HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Thirty-Two: The Road North

Aurelia was awake before Sorrel finished knocking.

She had not been asleep. She had been lying on the glass bed in the dark with her mother's letter open on her chest, reading the same line over and over until the words stopped meaning anything. Do it gently. At the first soft tap on the door she was on her feet with her boots in her hand.

"They're moving," said the Fox, from the threshold. His face was white in the lamplight. "The cavalry. Kael says they're riding north."

"North." She dragged on her boots. "Toward what?"

"Ashdown. The cottage. Orin's note said the stone is still in the hearth." He swallowed. "Your father wants the letter."

She stopped with one boot half laced.

The one thing he has never been able to burn. She had seen it in her father's face on the causeway, the way he had looked at Kael, not with hatred but with a terrible, patient hunger, as though the boy were a locked door. She had thought it was the prince he feared. It had never occurred to her that it was the page.

"How long?" she asked.

"A day and a half to Ashdown for a hard rider. They've a head start of an hour." Sorrel raked a hand through his hair. "Kael says we can beat them if we leave now and don't stop."

"Then we leave now."

"The Matriarch wants you in the hall first."

Aurelia looked at him sharply. "Why?"

"I'm not sure," said Sorrel. "But she looked as though someone had died."

The round hall was full of lamps, and nobody was smiling.

Ysolde stood at the head of the long table with a letter in her hand and a stillness in her face that Aurelia had not seen before. Greymantle loomed beside her, grim as a cliff. Edda sat in her chair with her eyes closed, as if listening for something far away. Kael stood near the window with Brannoch and Teyr, and when Aurelia came in, his eyes found hers at once and held, and she felt, absurdly, steadier.

Tavian was there too, hunched in a corner in his captain's coat, looking like a boy who had been awake for three days and had no idea where to put his hands.

"Thank you for coming, Highness," said Ysolde. "I will be brief, because every minute counts." She held up the letter. "An hour ago, the Fox Council convened in extraordinary session. Without my knowledge, and without my vote."

"The Council?" said Sorrel.

"Lord Perrin Quill called it. Eleven of the fifteen seats attended." Her voice was calm, and under the calm was something sharp as broken glass. "They have passed a resolution. It declares the ruling of the Open Ledger advisory, not binding. It recalls my seal from the treaty. And it informs the Emperor of the Lions that the Fox clan withdraws from the coalition of clans and wishes to restore friendly relations."

Nobody spoke.

"They have also ordered the city gates closed at dawn to any armed Wolf or Bear," Ysolde went on. "Greymantle's axes may camp outside the walls. They may not enter."

"Quill," Kael said slowly.

"He has been waiting for this. He offered you a charter, Highness. You refused it. I think he took the refusal as a message." She laid the letter on the table. "He has gone to the Emperor with an olive branch, and he has taken a majority of my Council with him."

"Can he do that?" asked Aurelia. "Legally?"

"He can do it constitutionally. I can overturn it, but not before the Council reconvenes, which will take at least a week." Ysolde's mouth tightened. "I cannot leave the city. If I do, he will seat a regent in my chair and the Foxes will be lost to us for good."

"A week," said Brannoch. "By then the Emperor has the letter."

"Yes."

"Then the Foxes have betrayed us."

"Quill has betrayed us," said Ysolde sharply. "Not every Fox. Not me. Not my son." Her eyes flicked to Sorrel, who stood straighter. "I ask the clans to remember that, in the days to come. A hand in a council is not a whole people."

A long, heavy silence followed. Greymantle shifted his enormous weight.

"My axes will stay," he said. "I give you that, Matriarch. We will camp at the foot of your walls, and we will hold the causeway road. I will not let the Lions slip past you while your Council plays at politics." His small eyes glinted. "But somebody else must go north."

"Yes," said Kael.

"And it will have to be few. A large party will be seen."

"Five," said Kael. "Maybe six."

"Who?"

"Sorrel, because he knows the paths. Me, because the letter is mine." He glanced at Aurelia, and then, as though bracing himself, looked away. "And whoever else wants to come."

She said it before he could finish.

"I'm coming."

"Aurelia."

"I swore on the ledger to share everything. I'm not going to be left behind to guard the one place my father can't reach." She kept her voice level. "And Sorrel was right, wasn't he? If I'm seen riding north with the Wolf prince, my father will say I've been taken. He'll have a reason to burn every Fox city between here and the Greywood."

"Yes," said Sorrel, uncomfortably.

"Then I won't ride north with the Wolf prince." She turned. "I'll ride north with my brother."

Tavian's head came up.

"Rell..."

"You are a Lion prince, a captain of the Emperor's own guard, and my brother. If we are seen riding together on the northern road, with the Captain and a few lancers at our back, what will anyone say?"

He stared at her. Slowly, something moved in his face, like a man who has been handed a rope.

"That I'm bringing my sister home," he said.

"Exactly."

"And that the Wolf is a prisoner."

"Or a guide. Or a courier. It doesn't matter. What matters is that anyone who sees us will see a Lion prince with a Lion princess, and a Lion captain." She heard her own voice, clear and quick, and thought, with distant surprise, that she sounded like her father. "They'll think twice before they ask questions."

"It's a lie," said Tavian.

"It's a disguise."

"It's an excellent one," said Teyr, with grudging respect, from the corner.

Brannoch grunted. "It might work."

"It will work for as long as it needs to," said Aurelia. "If we reach Ashdown before the riders do, it won't matter. If we don't, it won't matter either." She looked at her brother. "Will you do it?"

For a long, wavering moment, Tavian did not speak. His eyes went to the window, to the dark lake and the line of torches streaming north. His hands, she saw, were shaking.

"I told Father I couldn't stand on his side," he said at last. "I'm not sure I know how to stand on yours."

"You're standing on it now."

"Am I?"

"You walked across that causeway," said Kael quietly. "I watched you do it. It was the bravest thing I've seen in a month."

Tavian looked at him. It was the first time the two of them had really met each other's eyes. He was a tall, rangy young man with a Lion's mane, and Kael was a thin grey-eyed Wolf with a sword he did not know how to hold. And they both, she realized, were looking at the same impossible thing, the hole in the world where a father used to be.

"I don't know what to call you," Tavian said.

"Kael."

"I killed Wolves in the war. Not personally, I was seven. But my family did." The captain's voice was rough. "I was taught you were monsters. I want you to know I've stopped believing it. I just don't know what to put in its place."

"Neither do I," said Kael. "I thought you were all monsters too."

A silence. Then, helplessly, Tavian laughed.

"Well," he said. "We're a fine pair of idiots."

"I've been told that."

"By whom?"

"Everyone."

"Same," said Tavian, and wiped his eyes, and held out his hand.

Kael took it.

It was a small thing. It took less than a breath. But Aurelia, watching from across the table, felt something in her chest unlock, quietly, that she had not known was shut.

They left at the fourth hour, in the dark, by the north gate that Quill's men had not yet thought to watch.

Renn rode at the head of the little column. Behind her came Tavian in his captain's coat and a dozen of the Princess's lancers who had refused, without argument, to be left behind. Then Sorrel, hunched on a sturdy little Fox mare, muttering about the cold. Then Kael, on a borrowed horse he plainly did not trust, with the Wolf's sword strapped to his back. And last of all, riding alone at the rear, with her mother's letter inside her coat and her father's seal on her finger, came Aurelia.

At the gate, Ysolde stood with a lantern.

She had come down alone, without guards, in a plain grey cloak. She did not speak until the horses had passed under the arch. Then she reached out, quite suddenly, and caught Aurelia's stirrup.

"Highness," she said.

"Matriarch."

"I told you once I did not ask for trust." The small face was drawn and fierce in the lantern light. "I am going to ask for it now. When you reach the cottage, and find what Liora hid, do not read it alone."

"The letter?"

"Not the letter. The other one." The Matriarch's voice dropped. "She wrote to your father too. The week before she died. A letter I have never seen, but I know it exists. The last time we spoke, she told me she had written it. She said it was the only thing she could do that was both honest and kind."

"You think it's in Ashdown?"

"I think it is in a place your father has not been able to open for seventeen years." Ysolde let go of the stirrup. "I think he has been afraid of it. I think, perhaps, you will not be."

"I don't understand."

"No. But you will." The Matriarch stepped back. "Go, Highness. And whatever you find, remember what she told you in her letter. Do it gently."

Aurelia nodded. She could not trust her voice. She touched her heels to the mare's flanks, and the gate swallowed her.

The road north ran dark and cold and empty.

For the first hour no one spoke. The only sounds were hooves and the creak of saddles and the long wind sighing across the plain. Behind them, the lanterns of Lanternreach dwindled to a faint gold smear and vanished. Ahead lay only the black shape of the hills, and above them a vast field of stars.

At some point Kael drew his horse up beside hers.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I'm thinking."

"About what?"

"My father." She watched the road between her mare's ears. "I keep seeing him on the causeway. Saying I did not lay a hand. I keep trying to hate him, and I can't. And I keep thinking, what kind of a person doesn't hate the man who locked her mother in a room?"

"A person who loved him."

"That's not a virtue."

"No." He was silent for a moment. "But it isn't a crime, either. It's just a fact. Like the mark on my wrist. You can't make it go away by not looking."

She turned her head. In the starlight his face was thin and pale and very serious, and the silver crescent on his wrist glowed, soft and steady, under the edge of his cuff.

"Does it hurt?" she asked. "The mark? When it does that?"

"Not when you're near." He looked, briefly, startled by his own answer. "It's strange. Orin said it would burn whenever I was in danger. It doesn't. It only burns when I'm afraid or angry or alone." He studied the wrist as if it belonged to someone else. "It's been warm since I met you. Just warm. Like a hand on my shoulder."

She did not know what to say. She felt the heat rise in her face, and was grateful for the dark.

"I'm glad," she managed.

"So am I."

They rode on. The wind picked up, and somewhere ahead, over the hills, the first pale thread of dawn began to show along the horizon, thin and grey as a drawn blade.

Behind them, far back on the road, Tavian began, very quietly and off-key, to sing. It was an old marching song, one their mother had taught them both, about a lion who walked into a river and came out a lamb. Renn twisted in her saddle and told him to be quiet. He kept singing.

And somewhere ahead in the dark, a hundred Lion riders were racing toward a burned cottage and a stone in a hearth. A day and a half. An hour's head start.

Aurelia bent low over her mare's neck, and urged her on.