Chapter 147: Maeve's Escape

I went down to the cellar myself.

The door was open and the guard was on the floor with a lump on his head the size of an egg and there was a rope in the corner that had been cut and a bar on the window that had been taken out.

"Two Ravenscar wolves," the guard said, from the floor. "They came in through the window and they had a bar and a rope and they cut the rope and they took her out the same way."

"Did she say anything?"

"She said a thing to the wolf in front of her." The guard put his hand on his head. "She said, take me to the seat. And he said, the old man is in a cell. And she said, not that seat. The other one."

I stood in the cellar.

"Ronan," I said. "The house of the north."

"He has gone there," Ronan said. "Maeve has gone to the house of the north and she has gone to the cellar and she has gone to the place where the pact is signed."

I went up the cellar stair two at a time.

"How long?" I said.

"An hour. Maybe two."

"Then we go now."

We went out of the northern seat at nine in the morning with the nine and the fourteen and the seven and the twelve and the whole of the square behind us.

The house of the north was a mile up the hill and we went up the road at a run.

It was a grey morning and the road was wet and the whole of the hill was quiet. There were no wolves on the wall and no wolves at the gate and the front door was open.

"Fiadh," Ronan said. "The door is open."

"I see it."

We went in.

The hall was empty. The corridor was empty. The room at the top of the house was empty and there was a bed in it and a chair and a window that did not open and the woman in the bed was gone.

And the cellar door at the bottom of the stairs was open and there was a light coming up from it.

We went down.

The cellar was a stone room with a low roof and a floor of packed earth and there were shelves on the walls and a lamp on a hook and a wolf standing in the middle of it with a lantern in her hand.

Maeve.

She was in her coat and her boots and her copper curls were loose and she had a knife in her belt and she was standing over the place where the floor had been broken open.

There was a grave in the cellar. It was a grave that had been opened with a shovel and there was a body in it and the body had been wrapped in cloth and it had been there a long time.

"I found her," Maeve said.

I came down the last step.

"Maeve."

"I found her and I have been sitting here for an hour with her and I have been thinking." Maeve looked at me. "You are going to make a mark in this cellar and break the pact."

"Yes."

"And it will take something from you that the books do not name."

"Yes."

Maeve looked at the grave.

"I have been a fool," she said. "I have been a fool since the spring and I have done a great many things I am ashamed of and I have been trying to work out how to make them right."

"Maeve."

"There is a thing I can do," she said. "There is a thing I can do that nobody else in this world can do and it is the only thing I have left."

"What?"

Maeve put the lantern down on the floor.

"I can hold her," she said. "Your grandmother. I can hold her while you make the mark."

I stood in the cellar.

"Maeve," I said. "You have been in a cell for two days and you have escaped with the help of two Ravenscar wolves and you have ridden a horse up a hill and you have dug a grave open with a shovel and you are standing in a cellar at nine in the morning telling me you want to hold my grandmother's body while I break a pact."

"I am."

"Why?"

Maeve looked at me.

"Because I have been Beta of the Blackthorn Pack for nine years," she said. "And I have wanted the seat since before Ronan took it and I have done a great many things I am ashamed of and I have not once in nine years done a thing that was not for the pack." She looked at the grave. "And there is a woman in that grave who was kept in a room at the top of this house for seventy years and died in a cellar and nobody ever came for her. And I can hold her while her granddaughter says her name."

The cellar was quiet.

"Right then," I said. "Hold her."

Maeve knelt down beside the grave and put her hands under the cloth and lifted.

I put my hand on the floor of the cellar where the pact had been signed and I made the mark.

I do not know how to describe it. I put my hand flat on the earth and I said my own name and my mother's name and my grandmother's name and the name of the founder who signed the pact two hundred years ago, and I said the old words that Padraig had taught me, and the mark came up out of my own hand and it went into the earth and it went down.

The floor of the cellar went warm.

And then the whole of it went white.

I do not remember the next part. I remember the light and I remember the sound of Maeve saying something and I remember Ronan's voice in the bond, close and loud and frightened.

And then I was on my knees on the floor of the cellar with my hand still flat on the earth and there was nothing under it at all.

The pact was gone.

I could feel it. It was like a rope that had been round a wolf's neck for two hundred years and had suddenly gone slack.

I sat back on my heels.

And the cellar was full of wolves.

Ronan was there and Padraig was there and the nine and the fourteen and the seven and the twelve. And Maeve was kneeling beside the grave with her arms round a bundle of cloth and her face wet.

"Fiadh," Ronan said. "Fiadh, look at me."

"I am here."

"Your hair."

I put my hand up.

It came away with gold on it.

I looked down.

My hair had been golden blonde since the day I was born and it had been the colour of the founder's line. And now it was white.