“Will you show her, too?” Rom asked after a moment.

“Of cour—” Rae began, thinking he meant Ness, but her brother was tapping her pocket. “Oh,” she said.

“Yes.” Rom nodded.

Folded in her pocket was the parchment delivered by the bald-pated man at the market.

My dearest friend Rae, may this letter find you and your shepherd family in good fortune.… Soon I will travel to learn the ways of all the realm’s people, those who live close to the sea, those who live close to the land.… I will draw near your mountains in autumn.…

“Alba… the apprentice…” Shaking her head, Rae corrected herself. “The king, when she visits, may not have time for these writings.”

Rom shook his head gently. “I think she will. For you she will.”

Rae picked up her reed. In green embrace, she wrote. Rom, quiet, let his gaze drift high into the mountains, and Rae, seeing the way his eyes lingered on the distant cliffs, finally asked a question she had long been wondering.

“Do you remember?” she said hesitantly.

Rom, lowering his eyes, glanced at Rae, uncertain.

“Before,” she said. “Do you remember being a wolf?” Her hand swept over the land as though all the wilderness was contained in wolf.

He nodded. “Yes.” The yes carried a trace of shyness.

“What was it like?”

He hesitated, searching for words. Rae, waiting, watched a woodpecker flit from bough to bough in the nearby stand of trees. Dark-feathered, only its shimmering movement and its knocking, now and again, gave away its presence in the branches.

“Like sleeping,” he said at last. “Like dreaming.”

She nodded, thinking about what it would be like to live as a dream—like a shadow in shadows. Beside her, Rom had turned his face again to the mountains, and it seemed to her that his expression reflected the silent passing of clouds. He surprised her a moment later when he spoke again.

“Do you remember,” he said, speaking slowly, considering each word as he came to it, “the stones? The tall stones around the city?”

“The wall?”

“Wall. Yes. The wall around the city. Each word I learn feels like a stone like that. A wall between me and the wolf I was. The more words I learn, the… less I can feel as I did. But when you sing,” he said, meeting her eyes, “there’s no wall. Being a wolf—it’s like when you sing.”

“When I sing?” She did not understand.

“In songs…” He was still searching for words. “The feeling when I listen—maybe for you, too, when you sing them—it’s like being there.” He nodded vaguely at all the land before them, scrubby pines and mica-flecked stones and silver-swept fields. “In there.”

Rae wondered at this. She thought of Mop bellowing his songs in the field, telling her he wanted them to sound as easeful as the skylarks’; she thought of how his songs, when he used to sing them, seemed part of the land. I sing to wonder, he’d said. To share that wonder. She supposed his singing, and hers, too, was a little like dreaming—and like inviting someone to dream alongside you—but she didn’t think it could be just like being a wolf.