If Raisa survived, she swore that she would bend all her efforts to helping her mother win this most important of battles. They would join together—mother and daughter, queen and princess heir. If Marianna would allow that, after Raisa’s year in exile.
They represented the Gray Wolf line—and nothing could stand against them.
Even Mellony could have a role to play. Raisa would seek out her younger sister, would quit seeing her only as a rival for power and her mother’s affections.
A brush with death could be the midwife to wisdom and good intentions. She prayed she would live long enough to carry them out.
Thus resolved, Raisa curled up next to the fire. She should sleep—she would need to be clearheaded tonight.
But sleep was long in coming. Danger pressed in on her from all sides. It weighed her down, flattening her against the ground. Several times, her eyes flew open when some small sound startled her.
When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed a series of vivid scenes, like fever dreams, or the images in a clan memory stone.
She lay next to Han Alister on the roof of the Bayar Library at Oden’s Ford, her head pillowed on his shoulder. Fireworks burst overhead, raining flame down on them. Suddenly, he rolled over, pressing her onto the roof tiles, his knife at her throat. “What are the rules for walking out?” he demanded. “Who can you kiss, and how often, and who starts?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know the rules.”
And he looked at her with those riveting blue eyes, brushed her cheek with his hot fingers, and whispered, “What are you afraid of? Thieves or wizards?”
The scene dissolved, and she was a small child again, cuddled on her mother’s lap. Marianna read through a picture book while Raisa tangled her fingers in her mother’s glittering hair.
After that, she dreamed of a long-ago picnic on Hanalea. Her mother pelted her father with hard rolls when he teased her. “Next time I’ll choose a wife whose aim is not so good,” Averill said, laughing.
The scene shifted. Marianna sat next to the pompous Duke of Chalk Cliffs, who thought himself quite the ladies’ man. The duke chattered on and on about his hunting lodge in the Heart-fangs and how she should come visit. Marianna looked down the long table to where Raisa sat, and raised an eyebrow, her mouth quirking in a half-smile. Her mother could say more with one small gesture, one shift in expression, than Speaker Redfern in an hour-long sermon.
Finally, Raisa, Mellony, Marianna, and Averill snuggled together in a sleigh, riding out at solstice to see the fireworks. Marianna’s cheeks were rosy with the cold, and she laughed like a young girl. Raisa sat between her parents, holding their hands, the link between them. It made her feel cozier than the fur throws tucked in around them.
There followed more visions, new and unfamiliar. Not her own memories, then. Clairvoyance? Foretelling? Or the recent past?
Her mother knelt in the Cathedral Temple, head bowed, hands clasped in front of her, tears running down her face. Speaker Jemson knelt next to her, one hand on her shoulder, speaking softly. Marianna was nodding, she was speaking, too, but Raisa could not make out the words.
Marianna at her desk in her privy chamber, scrawling words across a page, spattering ink in her haste. Speaker Jemson and Magret stood by as witnesses. The queen signed her name, blew on the page to dry the ink, rolled and tied it, and handed it to Jemson.
Queen Marianna stood on her balcony in her tower bedroom, looking out over the city, her hands resting on the stone railing. The city sparkled under a light blanket of snow, the spring bulbs poking through. It was late afternoon, and the sun was descending, casting long blue shadows wherever it could slide between the buildings.
Beyond the castle close, children played in the park, and Marianna watched them in their brilliant colors spin and collide and pop up again, the sound of their laughter carrying in the softening spring air. Marianna smiled to see them, tucking her hands under her arms to warm them.
The queen heard another sound, this time behind her, and she started to turn.
“Mother!” Raisa jackknifed to a sitting position, suddenly wide awake, her heart flailing painfully in her chest. She’d slept the whole day through, and it was nearly dusk. The fire had long since died, and what heat the spring sun had provided was rapidly dissipating. Gillen’s horse looked at her, snorting clouds of vapor.
Her cry seemed to echo, reverberating among the peaks, the tombs of the dead queens all around her. At first it was Mother! and then it seemed to change to Marianna! Repeated over and over and over until it faded to silence.
“Mother,” Raisa repeated, softly this time, and yet still the mountains heard. They took up the refrain again. Marianna! Only this time they named off the line of queens.
Marianna ana’Lissa ana’Theraise ana’ … and so on, all the way back to Hanalea. The names echoed and clamored through the mountains like the tolling of a great bell. There had been thirty-two queens in the millennium since Hanalea healed the Breaking. The mountains named them all.
Raisa had always felt embedded, safe in these mountains, connected to the future and the past. Now she felt like a loose thread dangling, the entire web threatening to unravel. Or like a sapling ripped out of the soil and left to die. She closed her eyes, sending up a wordless prayer.
When she opened her eyes, she was ringed by wolves, larger than any she had ever seen before. Gray wolves in all the colors that gray can be. Their eyes were blue and green and golden and black.
“Go away,” she whispered, putting up her hands for defense. “Leave me alone.”
One wolf padded forward, stepping lightly over the snow, regarding Raisa with wise gray eyes. The others parted to give her room.
“Greetings, Raisa ana’Marianna,” the wolf said. “We are your sisters, the Gray Wolf queens.” The she-wolf sat down, curling her fluffy tail around her feet. “Isn’t it a shame,” she said, cocking her head, “that we become queens only in the pain of losing our mothers?”
“I need to rest,” Raisa said. “I have a long way to go tomorrow.” She drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. “I’ve had enough dreams for one night.”
“And we as queens birth our successors only in the pain of our own deaths,” a green-eyed wolf said, as if Raisa hadn’t spoken. “But the knowledge that our daughters follow us eases our passage.”
The gray-eyed wolf nudged Raisa’s knee with her nose. “You are not alone. If you concentrate, you can feel the connection all the way back through the Gray Wolf line.”
“We serve as advisers to the reigning queens,” the green-eyed wolf said, “only when the situation is dire. Like now.”
“Well, I’ve been seeing you for months,” Raisa said, shivering. “Why haven’t you spoken to me before?”
“Your mother could no longer hear us,” the green-eyed wolf said. “That’s why we came to you.”
“Althea,” the gray-eyed wolf said reprovingly.
“Well, it’s true,” Althea said. “Raisa may as well know. The Bayar blocked up Queen Marianna’s ears so she could not hear our warnings.”
“Why should I listen to you?” Raisa said. “You might be hallucinations, or demons conjured by my enemies. Or a bad dream,” she said hopefully.
“You must listen to us,” the gray-eyed wolf said. “You have many enemies. Unless you take action, they will destroy the Gray Wolf line.”
“That’s why I’m going home,” Raisa said. “To help my mother the queen. For too long we have not heard each other.”
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