Chapter 11: Lorcan's First Visit

The green door at the end of the pier was still on my mind when Lorcan came back, and he came back the next morning, which was sooner than the three days he had given me and therefore exactly what I should have expected.

He brought a physician with him. She was a small neat woman named Agnes with grey hair pinned at the back and a leather roll of instruments under her arm, and she had the flat careful eyes of someone who has been told what to find before she starts looking.

"Good morning," Lorcan said, and set his grey coat on the arm of the same chair as before. "I hope you will forgive the early call. This is Agnes, a physician of the Council. She has been tending Council wolves for twenty years and she is very good. I have asked her to examine the Alpha and to take over his care."

I was in the middle of grinding yarrow in the sickroom and I came out with the pestle still in my hand.

"Take over his care," I said.

"Temporarily. Until the question of your registration is resolved." Lorcan smiled. "You must see how it looks, Fiadh. An unregistered healer treating an Alpha, with a debt hanging over her family name. It is not that I doubt your skill. It is that the Council cannot be seen to permit it. If something were to happen to Ronan while he was in your hands, the pack would never forgive the Council for allowing it, and the Council would never forgive me."

Ronan was in the doorway of the kitchen with his sleeves rolled and his arms folded, and his face was the face of a man watching a bill being written out in front of him.

"Agnes can examine me," he said. "She cannot take over my care."

"Alpha," Lorcan said, and his voice was gentle, "you are not a physician. You cannot know what is best for you."

"I know what has been done to me so far, and none of it has helped."

Agnes stepped forward then. She did not smile. She looked at Ronan the way a smith looks at a shoe.

"Roll up your sleeve," she said.

He did not move for a moment. Then he rolled up his sleeve, and Agnes crossed the room and took his forearm in her hands and turned it to the light, and I watched her face as she saw the roots under his skin.

She was good. I will give her that. She did not gasp and she did not look at Lorcan. She turned his arm this way and that and pressed the marks with her thumb, and then she said, "The other one. On your chest. I will need to see it."

So we all trooped into the front room and Ronan took his shirt off and stood in the middle of it with the bandage across his chest, and Agnes unwound the bandage and looked at the open centre of the mark and the black crust at the edges, and this time she did look at Lorcan.

"Envoy," she said. "A word."

They went out into the hall. I heard their voices, low, and I heard Agnes say something sharp and Lorcan answer something smooth, and then the front door opened and shut and Agnes was gone and Lorcan came back in alone.

"Agnes will file her report with the Council," he said. "She agrees with your diagnosis, Fiadh. She used different words, but the substance was the same. She also agrees that the condition is beyond her." He sat down in the chair by the fire and folded his hands. "So. You keep the patient. But I will require a written account of your treatment every three days, delivered to me at the grey house, and I will require your word that you will not leave this territory without my written leave. And I will require your word that you will not speak of what you have found to anyone outside this pack."

"That is a great many requirements," I said.

"You are a great many problems." He said it pleasantly, as though he were paying me a compliment.

"And if I refuse?"

"Then I will be obliged to consider the second contract binding as of this morning, and I will take you into Council custody for the duration of the investigation into the Alpha's condition, and your patient will be left without a healer, and Padraig will be asked to take over his care." Lorcan looked at Padraig, who was standing by the window with his arms folded. "Padraig. Would you be willing?"

Padraig did not answer. That was an answer.

"You see," Lorcan said, turning back to me. "It is not a punishment. It is simply the only arrangement that keeps everyone in their proper place. You keep your patient. I keep my records. The Council is satisfied. Nobody has to be taken into custody." He took a pen out of his coat. "Your word, Fiadh. That is all I need."

The room was very quiet. Ronan had not put his shirt back on and he was standing there with the bandage in his hand and the mark showing, and I saw him look at me, and I saw him shake his head, once, very slightly.

I thought about the green door at the end of the pier and the woman behind it with thirty years of copies. I thought about my mother's missing page. I thought about the word custody and what it would mean for a healer with no pack and no name.

"I will give you my word that I will not leave the territory while the Alpha is in my care," I said. "I will give you my written account every three days. I will not give you my silence."

Lorcan's pen stopped.

"That is not what I asked for."

"I know." I put the pestle down on the table. "You asked for my silence because there is something you do not want said. I am telling you now that I will not say it to anyone outside this pack, because a healer does not gossip about her patient. But I will not promise you a closed mouth, Envoy. I have seen men like you before, in mining towns and fishing towns and one very bad winter in the north, and the ones who ask for silence are always the ones with something to hide."

Lorcan looked at me for a long moment. Then he put his pen away and stood and picked up his coat.

"Very well," he said. "I will take what you have offered and I will note that you refused the rest." He put the coat on. "You should know, Fiadh, that I have been patient with you because I admire your work. But patience is a resource, and I have a great deal of territory to look after, and I do not spend it twice on the same wolf." He went to the door. "The first report is due on Friday. Do not be late."

The car went down the road. Ronan put his shirt on. Padraig let out a breath that he had clearly been holding since Agnes arrived.

"Well," Padraig said. "That is the first time in nine years I have seen anyone hand Lorcan his own pen back."

I picked up my pestle and went into the sickroom and shut the door. My hands were shaking and I put them flat on the shelf and waited for it to pass.

Through the window, faint and far off, I heard a wolf howl from the north side of the bay. Then another, further out, and then a third that was not a wolf at all but something in between, a long ugly sound that rose and fell and did not belong on this coast.

Padraig opened the sickroom door. His face had changed.

"Rogues," he said. "Three of them, on the north ridge, and they are not running. They are standing there howling at the house."