "That smell. I'd forgotten."

They stood together for a moment in the quiet. Then Aurelia crossed the room and pulled the sheet from a writing desk by the window. Beneath it lay a stack of unfinished letters, a dry inkwell, a pair of spectacles with one cracked lens. A little silver music box sat beside them.

She lifted the lid.

A tinny melody began to play, thin and sweet and slow. It was the song she remembered. The song her mother had sung.

She sat down very suddenly on the dusty chair and pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.

Tavian did not speak. He only laid his hand on her shoulder, and left it there.

It took them an hour to search the room.

They went through the desk drawers, the bookshelves, the sewing basket, the trunk at the foot of the bed. They found hundreds of ordinary things. A child's drawing of a lion with too many legs. A pressed flower. A recipe for plum cake. A list of household accounts in a small, tidy hand. Nothing of any weight.

It was Aurelia who thought of the music box.

She had wound it a second time, listening to the tune, when a single note rang false. A tiny sour plink, as though something inside had shifted. She turned the box over and tapped the base, and the wood sounded hollow.

"Tavian. A knife."

He passed her a small penknife. She worked the blade along the underside, feeling for a seam. Under the lining of green felt, behind a panel of thin wood, her fingers found something folded flat.

She drew it out.

A single sheet of cream paper, creased and brown at the edges, one corner scorched black as though someone had once held it too near a flame and then changed their mind. The ink had faded, but it was still legible. It was a letter, begun and not finished. It was addressed to Cass.

Her father's name.

"It's Mother's handwriting," Tavian said hoarsely.

She read it aloud, slowly, her voice unsteady.

Cass,

You told me last night to stop asking, and I have tried. I have tried for seven months. But I cannot make it fit. I have read the dispatch from the Greenwater three times, and I know the first arrow fell on our side of the river, because Captain Aurel's own report says it came from the west bank, from the ford. I know the ford was held by Wolf pickets until dawn. I also know that two of those pickets were never found among the dead, nor among the prisoners, nor among the fled.

You told me Aldric struck first. I want very much to believe you. But I have sat with Ysolde Vane in her garden, and she will not look me in the eye when I say the word ford*, and I have seen what you do with your hands when a messenger comes from the north.*

You swore to me that the royal line of the Wolves was ended. That none survived the burning. Then why do you flinch at every report from the northern hills, Cass? Why do you send riders to villages that no longer have a name?

I am carrying your child. I do not want her born into a house built on a thing I cannot look at. Tell me the truth, and I will carry it to my grave. Tell me nothing, and I will find it myself. I know you do not wish me to. But I will not lie to our daughter when she asks me what her father did.

Whatever you did, I love you. But I will not be silent.

Liora

The paper trembled in Aurelia's hands.

Below the signature, in smaller writing, as though added later, one last line had been scrawled and half crossed out.

If this letter is found, tell Tavian the lavender is in the second drawer.

Neither of them spoke.

The thin tune of the music box had run down. The solarium was silent, grey with the light of the dying afternoon. Dust motes drifted in slow spirals through the beams.

"She wrote this," Tavian said at last. His voice sounded far away. "Before you were born. She knew, Rell. She knew. She asked him, and he..."

"She was pregnant with me." Aurelia's voice was barely audible. "She wrote that she wouldn't lie to her daughter."

"And then she died."

The word hung in the air.

Aurelia looked at the scorched corner of the page. Somebody had held this letter to a flame. Somebody had decided to burn it, and then had stopped. Her mother, perhaps, in a moment of fear. Or someone else, who had found it, and been unable to finish.

"She died of fever," Tavian said, as though repeating a lesson. Then, very softly: "The week after, I remember Father sitting in the study, burning papers. Piles of them. He wouldn't let anyone in. I stood at the door and watched him, and he never looked up." His face was grey. "I thought he was grieving."

"Maybe he was."

"Maybe." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, and when he took it away she saw that he was crying, silently, in the awkward way of someone who had not done it in years. "Rell, I don't want to know what this means."

"I don't either." She folded the letter along its old creases, very carefully, and pressed it flat. "But I think we're going to find out anyway."

Dusk was falling when they left the solarium. Tavian locked the door behind them and slipped the key back around his neck, and they walked together down the long empty corridor without speaking. At the stairhead, he stopped.

"Tomorrow," he said, "when he asks about the gallows, and Vale, and the Bears. Don't tell him about this."

"Tavian..."

"Not yet. Please. I need time." He gripped her wrist, hard. "I want to believe there's an explanation. I need to go on believing it a little longer. Give me that."

She looked at him for a long time. Then she nodded.

"Not yet," she agreed.

He let go and went down the stairs, a tall, tired, uncertain young man in a uniform he hated. She watched him until he turned the corner.

Back in her room, she did not light a lamp. She sat at the window with her mother's letter spread open on her knee, and watched the lanterns come on one by one across the darkening city. Somewhere below, a watchman called the hour.

Tell me the truth, and I will carry it to my grave.

She wondered whether she had.

She thought of Harl in the pit, and of the grandmother's blank slate, and of the Fox seal, and of the ford. Ford. The word kept turning in her mind. The ford where the first arrow fell. The ford where two Wolf pickets had vanished. The ford her mother had said aloud so often that her brother, at seven, had learned it without knowing why.

Sleep was impossible. At last, long past midnight, she folded the letter into the lining of her sleeve with the others, and lay down fully dressed on top of the covers, and stared at the ceiling.

At dawn, her father would be waiting on a throne carved out of stolen stone.

She did not know what he would say. But she knew, with sudden fierce clarity, what her mother would have wanted her to ask.

Tell me about the ford.