HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Twenty-Two: Come Home

Aurelia read her father's letter eleven times before she understood why it frightened her.

It was not the threat. She had expected a threat. It was the last three words, written in the same steady hand as the rest. Come home. No anger in them, no reproach, only a quiet certainty that she would. It was the voice he used when she was small and had wandered too far from the nursery, a hand held out in the dark.

She sat on the glass bed with the letter in her lap and the rain running down the black windows, and tried to find the man who had written it in the seal on the ledger. The two would not fit together. She kept trying anyway.

"Highness."

Renn stood in the doorway, soaked to the skin from the walls. She had been up on the causeway tower since dawn.

"How many?"

"I counted until I ran out of fingers." The Captain wiped her face with a sleeve. "Three thousand foot, five hundred horse, a siege train. Marching in good order. They've stopped about two hours short of the causeway and they're making camp." She paused. "The banner at the center isn't Vale's, Highness. It's the Emperor's own."

Aurelia closed her eyes.

"He's here."

"Not on the field yet. But the banner doesn't travel without him."

Lord Cressin arrived before she had finished dressing.

He did not knock. He walked in as though the glass room were his own, still in his plum cloak, dry as a bone, and he carried a sealed order in one gloved hand and an expression of tremendous satisfaction.

"Highness. You will be relieved to hear that His Majesty has sent for you."

"I read the letter, my lord."

"Then you know what is required." He held up the order. "I am commissioned to take charge of your escort and conduct you out of the city before the deadline. His Majesty does not wish you to be inside the walls when the Fox clan is declared in breach. Your safety, you understand, is paramount."

"Captain Renn commands my escort."

"Captain Renn is a soldier, and soldiers follow orders." He broke the wax with a flourish and unrolled the paper, and she saw the lion's head at the bottom. Her father's seal. The same one. "This places the thirty lancers under my authority. I would be grateful if you would be ready to depart within the hour."

Renn did not move. Her hand rested lightly on her sword.

"With respect, my lord," she said, "the Princess is under truce. Matriarch Ysolde's law forbids any man to lay hands on a guest within these walls."

"I am not laying hands on anyone, Captain. I am conveying an instruction."

"Convey it to her, then. She's standing right there."

Cressin turned to Aurelia with a bland smile. "Highness?"

She looked at him for a long moment. In his pale watchful face she saw the notebook, the pencil, the quiet whistle in the gallery. She saw a man who had been told to bring her home by any means that left no marks.

"No," she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I am not leaving. Not today." She held out her hand, and after a moment, without quite meaning to, he gave her the order. She read it, front and back, and handed it to Renn. "It says the escort is under your authority for the purpose of my safe conduct. It says nothing about my consent. It says nothing about a truce. And it was written, I notice, three days before I arrived in the city." She tilted her head. "Which means my father knew exactly where I was going to be, and what I would be tempted to do there. And chose to send you anyway."

For the first time, something flickered in Cressin's eyes. Not fear. Something more like calculation.

"Highness, I assure you..."

"Lord Cressin." She kept her voice quiet. "I'd like you to go to your room, and stay there, until the Matriarch's guards come to fetch you. You are under the same truce as I am, and I suspect you have been breaking it for four days. I did not grant you leave to repeat what I said under this roof. You wrote it down anyway."

"I did nothing of the kind."

"The notebook is in your left sleeve," said Renn pleasantly. "You keep touching it."

He did not look down. He did not need to. His hand had already moved, a small involuntary clutch at his cuff, and his pale face went a shade whiter.

"You are making a grave mistake," he said softly.

"Probably. I seem to be making a great many lately." She stepped aside from the door. "Good morning, my lord."

He bowed, very precisely, and left. But on the threshold he paused, and without turning around, spoke in the mild voice of a man remarking on the weather.

"Your brother rides with the column, Highness. His Majesty thought you might wish to know."

The door closed behind him. Aurelia stood motionless in the glass room with a hundred small white reflections of her own face staring back at her.

Tavian.

She found Kael where she had known she would, on the terrace.

It was early afternoon and the rain had slackened to a fine grey mist. The lake had vanished. The island seemed to float in a cloud, the lanterns burning in the haze like drowned stars, and he stood at the end of the landing with his arms folded and the Fox beside him. Sorrel had changed. He was wearing his green coat again, patched and ragged, and he looked like a man who had left something heavy behind in a room and walked out lighter.

"He wants you at the causeway by sunset on the fourth day," Aurelia said, without preamble. "That's not what he's going to do."

"No?"

"He's close enough that he doesn't have to wait four days. If the Foxes hold the gate, he'll call it rebellion on the second. If they open it, he'll say he's keeping the peace." Her voice was steady. "He gave the deadline to give himself the right to break it."

Kael nodded slowly. "That sounds like him."

"You've never met him."

"I've spent a month being hunted by him." A thin smile. "I think I'm getting to know him."

She did not smile back. "I'm going out to meet him."

Silence.

"No," said Kael.

"It's the only way to buy time."

"He'll take you."

"He's my father. He won't hurt me."

"He killed your mother."

It fell between them like a stone. Sorrel looked away, studying the mist with sudden intense interest. Aurelia felt the words go in, one by one, like a row of cold needles.

"We don't know that," she said.

"You said she wrote it down, and then she died." He said it carefully. He did not raise his voice. "I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm saying you can't walk out there and expect him to be the man who held your hand when you were six."

"I don't expect that." She was surprised to find it was true. "I expect him to be exactly who he's been. Patient. Courteous. Careful. He won't strike me, Kael. He needs me. I'm the only thing standing between him and an open accusation of war on the Fox lands. If I'm in the camp, he has to explain why. If I'm gone, he can claim whatever he likes."

"So you'll be a hostage."

"I'll be a witness." She took a breath. "And a distraction. The longer he talks to me, the longer you have."

"Have for what?"

"To go." She nodded at Sorrel. "Your Fox knows ways out of this city that don't cross the causeway, doesn't he?"

"Several," Sorrel said, looking apologetic. "They are not comfortable."

"I don't care if they're comfortable." She turned back to Kael. "You have to leave Lanternreach tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight, while he thinks I'm still deciding."

"And leave you to face him alone."

"Yes."

"I won't."

"Kael."

"No." For the first time, his composure cracked. He took a step toward her, and the mist swirled around him, and she saw how tired he looked, how thin, how very young. "I swore I wouldn't make you choose. I thought I could keep that. But I can't let you walk into his camp so I can hide in a tunnel."

"It isn't about whether you can let me."

"I know." His voice had dropped to almost nothing. "That's what frightens me."

The mist drifted between them. Somewhere a bell rang the hour, flat and distant. Aurelia was suddenly aware of how close they stood, and of Sorrel, who had discovered a pressing need to examine a nearby gargoyle.

"Listen to me," she said. "Please. I'm not being brave. I'm being practical." She laid her hand on his arm, above the mark, and felt the warmth under her fingers. "You asked me once what I'd do if I found the proof. I've found it. I know what he is. And the only way I can stop him is to be close enough to see what he does next."

"You could be killed."

"So could you." She tried to smile. "We seem to be a pair of fools with very sharp enemies."

He looked at her for a long time. In the grey light his eyes were nearly black.

"Promise me something," he said.

"I'll try."

"If he tries to take you home, if he locks you in that tower and throws away the key. You find a way to tell me. A message, a bird, a word to Sorrel's mother. Anything." His fingers closed over hers. "I'll come."

"You'd march on the Emperor's camp for one girl?"

"Not for one girl." A pause, and a small, helpless laugh. "For the one who pulled down a gallows."

She felt the whole of her chest go warm and tight at once. She wanted very much to say something clever, something that would put the moment in its proper place. Instead she only said, "That's a terrible reason."

"I know."

"It's the best one I've heard in weeks."

Sorrel coughed delicately from the far end of the landing. "I hate to intrude on a moving scene. But I believe the Matriarch has just sent for you both."

Ysolde received them in the long gallery above the main gate, where the whole causeway lay stretched below like a white thread across the grey water.

At the far end of it, where the shore began, the first of the Lion banners had come into view. Gold and blue, rank upon rank, filling the plain beyond the lake like a second sunrise. The sound of the army reached them faintly through the mist, a distant, rolling murmur that was half drums and half the tramp of boots.

And at the head of the column, small as a toy at this distance, rode a lone figure on a tall white horse.

"He has sent a herald," said Ysolde. "He asks for a parley at the foot of the causeway. Tomorrow at dawn. One representative of the Fox clan. One of the Wolf. And his daughter." She folded her hands. "He did not ask for you, Highness. He asked for his daughter. I believe that is a distinction he intends you to notice."

"I noticed," Aurelia said.

"Then you also noticed he requests a Wolf by name." The Matriarch's eyes moved to Kael. "He wants to see your face, Highness. He will come with a promise of safe conduct, and I must tell you plainly that I do not believe it."

"Neither do I," said Kael.

"Then we must decide who goes." Ysolde's voice was dry. "Not you, certainly. If you walk out there, you do not walk back. I will send an envoy, and the Princess will go in her own person. As for the Wolf." She paused. "I think we must find the Wolf a more convincing absence."

"A decoy," Sorrel said slowly. "A servant in a cloak. At a distance, in the mist, who'd know?"

"The Emperor," said Aurelia, almost to herself. "He'd know."

They all looked at her.

"He's met every Wolf in the old war. He knows how they stand." She stared down at the white road, at the long dark line of men on the horizon. "I'll tell him Kael is ill. Or that he refuses to come. It will be a lie, and he'll know it's a lie, but it will also be a message. It will tell him the Wolf is not his to summon. And it will give you the night."

"One night is not much," said Kael.

"It's what I can give you." She turned to face him, and found him already looking at her. "I won't ask for more."

She did not sleep.

At the fourth hour before dawn, she dressed in the plain riding coat, the one she had worn at Thornfield, and pinned her mother's letter inside the lining. She left the ledger copy with Ysolde. She took her father's seal ring off her finger and set it on the dresser, where it gleamed in the lamplight like a small gold eye, and then, after a moment, she put it back on.

Renn waited at the door. She had not been asked to come. She had simply appeared, armed and helmeted, with the thirty lancers drawn up in the corridor behind her.

"You're not coming," Aurelia said.

"I'm the captain of your escort, Highness. Where you go, my people go."

"They'll be killed."

"Possibly." Renn's weathered face was perfectly calm. "I fought for your father at the Greenwater, believing I knew what I was fighting for. I'd like to find out what I was wrong about. And I'd like to see his face when he learns I've decided to stand beside his daughter instead."

Aurelia's throat tightened. She did not trust herself to speak. She only put out her hand, and the Captain gripped it once, hard, soldier to soldier.

Then they walked out through the sleeping palace, past the mirrors and the dark glass, down the long stair and across the courtyard. The great gate groaned open. Beyond it the causeway ran out into the mist like a pale road into the afterlife.

At the very end of it, the grey dawn was beginning to color the east. A single tall rider on a white horse sat motionless against the light, with a young man in a dress uniform at his side.

Tavian looked up as she approached. His face was white and drawn. He raised one hand, half a wave, half a warning, and let it drop.

And the Emperor of the Lions turned his head and smiled at his daughter, with such warmth and such perfect, practiced love that for one dreadful moment she almost wept.

"Aurelia," he said. "You've come home."