Chapter 13: Nessa's Gossip

The slate wolf on the beach did not run when we came down the path. It watched us the whole way, and when we were maybe fifty yards off it turned and walked into the surf and swam out past the point, and the spiral it had left behind broke up under the first wave.

By the time Ronan got down to the sand with four warriors behind him there was nothing to see but wet shingle and a dead hare with its throat cut.

"Third one this week," he said, straightening up. "Somebody is counting us."

"Somebody is drawing spirals on your beach," I said. "That is the part I would be worrying about."

He looked at me, and there was something in his pale green eyes that I could not read, and then he turned and went back up to the house without another word.

The whole pack was in a state about the rogues. Warriors went out on the ridge twice a day and came back with nothing. The boats went out late and came back early. Two of the young wolves asked Maeve whether they should send their mothers inland, and Maeve said no in a voice that ended the conversation.

I spent the afternoon in the sickroom with the door open so I could hear the house. That is how I came to hear Nessa.

She was in the kitchen with two of the boatmen, and she was talking the way she always talked, which is to say she was talking about everything at once, and I was only half listening until she said the word mate.

"...well, she never came, did she," Nessa was saying. "That is what I heard. The Council said they had found a mate for the Alpha and she was coming at the end of the month, and the end of the month came and went and there was no woman at the gate."

"Maybe she changed her mind," said one of the boatmen. "I would."

"Nobody changes their mind about an Alpha." Nessa's voice went lower, the way it did when she was enjoying herself. "But here is the thing. I was in the hall when the letter came. I was bringing in the peat. And Maeve read it out to the Alpha, and she read out the name and the pack and the day she would arrive, and the Alpha listened to the whole thing and then he said, I have never heard of this woman in my life."

The boatman laughed. "That is what a man says."

"No, but he said it strange. He said it like he was reading out a word in a language he did not know. And then he went out and stood on the step for a long time, and when he came back in his face was the colour of the sand." There was a pause. "And two weeks after that he was sick."

I put down my pestle.

"You have a good memory, Nessa," I said, from the sickroom door.

She jumped about a foot. "I did not know you were listening."

"I was not listening. I was in the next room with the door open and you have a voice like a bell." I came and sat down at the kitchen table. "Tell me again about the letter. The one that named the mate. Did anyone keep it?"

"Maeve keeps all the letters. She has a box in her room."

"And the name in the letter. Do you remember it?"

Nessa screwed up her face. "It was not a name I knew. It was something like Elara. Or Elena. It had an L in it."

Elara. The name Ronan had said in the dark of his own room with his eyes shut. The woman in the green scarf.

"Was there anything else in the letter?" I asked. "Anything about where she came from, or what pack she belonged to?"

"That is the strange thing." Nessa leaned her elbows on the table. "There was no pack. Maeve read out the whole letter and there was no pack name at all. Just the woman's name and the day. And the boatman who brought the letter said the boat had come from the south, but the letter had a Council seal on it, and the Council is in the north." She shrugged. "I thought it was odd at the time. But everything about the Council is odd."

I sat there with my hands around a cup of cold tea and I thought about it.

A mate bond is a thing that happens between two wolves. It is not arranged. That is the whole of it. The Council can approve a bond and record it and bless it, but it cannot make one, and every wolf on this coast knows that the same way they know the tide comes in. When a wolf finds their mate, it is the scent and the first touch and the mark, and there is no letter and there is no boat from the south and there is no date on which the mate is due to arrive.

The Council had sent Ronan a letter naming a mate who had not come, from a pack that had no name, and two weeks later he was sick. And the woman who did come, in the spring, in a green scarf, had not been named in any letter at all. She had arrived with Lorcan and left before supper and left a mark on his chest that had opened in the night and bled black.

"Fiadh?" Nessa said. "Your tea is cold."

"I know." I stood up. "Where is Maeve now?"

"Out on the pier. She went to meet the boat."

I went up the stairs and down the corridor to Maeve's door. It was not locked. I stood in the doorway and looked at the room, and there on the chest of drawers by the window was a wooden box with a brass clasp.

I am a healer, I told myself. I do not go through other people's letters.

I went through the letters.

There were eleven of them in the box, and I read them fast, standing by the window with one ear on the stairs. Nine were about harvest tithes and border patrols. One was from Lorcan, dated the spring, and it said nothing I could use. And the tenth was the letter.

It was short. It was written in a clerk's neat hand, and it said that the Council had selected a mate for the Alpha of the Blackthorn Pack, that the wolf's name was Elara and that she would arrive on the fourteenth, and that the Alpha should prepare the house for her coming, and that the bond would be confirmed by the Council's envoy on arrival. At the bottom there was the seal, and under the seal, in a different hand, small and neat and quite distinct, someone had written a single line.

The line said: this matter is to be held.

I stood very still in Maeve's room with the letter in my hand and the sea going outside, and the pull in my chest turned over and went cold.

I had read that line before. Three days ago, in the front room, when Eamon the clerk told me there was a page missing from my mother's file and a line in the margin that said the matter was to be held.

Someone had written the same five words on two different papers twenty years apart.

The door opened behind me.