HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Twelve: The Prisoner at Thornfield

Aurelia smelled the smoke an hour before she saw the village.

It came down the valley on a cold east wind, thick and greasy, and the lancers in front of her went quiet one by one. Captain Renn raised a fist and the column slowed. Nobody spoke. They had been riding for three days down from the Bear passes, with the parchment hidden in Aurelia's sleeve and the nights full of her own half-formed thoughts. The smoke was the first thing that had made all thirty soldiers fall silent at once.

"That's not a cookfire," Renn said.

"No."

They crested the ridge together.

Thornfield had been a farming village of perhaps eighty houses, strung along a creek at the bottom of the valley. Now a third of it was ash. Black skeletons of rafters stood against the sky, still smoldering. A line of wagons waited in the square, heavy with grain sacks and furniture and weeping people. And around the edges of it all, in the gold and blue of the Emperor's colors, stood a ring of soldiers with their crossbows leveled inward.

In the middle of the square, a gallows was being raised.

"Gods," Renn breathed. "That's a lot of rope."

General Marek Vale received her in the headman's house, which he had taken for his headquarters.

He did not rise when she entered. He sat behind a farmer's table covered with maps, his scarred face lit from below by a smoking lamp, a cup of wine in one thick hand. He did not seem surprised to see her. He had, she realized, been told she was coming.

"Highness." A nod, no more. "You've picked a bad day to ride through."

"What have you done?"

"My duty." He sipped. "The boy passed through this valley eleven days ago. A farmer sheltered him one night. Fed him. Gave him a cloak. We have it from three witnesses." The general shrugged. "The farmer is dead. His family is in the cellar. The rest of the village has been given until dawn to tell me which road he took."

"Or?"

"Or every tenth man hangs. Then every tenth again." He said it the way another man might discuss the price of oats. "It is remarkable how quickly memories improve."

Aurelia felt the blood leave her face. "There are children out there."

"Children grow into Wolf-lovers. I have seen it."

"General, you will stop this."

"I cannot." He reached into his coat and drew out a folded letter, sealed in red wax. He slid it across the table with two fingers. "Read it, if you like."

She did.

The hand was her father's. The words were few and perfectly clear. The Wolf must not be allowed to reach the clans. Any village that shelters him shall answer for him. Spare nothing that serves the hunt. Below it, a lion's head pressed into red wax, and his signature, as familiar to her as her own face.

Spare nothing.

She read it twice. The page began to shake, and she realized it was her hand.

"You will not hang anyone tonight," she said. She heard her own voice from a long way off, cold and clear, like someone else speaking. "I am the Emperor's daughter and I outrank you in this camp. The gallows come down."

"With respect, Highness—"

"You will stand down, General Vale, or I will have Captain Renn escort you to Solhaven in irons, and I will explain to my father why his commander was so eager to burn the villages he is supposed to protect."

The scar along his jaw went white. For a long, dangerous moment they stared at each other across the table.

"The Emperor will hear of this," Vale said at last, softly.

"I'd be disappointed if he didn't."

"He will not like it."

"Then he can tell me so himself." She picked up the letter and tucked it into her sleeve, next to the parchment from the Bear hold, and saw his eyes follow it. "Take the rope down. Release the families from the cellar. Feed them from your own supplies. You may question anyone you wish, but you will touch no one."

Vale looked at her a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, very slowly, the nod of a man filing something away for later.

"As you command, Highness."

She found the prisoner at the edge of the camp, in a pit.

It was a shallow trench dug behind the stable, covered with a wooden grate, a rotting barrel in one corner. Rain had pooled in the bottom. A man sat in the mud with his back against the wall and his hands manacled before him, and he did not look up when the guard lifted the grate.

"The Wolf?" Aurelia asked.

"Caught him at the river crossing, Highness. Tried to take the boy's trail after the hunters left. He's been here three days." The guard shifted uneasily. "He doesn't say much."

"Leave us."

"Highness, he's dangerous—"

"He is chained and starving. I'll manage."

The guard went. Renn stayed at the top of the pit, a silent shadow against the grey sky, one hand resting on her sword.

Aurelia climbed down the ladder. The mud sucked at her boots. Up close the prisoner was older than she had expected, perhaps fifty, lean and grizzled, his coat the color of wet slate. A fresh cut ran down his forehead, and his lip was swollen. His eyes were closed.

"You've come to question me," he said, without opening them. His voice was dry as old paper. "Save your breath. I'll tell you nothing."

"I'm not here to question you."

"Then you're here to gloat."

"No."

He opened one eye. It was pale grey, sunken, and shrewd. It traveled over her fine riding clothes, the gold clasp at her throat, the signet ring on her finger, and she saw the exact moment he recognized the crest. His whole body went still.

"The Emperor's whelp," he said quietly.

"My name is Aurelia."

"I know what you are." He laughed, a harsh crack of sound that turned into a cough. "Come to see the beast in its cage. Did your father send you?"

"My father doesn't know I'm here." She crouched, carefully, so that her eyes were level with his. "I don't know what I'm doing here, if I'm honest. I spent the past week learning that the stories I was raised on don't fit together. I think someone lied to me. I want to hear what you'd say, if you had nothing left to lose."

He studied her for a long moment. Rain dripped from the grate onto his shoulders.

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Harl."

"Harl. Were you at the Greenwater?"

His jaw tightened.

"There's a Captain in my guard who was," she said. "She told me the Wolf lines were standing in the river. Not charging, only standing. She said it looked like they were waiting for something."

A long silence. When Harl spoke again, the sarcasm had drained out of his voice, leaving only weariness.

"We were," he said. "We were waiting for the parley."

"What parley?"

"The king called one. Aldric. Three days before the battle." His eyes stared at something far beyond the pit. "He'd heard the Bears were marching. He'd heard Lion troops were gathering on the border. He didn't know why. No one had told him he'd done anything wrong. So he sent riders under the white banner, to ask for talks. To ask the Four Clans what they wanted." A bitter twist of the mouth. "He was a fool, you see. A good man, but a fool. He believed they would listen."

"And they didn't."

"They never answered. We marched to the river with orders to hold. Hold the line, make no move, show no aggression. A thousand of us. We stood in the Greenwater to our knees with our weapons sheathed, and we waited for an answer." He drew a ragged breath. "And at dawn, an arrow came out of the mist."

"Whose arrow?"

"It struck one of our own. A boy named Tam, eighteen, standing right next to me. It came from behind us. From our own side of the water." His chained hands curled. "We looked back, and there was nothing there. Trees and mist. And then the Lion horns sounded, and the Bears came over the ridge, and the whole world ran red."

Aurelia felt the cold climb up her arms. "You're saying the Wolves didn't start the war."

"I'm saying a Wolf king sat on his throne with a white banner in his hand, and woke to find an empire descending on him." He turned his head and looked straight at her. "I'm saying someone fired the first arrow from our own lines to make sure that parley never happened."

"Who?"

"If I knew that, girl, I'd have told it to every living soul in seventeen years." His voice cracked. "I only know this. The king gave no order to strike. And the very night before the battle, the queen sent her youngest child out of the palace by the servants' stair. We all knew it. All the old guard. We knew the line would not die with us." A ghost of something like pride. "That's why your father sealed the archives. That's why he hunted us for years. He wasn't afraid of a dead dynasty. He was afraid of a living one."

"The boy," Aurelia whispered.

"Aye. The boy."

The rain ticked on the grate. Somewhere above, Renn shifted her weight, and the leather of her sword belt creaked.

"Why are you telling me this?" Aurelia asked at last.

Harl smiled. It was a thin, tired, crooked thing. "Because I'm going to be dead by tomorrow. Because you pulled down the gallows, and I heard it from the guards, and I thought, there's one Lion with a conscience. Because for seventeen years I've had no one to tell." He studied her. "And because you have his eyes."

"Whose?"

"The Emperor's." He said it flatly. "But you look at things differently. He never wondered what was under the stone. You do."

Her throat was tight. She stood, slowly, and the mud sucked at her boots.

"I can't free you," she said. "Not today. If I try, Vale will report it, and my father will know exactly where I've been." She hated how small it sounded. "But I can make sure you're fed. I'll leave orders that you aren't touched."

"And tomorrow?"

"I'll find a way."

"No you won't." Harl's voice was kind, almost gentle. "But it was a decent thing to say."

She climbed the ladder. At the top, Renn put out a steadying hand, and Aurelia took it without a word.

"Highness," the Captain said quietly. "He could be lying. To save his skin."

"He could."

"Do you believe him?"

Aurelia looked back down at the pit. The old Wolf had closed his eyes again, his face grey in the failing light, as though nothing in the world remained to be said.

"I believe," she said slowly, "that I have been standing on a floor made of other people's silence. And that the further I walk, the thinner it gets."

That night she did not sleep in the headman's house. She lay in a tent at the edge of the camp, listening to the rain on the canvas, with the Emperor's letter in one hand and the scrap from the Bear hold in the other.

Spare nothing that serves the hunt.

Hold the line, make no move.

The queen sent her youngest child out by the servants' stair.

She tried to picture her father at thirty, a young general on the eve of a great war, and could not make the image sit still. She tried to picture a different man, one who had planned a war before it began and then arranged for the other side to appear to start it. She tried to picture that man kissing her forehead when she was seven, and carrying her on his shoulders through the marigold parade.

The two pictures would not join.

Past midnight, the rain stopped. In the sudden quiet she heard footsteps outside, soft, pausing at her tent flap. She tensed, and a hand she knew slipped a small folded note beneath the canvas.

It was in Renn's blunt handwriting. Vale sent a rider to Solhaven at dusk. The Emperor will know by tomorrow night. I'd start thinking about what you want to say to him.

Aurelia read it twice. Then she held the corner of the page to the lantern flame and watched it curl and blacken.

She did not know what she would say.

But she knew, with a calm that surprised her, that she would not lie.