Read Chapter 10: The Hunted Wolf

The inn's common room stank of woodsmoke and sour beer, a smell René would have found almost welcoming if not for the way the single Imperial officer by the hearth had gone still the moment René crossed the threshold.

He was reading a broadsheet. Or he had been. Now his eyes were fixed on René's face with the particular intensity of a man comparing what he saw to what he remembered.

René kept his stride easy. He'd been Josef Brenner here, then a Huguenot refugee. Now, with the dead captain's papers folded against his ribs, he was Captain Matthias Vogel of His Imperial Majesty's Third—the regiment designation mattered less than the commission itself, which was real and therefore dangerous in the wrong hands.

The officer folded the broadsheet. "You there."

René paused mid-stride toward the staircase. "Me?"

"You are Captain Vogel."

It was not a question, and the officer was already rising from his stool. His hand rested on his sword hilt with the casual weight of a man who expected to use it.

"And you are?" René kept his voice bored, the tone of a man who had been asked to identify himself by inferiors too many times.

"Lieutenant Brandt. Adjutant to the garrison at Innsbruck." Brandt stepped closer, and René saw the broadsheet in his hand had a woodcut beneath the text. A face. His face, rendered in harsh black lines that made him look a decade older and twice as vicious. "I've seen this face. The courier who left Paris with Richelieu's words."

The room had gone quiet. The innkeeper's wife had stopped wiping the same mug. Somewhere behind René, a log shifted in the fire.

"I've been on the road for six weeks," René said. "I haven't been near Paris in a year. You have the wrong man."

"Perhaps." Brandt's eyes narrowed. "But my orders say the courier is in the Tyrol. And I find you here at an inn an hour from where a Swedish officer was seen taking a message. You understand my suspicion."

René's hand drifted to his belt. Not toward a weapon—there was no weapon to reach for, the captain's sword being a poor fit for close quarters—but toward the pouch where the commission rested. The motion was enough to make Brandt's hand tighten on his own hilt.

"Careful," René said. "I carry the Emperor's commission. You draw on me, you draw on the Imperial chain of command. How do you think that plays in your report?"

"Poorly, if you're genuine." Brandt's voice dropped. "But if you're not, it plays as initiative. I'll take that risk."

He drew.

René moved before the blade cleared the scabbard, not backward but sideways, driving a stool into Brandt's knee. The officer grunted and stumbled. The broadsheet flew from his hand and landed near the hearth, face-up.

The woodcut stared at René from the floor. His own eyes, his own scarred jaw, rendered in stark line. The caption beneath was in French and German both: *The Wolf of Paris. Sixty thalers for his head.*

Sixty thalers. Richelieu's own bounty was generous, even from the grave.

René didn't wait to see Brandt rise. He was already moving for the back corridor, past the innkeeper's wife who pressed herself against the wall with a strangled cry. He heard Brandt shout something behind him, heard the scrape of chairs as other men in the common room responded—not soldiers, but the kind of men who'd sell a stranger for six thalers, let alone sixty.

The corridor ended at a kitchen door. René burst through into a washroom, steam rising from a copper pot, and found the window too small and the rear exit blocked by a servant carrying firewood.

He took the stairs instead.

They were narrow and crooked, a Tyrolean afterthought of warped timber. He took them two at a time, hearing boots below him now, multiple sets. Brandt had roused the whole pack.

The upper floor held four rooms. Three were shut tight. The fourth door was open, revealing a window that overlooked the street. René was through it before he registered the drop: two stories, a pig trough below, and a roof angle that would break his neck if he mistimed his landing.

He dropped.

The trough was where he'd aimed, and he hit it on his shoulder with a crack that sent pain arcing down through his collarbone. He rolled across the packed mud of a side alley, came up against a fence, and looked back.

Brandt was at the window already, silhouetted against the lamplight. He hadn't hesitated. He was climbing out.

René ran.

The alley fed into the village's main square: a cramped space ringed by tanneries and a smithy gone dark for the night. The watch had been called up—two men with halberds were crossing from the far side, cutting off his path to the bridge. Behind them, the church tower loomed, and beyond it the mountain road he'd planned to take at dawn.

He angled left instead, into a lane that stank of offal, and found his way blocked by a cartload of hides. He vaulted it, leather slick and cold beneath his hands, and came down on the other side into darkness.

Not just darkness. The reek hit him first—ammonia, lime, and something sweet and rotting that coated the back of his throat. A tannery's slow pit.

He heard footsteps behind him. Brandt's voice, sharp: "He went this way. Spread out."

René pressed himself against the timber wall of the pit. Moonlight leaked through gaps in the surrounding sheds, but here he was nearly blind. He could hear water trickling somewhere, sheep bleating in a nearby pen, and his own heartbeat.

Then the moon shifted, and he saw it.

Three paces to his left, a vat the size of a coffin stood open. The skin of the liquid within was dark and still, and the reek was strongest here. Bark-dust floated on the surface in a scum like dead leaves.

A tanner's vat. Eight feet deep, full of lime and oak bark and the collected sweat of a hundred hides.

Men were approaching from both ends of the lane. He could see the glint of a halberd blade in the moonlight, hear Brandt's boots on the packed earth of the main square behind him.

René climbed the vat's lip and dropped in.

The liquid swallowed him with a soft, sucking sound. It was cold, colder than he'd expected, and thick—not water but a slurry that clung to his face and filled his nose with a taste like old copper. He forced himself down, one hand finding the rough timber bottom, and held there with the surface a hand's breadth above his head.

Through the liquid, sound came muffled and distorted. Boots. Voices. Brandt said something René couldn't parse, and another voice answered. Then the footsteps passed the vat, one, two, three sets, and continued down the lane toward the river.

René counted to sixty under his breath, broke the surface, and dragged air into his lungs in a long, ragged gasp.

The lane was empty.

He climbed out, dripping, the smell of the pit sealing itself into his clothing, his skin, his very pores. He would stink for a week. He would be trackable for a week by any dog with a working nose.

But he was alive.

He moved away from the tannery at an angle, skirting the churchyard where the tombstones leaned like bad teeth, and found the low stone wall that bounded the village. Beyond it lay open pasture and, five hundred yards further, the dark mass of the treeline.

He was over the wall and half-running across the field before he realized he hadn't planned the route. Instinct had taken over. Instinct had carried him away from the village, away from the bridge, away from the road to Falkenstein and the gorge Krauss was holding.

He stopped at the treeline and looked back.

The village was dark. No torches moved in the streets. Somewhere, Brandt was searching a lane by the river for a man who was no longer there.

René stood in the shadow of the pines, breathing hard, the tanner's slurry drying to a crust on his clothes. The captain's papers were still against his ribs, sealed in their oiled pouch. The commission was still valid. The plan was still possible.

But now there was a bounty on his face, and a lieutenant who had seen it, and a village behind him where a girl named Katarina knew his true name was a lie. She had been watching him with those careful eyes. She had promised him a horse at dawn.

The horse was lost now. The dawn would come whether he was there or not.

He turned into the trees and began walking deeper into the mountain.