Chapter 108: Lorcan's Rise

We were three hours out of the harbour when the wind turned and Oisin put the boat into a cove under the cliffs to wait it out.

I sat in the bow with my back against the mast and the silver on my wrist and the stone in my pocket and watched the coast go grey.

Padraig came and sat down beside me.

"Healer," he said. "There is a thing I have been carrying since the mill and I have not told you because there was always a trial or a reading or a war and there was never a good moment."

"There is never a good moment. Tell me now."

He put his hand into his coat and took out a folded paper.

"This is a copy," he said. "The original is in the north and it is in the keepers' house and it is the thing your mother meant when she wrote that the proof was in the keepers' house and the keepers' house was not in the north."

I looked at him.

"Padraig. What is this?"

"It is the old pact." He unfolded it. "The founders of the Council and the first keepers made an agreement two hundred years ago and it was written down and it was signed by five wolves. It is the agreement that made the Council and it is the agreement that made the binders and the ritual network."

I took the paper.

It was a copy and the copy was old and the hand was not my mother's and it was not Padraig's either.

It said that the founders of the Council and the keepers of the north had agreed that the founder's bloodline should be kept and recorded and that the keepers should keep it. It said that the Council should hold the law and the keepers should hold the blood, and that neither should hold both. It said that a wolf of the founder's blood should be recorded and not bound, and that a wolf who was bound should be recorded and not kept.

And at the bottom of it there were five signatures.

I read them.

The first was a spiral and no name. The second was a family name I did not know. The third was Dunmore. The fourth was Ravenscar.

And the fifth was a name I had seen before.

It was Cael.

"Cael signed this," I said.

"Cael's grandfather signed it," Padraig said. "Two hundred years ago. The keepers have been in the north since before the Council and they signed the pact that made it."

I sat in the bow of the boat with the paper in my hands.

"Then the keepers broke it," I said.

"The keepers broke it a hundred years later." Padraig wiped his mouth. "They kept the blood and they took the law as well. They put a false bond on a wolf of the founder's line and they have been doing it ever since."

"And the proof that I am the heir is in the keepers' house and the keepers' house is not in the north." I looked at him. "What does that mean, Padraig? Where is it?"

Padraig looked at the sea.

"There is a second house," he said. "The keepers have two. There is the house in the northern seat where the elders are and there is the house where the bloodline is kept and it is not in the north and it has never been in the north."

"Where is it?"

"The old woman in the green door at the end of the pier," Padraig said.

I stared at him.

"Eithne," I said.

"Eithne was a keeper before she was a clerk. She left the north fifty years ago and she took a copy of the bloodline record with her and she has been living at the end of that pier ever since." Padraig looked at me. "The grey door is open, Fiadh. The boy on the step said the grey door is open and I did not understand it at the time. It meant the keepers' house is in the harbour and it has been there all along."

I sat in the boat with the paper in my hands and the wind coming off the water.

"Then we go back," I said.

"We cannot go back. The Council has boats on the water and Maeve has given them the coast and the harbour is full of Council wolves."

"We do not go into the harbour. We go into the cove below the headland and we go up the rocks and we go to the end of the pier in the dark." I stood up. "Oisin. Turn the boat."

Oisin looked at me from the tiller.

"Healer," he said. "The Council has two boats on the water and one of them is between us and the headland."

"Then we go round it."

"There is a reef off the headland and the tide is going out."

"Then we go round the reef."

Oisin looked at me for a long moment.

"Right," he said. "Round the reef."

We came into the cove below the headland at midnight.

There was a light on the water to the south and another to the north and neither of them was close.

We went up the rocks in the dark with Padraig between us and Oisin in front with the lantern shaded, and we came to the harbour wall from the sea side and went over it at the place where it was low.

The town was quiet.

There were Council wolves on the pier and Council wolves on the slip and a light in the pack house on the hill.

And at the end of the pier there was a grey door and there was a light in the window.

"Go," Oisin said. "I will keep the wall."

I went along the pier in the dark with my boots in my hand and my heart going.

I got to the grey door and I put my hand on it.

It was open.

I went in.

Eithne was sitting at her desk with a lamp and a ledger and she looked up when I came in.

"Healer," she said. "You took your time."

"You knew I was coming."

"I have known since the trial. I have been sitting here for three days waiting for the door to open." She got up out of her chair. "There is a thing in this room that has been waiting for you for a hundred years and I have been keeping it since I was a girl."

She went to the shelf and took down a box.

"Your mother came to me twenty two years ago," she said. "She asked me to keep this and I have kept it. And I have been waiting for a founder wolf to come and take it off my hands."

She put the box on the desk and opened it.

There was a book in it and a seal and a letter.

I looked at the book.

It was the record of the founder's line and it went back three hundred years and on the last page there was a name.

It was mine.

And under my name there was a note in my mother's hand that said: this is the fourth. She is the heir. If I do not come back she is to be told.

And down on the pier, a bell began to ring.