Chapter 12: A Wolf Who Won't Speak

The rogues on the north ridge did not come down. They stood on the skyline until the light went, three shapes against the grey, and twice more that ugly half howl came across the water. Then they were gone, and the warriors who went up to meet them found nothing but tracks in the wet heather and a dead hare laid out on a stone with its throat cut clean.

Ronan did not sleep that night. I know because I did not either, and the pull in my chest kept me company, steady as a clock.

By the third morning I had had enough of the house. I told Maeve I was going to gather gorse and thyme on the cliffs, and I took my basket and walked north along the headland with the wind coming off the Atlantic and the gulls screaming over the rocks.

The cliff path is a good place to think. There is nothing up there but grass and stone and the sea going on and on, and the noise of it fills your head so full that you can hear yourself inside it.

I sat down on a flat rock with my basket beside me and put my hands on my knees.

I am twenty eight years old, I said to myself. I have been in nine packs and I have never once shifted. Not on a full moon. Not in a fight. Not when a man in a mining town put a knife in my arm and I sewed it up myself in a cold room.

Every wolf shifts. That is the first thing a wolf learns. The first shift comes with the first blood, or a year or two after, and after that the wolf is there under the skin, waiting. You feel it in your chest when the moon is full. You hear it in the back of your head when you are angry.

I had never felt any of it. Not once.

I closed my eyes and reached inward, the way my mother taught me before she gave up teaching me. Down past the noise of the wind, down past the cold, down into the dark of me where the wolf is supposed to be.

Nothing.

It was not that there was a wolf and it would not answer. It was that there was nothing there at all. A clean empty room with the door shut. I called into the dark and the calling came back to me with nothing on it.

I opened my eyes. A gull came down, took a look at me and went away again.

"Right then," I said, out loud, because my mouth says that when my mind is running. "Think, Fiadh."

I had heard of late bloomers. Everyone had. A wolf who does not shift until twenty five, or thirty, and then it comes all at once and the old women say better late than never. But a late bloomer still feels the wolf. They have the dreams. They have the pull of the moon. They wake up with mud on their feet and no memory of how it got there.

I had none of it. Not the dreams. Not the moon. Not the mud.

I picked up my basket and walked on, and my mind worried at it the way a tongue worries at a loose tooth.

There was a thing I had not thought about in years. When I was small, maybe six or seven, my mother took me to a woman in a cottage up a glen, a woman with grey hair and a face like a closed gate. I remember the cottage because it smelled of peat and something sweet and wrong, and I remember the woman looking at me for a long time before she and my mother had a conversation in the next room with the door shut. I remember the tea she gave me. It was bitter and my mother made me drink all of it, and she watched me swallow every drop with an expression I could not read.

After that we moved. Four times in two years, from that glen to a town on the east coast to a rented room above a bakery and then north, and my mother never spoke of the woman again.

I stopped on the path. The wind pushed at my back.

A suppression, said a small cold voice in my head. There is a thing healers do when a wolf is too dangerous or too young or too ill. The old ones call it the quiet. It is done with tea and words and a mark on the skin, and it does not kill the wolf. It puts the wolf to sleep and keeps it asleep, and it has to be renewed every few years or the wolf will wake on its own.

My mother was a healer. My mother made me drink bitter tea in a strange woman's cottage and then moved me four times in two years.

I put my hand over my own chest. Under my palm my heart was going fast, and under my heart there was nothing, as there had always been nothing.

"Fiadh!"

I turned. Nessa was coming up the cliff path with her skirts held up and her cheeks red.

"Maeve said you were gathering thyme," she said, out of breath. "I said I would help. You have not gathered any thyme."

"I was thinking."

"About what?"

I looked at her. She was twenty two and she had freckles and hazel eyes and she could not keep a secret to save her life, and she was the only wolf in that house who had been kind to me without wanting something.

"Nessa. When you were small, did you ever hear of a thing called the quiet?"

Her face changed. It was quick, a flicker, gone before it settled, but I saw it.

"Where did you hear that?"

"Somewhere. Why?"

"It is an old thing. My grandmother told me about it once, when I asked her why the wolf in my chest was so loud." Nessa sat down on the flat rock and hugged her knees. "She said that when a wolf is very young or very sick, sometimes a healer puts the wolf to sleep so the person can live a normal life. She said it was mostly done for wolves born wrong, or wolves who hurt people without meaning to, and that it was a mercy." She looked up at me. "Why?"

"No reason." I picked up my basket. "Help me with the thyme. Maeve will want it for supper."

We gathered thyme for an hour. The wind dried my eyes and the sun came out and went in again, and Nessa talked the whole time about the rogues on the ridge and how the warriors had found the dead hare and how Padraig had said the hare was a message, though he would not say to whom.

I let her talk. I filled my basket and said the right things, and all the while I was thinking about a cottage up a glen, and a woman with a face like a closed gate, and my mother's eyes on me while I drank every drop.

When we came back down the path there was a wolf standing on the beach below the house.

It was big, bigger than any wolf on this coast, and its fur was the colour of wet slate. It stood at the tidemark with its head up and its ears forward, and it was looking at the pack house with an attention that was not animal at all.

Nessa stopped dead. "Fiadh," she whispered. "That is not one of ours."

I knew it was not one of ours. It was standing exactly where Ronan had knelt in the shallows three mornings ago, on the same patch of sand, and beside it in the wet shingle someone had drawn a spiral with a stick, and the tide had not yet reached it.