Chapter 16: The Scent at the Door

Eithne did not answer my question. She got up and went to the shelf behind her desk and pulled down a box tied with string, and her hands were not steady on the knot.

"I am going to tell you something," she said, "and then you are going to leave this house and not come back for three days. Do you understand?"

"No."

"Good. You are not a fool, then." She set the box on the desk. "The line at the bottom of the page is not a Council line. It is not written by any clerk and it is not in any rule book. It is put there by one hand, on certain papers, and that hand belongs to a man who has been sitting on the Council for forty years and who has never once been challenged for his seat."

"Soren," I said.

Eithne's head came up. "Where did you hear that name?"

"I have not heard it. I guessed. There is a master behind Lorcan and Lorcan is too careful to be the top of anything." I sat down in the chair opposite her without being asked. "Eithne. What is in that box?"

"My copies." She untied the string. "Thirty years of copies, and I took them home because I did not trust the archive, and I was right not to. Every paper that had that line at the bottom of it went missing from the file within a year. I have eleven of them." She lifted the lid. "Your mother's is the oldest."

I reached for the papers and she put her hand flat on them.

"Three days," she said. "You do not come back for three days, and when you do, you come at night, and you come by the harbour wall and not the street. If a grey car comes to this pier in the next three days I will know it was you who brought it, and I will burn the box and I will not open my door to you again."

"Three days," I said.

She took her hand away.

I read my mother's file standing up at Eithne's desk with the lamp pulled close, and it took me the better part of an hour because the hand was old and cramped and the paper had gone soft at the folds.

It said that Siobhan, healer, of no fixed pack, had been granted a licence to practise in the western territories in the year of my birth. It said that in the same year she had petitioned the Council for leave to travel to the northern isles, and that the petition had been refused. It said that three years later she had been summoned to appear before the Council on a matter concerning a child, and that the summons had been answered and the matter had been heard in private. And at the bottom of it, in the small neat hand that was not a clerk's, was the line.

This matter is to be held.

There was no mention of a debt anywhere in the file. Not one word.

I looked up. Eithne was watching me from her chair with her hands folded.

"There is no debt in this," I said. "There is a licence and a petition and a summons about a child. Where is the debt?"

"That is the other thing I have been wanting to tell you," Eithne said. "There is no debt, healer. There never was. I filed every paper your mother ever sent to the Council and there is not one line in any of them that mentions money owed. The debt was put on you after she died, by the same hand that writes the line at the bottom of the page, and it was put on you because a debt is a very good way of owning a person without anyone having to explain why."

I stood there in the little room with the papers in my hand and the lamp hissing and the sea going on outside, and I felt the ground move under me.

The door of the pack house. The tray of tea. My mother's file with no debt in it. Three months of service to a pack I had never heard of, in settlement of a debt that did not exist.

The clock on Eithne's shelf struck ten. I put the papers back in the box and Eithne tied the string and I thanked her and I went out, and the cat was back on the step and it watched me go up the pier without moving.

I walked back to the pack house along the harbour wall with my mind going like a mill wheel, and I was maybe twenty yards from the front door when I stopped.

The door was open. Ronan was standing in it in his shirtsleeves with the cold coming in around him, and he was not looking at me. He was looking past me, down the road toward the pines, and his whole body had gone into a shape I had not seen before. His shoulders had come forward. His head had dropped. His hands at his sides were curling.

And under his skin, along his arms, something moved.

It was quick. A ripple, a shifting of the bones, and the line of his jaw changed and the hair on the back of his hands thickened and darkened, and for about two seconds there was a wolf standing in the doorway in a torn shirt. Then Ronan made a sound low in his chest and shut his eyes and the ripple went backward, and by the time I reached him he was a man again, white and shaking and holding the door frame with both hands.

"Inside," I said. "Now."

"There is a scent." His voice had gone rough. "Down by the pines. It has been there all evening and it is not one of ours and it is not moving."

"Inside, Ronan."

He let me push him in. I got the door shut and the bolt across and then I turned on him.

"That was a half shift," I said. "You nearly went over in your own doorway. Do you know what happens if you go over now? You have not got the strength to hold a full shift for ten minutes, and the wolf will take what it wants because you cannot hold it back, and then you will be lying on the floor of this hall in pieces and I will be the one who has to explain it to your pack."

"I know."

"Do you? Because you stood in the doorway like a fool and let it come over you."

Ronan pushed himself off the frame. He was still shaking. He looked at me and his pale green eyes were bright and hard and there was something in them I had not seen there before, something worn thin and close to breaking.

"I stood in the doorway," he said, "because the last time that scent came to my house, it took my strength and my pack and my name, and I will be burned before I let it take my healer too."

He walked past me up the stairs with one hand on the rail and did not look back.

I stood in the hall with my coat still on and listened to his door close.

Then I went to the kitchen and poured myself a cup of water and drank it, and looked out of the window at the pines, and there was nothing there but dark trees and the wind.