HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Nine: Hollowroot

It took four more days to reach the Greywood, and by the end of them Kael had stopped noticing the cold.

The forest began without warning. One moment they were crossing a bleak, windy moor of heather and standing stones. The next, the trees rose around them like the pillars of a drowned cathedral, ancient oaks and ash and grey-barked beeches, their branches knitted so thickly overhead that the daylight turned the color of old pewter. The air smelled of moss and rot and something sharper beneath. Kael felt it settle into his bones like a memory he had never lived.

"Don't wander off," Sorrel said, for the fifth time. "The trees here move. Not literally. But people get lost, and the ones who go looking for them get lost too."

"You've been here before."

"I've been near here before. It's different." The Fox glanced at the branches and, for once, did not smile. "Wolves don't like visitors."

They walked through the long grey afternoon and into the dusk. Kael followed Orin's charcoal map as best he could, though the forest had a way of rearranging itself around his notion of north. Twice he caught the pendant humming faintly against his chest, a warmth that came and went like a pulse. The second time, it grew strong enough to guide him.

They found the split oak at sunset.

It was enormous, wider than a cottage, its trunk cloven top to bottom by some ancient bolt of lightning. The two halves leaned apart like the hands of a man in prayer, and between them a dark hollow gaped, floored with leaves. Black scorch marks still scarred the bark. Someone had hung a ring of small bones from the lowest branch, and they clicked softly in the wind.

Kael stopped.

"Well," Sorrel murmured. "That's cheerful."

"Wait here."

"Gladly."

Kael stepped forward alone, pulling the torn cloth from his left wrist. The mark glowed faintly in the dusk, a pale silver thread. He turned his hand palm out, as Orin had told him, and said the words in a voice that did not sound like his own.

"The moon is not broken. Only waning."

For a long moment nothing happened.

Then a voice spoke from the branches above him, low and cold. "Again."

"The moon is not broken. Only waning."

The leaves rustled. Dozens of them, falling at once. Kael looked up, and the branches were full of eyes.

They took his sword first.

There were perhaps twenty of them, silent as smoke, dropping from the trees and rising out of the bracken with spears and bows leveled. Wolves, every one. Tall, grey-furred men and women with the loose, tireless build of long-distance runners, their coats stained with bark and ash. They wore no uniform, only a tattered scrap of grey cloth knotted at the left arm. Their faces were hard and thin and suspicious.

One of them, a woman with a scar from brow to jaw, pressed a spear to Kael's ribs. Another lifted his hand, studied the mark by torchlight, and said, quietly, "It is true."

The ring of spears wavered.

"The pendant," the woman with the scar said. "Show us."

He drew it out. She stared at it for a long time. Her expression did not change, but her knuckles went white around the spear, and Kael heard her heart skip a beat.

"Where did you get this?" she asked.

"My guardian gave it to me. Before the hunters came."

"Name."

"Orin."

A strange sound ran through the circle. Not quite a gasp. Not quite a laugh. A soft, collective exhale, as though a stone had been lifted from twenty chests at once.

"Orin," the scarred woman repeated. Something shifted in her face. "He was alive?"

"I don't know." Kael's voice cracked. "He stayed behind at the cottage. They burned it. I couldn't see if..."

He could not finish. For a moment, nobody spoke.

Then the woman lowered her spear. "Bring him in," she said. "And the Fox. Bind his hands, but gently. He's a guest until he proves otherwise."

"Gently," Sorrel said, with great dignity, as two hulking Wolves took him by the arms. "I'd like that on the record."

Hollowroot lay under the earth.

They led him through the cleft in the great oak and down a long spiral of roots and packed clay into a space so wide that Kael forgot to breathe. It was a village. A whole village, buried in the bones of the forest. Houses of timber and wattle climbed the walls of an enormous natural cavern, their windows glowing with lanterns, and the ceiling above them was a tangle of living roots, thick as pillars, hung with luminous fungi like a sky of pale green stars. Narrow bridges crossed the central void. Children ran along them, shrieking. Smoke curled up from a hundred cook-fires. Somewhere in the dark, someone was singing.

Hundreds of Wolves lived here. Kael could see them now, drawn from their homes by the news, gathering on the walkways and balconies to stare. Old men with white-streaked fur. Women carrying babies. Soldiers in patched mail, lean and watchful. A pack of boys no older than ten, wide-eyed and openly worshipful. A silence spread through the cavern as he passed, rolling outward like a wave, until it seemed that the whole hidden world was holding its breath.

They brought him to a great round hall at the cavern's heart, built around a tree stump the size of a wagon. Three people waited there.

The first was a huge, grizzled warrior with a face like a clenched fist and a coat shot through with white scars. He wore a scarred breastplate that had clearly been beaten flat and re-forged more than once, and an axe hung at his belt. He did not rise. His eyes, pale grey, burned.

The second was an old woman, tiny, silver-furred, leaning on a gnarled staff. Her expression was tired and kind, the face of someone who has buried a great many people and still gets up each morning. She studied Kael with a quiet, bottomless sorrow.

The third was a young man not much older than himself, slender and sharp-featured, his fingers stained with ink. He wore spectacles. He was the only one who did not look at the mark first. He looked at Kael's face.

"This is the boy?" said the grizzled warrior. His voice was a growl. "This is what Orin sends us after seventeen years?"

"Be quiet, Brannoch," the old woman said wearily.

"I will not." The warrior stood. He was enormous. "I fought at the Greenwater. I carried three dead brothers out of that river. I have waited seventeen years for a sign, and now they bring me a half-starved farm boy with a stolen sword." He jabbed a thick finger toward Kael. "The Moon-mark can be forged. The pendant can be stolen. The words can be bought from any loose-lipped fox in the territories."

"Hey," said Sorrel, from the doorway.

"I'm not a fox's prisoner and I'm not a thief," Kael said.

Brannoch turned on him. "No? Then prove it."

"How?"

"The old way." The warrior bared his teeth. "Wolves know their own. Change."

"What?"

"Change. Here. Now. If you're the blood of Aldric's line, the Wolf in you will answer."

Kael stared at him. His mouth was dry. In his memory the ravine rose up again, bodies on a slope and the taste of copper. "I can't. I don't have control. If I change here, with all these people..."

"Then you're no prince."

"Brannoch," said the old woman sharply.

"If he cannot master the Change, he is a danger to everyone in this hall."

"That is not the test."

"It is my test." The warrior's voice rose, and the cavern echoed with it. "Seventeen years we have lived like rats in a hole. Seventeen years my daughters have never seen the sky. And now, now, they tell me the last of the royal house has finally decided to arrive, and he cannot even wear his own skin." He spat. "What kind of king is that? What use is he? We don't need a boy-king. We need a sword. We need a war."

"We need peace," the old woman said.

"Peace." Brannoch laughed, short and bitter. "Edda, they burned our capital."

"And you would burn theirs. And then in seventeen years some other fool will burn yours." She struck her staff on the floor, once, a dry crack. "Enough. I've heard this argument a thousand times. I did not live to be seventy to hear it again tonight."

"What do you want, then, old woman?" Brannoch snarled. "To go crawling to Solhaven with a white flag?"

"I want this boy fed and warm and heard before anyone decides anything about him." She turned to Kael, and the lines in her face softened. "Child, forgive us. Our home has been small for a long time. Grief makes everyone short-tempered."

Kael found he could not speak. He had not been called child by anyone but Orin in his whole life.

"What I want," said the young man in spectacles, "is a different question entirely."

They all turned. He had been sitting quietly, ink on his fingers, studying Kael with a calm, curious detachment that was somehow more unsettling than Brannoch's rage.

"My name is Teyr," he said. "I keep our records. Forgive me, Highness, but I should say what none of the elders will." He pushed up his spectacles. "I don't think the Wolf Kingdom should come back."

The hall went silent. Brannoch's face turned the color of raw meat.

"Teyr," said Edda gently.

"Not like this. Not as it was." The young man kept his voice level. "The old kings ruled for three hundred years by blood alone. Nobody chose them. Nobody voted. When one grew cruel, as they eventually do, the only remedy was knives. It was luck that kept the Wolf dynasty good for as long as it was. When the luck ran out, three hundred years of peace ran out with it." He met Kael's eyes squarely. "I mean no insult. If you want the throne, you may well be a better man than your father. But the throne is the problem, Highness. A kingdom that depends on one family's goodness is a kingdom that has not been fixed. Only postponed."

"That's treason," Brannoch said. His voice was thick.

"It's history."

"I'll have your tongue for it."

"You'll have an argument for it, which is all I've ever offered."

In the middle of it all, Kael stood with his hands bound loosely behind him, hungry, exhausted, grieving, forgotten. He looked at the three of them, the war-captain, the healer, the scholar, and he realized with a slow, cold sinking sensation that every person in this room wanted something different from him. Vengeance. Peace. Abolition.

None of them had asked what he wanted.

He wasn't sure he knew.

"Please," he said.

The shouting broke off. All three turned.

"I came here because Orin told me to. Because he said you would help me." He swallowed. "I don't know how to be a king. I don't know if I want to. I didn't even know this morning, this year, that I was anything but a shepherd. I only know that someone burned my home, and I've killed people, and I can't stop shaking." His voice wavered. "I don't have answers for you. I'm sorry."

Silence.

Then, slowly, Edda laid her gnarled hand against his cheek. Her palm was warm, dry as parchment.

"That," she said softly, "is the first honest thing anyone has said in this hall in a long time."

Brannoch grunted and looked away. Teyr slid his spectacles down his nose and studied the table with an odd expression that might have been respect.

"Feed him," Edda said. "Then let him sleep. We will talk in the morning."

They gave him a bed in a root-walled room above the central cavern, with a straw mattress and a rough wool blanket and a small window that looked out on the glowing ceiling. Someone had left a bowl of stew and a hunk of bread. He ate it all, and then, because he could not stop himself, he cried quietly into the blanket for a long time.

When the tears ran dry, the knock came.

Sorrel slipped in without waiting, closing the door behind him. They had taken the bindings off, finally, though a pair of Wolf guards remained posted in the corridor. The Fox leaned against the wall, arms folded, his usual grin absent.

"You did well," he said. "In there."

"I didn't do anything."

"Exactly. Nobody expected that." He pushed off the wall and came to sit on the edge of the bed. "Listen. You've got maybe three days. After that, the Council will force a vote, and one of those three will win. If Brannoch carries it, you'll be a figurehead for a war you can't win. If Edda does, you'll be sent away to some quiet corner to grow old in obscurity. And if Teyr..." He shrugged. "Well. You'll be a very well-read ex-prince."

"You've been here a few hours. How do you know all this?"

Sorrel smiled, small and tight. "It's my trade. I told you."

Kael looked at him for a long moment. "You knew about Orin."

"I'm sorry?"

"When I said his name, the Wolves reacted like it meant something. You didn't. You just watched them." He sat up. "You knew who he was already. You knew about the Greywood, and the oak, and the words. You knew before I told you anything."

The Fox's expression did not change. But he did not answer, either, and the silence stretched until Kael could hear his own pulse.

"I told you I wasn't a good person," Sorrel said at last, quietly.

"That isn't an answer."

"No." He rose. At the door he paused with one hand on the latch. "But it's true. Sleep, Wolf. Tomorrow will be long."

The door closed behind him.

Kael lay awake for a long time, staring up through the little window at the green-lit roots, listening to the sleeping village breathe around him. Somewhere below, a mother hummed a lullaby to a child. Somewhere above, a sentry shifted on a platform of woven vines.

The pendant lay warm on his chest.

Three days, he thought. Three days to decide who I am.

He closed his eyes and, for the first time since the fire, did not dream of burning.