Chapter 15: Padraig's Warning

I did not get up to Ronan's room.

I got as far as the bottom of the stairs, and then Padraig came out of the sickroom with my pot of poisoned tea in his hands and his old face grey, and he said, "Not here. Not in the house. Come out to the boats."

So I followed him out. The night was clear and cold and the harbour was a black sheet with the lights of the boats in it, and we stood on the slip with our collars up and the water slapping at the stones.

"You were right about the tea," he said. "I smelled it myself. There is wolfsbane in it, and not a little. A week of that in a sick man and he would not have the strength to climb the stairs."

"I know what wolfsbane does, Padraig. I am a healer."

"You are a healer with a debt and no pack and a Council writ hanging over your head, and you are standing in the middle of a thing you do not understand." He turned to face me. "I have been in this pack for forty years. I know every wolf in that house by the sound of their feet on the flags. And I am telling you now, as plain as I can, that you should get on the morning boat and go."

I looked at him. The wind was coming off the water and it had his white beard flat against his chest.

"You know something," I said.

"I know that a healer who starts asking about blood rituals does not stay long in a pack that has one." He said it quietly. "I told you that in the sickroom and I will tell you again. You have been here a week and you have found a false bond and poisoned tea and a spiral drawn on the sand. That is a great deal of finding for a week, and the people who put those things there will have noticed you by now."

"Then tell me what you know and I will stop asking."

"I cannot."

"Cannot or will not?"

Padraig was quiet for a moment. The water slapped at the stones and somewhere out in the dark a gull was quarrelling with another gull.

"Both," he said. "If I tell you what I know, you will go to the Alpha with it, and then the Alpha will go to Lorcan, and Lorcan will know that I have been talking. And I have a granddaughter in a pack up the coast, and she is fourteen, and if I am struck off the roll of healers she has no one to train her." He rubbed his face with one hand. "That is the whole of my courage, girl. It is a small thing and I am not proud of it."

I thought about my mother's name and the line about the debtor's children and the Council's schools. I thought about Nessa's brother and his debt.

"You are not the only one with a small courage," I said.

"No." He looked at me. "But there is a difference between us. You do not have to stay. You came here on a contract and the contract has a number missing, and a woman with no pack can walk away from a contract that was never properly written. You could be in Galway by tomorrow night with your tins and your life."

"And Ronan?"

Padraig did not answer that.

"Padraig. The false bond. How long has he got?"

He looked out at the boats for a long time.

"I have seen one before," he said. "Forty years ago, up the coast. He lasted four months from the day the strength started going. Ronan has been going since the spring. That is six months." He turned to me. "I do not know why he is still standing. I do not know what is holding him up. But whatever it is, it will not hold him much longer, and when it goes he will go fast, and you do not want to be standing next to him when he does."

I went cold from the neck down.

"That is a terrible thing to say."

"It is a true thing to say. I am an old man and I have stopped dressing things up." He turned away. "Go home, healer. Go while you can still go of your own accord. If you stay, the Council will take you, and then you will not be a healer at all, you will be a name in a file with a page missing."

He walked back up the slip and left me standing there.

I did not go up to the house straight away. I went along the harbour wall to the end of the pier, and I stood in front of the green door, and I looked at it for a while.

There was a light in the window. There was a cat sitting on the step, black and wet and enormous, and it looked at me and did not move.

I knocked.

Nobody came. I knocked again, harder, and the cat got up and went under the wall, and after a long moment I heard a chair scrape inside and a bolt draw back and the door opened on a chain.

The woman behind it was small and bent and had a face like a withered apple and eyes the colour of the sea on a grey day.

"Whatever you are selling," she said, "I do not want it."

"Padraig sent me."

"Padraig is a coward." She looked at me up and down through the gap. "Who are you?"

"Fiadh. Healer. My mother was Siobhan."

The chain rattled. She opened the door another three inches and looked at me harder, and something in her face moved, and it was not welcome.

"Siobhan," she said. "Well. That is a name I have not heard in a long time." She looked past me along the pier, both ways, and then she said, "You had better come in. And if anyone asks, you came about a bad back."

I stepped over the threshold into a small warm room full of paper. There were shelves on every wall and boxes stacked on the floor and a desk by the window with a lamp on it and a ledger open and a pen laid across the page, and the whole room smelled of dust and ink and something older.

The woman shut the door and put the chain back on and turned round.

"My name is Eithne," she said. "I was clerk to the Council for thirty years, and I keep copies of everything, and I know your mother's name because it was on a file I filed myself." She sat down slowly in the chair behind the desk. "What do you want to know?"

"Everything," I said. "But I will start with the line at the bottom of the page that says this matter is to be held."

Eithne went very still. Her hand, resting on the desk, closed slowly into a fist.

"Who told you about that line?" she said.