Chapter 105: The Third Love Scene

He had his hands on my face and his forehead against mine and he was breathing hard and so was I.

"I am angry with you," I said.

"I know."

"You voted with them."

"I know." His hands did not move. "And I have spent the last hour sitting on the stairs trying to work out whether I was right and I do not know. I do not know if I was right and I do not know if I was a coward and I have not got the time to work it out, because you are leaving at noon."

I looked at him.

"You should have told me," I said.

"I should have told you. I should have said a word in your ear before she asked and I did not because I did not know what I was going to say until I said it." His thumb moved on my cheek. "And if I had voted against it we would have had tonight and lost the north. And I have been losing things all year and I am tired of it."

I put my hands on his chest.

"I am not a thing to be kept," I said. "I am not a seat and I am not a territory and I am not a claim. I am a healer with a case of tins and a stone in my pocket and a silver mark coming at dawn."

"I know what you are." He looked at me. "You are the wolf who walked into my house on a wet night and knelt down in the shallows and told me to let go of your wrist."

I kissed him.

It was not a gentle kiss. There was anger in it and there was fear and there was a week of a door shutting and opening between us, and he answered it the same way and his hands came off my face and went into my hair and round my back.

We did not get to the bed.

We got about as far as the wall by the window and that was where it happened, and it was not like the bothy and it was not like the rented room in the Council town and it was not like the night after the slip. There was no tenderness in it at first. There was a great deal of holding on and a great deal of saying each other's names in a way that was not quite a question, and at one point I got my hand flat on his chest over the silver mark and said, you voted with them, and he said, I know, and I said, do not do it again, and he said, I will not.

And then it went slower.

It went slower and it went quieter and he carried me to the bed and put me down on it and stood over me in the dark for a moment.

"Fiadh," he said.

"What?"

"I am going to say a thing and I want you to hear it and I do not want you to argue with it." He got onto the bed beside me. "I love you. I have loved you since the beach and I will love you when you are in the north and I am in this house and there is a whole coast between us. And if the north takes you and I never see you again, I will still be standing in this house loving you and there is nothing that anybody can do about it."

I lay on the bed in the dark.

"That is the worst thing anyone has ever said to me," I said.

"It is the truest thing I have ever said."

I pulled him down.

The second half of the night was different. It was slow and it was quiet and there was a great deal of touching that had nothing to do with wanting and everything to do with memorising. He traced the silver mark over my heart with his finger and then he put his mouth on it. I put my hands in his ginger hair and pulled his head up and looked at his face in the dark and tried to remember it.

At some point I fell asleep.

I woke at first light with his arm across me and his breath in my hair and the stone in my coat pocket, and the stone was cold.

Very cold.

I sat up.

Ronan woke.

"What is it?"

"The stone." I got it out of my coat and held it in my palm. It was grey and it was smooth and the hole in the middle of it was black and there was nothing in it.

"The thread has gone," I said.

"Gone where?"

I put my hand on my chest.

There was nothing there either. The pull that had been between us since the bothy was still there and the silver mark was still there and the wolf in my head was still there, but under all of it, in the bottom of me, there was a cold place that had not been there before.

"It is in me," I said. "The thread has gone out of the stone and into me and it is at the bottom of my chest and it is cold."

Ronan sat up.

"Fiadh."

"It is not doing anything yet. It is sitting there." I looked at him. "It has been in the stone for a week and it has been cold and now it has gone into me and it is cold and it is quiet."

The door opened and Padraig came in with a lamp in his hand.

"Healer," he said. "It is dawn. The elder is at the bottom of the stairs with the silver."

I got up off the bed.

"Padraig," I said. "The thread has come out of the stone."

The old man stopped in the doorway.

"It has come out of the stone and into you," he said.

"Yes."

He put the lamp down on the table and came and put his hand on my chest and stood there for a long moment.

"It is in the bottom of you," he said. "It is not doing anything yet. It is waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"For you to be weak enough." He took his hand away. "You have got fourteen days to find the proof and get that mark off. And you have got a false bond sitting in the bottom of your chest that is going to start working on you the moment you are too tired to hold it."

I stood in the middle of my own room.

"Then I had better not get tired," I said.

Downstairs, Ilsa's voice came up the stairwell.

"Healer," she called. "It is dawn. Come down."