2
Kason
My father's council chamber had thirty-one chairs and one empty one, and every man in the room was careful never to look directly at it.
I'd stopped being careful about that particular courtesy years ago.
Emil's chair stayed empty because tradition said a fallen heir's seat went unfilled for a decade of mourning, and I'd spent nearly the whole of that decade sitting one chair over from it, close enough that I could still catch, on certain nights when the fire burned low and my senses ran ahead of my sense, the ghost of a smell that wasn't there anymore.
My wolf remembered him better than my mind did some days.
That was its own cruelty, one I'd never mentioned to anyone, least of all my father, who carried a version of the same weight and wore it every single day like it cost him nothing.
"Three raids in six weeks," Voivode Halmar was saying, tapping a thick finger against the map spread across the council table. "All along the eastern passes. Two border patrols missing entirely. This is not opportunistic banditry, Your Highness. This has the shape of a campaign."
"It has the shape of the Unbound," Teodor said, from his position at my right shoulder, where he'd stood at every council session for the better part of eight years and would likely stand at the next eighty.
"It's had that shape since the first missing patrol.
We've simply been slow to say the name out loud. "
A ripple went through the older Voivodes at that — not disagreement, exactly, more the specific discomfort of men who preferred their old grievances to stay old.
The Unbound had been a fringe complaint for two generations, Varak Ossendrei's grandmother's grudge dressed up in new robes every decade or so and mostly ignored by a throne with larger problems. It was proving much harder to ignore now that it had teeth.
"Say the name, then," my father said. King Aurelian rarely spoke in council unless the room needed reminding whose voice ended a debate, and the room went quiet the instant he did, thirty-one Voivodes finding thirty-one different points on the map to study instead of his face.
"What does the Unbound want with two border patrols, Teodor, that banditry couldn't get more easily? "
"Bodies," Teodor said. "Or blood. We don't yet know which, or why."
"There's more," said Voivode Renner, the eastern border's own liaison, and something in the set of his shoulders made the room go quieter before he'd said another word.
"One of the missing patrol wolves turned up three days ago.
Alive. Barely. He'd been held somewhere long enough to lose most of the weight off him, and when the healers asked what he remembered, he couldn't tell them much beyond restraints that weren't ordinary iron — something laced, he thought, though he couldn't say with what — and other captives.
Wolves. He counted at least six voices in the dark before he got free. "
The silence that followed had a different texture than the one before it. I'd sat through enough council sessions to know the difference between a room absorbing bad news and a room absorbing news that had just become personal.
"Where is he now?" I asked.
"Under guard, at the healers' hall. Recovering. He asked me to tell the throne he was sorry he couldn't say where he'd been held before they moved him." Renner's mouth thinned. "He also asked, twice, whether the Council had found anyone else. I didn't have an answer for him."
Six voices in the dark. I turned that over the way I turned over battlefield intelligence, looking for its shape, and didn't care for what it suggested about the scale of an operation two generations of throne had dismissed as a grudge with delusions of relevance.
"Then we find them," I said. "Whatever the Unbound is doing with captured wolves, it isn't for sport, and it isn't small. I want Renner's report cross-checked against every disappearance filed in the last two years — wolf and rogue both."
"Rogue disappearances rarely get reported at all, Your Highness," Halmar said. "They belong to no pack. No one's required to notice when they're gone."
That should not have landed the way it did. I filed the discomfort of it away without examining it too closely, the way I'd been filing away a great many things for three weeks, and turned my attention back to the map.
I did know why some large piece of that question mattered to me more than it should have, and I kept that knowledge exactly where I'd been keeping it for three weeks: behind my teeth, unspoken, a restlessness under my sternum that had started sometime after the last skirmish report and hadn't settled since.
My wolf paced when I sat still too long.
It hadn't done that in years, not since the worst of the grief after Emil, and I'd told myself twice a day for three weeks that it meant nothing, the way I told myself most things I didn't yet want to look at directly.
"We increase the eastern patrols," I said, before the silence could curdle into the kind of argument that ate an entire afternoon and produced nothing.
"Doubled, effective immediately. And I want a supply convoy through the Sorrowmarket by the week's end — quietly, not as a show of force, but I want eyes on that crossing before the Unbound decides it's worth more to them than the passes. "
"Send Teodor," Halmar said, not unreasonably. "There's no need for—"
"I'll lead it myself."
The room's attention landed on me the way rooms did, thirty-one sets of eyes finding their way to my face and then, almost as one, finding somewhere else to look instead.
I'd stopped noticing when that started happening, sometime in the years after I took up more of the crown than I'd ever asked to carry.
It didn't feel like power most days. Most days it felt like a wall I hadn't built and couldn't set down.
"With respect, Your Highness," Halmar tried again, "a crown prince riding a supply convoy is not a subtle use of your time, particularly not with the Sorcha match still unsettled and a wedding date the northern pack is growing impatient to hear."
"The Sorcha match is a formality the northern pack has already agreed to.
It will keep." I said it flatter than I meant to, and caught, from the corner of my vision, my father's eyes moving to me and staying there a beat too long.
He'd know exactly how flat that sentence had come out.
He usually did. "I want to see the Sorrowmarket road myself.
Two raids from now, I'd rather already know the ground than be learning it under fire. "
It wasn't a lie. It also wasn't the whole of it, and my father — who had spent thirty years learning to read the difference on my face the way I'd learned to read it on soldiers under my command — said nothing further about it in front of the council, which meant I'd be hearing about it privately before the day was out.
The session ran two more hours after that.
Trade tariffs. A dispute between two lesser packs over grazing rights that had escalated, absurdly, all the way to the throne — two Voivodes on their feet, voices raised, one of them a hand's width from invoking a formal challenge over a strip of pasture neither pack had properly used in a decade.
"Enough." I didn't raise my voice to say it.
I'd learned young that raising it cost more than it earned, that the trick wasn't volume but the particular stillness that came before a decision had already been made.
Both men sat. The room went the kind of quiet that settled over it only when I stopped asking and started deciding.
"The pasture reverts to common grazing, split by season, enforced by the border wardens rather than either of your households.
If either pack grazes out of turn, the penalty is a full season's forfeiture.
That's not a negotiation. That's the ruling. "
Neither Voivode argued further. I watched both of them lower their eyes before they sat back down, the way wolves did when a decision had gone past the point of debate, and felt, as I always did in moments like that one, the hollowness of power that worked exactly as it was meant to and still didn't feel like anything close to triumph.
Lady Sorcha's father sent word again before the session closed, asking when a formal date might be set, phrased with exactly enough courtesy that refusing to answer it would read as an insult neither kingdom could currently afford.
I answered none of it the way any part of me actually wanted to.
My father caught my sleeve as the Voivodes filed out, waiting until the chamber had mostly emptied before he spoke, which was its own kind of message. Aurelian Draguvane had never once corrected me in front of a full council in thirty years of ruling, and he didn't start that afternoon.
"The Sorrowmarket road hasn't needed a prince's personal attention in a decade," he said, quietly enough that only I could hear it. "What am I not being told?"
"Nothing you'd credit, if I told it to you plainly." That was, at least, entirely honest. "I want to see the ground myself. That's all it is, for now."
He studied me the way he'd studied me since I was a boy too young to know he was doing it — patient, thorough, unhurried, a king's attention turned briefly into a father's.
"Your brother used to get a look on his face right before he did something reckless enough to worry me. You've had it for three weeks."
"I'm aware."
"Go, then." He let go of my sleeve. "But come back and tell me the truth of it, Kason, whatever it turns out to be. I've buried one son on a lie I told myself about how safe the roads were. I don't intend to make that mistake twice."
I didn't have an answer that wouldn't have cost either of us something, so I gave him none, and let him read the silence for whatever truth he could find in it.