HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Nineteen: Terms Under Truce

Kael did not sleep after the terrace.

He lay on his back in the dark chamber and watched the ceiling, which gave him back a hundred small reflections of a boy who looked as though he had seen a ghost. Sorrel's bed was empty again, but this time Kael knew where he was. The Fox had left a note on the pillow in his looping hand: Mother wants us at the second bell. Wear something that doesn't smell of lake. Don't speak until she does.

Kael read it twice. Then he pulled the sleeve down over his left wrist and tried to ignore the fact that the skin there was still faintly warm.

The Matriarch received them in a round hall at the top of the palace, where the black glass gave way to windows of clear crystal and the whole lake lay spread below in flat pewter light.

A long table stood at the center, bare of cloth. Ysolde sat at its head in her plain grey gown. Sorrel stood behind her left shoulder, back straight, hands clasped, and for the first time Kael saw him in the place where he belonged. The Matriarch had not looked at him once since they entered. But when Kael took his seat, he saw her fingers tighten on the arm of her chair.

Across the table, Princess Aurelia sat with Captain Renn at her shoulder.

She had changed. The borrowed nightgown was gone, replaced by a travel-stained riding coat and a plain gold clasp. Her dark hair was pinned back. She looked older in daylight, and more composed, a girl who had been raised to sit at tables like this one. But when her eyes met his, there was a flicker in them, quickly smothered, that he recognized because he felt it in his own chest.

Last night happened.

At the far end of the table, apart from everyone, sat a slim man in a plum-colored coat with a notebook open at his elbow.

"Lord Cressin," said Ysolde pleasantly. "How good of you to join us."

"The Emperor wished a gentleman of the court to witness all proceedings, Matriarch."

"Of course. And you shall." She folded her hands. "Before we begin, a small formality. By Fox law, all within this hall are bound by the truce I sworn yesterday. I have sworn it. The Princess has sworn it. Her Captain has sworn it. It would be an irregularity for a man to sit in on the proceedings without taking the same oath."

Cressin's pencil paused. "I am an envoy of the Emperor. My oath is already given to him."

"A pity. Then I must ask you to wait outside."

"I must refuse. His Majesty's instructions..."

"Are very clear, I'm sure." Ysolde's smile did not change. "But I am not His Majesty. This is not his hall. And by the law of the Four Clans, which the Lions have never repudiated, no word spoken under truce may be carried away without the leave of all who spoke it." She turned her head. "Princess Aurelia. Do you grant Lord Cressin leave to repeat what is said here?"

The silence was very short.

"No," said Aurelia.

Cressin went white around the nose. "Highness."

"I'm sorry, my lord. It's the law." She did not sound sorry. "You're welcome to stay, if you swear to it. Or you can wait outside."

For a moment the courtier looked at her as though he had never seen her before. Then he closed his notebook, very precisely, and rose.

"I shall write to His Majesty about this irregularity," he said.

"Please do," said Ysolde. "And give him my warmest regards."

The door closed behind him. Renn, at the Princess's shoulder, let out a long breath through her nose that was almost a laugh.

"Now," said the Matriarch. "We may speak plainly."

Nobody moved.

"You are each carrying pieces of a picture," she said. "I have watched you both for weeks, through different windows. You have each found a little of the truth, and you each believe you are alone in it." Her eyes moved from one face to the other. "You are not. I propose we lay the pieces on the table. Not all, and not at once. But enough that each of you knows what the other has."

"And why should I trust you?" said Aurelia.

"You shouldn't. That's rather the point." Ysolde's voice was dry. "I do not ask for trust. I ask for an exchange. Highness, you first."

Aurelia hesitated. Kael watched her weigh it, her fingers resting on the table, her jaw set. Then she drew a folded parchment from her sleeve and laid it flat.

"The Redrock Treaty," she said. "The second clause. It names a campaign against the House of Aldric, to commence at the first snow. It is dated two months before the Wolf king supposedly broke the Concord." She tapped it. "The Fox seal appears as witness and guarantor. The Bears say the third clause was scraped from the stone by imperial engineers. And a Wolf prisoner called Harl told me the king had called a parley under a white banner, and that the first arrow came from the Wolf side of the river. From behind his own line."

Kael had not known she would say it so plainly. A small cold feeling spread through his chest. Not suspicion. Surprise, and under it something like respect.

"The ford," he said.

She looked at him sharply. "You know about the ford?"

"I do." He took Teyr's letter from his coat and set it on the table beside her parchment. "The western ford was held by thirty pickets of the Queen's Own. All died in the Lion charge, except two. A sergeant called Mace and a scout called Dessa. Neither was seen again."

The Princess read the letter. Her face went very still.

"My mother mentioned two missing pickets," she said, very low. "In a letter I found. She wrote that they were never found among the dead, nor the prisoners, nor the fled."

A letter. Kael looked up. She had not mentioned it to the table. She had said it only to him, quietly, as though she had trusted him with it by accident.

"Your mother knew," he said.

"She asked my father. She wrote that she wouldn't be silent." Aurelia's voice cracked, and steadied. "She died the next year, of fever."

Nobody spoke. At the head of the table, the Matriarch sat with her eyes half closed, and Kael saw her fingers curl against the chair arm until the knuckles whitened.

"Corvin," said Ysolde quietly.

Sorrel flinched as if struck.

"My husband," the Matriarch said, to the room at large. "He was my envoy at the parley. The seal on the treaty is mine, but it was my husband's hand that pressed it, on my behalf, the week before the Greenwater. He went to the western ford with a message from my own pen, to be delivered to the Wolf king's captain. He did not return." She opened her eyes. They were dry and terribly steady. "I was told he died of fever on the road. I believed it for eleven years."

"And now?" asked Kael.

"Now I believe he saw something at the ford that morning." Her gaze moved, for the first time, to the young man behind her shoulder. "And that someone made sure he never spoke of it."

Sorrel did not breathe.

"I should have told you," Ysolde said to him, very softly, in front of everyone. "Four years ago, when you found the letter. I should have said, I don't know either, my son. I have been afraid to look. I said let it lie, because I could not bear to say that." Her voice shook. "That was cowardice. I am sorry."

"Mother," Sorrel whispered.

It was the first time Kael had ever heard him use the word.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. Then the Matriarch lifted one small hand and rested it on her son's wrist, lightly, and he bent his head, and the room was very quiet.

Aurelia glanced sideways at Kael. He gave her a tiny nod. Yes. That's what it looks like.

"Here is what I propose," Ysolde said when she had composed herself.

She laid a thin brown-bound ledger on the table. It was cracked along the spine, and a small ear had been stamped into the cover in faded ink. Beside him, Kael felt Sorrel stop breathing for the second time that morning.

"The Ford Ledger," she said. "Kept by my husband during the last year of his life. It records who passed the western crossing, what was carried, and what was paid. I have not opened it in seventeen years. I have been afraid of what it would say about my clan." She pushed it a few inches toward the center of the table. "I will open it. But not alone, and not to one of you only. I will open it before both of you, in this room, in three days' time, with my son beside me. And whatever is written there, we will read together."

"What do you want in return?" Aurelia said.

"A promise." The Matriarch spread her hands. "Both of you will swear that whatever you learn from the ledger will be shared between you before it is shared with anyone else. Not your father, Highness. Not the Wolf Council, Highness. You will hold the truth between the two of you until you both agree what is to be done with it."

Silence.

"That means I can't tell my father," Aurelia said slowly.

"For a time."

"He's the Emperor. He'll ask."

"Then you will refuse." Ysolde held her gaze. "I know what I am asking. I know it may cost you a great deal at home. But if this ledger says what I fear it says, then it is not a document for any one throne. It belongs to all the clans, and I will not have it become a weapon for the first hand that grabs it."

Aurelia looked at Kael.

It was a long look. Clear, level, and unguarded, with the question in it unmistakable. Do you trust me enough for this?

He thought of the terrace. The silver thread around his wrist. The moment she had said I won't call the guards, and the glow had faded.

He thought of Greymantle's warning. Do not trust a Fox with anything you cannot afford to lose.

He thought of Orin, burning, and of a hundred riders and a Lion general who had written spare nothing.

Then he thought about the girl in front of him, who had pulled down a gallows.

"On one condition," he said.

Ysolde raised an eyebrow. "Name it."

"The same terms for her as for me." He did not look away from Aurelia. "Whatever I learn, I share with her before I share it with the Wolf Council. Equal footing. Equal silence."

The Princess's lips parted. She had not expected that.

"The Wolf Council won't like it," said Sorrel quietly, from behind his mother's shoulder.

"Then they can be unhappy." Kael held out his left hand, palm up on the table. "I swear it. On the mark, on my name, on whatever's left of the house that carried me out. I'll hold what I learn with her until we both agree."

For a long moment, Aurelia did not move.

Then, slowly, she laid her own right hand against his. It was warm, dry, and callused from reins. The mark on his wrist flared once, bright and silver, and Renn muttered something under her breath that was almost a prayer.

"I swear it," said Aurelia. "On my mother's name."

The Matriarch released a breath so soft it might have been a sigh.

"Then it is done," she said. "In three days we read. Until then you are both guests of Lanternreach, under truce." She rose. "I strongly suggest you rest. And Highness..."

"Yes?"

"Lord Cressin has an excellent memory for faces, and a very dull sense of humor about oaths." Her smile was thin and sharp. "Be careful what he sees."

They parted in the corridor outside, in the long hall of mirrors, with Renn standing three steps off pretending to inspect a lantern.

"Three days," Aurelia murmured. She had not let go of his hand until the last possible moment, and now she stood with her own tucked into her sleeve as though it did not quite belong to her. "I'll have to write to my father. I'll tell him something small. A truce, a negotiation. Nothing that makes him send soldiers."

"Will he believe it?"

"I don't know." She hesitated. "He's very good at being believed."

"So am I," Kael said. "I just learned how, last month."

She laughed, short and surprised. It was the first time he had seen her do it in daylight, and something in the sound loosened a knot in his chest that he had not known was there.

"Kael," she said. "Last night. On the terrace."

"Yes?"

"I meant what I said."

"I know."

"Do you?"

He looked at her for a moment. Past her shoulder, in the black glass of the corridor, a hundred reflections of the two of them stood together, close and wary and strangely alike.

"Yes," he said. "That's the problem."

She flushed, just slightly, and turned away. But as she walked down the corridor with Renn behind her, he saw her shoulders ease, the way a person's do when they have carried something alone for too long and have just discovered they need not.

He stood there until the last gleam of her coat had vanished around the corner.

"Kael," said Sorrel, at his elbow.

"Yes?"

"You're doing it again." The Fox nodded at Kael's left wrist, where a faint silver ring still glimmered under the cuff.

He pulled his sleeve down. It was a poor disguise.

"It's nothing."

"It's something," said Sorrel, with considerable feeling. "And whatever it is, my mother has just locked it into a binding oath with the most dangerous girl on the continent." He ran a hand through his hair. "I can't decide whether she's a genius or a lunatic."

"Both, probably."

"Probably," Sorrel agreed, and for the first time in days, he grinned.