HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Twenty-Five: Be Home Before Dark

Kael did not remember leaving the wall.

He remembered the Princess holding the paper above her head, a small white flag in the mist. He remembered Sorrel's hand closing on his arm and Brannoch's voice saying Highness, now, while we can, and the stones of the gatehouse stair under his boots. Then he was in a small room off the lower gallery with the door shut, and the Princess was standing in front of him, soaked to the knees, holding out a folded square of grey paper.

"I swore I wouldn't hide anything," Aurelia said. Her voice was steady, and her hand was not. "He gave it to me to give to you. I think that's the cruelest part. Read it."

He took it.

The paper was frayed at the edges and smelled faintly of smoke. The hand was square and blunt, the letters pressed hard into the page as though the writer had been holding the pen in a fist. Kael had seen that hand every day of his life, on shopping lists and flour sacks and the margins of old charcoal maps. He had never seen it shake.

Kael. Do not come. Whatever they say, do not come. I am well. I kept the stone in the hearth, as I promised. Be home before dark.

He read it once. The words slid off him like rain. He read it again, and the room tilted, and something rose in his throat that was not quite a sob and not quite a laugh.

"He's alive," he said.

"Yes."

"They said, I saw the roof come down. I thought..." He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth. For a moment he could not speak. Across the room, Sorrel turned to study the wall, and Brannoch found something fascinating on the floor. Aurelia did not look away. She stood quietly, with her hands folded, and let him have it.

When he could breathe again, he said, "Tell me everything he said to you."

She told him. The offer, the safe conduct, the paper he would have to sign. The warmth in her father's face, and the way he had kissed her forehead. She told it in order, plainly, leaving nothing out, and when she reached the part about Liora, I did not lay a hand on her, she stopped.

"I don't know what that means," she said. "I've turned it over all the way back across the causeway. He didn't say I did not harm her. He said I did not lay a hand. It might mean she died of a fever. It might mean someone else did it."

"Or that he let it happen."

"Or that." She swallowed. "I don't know which is worse."

"It's a trap," said Brannoch.

He said it flatly, as he said everything, and Kael knew he was right. It was one of the few things he had known since the first line.

"Of course it's a trap. The old man writes do not come. The Emperor puts it in his daughter's hand and says, come by sunset tomorrow. A child could see it."

"I know."

"Then you know what you do. You go through the water gate tonight, as we planned. You reach the north road before dawn, and the Wolves regroup in the high country, and we fight this war the way we were always going to." His scarred jaw worked. "I'm sorry for the old man. I knew him a little, in the early years, before he vanished with a baby in his arms. He was a good soldier. He'd tell you the same. A prince does not walk into a camp to save one servant."

"He isn't a servant."

"Highness..."

"He's the only person who ever taught me to breathe." Kael did not raise his voice. "He lied to me for seventeen years to keep me alive. He chose my name from a stable boy who died. When the hunters came, he stood in front of the door and told me to run, and I ran." He looked at the war-captain. "I'm not going to leave him a second time."

"That's not a decision. That's grief."

"It can be both."

Brannoch opened his mouth, closed it, and turned away with a sound like rock grinding on rock.

Sorrel, from the corner, spoke very softly. "May I say something?"

"Please."

"The last line." The Fox had taken the note from Kael's hand without being asked and was holding it to the window, studying it with his head tilted. "Be home before dark. Why did he write that?"

Kael frowned. "It's the first thing he ever taught me. The first rule."

"I know. You told me. But he's been a prisoner for six weeks. He's had every chance to write a hundred things. He could have said he's wounded, or that he's afraid, or that the Emperor is lying." Sorrel's amber eyes moved over the paper. "Instead he writes a rule he gave you when you were a child. Do not come. And then he repeats himself, in a different way, in the only phrase he knew you'd never mistake."

Kael stared at him.

"It's a message inside a message," Aurelia said slowly. "The Emperor read it. He had to. If it said anything he didn't like, he'd never have let it out." She looked at Sorrel. "But he wouldn't recognize a rule from a boy's childhood. He wouldn't know it meant anything."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning hide." Kael felt his heart begin to pound. "Be home before dark means stay out of sight. Don't be seen. It was never about the cottage." His hands were shaking, but it was a different kind of shaking now. "He's telling me not to come. He's telling me the Emperor wants me to appear. He's telling me... he doesn't want me to give him what he came for."

"The stone," said Sorrel.

"The stone in the hearth. I kept the stone in the hearth, as I promised." Kael's breath caught. "Orin hid something under that stone. A letter. From my mother. He never gave it to me. He said it would keep until I'd seen enough to read it properly." He looked at the Princess. "He's telling me it's still hidden. The Emperor doesn't have it."

"Then it's the thing he wants," Aurelia said, very quietly. "Not just you. The letter."

Nobody spoke.

A message from the queen the night before the palace fell. Kael thought of the way Orin had weighed it in his fingers. She made me swear on my life to keep it until you were ready. A letter that the Emperor of the Lions would send three thousand soldiers across a continent to keep from being read.

"Teyr said the Emperor feared a living dynasty," he said. "I thought it was the boy he was afraid of. But it's not just me. It's what she knew."

They argued for an hour, and Kael let them.

Brannoch said it was folly. The Princess said it was the only way. Sorrel said that if they were going to do something suicidal, they should at least do it with a plan. At the end of an hour, the room was full of stubborn silence, and Kael had learned something. There were no good options. There were only different prices.

"I have to go," he said.

Brannoch swore.

"Not to sign. Not to give him what he wants." He held up a hand. "But I have to be there. If I'm not at the foot of that causeway at sunset, he declares the Fox clan in breach, and he marches on Lanternreach. A hundred thousand people live in this city. The Matriarch's whole clan. He'll burn it to the lake bed." He took a breath. "I won't do that. I can't save one old man by drowning a city."

"Then what's the plan?" asked Brannoch.

"I'm still working on it."

"Highness."

"I know." He almost smiled. "But I've learned something these last weeks. Every time I thought I was cornered, there was a door I couldn't see. A Fox at the ford. A Bear who took the first oath. A girl on a terrace who didn't call the guards." He turned, and found Aurelia watching him, her face very pale and very steady. "I don't have a door yet. But I think if I stand in the right place long enough, someone will open one."

"That isn't a plan," said Brannoch.

"No."

"It's a prayer."

"Then it's a prayer with a thousand people behind it." He met the war-captain's eyes. "You're welcome to come. You're welcome to leave. If you go, I won't think less of you. But I'm going to find the last piece of that ledger, and the letter, and my guardian. And I'm going to do it in the open, where the Emperor can't claim I stole anything."

Brannoch stared at him. The big face worked, slowly, through a succession of emotions Kael could not name.

"Edda said you'd go soft," he said at last. "She didn't say you'd go mad." He heaved a breath, and something in his shoulders gave, an old weight shifting. "Fine. I'll go to the causeway. But I'll be standing behind you, and I'll have my axe, and if that old man's note turns out to be a lie, I'm taking his head off first."

"That's fair."

"It isn't." The war-captain pointed a finger like a club at Sorrel. "And you. Fox. You'll be at his other shoulder. If this goes bad, if there's any sign your mother's people are playing both sides..."

"I'll be there," Sorrel said evenly. "I've stopped being anywhere else."

They broke up after noon, in twos and threes, to find food and sleep and a few quiet hours before the evening's work. Kael stayed in the little room. He was not sure he could stand.

The door clicked shut. When he looked up, Aurelia was still there, standing by the window with her back to him, looking out at the great field of campfires on the plain.

"You didn't go," he said.

"No." She did not turn around. "I wanted to say something, and I'm no good at saying it in front of people."

He waited.

"When I was little," she said, "my father used to carry me on his shoulders through the marigold parade. I thought he was the strongest man alive. I used to think it meant he couldn't be wrong." Her voice was very quiet. "I've spent six weeks learning how wrong a person can be. And I still can't make myself believe he's a monster. He kissed my forehead, Kael. He said he was sorry. I think he meant it."

"I think he did."

"That's the worst of it." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, angrily, without any pretense. "He meant every word. He loves me. And he'd still do any of it again."

Kael crossed the room and stood beside her. He did not touch her. He only stood close enough that their sleeves brushed, and looked out at the same grey plain and the same three thousand fires.

"My guardian loved me too," he said. "He kept me ignorant for seventeen years, and burned his life down to do it. I used to think love and honesty were the same thing. Now I think they're only cousins. They don't always visit."

She laughed, a small cracked sound. "That's the Fox court talking."

"It's Orin. He'd have said it more bluntly."

"Would he have liked me?"

"I think he'd have called you a dangerous girl." He paused. "He'd have been right."

She turned then, and looked at him, and he saw that her eyes were wet and that she was smiling anyway. It was a crooked, unsteady smile. It went through him like the heat in his wrist.

"I'm coming with you," she said. "Tomorrow. To the causeway."

"No."

"I wasn't asking."

"Aurelia, he'll..."

"He'll take me home, or he won't. He'll say I'm his daughter, or he won't. Either way, I'm the only one on this continent he hesitates in front of." She said it matter-of-factly, and he realized she had thought it through, every angle. "If I'm standing next to you when you walk onto that stone, he has to decide how much he's willing to lose. I think that's the only door either of us is going to find."

"It's too dangerous."

"I know." She reached out and took his hand, the left one, the marked one, and turned it palm up between them. The pale crescent glowed softly under her fingers. "I think the dangerous things are the only ones left."

He wanted to argue. He wanted, with a fierce unfamiliar ache, to keep her somewhere safe. But he looked at her steady eyes and the stubborn set of her jaw and the way her fingers closed around his without a trace of hesitation, and he thought of Orin's note.

Do not come.

"All right," he said.

"All right?"

"I don't think I could stop you." He tried to smile, and it came out helpless. "And I don't think I'd want to be the kind of person who could."

She laughed, softly, and leaned her forehead against his shoulder. He stood very still, afraid that if he moved he would frighten the moment away. It lasted only a few breaths. Then she straightened, and wiped her face, and became the Emperor's daughter again.

"I'll send word to the Matriarch," she said. "If we're going to do this, we need the Fox court at our backs. Ysolde has the ledger. She has the seal. And I think she has something else she hasn't told us yet." She paused at the door. "Get some sleep, Wolf."

"You too, Princess."

She went out. The door closed, and the room felt suddenly large and cold.

Kael sat down on the bench with Orin's note in his hands and read it again. Be home before dark. He had been told that all his life, and for seventeen years he had thought it meant stay safe. Now he understood it had meant something else. It had meant I will always be waiting.

He closed his eyes.

I'm coming, he thought. Not the way you'd want. But I'm coming.

Outside, the first bell of the afternoon began to ring. Somewhere beyond the walls, three thousand soldiers were breaking their fast. And up in a high round room, a woman in grey was sitting quietly at a table, holding a letter she had not yet shown to anyone.