The Gray Wolf Throne
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As he passed through the narrowest part of the pass, his nerves screamed and his skin prickled. He knew it was a prime place for an ambush. Magic or not, a bolt between his shoulder blades would take him down quick.
Arrows were faster than jinxes—isn’t that what he’d told Micah Bayar a century ago?
He navigated the pass unmolested, pausing a moment at the highest point to scan the long descent in front of him. The snow was scuffed up and tumbled about, and it had happened recently. Something lay across the trail just ahead, black against the snow.
It was another body, bristling with arrows. A fresher kill, and clean of snow, so it must have happened since the storm.
Han sat motionless for a long moment, his eyes searching the downslope ahead of him. He scanned the masses of stone to either side of the trail, in case archers waited to ambush him there. The wind pitched fine snow into his face, stinging like glittery ground glass.
He was getting much too close to this action. He had no intention of dying here, within a day of his destination. But he couldn’t stay here either, not with bad weather coming.
He nudged Ragger forward at a slow walk, murmuring reassurances he didn’t believe himself. He rode up alongside the body and sat looking down at him.
The man lay on his face, arms stretched out ahead of him as if he hoped he could still go forward. Blood spattered the snow all around him. He was tall, broad-shouldered, dressed like the dead soldiers back at Way House. Whoever had attacked him meant to make sure of him—Han counted eight arrows sticking out of him before he left off numbering them.
The snow surrounding the body was trampled down, boot-prints and hoofprints of at least a dozen riders. Han examined the tracks descending toward Marisa Pines Camp. They’d left at a dead run. Afraid they’d be caught? Or still chasing someone?
Was this one last straggler from the attack at Way Camp? Why had they been so eager to finish him off? It was almost as if this man was such a dangerous person that they wanted to kill him extra dead.
Robbers or southern renegades wouldn’t worry about one survivor, would they? Soldiers never carried much money, not even right after payday. In Ragmarket, everybody knew they were not worth slide-hand, let alone a hard rush.
Anyway, they’d left Ginny Foster’s pay voucher behind.
It didn’t make sense—unless they’d served as guard to something valuable—trade goods, maybe. Maybe whoever had attacked them didn’t want anyone carrying tales back to the capital.
Wary as he was of being ambushed, Han would have ridden on by, except that he saw something glittering in the snow next to the dead soldier.
Taking a quick look around, Han dismounted and knelt next to the body. It was a sword, lying half under the dead man.
Made itchy by the notion of stealing from the dead, Han gently turned the body over, freeing the sword.
It was a beautiful piece, the hilt and cross-guard worked in gold, in the form of a lady with flowing hair.
His attackers must’ve been in a real hurry, to leave it behind.
No simple soldier carried a blade like this. It was the kind of movable that was handed down in blueblood families. Could this man be a noble in disguise?
He studied the man’s face for clues. He was older than the others he’d seen—of middle age, with graying hair in a military cut, his gray eyes staring out accusingly. There was something familiar about that face, about those gray eyes.
Han shivered, making the Maker’s sign, as if someone had walked over his own grave. Ah, Alister, he thought, shaking his head. You’re likely going all romantic about a thief and his stolen sword.
With his thumb and forefinger, Han gently closed the soldier’s eyes. The body was still faintly warm, and hadn’t stiffened up completely. He lifted the soldier’s hands and pressed them together across his chest. Then sat back, staring, his heart thumping.
The soldier wore a heavy gold ring on his right hand, engraved with circling wolves.
He’d seen rings like that before.
A memory came back to him: Rebecca’s Corporal Byrne smashing him up against a wall in Oden’s Ford, his hand in a choke hold around his neck, demanding to know where Rebecca was.
When Byrne had released him, Han had noticed the ring he wore. Wolves. Just like this one. Just like the ring Rebecca Morley had worn. At the time, Han had thought maybe she and her corporal had exchanged love tokens.
Now when he looked into the dead man’s face, he saw a reflection of the younger Byrne—the same gray eyes, the same bone structure. This was Corporal Byrne’s father. It had to be.
“Blood and bones,” Han said. The knowledge birthed more questions than it answered.
The elder Byrne was captain of the bluejackets. Han recalled that day in Southbridge when the younger Byrne had saved him from a beating by Mac Gillen, a brutal sergeant in the guard.
Maybe you’re the son of the commander, and maybe you go to the academy. That don’t mean nothin’, Gillen had sneered.
The dead soldiers—they were bluejackets for sure, then. Members of the Queen’s Guard traveling without uniforms.
So somebody had murdered a party of bluejackets in Marisa Pines Pass? But why? And who? Only the Demonai came to mind—if tensions between the clans and the Valefolk had erupted into conflict—but the Demonai warriors didn’t use crossbows.
And why would the guard ride unbadged? They must have crossed the border at Marisa Pines Pass. Were they coming back from some secret mission in the south?
Han didn’t know much about military matters, but he’d thought the Highlander army was supposed to handle spats across borders. Not the Queen’s Guard, who were more like bodyguards or constables. Their natural enemies were thieves, assassins, and other city criminals who would never attack soldiers traveling in a pack.
Whoever it was, whatever their purpose, it wasn’t Han’s fight. He had no use for bluejackets. They’d killed his mother and sister, had burned them to death in a stable. They’d hunted Han relentlessly for murders he didn’t commit. He didn’t owe them anything. He told himself this while he tried to put poor dead Ginny Foster out of his mind. While he tried to ignore Captain Byrne’s body lying in the middle of the trail.
Han and Amon Byrne had had their differences, mostly over Rebecca, but Byrne the Younger had stuck up for Han when nobody else did. Corporal Byrne seemed to have scruples at a time when scruples were scarce.
Han considered the blade, thinking he should leave it with Byrne, lay it next to him or press it into his hands. It seemed to belong with him, somehow.
But if he left it there, the next traveler through the pass would just take it and sell it in the markets.
I should take this to lytling Byrne, Han thought. He should have it—and the ring—along with the story of how his father had died.
Carefully, he slipped the gold ring off Byrne’s finger and tucked it into his purse.
That done, Han knew he’d better be on his way. He felt exposed, perched on high ground as he was. Danger thickened the air in the pass, making it hard to breathe.
But somehow it didn’t seem right to leave without some sort of ceremony.
Captain Byrne had died fighting. What did a person do for a soldier? After a moment’s thought, Han drew his own knife and put it between the dead man’s hands, the hilt pointing toward his head. He wasn’t much for praying, but he bowed his head over the body and commended Captain Byrne to the Maker and the Lady.
Han carried the sword back to Ragger, who was looking on disapprovingly. He slid the blade into his saddle boot next to his longbow and mounted up, thinking his home country was shaping up to be more dangersome than foreign places had ever been.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
Raisa found her hiding place at daybreak in a small ravine a few hundred yards off the main trail down into Marisa Pines Camp. There the trail ran over solid rock, and the wind had swept it clean of snow, making it hard for anyone following to tell where she’d turned off. After she stowed Gillen’s gelding at the head of the ravine, she went back with a pine bough and did her best to brush away the tracks leading away from the road.
She fed and watered the horse, but left him saddled and ready to ride. She built a fire under an overhang, and huddled next to it, eating Gillen’s hardtack and sausage.
This might be your last meal, she thought, recalling all the elaborate banquets she’d attended at Fellsmarch Castle.
In fact, she was ravenous, and it tasted wonderful. She loved eating while breathing in the cold clear air, and being alive. She’d never really appreciated it before.
She’d learned so much in the past year—would it all go to waste now?
I’m only sixteen, she thought. I’ve got plans.
If she died in the mountains, Han Alister would never know what had happened to her.
And Amon. He was still alive—he had to be. She could feel energy singing along the connection between them. He would know she was in danger. He’d be frantic to get to her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry about your father. Stay alive and hurry home. I need you more than ever now.”
It was tempting to press on when safety seemed within her grasp. Marisa Pines Camp was an easy day’s ride away, if the weather stayed clear. She was tempted to make a run for it, to trust that she could evade her would-be assassins a little while longer.
But they would be waiting for her somewhere along the trail. They knew exactly where she was going, and they would bend all their efforts toward preventing her safe arrival. It was a bright sunny winter day. Everywhere she went she left tracks over the virgin snow cover. Each time she broke out of the trees she’d be visible for miles, a dark spot on white. Better to wait for the cover of darkness and then proceed cautiously, creeping off-trail whenever she could. Perhaps one person, alone in the dark, could slide through the traps they’d no doubt laid for her.
Sometimes inaction demanded more strength from a person than action.
She tried to look ahead, tried to convince herself she would make it to safety, that all of this struggle would not be in vain. She was determined to stay alive, to take vengeance on those who had murdered Edon Byrne. Who had tried their best to murder her.
At Marisa Pines, she could finally rest under the protection of the clans, and properly mourn those who had paid for her passage with their lives. Once there, she could send word to her mother the queen about the attack in the pass and the loss of her captain.
It was a grave attack on the queen’s authority. Maybe it would wake Queen Marianna to the real dangers circling the Gray Wolf throne. Perhaps Marianna would be willing to travel to Demonai Camp, as Elena had suggested, and allow clan healers to verify whether the High Wizard was still bound to the queen. They could determine how much damage Gavan Bayar had done and find a way to undo it.
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.”
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.
“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.
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 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.