HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Lavender in the Second Drawer

The Fox with the green ribbon came to her at the third hour before dawn.

Aurelia was sitting on the edge of the glass bed, fully dressed, with her boots on and her hands folded in her lap. She had not tried to sleep. She had watched the lake darken and the lanterns gutter, and listened to Renn's slow pacing in the antechamber, and she had told herself every half hour that no answer was also an answer.

The knock was so soft she almost missed it.

A slight, quick-eyed girl in a grey servant's tunic slipped through the door and shut it behind her. A strip of green ribbon was knotted around her left sleeve. She did not bow. She drew something from inside her jacket and held it out in both hands.

"From the Lion camp, Highness. A young man in a captain's coat. He gave it to me at the picket line and told me to run." She swallowed. "He was crying. I didn't think soldiers did that."

Aurelia took it.

It was a flat bundle wrapped in a man's handkerchief, tied with a bootlace. Under her fingers she felt something stiff and thin, and something small and dry that crackled. She sat very still for a moment. Then she undid the knot.

Inside lay a child's drawing of a lion with too many legs, mounted on a square of grey card. Beside it lay a pressed flower, brown and brittle, folded in a scrap of paper. Beneath both was a single sheet of Tavian's writing, scrawled fast, the ink blotted in two places.

Rell,

I went to Mother's room the night after Father told me I would ride with him. I wasn't going to look. I only wanted to be near her things. I took the drawing and the flower and I put them in my saddlebag, because I couldn't leave them. I've been carrying them for ten days and I never thought.

Your note came at midnight. I read it four times. Then I took the card off the drawing with my penknife, and there was a page behind it.

I'm sending it to you. I can't keep it. I'm afraid of what I'll do if I do.

I'll be at the causeway. I don't know on which side. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't know how to be brave the way you are.

T.

She read it through once. Her eyes had gone hot, and she wiped them with the heel of her hand, and then she turned the drawing over.

The backing card had been cut cleanly along one edge. Between the card and the paper, flattened as thin as a leaf, lay a folded sheet of brown, age-spotted parchment, covered in small slanting handwriting she had seen only a day earlier.

Corvin Vane's.

She read it in the lamplight, with her heart beating in her ears.

Last entry. The night before the Greenwater. Black Heron, third bell.

Mace is drunk and Dessa has gone to find the captain. I have been waiting two hours for her to return. I will not wait longer. I am taking the book to the Wolf camp myself.

A man has just sat down across from me. A thin, stooped, gentle man in a grey coat with ink on his sleeves. I do not know him. He gave no name, only a message. He says he is the Emperor's own secretary and that his master wishes to see me alone, tonight, at once, before the bloodshed begins. He says the Emperor will explain everything. He says it is all a terrible misunderstanding, and that he has come in friendship to prevent a war.

He is very kind. His hands tremble. He has not once looked me in the eye.

I told him I would think it over. He asked if I would take a cup of wine to settle my nerves. I said yes. I do not know why. I think I wanted to believe him.

I am writing this under the table with the book on my knee. If I do not reach the Wolf camp, let it be known that I was taken by a man named

The ink ended in a long scrawl, as though the pen had been jerked out of the writer's hand. Below it, in the corner of the page, a single drop of dark red had dried to a stain.

Aurelia read the last line again, and again, with her finger on the blotted ink. A name that had never been written. A man who had never looked him in the eye.

Thin. Stooped. Gentle. Ink on his sleeves.

She had known him since she was four years old. He had taught her to hold a quill. He had taught her the old script, and the names of the ancient kings, and how to blow gently on wet ink so it would not smear. She had sat on his knee in the archive and listened to his stories about the Wolf court, and at the end of every one he had said the same thing, in his soft dry voice.

Some questions are better left in the dark, little Highness.

She put the page down. Her hand shook so badly that it slid off the edge of the bed and fluttered to the floor.

"Belen," she whispered.

Renn found her ten minutes later, on her knees on the glass floor, gathering up the page with both hands as if it might break.

"Highness?"

"It's him." Her voice did not sound like her own. "It was never the Chamberlain, or anyone else. It was Belen Vorr. He sat across from Corvin Vane in a tavern and offered him a cup of wine. He cut the page out of the book. He's the one who's been keeping the keys." She pressed the parchment flat against her chest. "I trusted him. I was fond of him."

The Captain crouched beside her. She did not touch her. She only waited, with the patient stillness of a soldier who had stood beside a great many people in the worst hour of their lives.

"You're not the only one he fooled," Renn said at last.

"He looked afraid. Every time I went near that grate. I thought he was afraid for me."

"Perhaps he was. Fear and guilt wear the same face." The Captain's weathered mouth twisted. "I've known soldiers who killed on orders and spent every night after sobbing in their sleep. It doesn't make them innocent. It just makes them human."

"That's what my mother wrote. He is not a monster." A laugh broke out of her, short and ragged. "She was talking about my father. I think she'd have said it about Belen too."

"Aye. She sounds like a woman who would."

Aurelia drew a long breath. In, four. Out, six.

"I have to tell Kael," she said. "And the Matriarch. And I have to decide what to do with this, because if I read it aloud on the causeway, in front of the whole army, I name a man who may be standing in the Emperor's camp."

"Do you think he is?"

"I think my father keeps his oldest servants close." She folded the page, with enormous care, into the lining of her sleeve. "I think if Belen is anywhere, he's at my father's elbow. And I think he knows exactly what happened to the page."

The dawn was pale and thin and cold.

She stood in the courtyard of the water gate, in her plain riding coat, with the ledger under her arm and her mother's letter against her heart. The mist lay thick on the causeway. Behind her stood the clans: Greymantle like a boulder, with a dozen of his sons at his back; the Matriarch in grey, with Sorrel at her shoulder; Edda leaning on her staff; Teyr clutching his scrolls. Kael stood a little apart, a tall, pale, solemn figure in a Fox servant's coat with a Wolf's sword on his back, watching the gate with an expression she had learned to read.

He's frightened, she thought. And he's decided to walk through it anyway.

She had told him everything an hour ago, in a low voice, by the lake. The page, the name, the tremble in an old man's hands. He had listened without speaking. When she finished, he had taken her left hand in both of his and held it for a long time.

"If he's there," he had said, "I'll stand beside you."

"It's my father."

"It's your decision, too. I'm not taking it from you." A faint, rueful smile. "I'm only offering to stand there while you make it."

It had been the kindest thing anyone had said to her in weeks.

Now the great gate groaned open, and the mist rolled in, cold and white. Far down the long grey road, the Lion banners were visible, ranked and silent. At the center of them a pale horse stood waiting, its rider small and straight and unmoving.

A herald in gold and blue was walking along the causeway toward them, a young man in a very new coat who looked as though he would rather be anywhere else. He stopped ten paces away and bowed to the Matriarch.

"The Emperor of the Lions sends greetings," he said. His voice shook only a little. "His Majesty accepts the parley. He will come to the midpoint of the causeway at the noon bell, in the sight of both armies, to hear whatever the clans wish to say."

"Alone?" asked Ysolde.

"With his household, Matriarch. As is his right." The herald hesitated. "He asked me to say that he brings witnesses of his own."

A small cold feeling moved down Aurelia's spine.

"Which witnesses?" she asked.

The young herald looked at her. For a moment, she thought she saw something like pity in his face.

"I am not permitted to say, Highness. I was told only to give you this."

He held out a small folded square of paper. She took it with fingers that did not feel like her own. It was thin and grey, like the one on the causeway. It bore no seal. The writing was a few short lines, small, neat, and a little shaky, in a hand she had known all her life.

Little Highness.

I am so sorry. I should have burned it all. I should have told you before you had to find it for yourself.

Whatever you say today, whatever you have learned, please remember that I have always loved you. I will be at your father's side, and I will not run.

Belen

She read it twice. Then she lowered it, slowly, and found that Kael was beside her. She had not heard him move. He did not speak. He only looked at the page in her hand, and then at her face, and quietly, without a word, laid his palm flat against the small of her back.

It was a small, steadying touch. She leaned into it.

"He knows," she said. "He knows I've found it. He's coming anyway."

"Then he wants to be heard," said Kael.

"Or he wants to die."

"Maybe both." His voice was very low. "I think those can be the same thing, sometimes."

She folded the note and tucked it away. Across the lake, thin and clear in the cold air, a single trumpet sounded, high and cold and long.

At noon, on the causeway, the Four Clans would speak.

And an old man with ink on his sleeves, who had taught her to read, would stand in the light and be asked what he had done.