The Gray Wolf Throne (13 page)

“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 Heartfangs and how she should come visit. Marianna looked down the long table to where raisa sat, and raised an eyebrow, her mouth quirk-ing 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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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 107

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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.” The wind stirred the treetops, whispering,
Marianna
.

The wolves stirred, too, looking at each other, snapping their jaws and whining.

“The line now hangs by a thread,” the gray-eyed wolf said.

“And you are that thread, raisa
ana
’Marianna.” it was so close to her thoughts that raisa shivered again.

“My mother and i are in danger,” raisa said. “is that what you’re saying?”

“Beware of someone who pretends to be a friend,” Althea said. “Look close to home for your enemies.”

“why is prophesy always so bloody cryptic?” raisa said.

“why can’t you just flat-out tell me what’s going on?” The wolves rose, as if at a common signal.

“This is the message we bring you, raisa
ana
’Marianna, descendent of the queens of the Seven realms,” Althea said.

“you must fight for the throne. you must fight for the Gray wolf line. you must not allow yourself to be ensnared as Marianna was.

The future of the realm balances on a knife’s edge.” She bowed her head and turned away, moving off at a trot.

The others followed, all but the gray-eyed wolf. She tilted her head, regarding raisa thoughtfully, as if taking her measure. raisa thought she saw sympathy in the she-wolf ’s eyes.

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“raisa
ana
’Marianna, my sisters speak the truth, but it is incomplete. Do not make the mistakes that i made. Choose your friends carefully. never forget that two threads spun together are stronger than one of double thickness.”

“My mother and i,” raisa whispered. “is that what you mean?” The she-wolf glanced over her shoulder, as if worried about being overheard by her sister queens, then turned back to raisa.

“know that sometimes you must choose duty over love. Do not forget duty. But choose love when you can.”

raisa stared at her. “who are you?” she whispered.

“i am Hanalea
ana
’Maria, who shattered the world.”

“But . . .” As raisa groped for words, Hanalea bowed her head and turned away. She broke into a lope, ears back, tail streaming behind her, disappearing into the shadows under the trees.

raisa opened her eyes again. She lay on her back, staring up at the treetops. The cold and wet had seeped through her coat.

Snow sifted down on her as the wind stirred the branches.

Marianna
, they whispered.

She sat up, her head still clouded by the remnants of dreams, a knot of dread in her middle.

So it was a dream. But what did it mean, this twilight visitation? was it a nightmare born of worry? A premonition of something that might occur? An obscure parable symbolizing something completely different?

it was said that the Gray wolf queens had the gift of prophesy, but she’d never seen it in her mother, Marianna. was this how the messages came—from gray wolves in a dream?

or perhaps it was just that—a dream. The remnant and consequence of a tragic day.

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Could she trust in a tradition of magic that seemed to have gone dormant—relics of a past when wizards behaved, amulets lasted forever, and queens knew what they were doing.

what would she find when she returned to Fellsmarch? what was the danger so potent that the wolves had issued this warning?

She had to know. She had to know now.

She scrambled to her feet. As she did so, she saw that the snow all around her campsite was pocked with pawprints the size of luncheon plates.

wolfprints.

Bloody bones, she thought. Maybe she was losing her mind.

“i’m sorry,” she whispered to Gillen’s horse, who’d stood saddled all this time. He’d managed to scrape his back against a tree, knocking the saddle askew. She released the bit long enough to feed and water him again, then tightened the girth and mounted up.

when she emerged from the dark narrow canyon, more daylight remained than she expected. The last rays of the sun reflected back from the snow, illuminating the road before her. She looked up and down the trail, then turned north, toward Marisa pines Camp.

raisa walked the gelding off the trail when she could, though it made for slower going, hoping it would prevent her being spotted by anyone looking down from above. She kept Gillen’s cocked crossbow next to her, knowing that her one shot was unlikely to save her.

it was all she could do to keep the gelding reined in, when what she wanted to do was break into a gallop, to race all the way to safety. occasionally she stopped and listened, hearing only the 110

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movement of branches overhead and the hiss of snow on snow.

Those hunting her would be proceeding cautiously also, not wanting to miss her in their haste. or maybe they had set a trap and were sitting like spiders, waiting for her to fall into it.

She did her best to stay alert to her surroundings, to live outside of her head. She couldn’t afford to dwell on all the decisions that had brought her to this place, where life and death intersected. Her future—her life depended on this small space of time on this narrow road that led from Delphi, through Marisa pines pass, and down to the camp.

where are the Demonai? she thought. why couldn’t they be patrolling this stretch of road?

raisa eased her white-knuckled grip on the reins as the light dwindled. perhaps she could move a little faster now, at least until the moon rose. But the lack of light made traveling off-trail more dangerous. if her horse sprained his leg, she was done. So she risked the trail more often, making better speed in places where the trees closed overhead and hid her from prying eyes.

How many of them were out there, she wondered. How many had died at the hands of her guard? would they split up or stay together? would some ride the trail, hoping to overtake or intercept her, while others lay hidden along the way?

raisa scanned the forward trail, trying to spot likely ambushes, but the darkness hid them as well as it hid her. Ahead, the trail threaded through a narrow gorge, running alongside the frozen-over stream at the bottom. She could see tracks—evidence that horses had passed this way since the storm.

She told herself that just because horses had passed this way didn’t mean they were still here. Anyway, there was no other 111

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way through. keeping close to the canyon wall, lying flat so she wouldn’t be silhouetted against the entrance, she walked the gelding into the gorge.

The element of surprise was what saved her. The men waiting in the canyon had likely been waiting for hours with nobody to kill, and so were less alert than they might have been.

Halfway through the gorge, she saw a flicker of movement against the opposite canyon wall. A horse whickered a greeting, and Gillen’s horse answered.

on all sides, boots scraped against rock as soldiers scrambled for the weapons they’d laid aside.

raisa drove her heels against the gelding’s sides, and he spurted forward. Behind her, somebody swore a northern oath. A shout went up, clamoring against stone.

They exploded from the mouth of the canyon, raisa urging her horse to even greater speed. They flew down the narrow corridor between the trees, risking life and limb in the near-darkness. Behind her, she could hear the rattle of hooves on stone evolve into the thunder of pursuit.