HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Hearth Stone

The Emperor asked to speak with his daughter at the ruins of the cottage, and Aurelia said yes before anyone could stop her.

The herald came at first light, a young man in gold and blue with a white cloth tied to his spear, riding alone up the old charcoal road. He did not dismount. He read the message from the saddle in a voice that shook slightly. His Majesty Cassian, Emperor of the Lions, requested a private audience with the Princess Aurelia, at the hearth of the burned cottage on the edge of Ashdown, at noon. He would bring one companion. She might bring none, or as many as she liked. He would be unarmed.

"It's a trap," said Renn.

"Probably."

"He wants you alone so he can take you."

"If he wanted to take me, he'd have sent Vale's whole column." Aurelia fastened her coat. "He's done that sort of thing. This is different. He wrote it himself. Look at the handwriting."

She held out the paper. Renn did not take it. "It's very steady."

"That's what worries me. His hand shook on the causeway. Now it doesn't." Aurelia folded the page. "I think he's made a decision."

"What kind?"

"I don't know. That's why I have to go."

Kael did not argue. He sat against the wall of the hut with the Wolf's sword across his knees and listened to her list the terms. She would walk in alone. He would stay in the trees, within earshot, and would not intervene unless she raised her voice or spoke a single word they had agreed on beforehand. Renn and the lancers would hold the old charcoal road.

"The word," he said. "What is it?"

"Lavender."

His mouth twitched. "He'll never guess."

"He might. He knew her better than I did." She knelt and took his hands. The marked one was warm, as it always was now. "Kael. If he asks about the letter. About what she wrote."

"Tell him."

"All of it?"

"Whatever you think he needs." His eyes were very steady. "She wrote it for the Emperor's daughter, too. You're allowed to decide what he's allowed to hear."

She kissed his forehead, quickly, a little shy, and walked out into the grey morning before she could think better of it.

The valley looked different in daylight.

The soldiers were gone. The tents had been struck. Where four hundred Lions had camped three days ago, only a wide trampled field remained, scarred with fire-pits and dung heaps and the long ruts of wagons. The village stood empty, its doors open, its chimneys cold. A single banner hung from the mill, gold and blue, motionless in the windless air.

At the edge of the forest, where the last fence gave up and the trees began, a ragged black scar lay across the earth.

She had seen it from the hill. Now she walked into it. The cottage had been a small place, no bigger than the servants' hall in the palace. Only the foundation stones remained, heaped in untidy piles by Vale's diggers, and the great flat slab of the hearth, which had been dragged aside and left on its edge, as if somebody had grown tired of lifting it. A hole gaped in the floor beneath. It was empty.

Someone had laid a clean wool blanket over the hearthstone and set a folding chair beside it.

On the blanket sat an old man with a splinted leg and a burn across his shoulder, his grey head bare to the cold. He had his hands folded in his lap. His eyes, wet slate, were fixed on the forest.

And in the folding chair, not three paces away, in a plain dark coat with no weapons at his belt, sat the Emperor of the Lions.

"Aurelia," said her father.

"Father."

"Thank you for coming." He rose. He seemed to have shrunk in the days since the causeway. His silver mane had gone dull, and the hollows under his eyes were deep as thumbprints. But his back was straight, and his voice was perfectly even. "I took the liberty of bringing a chair. I thought you might be tired."

"I'll stand."

"As you like." He did not sit again. "May I present Orin? You have heard of him, I think. He has been my guest for some weeks. I must admit he has been a poor one. He insists on correcting my cook."

"Majesty," said Orin dryly, "the man puts cumin in barley."

Aurelia stared at him.

She had not expected him to speak. She had not expected the voice, a slow rough drawl, unhurried and perfectly unafraid. He looked at her with those steady grey eyes and she felt, with the oddest sensation, that she was being weighed. Not unkindly. Carefully. As a man weighs a loaf of bread before deciding whether to eat it.

"You're the daughter," he said.

"Yes."

"You're thinner than I expected." He tipped his head toward the forest. "He's there, isn't he? In the trees."

She did not answer.

"Good. Tell him to stay there." The old man's face did something complicated. "Tell him I'm very proud. Tell him I'm sorry about the cloak." A pause. "Tell him the barley wants more salt."

Her throat closed. She nodded.

"That's all." Orin turned his face back toward the forest, and said nothing more.

"I wanted you to see this place," said the Emperor.

He walked slowly around the ruin. He stopped at the edge of the hole in the floor and stood looking down.

"Vale's men took apart the entire hearth. Stone by stone. They found a loose slab, a hollow, a few scraps of oilcloth, and nothing else." A dry breath that was almost a laugh. "He was quite insistent. It's here, Majesty. Orin said so. And all the time it was riding north on the boy's back." He shook his head. "I should have known. I used to play chess with that man's king. Aldric always let me think I was winning."

"You knew he was lying."

"I suspected. I let myself be lied to, which is a different thing." He looked up. "I am very tired, Aurelia. I have found that tiredness brings a certain clarity. I have been looking at my own life for six days, and I find I can no longer pretend I am surprised by any of it."

She did not speak.

"You have the letter," he said quietly. "The one Seren wrote. I do not ask you to give it to me."

"I wouldn't."

"No. I wouldn't either." He nodded slowly. "But I would like to know what it says. One thing. If you will tell me."

She had rehearsed a dozen answers on the walk. Silence, or a lie, or a cold, clean refusal. But he was standing on the edge of that empty hole with his hands hanging at his sides, and she thought of Seren writing in the dark with the fire singing in the stairwell, and of Kael's face when he read it, and she found she could not make herself say any of them.

"She says the throne isn't ours," Aurelia said. "She says it never was. There are words carved under the manes. Held in trust for the Four."

Her father closed his eyes.

For a long moment he did not move. A thin wind came down the valley, rattling the empty doors of Ashdown. Somewhere far off, a crow called.

"Yes," said Cassian. "I know."

"You know."

"I carved over them myself." He opened his eyes. They were wet. "Do you remember the night after the conquest? No. You were not born. It was the first night in the great hall. The servants had gone. I sat on the black throne alone, with a lamp, and I ran my hand along the arm, and I felt letters." His mouth twisted. "Aldric told me, once, when we were young men and he was drunk. He said, the throne is only a chair, Cass. It's the words under it that matter. I thought it was a joke."

"But it wasn't."

"It was the truest thing he ever said." He drew a breath. "I scraped them off that night. I did not sleep. I did it with a mason's chisel, by lamplight, with my own hands, because I could not bear for anyone to see. I sat on a throne that told me, every time I touched it, that I did not own it."

"Then why did you keep it?"

"Because if I gave it up, I would have to admit what I'd done." His voice cracked. "Seventeen years, Aurelia. I have never once sat in that chair without feeling those pale places under my palms. I could not read them. I could not forget them."

She looked at him. She saw a tall tired man in a plain coat, and she saw, with sudden clarity, the thing she had been trying to hate for weeks. He was not a tyrant. He was not even, quite, a liar. He was a man who had been punishing himself for so long that he had mistaken it for governance.

He is not a monster, her mother had written.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"I want an ending," said the Emperor.

He turned from the hole and faced her. For the first time in her life, she saw him without a mask. There was no performance left in him, no studied calm. Only a face, grey and lined and raw.

"The Foxes have sent the ledger to every captain in my army. Every temple and barracks on the continent has read my seal. Half my officers have not left their tents in two days. The other half are waiting to see what I will do." He spread his hands. "I could march. I could burn the Greywood. I have the men. But I would be burning them for a lie, and they know it, and I think it would end the empire faster than any Wolf could."

"So?"

"So I propose a different thing." He drew a slow breath. "I will go to Solhaven. I will convene the Great Hall, under truce, with every clan represented. I will let the Wolf prince read the words on the throne in front of them all. I will answer whatever questions are put to me, under oath, on my own seal."

She could not breathe.

"You'll confess," she whispered.

"I will tell what I did. What happens after is for the clans to decide." His eyes held hers. "I will not run, Aurelia. I think I have run for long enough."

"And Orin?"

"Is free." He nodded to the old man on the blanket. "Not as a bargain. I have kept him too long. I would like to give him back before I ask anything of anyone."

On the hearthstone, Orin let out a long, slow, unsteady breath.

"I'd stopped hoping," he said, very low, to nobody. "Seventeen years. And the Lion finally has the manners to open a door."

She did not trust it.

She stood in the ashes of the cottage with the wind in her hair and a sick suspicion growing in her chest. It was too clean. Too reasonable. Every clan in the Great Hall, every captain under his hand, a single room with a single door. It was exactly how he had won the war.

"You want them all in one place," she said.

"Yes."

"Under your guns."

"Under my roof." He did not flinch. "I know how it sounds. I would think the same, in your position. I can only tell you that I will give my word on my mother's grave, and on yours, that there will be no soldiers in the hall but the ceremonial guard. And that you, Aurelia, may choose who stands in the doorway."

"Me?"

"You." A faint, sad smile. "The only person on this continent I have never been able to lie to for longer than an hour. If you think I am deceiving you, I will not even be offended."

"Father..."

"I know." He stepped forward, and she did not move away. He laid his hand on her shoulder, lightly, as he had on the causeway, as he had when she was small. "I know you cannot forgive me. I do not ask it. I only ask you to come home, to the hall, and watch me do the one honest thing I have left."

The word was in her mouth. Lavender. It sat on her tongue, ready, waiting for Kael to burst out of the trees. She could feel his heart, almost. She could feel the heat of him, ten yards away, listening.

She did not say it.

"Two weeks," she said instead. "The clans will need that long to reach Solhaven."

"Two weeks."

"I'll bring the Wolf prince. And the Matriarch. And the Bears."

"I would be honored."

"And Tavian," she said, and watched his face.

For one dreadful second, it did something she could not read. Then he said, quietly, "He went south to the capital. I received a bird from the Chamberlain this morning. Oswin will have the household locked down by now. I am afraid your brother is in some danger."

"What did you do?"

"What I should have done years ago." His voice dropped. "I recalled Oswin at dawn. I stripped his authority by my own seal, in front of the whole guard. I have never done it to anyone before." He looked at his hands. "It may be too late. I sent a rider after the bird. I do not know if he will arrive in time."

Aurelia felt the world tilt.

"If anything happens to Tavian..."

"Then I will have lost the last good thing I made." He met her eyes. "I think I should like to go home now, and see if I can save him."

He left a quarter hour later, on foot, with a small escort that had waited at the edge of the valley. She watched him go, a tall grey figure walking alone through the burnt ground, and did not wave, and could not have said why her eyes burned.

When he was gone, the trees stirred.

Kael came out of them at a run.

He did not slow. He did not look at her. He crossed the black earth in a dozen strides and dropped to his knees in the ashes at the foot of the hearthstone, and he did not say a word. He only looked at the old man on the blanket, and the old man looked at him.

"You've grown," said Orin.

"You're alive."

"So are you. It's a good start." A long breath. His thin face worked. "Come here, boy. Let me see you."

Kael did not move. He could not seem to. His hands hung at his sides, trembling, and his face was wide open, and at last, very slowly, like a child, he bent forward and laid his head on the old man's chest.

Orin put one hand on his hair. The other lay still on the blanket, bound in a bandage, and trembled.

"Home before dark," he murmured.

"I'm sorry," said Kael, muffled. "I'm sorry I didn't..."

"Hush."

"I read it. Mother's letter. I read it."

"Did you." The old man's voice cracked. "And?"

"She said I should learn to cook one thing well."

A sound came out of Orin that was half sob and half laugh. His grey head bent over the boy's dark one, and his shoulders shook. "She would," he said. "Gods, she would. She wrote the last line standing up. I held the door and swore at her."

"I know. She said."

"Seventeen years," said the old man, into Kael's hair. "I never once stopped hearing her tell me to hurry."

Aurelia turned away. She walked to the edge of the ruin, to the black lip of the empty hole in the floor, and stood with her arms wrapped around herself and her face to the wind. It was not hers to watch. But she could hear them, the low voices, the broken laughter, the long silences, and she found that she was crying quietly, steadily, for a woman she had never met and a man she was only beginning to know.

Behind her, Orin said something so softly that she almost missed it.

"You love her."

"Yes," said Kael.

"Good." A pause. "She's a Lion."

"I know."

"Your mother would have liked her." And then, dryly, in the same old voice that had taught a boy to breathe with a wooden spoon: "I'm told she corrects people's grammar."

Aurelia laughed, startled, through her tears. When she looked round, Kael was looking at her, flushed and wet-eyed and openly delighted, and the mark on his wrist was blazing like a small sun.