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.”