HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Ford at Marrow Creek

Kael had never ridden so far in his life, and his body let him know about every mile.

By the second evening his thighs were raw, his hands were blistered through the reins, and the borrowed horse had developed a habit of looking back at him with open contempt. They had left the Fox plains behind and climbed into rolling grey country, all heather and stone walls and wind. The nights were bitterly cold. They slept two hours at a time in hollows, without fires, and woke stiff with frost.

Nobody complained. Even Sorrel, who complained about everything, had gone quiet.

"Ashdown is a day and a half from here," Kael said on the second evening, studying Orin's charcoal map by starlight. "If we ride through the night, we reach it before noon tomorrow."

"And the riders?" asked Aurelia.

"I don't know. We haven't seen them since the first morning." He frowned at the map. "They had an hour's head start. They should have been out of sight by now. But they should also have been ahead of us, and I keep feeling like they're not."

"What do you mean?"

"I can't explain it." He rubbed his wrist. "It's just a feeling. Like looking in the wrong direction."

Tavian, crouched a little way off with a canteen, looked up. "Do you hear something?"

Kael was already listening.

It was a long way off, beyond a low ridge to the east, but a Wolf's ears could pick it out. Hooves. Not hundreds. Forty, perhaps, in good order, moving at a steady trot. And under the hooves, faint and unmistakable, the creak of Lion saddle leather and the ring of a sword hilt against a buckle.

"Cavalry," he said. "Coming across the moor. East of us. They're cutting the corner."

"How far?"

"Half an hour, if they keep this pace."

Renn was on her feet at once. "They're not the column from the causeway."

"No. That column is behind us." Kael closed his eyes, listening. "These are fresh. Their horses aren't blown. They've been waiting." He opened them. "Somebody told them where we'd be."

Nobody said Quill. Nobody had to.

"We can outrun them," said Sorrel.

"Not on these horses."

"Then we hide."

"There's nowhere to hide." Tavian looked across the open moor, grey and bare under the stars. "Forty riders. We have a dozen lancers and a Fox who can't use a sword." He glanced at his sister, and a small, grim light came into his face. "But I'm a captain of the Emperor's guard, and I'm escorting my sister home. They're going to stop us anyway. Let me do the talking."

"They'll want the Wolf," said Renn.

"They'll want a prisoner." Tavian turned to Kael. "Can you look like one?"

Kael knelt at the edge of Marrow Creek with his hands bound behind him and his hood pulled low over his face.

The ford was a shallow, stony crossing in the middle of the moor, where the road dipped down between two banks to a wide, bright stretch of water. The Lion patrol came to it at a steady trot, from the east, exactly as he had heard them, and halted on the opposite bank in a clatter of hooves and torchlight. At their head sat a broad, red-faced captain on a tall bay horse, with a scarred jaw and hard, tired eyes.

"Hold!" he called across the water. "Name and business!"

Tavian rode forward, alone, into the middle of the ford.

He sat very straight on his horse, his captain's coat buttoned to the throat, his hair combed back, and in the torchlight he looked so like the Emperor that Kael felt a pang of sympathy for the soldiers on the far bank. Not a prince, he thought. A son.

"Captain Tavian of the Imperial Guard," the young man said, in a clear, cool voice. "Escorting Her Highness the Princess Aurelia home from Lanternreach, on His Majesty's own command. Stand aside."

The red-faced captain stared at him. "Your Highness." He bowed slightly in the saddle. "I did not expect... That is, we were told to watch the northern road for a party of Wolves."

"You are looking at one." Tavian tilted his head toward the bank where Kael knelt. "The Wolf prince, taken at Lanternreach. I am delivering him to the Emperor myself."

A murmur ran through the riders.

"That is, forgive me, Highness. The Emperor's orders were that no prisoner be moved without a signed warrant."

"I am carrying one."

"May I see it?"

"You may not." The cold in Tavian's voice was perfect. "It is sealed with His Majesty's personal ring, and addressed to no one but General Vale. Do you wish to explain to the Emperor why you delayed his son?"

There was a long, dreadful silence. Water ran over the stones. Kael kept his head down, and kept his breath slow, and counted the heat in his wrist. Up. Down. Up. Down.

The red-faced captain looked at Tavian. He looked at the lancers at his back, and the plain-coated girl sitting very still on a grey mare, and the thin figure in chains on the bank. He rubbed his scarred jaw.

"Highness," he said slowly. "A word."

He spurred his horse into the ford and brought it alongside Tavian's. They bent their heads together. Kael strained his ears, and caught only a murmur of voices, and the sound of the captain's heart, which was beating a great deal faster than a man's should for a conversation about warrants.

Then, quite distinctly, the captain's voice said, low and flat: "I am sorry, Highness. I have orders from the Chamberlain to detain you."

Tavian's horse shied.

"What?"

"Oswin sent word by the swift rider. The Emperor has withdrawn your commission. You are to be returned to Solhaven in the custody of the guard." The captain's hand moved to his sword. "Forgive me. I do not wish to do this. But my sons are in the barracks, and the Chamberlain has their names."

There was no time to think.

The captain drew. A dozen riders surged forward. Renn's voice rang out, a flat, hard command, and the lancers wheeled to meet them, and the quiet ford exploded into noise.

Kael's bonds were a knotted loop of soft rope. He had loosened them an hour ago. He rolled to his feet, and the ropes fell away, and his hand found the hilt of the Wolf's sword over his shoulder.

Four riders came at him.

He did not decide to Change. He only felt the heat in his wrist climb like a tide, and this time, for the first time in his life, he did not fight it. He did not let it take him either. He stood in the middle of it, as Edda had taught him, as though standing in a river up to his chest, and let the water go past.

His hands lengthened. His nails curled and thickened. The world sharpened until every drop of spray from the ford hung in the air like glass, and the four horsemen slowed, as though moving through honey. He saw the lead rider's sword come down in an easy arc. He stepped inside it. His claws closed on the man's wrist, and the blade went spinning, and he swept the rider off his horse and into the creek with a single movement of his arm.

It was not killing. It was something else. He could feel the red haze waiting at the edge of his mind, patient and hot, and he held it back with every ounce of will he had. No. Not this time. I know your name.

Another rider. Another. He took the next sword on the flat of his blade and threw it aside. He caught a bridle, dragged a plunging horse around, and the man on it fell in a clatter of armor. A crossbow bolt grazed his ribs and he did not feel it. Around him the ford was a chaos of splashing water and shouting and terrified horses, and in the center of it, he found, he was calm.

I can do this, he thought. I can do this and still be me.

"Kael!"

He turned.

Aurelia had left her saddle. She stood knee-deep in the creek with a lancer's spear in both hands, white-faced and fierce, with her hair coming down around her shoulders. Between her and a Lion rider stood Tavian, on foot, his coat torn, his sword out, holding off three men at once with the dazed, furious look of someone who had been trained for this his whole life and had never expected to do it against his own.

"Behind you!" she cried.

He wheeled, and the last of the four came at him with a long knife, a short, vicious man who had not been thrown. Kael caught his arm. He held it. For one heartbeat he looked into the rider's face, wide-eyed, grey, very young, and felt the old red heat roar up in him, hungry and bright.

Please. Mother.

He let go. The man scrambled backward through the shallows, and Kael stood panting in the middle of the ford, claws and fangs and blood on his sleeve, and did not strike again.

"Enough!" he roared.

It was not a word. It was a note, a deep, rolling sound that went out across the moor and made every horse in the ford scream and every man flinch. Even the red-faced captain, who had been about to charge Tavian with a lance, drew up short.

"Enough," said Kael again, in his own voice. His breath smoked in the cold. "I'm not going to kill you. Not any of you. I want to go north. I want to find my guardian's letter. If you stand aside, nobody else dies."

It was, afterward, impossible to say who moved first.

Perhaps it was Renn, who simply walked into the water, put her sword to the red-faced captain's throat, and said calmly, "Drop it, Hollis." Perhaps it was Tavian, who stepped forward with his own blade lowered and said, quietly, "We were at the academy together, Dray. Do you really want to do this?"

Or perhaps it was only the quiet. A dozen riders on the far bank had stopped fighting. They were staring at the Wolf prince, a thin, dripping young man with claws receding slowly from his fingers, and at the girl beside him, white and shaking, her hair in her eyes. They looked at the two Lion princes who had not killed them. And in the silence, the only sound was the creek running over the stones.

The red-faced captain let his sword fall. It struck the water with a small, flat splash.

"Gods," said Hollis. His voice shook. "Gods. I've heard stories. I never believed..." He swallowed. "Highness, I am sorry. It was the Chamberlain. He had my sons' names."

"Where are they?"

"In the capital. At the barracks." His heavy face crumpled. "I don't know what he'll do."

"Nothing," said Tavian. "I promise you. If I have to ride to Solhaven myself." He gripped the man's shoulder. "Dray. Listen to me. We need to know. Where's the Emperor's column? Not the one from Lanternreach. The one that's already in the north."

The captain blinked. "You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"General Vale isn't racing for Ashdown." Hollis's voice was barely above a whisper. "He's been in Ashdown. Four days. His column marched straight from the Greywood the morning after they burned the roots. The village was cleared. Every house is under guard." He licked his lips. "I was posted on the northern road to watch for the Wolf prince. We were told he'd be coming for the cottage."

Kael felt something cold open in his chest.

"The cottage," he said. "What's he doing there?"

"Digging, Highness. Day and night. The General has two hundred men tearing up the foundations, stone by stone." The captain wiped his face with a trembling hand. "He says there's something under the hearth. He's been at it since the second day. He's been in a terrible mood. I think he hasn't found it."

I kept the stone in the hearth, as I promised.

Orin had not simply hidden the letter under a loose stone. He had done something else. Something the General's men could not find, in four days of digging.

"He hasn't found it," said Kael, aloud. "Because it isn't under the hearth."

"Where is it?" asked Aurelia.

"I don't know." He turned to her, and found her already looking at him, steady and white, and he felt it settle into place, the same quiet certainty that had carried him across the ford. "But I think I know who does. And I think we have about a day and a half to get there."

Sorrel, who had been sitting in the shallows with an expression of extreme patience and a crossbow bolt in his sleeve, sighed loudly.

"You know," he said, to nobody in particular, "I really should have stayed a nobody."

They left Captain Hollis and his men tied back-to-back on the north bank of Marrow Creek, with their horses hobbled and their weapons in a pile. Tavian had refused to let anyone be hurt beyond a few bruises, and Renn had refused to let anyone be freed, and in the end they had compromised on a loosely knotted rope that would take about two hours to work free.

"He'll send word," said Renn, as they mounted. "Even tied up. One of them will manage a signal."

"I know."

"Then Vale will know we're coming."

"He already knew." Kael gathered the reins. His hands ached, his ribs were bleeding, and the borrowed horse looked at him as though it had been through something terrible and wished to discuss it. "The Chamberlain told the captain to stop us. Someone in Lanternreach sent word to the Emperor within an hour of us leaving." He glanced back, once, at the dark road behind them. "There's a spy at the Matriarch's table."

"Quill?"

"Or someone Quill is paying." He did not say the other name, the one that had been circling in his mind since Marrow Creek, the one he could not yet bear to hold. "We'll find out. But not tonight."

They rode north under a sky full of stars.

Aurelia fell in beside him. For a long time neither of them spoke. The hills rolled past, black and silent, and the wind smelled of pine and cold water. Somewhere ahead a nightjar called, thin and lonely.

"You didn't kill them," she said at last.

"No."

"I watched. You could have. Every one of them."

"I wanted to." He kept his eyes on the road. "That's the strange part. I could feel it, like a hand on the back of my neck. It said, they would kill you, they hurt the old man, it would be so easy. But I thought about the boy in the ravine. And I thought, I am not going to be that again." He took a breath. "I don't know if I can do it every time. But I did it tonight."

"You did."

"You helped."

"Did I?"

"You stood in a creek with a spear and shouted my name." His mouth curved, just slightly. "I've never had anyone shout my name in a fight before. It's a good sound."

She laughed, startled. She was, he realized, blushing. He decided to look at the road.

They rode on. A thin moon rose over the hills, silver and pale, and by its light he could see the faint dark line of the Greywood on the northern horizon, and beyond it, so far away it might have been a dream, a single small smudge of smoke where a village lay in the shadow of the trees.

Ashdown.

Three days ago he would have called it home. Now it felt like a stranger's house, full of someone else's memories, with a General in the kitchen and a prince's mother's last words hidden in a place he could not name.

He urged the horse forward.