The wolf stood quietly, his ears flicking back and forth, his nose quivering.

“Rae?” A shout came through the trees. “Rae!”

At the noise, the wolf turned, ears flattening against his head.

“It’s just Ness,” Rae said quietly, hoping the softness of her voice would stop the wolf from bolting away. “She’s probably gathered all the greens she needs.”

The shout came again. “Rae!”

Rae wondered briefly at the sharpness of Nessa’s tone, but worried her own raised voice would scare the creature, she could not bring herself to answer.

“She’ll just be going back to the house; she knows I’ll follow,” she told the wolf in still-gentle tones. He sniffed in the direction of the shouts, but he did not run.

Nessa did not call again.

Rae and the wolf remained apart, a scattering of trees between them. Rae, settling herself against a trunk, morels still tucked in her lap, was happy watching the wolf, watching the light shifting on his fur. She wondered at what she thought she had seen, the form of a boy, and thought how forest shadows sometimes played with imagination, how they sometimes made things seem as they were not. She looked again, though, trying to see through the gold-and-silver-flecked hide: When he moved, his fur showed the structure of wolf muscle and sinew and bone. She could see nothing not wolf beneath.

The wolf settled himself, sitting first on his hindquarters, still alert, then slowly lowering himself until he lay with raised head. They sat this way for a while. Rae felt content in his company.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered after a time. “About the stones, I’m sorry. I didn’t want… but the sheep… and Mop, I worried—”

As she began speaking, the wolf seemed to be listening, but then, without warning, he startled, leaping to his feet. Rae, disconcerted, clambered up, a few morels tumbling from her apron, thinking she had somehow unsettled him. But no, it wasn’t she who’d made him jump.

Ears, torso, and tail tensed with alarm, he stood staring out, his whole body quivering, in the direction of the fields and farm.

Rae followed his gaze. He must have heard the sheep bleating, she thought, though she had heard nothing. Still, something about the way he was standing unnerved her. She stepped through the trees until she could see the field.

She spotted them immediately: Their presence, so strange beside her house, sent her heart racing.

Horses.

Even from a distance, she could make out the trio of bays, shifting and stomping and flicking their tails.

Behind her, the wolf gave a low growl. Rae found she was trembling, terrified by the unexpected appearance of the creatures. No one had ever come to their home at the edge of the mountains.

It’s Myntas come for a visit, she tried to reassure herself. Come to fetch his old mule. But even as she thought this, she knew the horses would not be his.

She scanned the field for Mop or Ness, for the riders of the horses. She saw only sheep.