Chapter 17: The Alpha's Confession

I gave him an hour. Then I went up.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed with his boots off and his shirt still on and his hands hanging between his knees, and he did not look up when I came in. The candle on the table had burned down to a stub. The window was black.

"I brought you something for the shaking," I said, and set the cup on the table. "It is not poisoned. I made it myself and I watched it the whole time."

He did not laugh.

I sat down on the chair by the window. The pull in my chest had been bad all evening and it was worse now, close and steady and warm, and I had stopped pretending it was anything other than what it was.

"Tell me about Elara," I said.

Ronan looked at the floor for a long time.

"In the winter," he said, "the harvest failed. The seaweed came in thin and the boats came back light and by February I had a pack of twenty two wolves and no money to feed them. The tithe was due to the Council and I could not pay it. I sold the old boat. I sold the traps. I sold my mother's rings and it was not enough." He rubbed his face slowly. "In March, Lorcan came. He said the Council was aware of my difficulties and wished to help. He said there was a way to settle the tithe and put the pack right and all it required was my cooperation."

"What did he want?"

"He wanted me to accept a mate." Ronan said it flatly. "A wolf of the Council's choosing. He said it would bind the Blackthorn Pack closer to the Council and the Council would see to it that the tithe was forgiven and the debts wiped and the boats repaired. He said it was done all the time. He said it was an honour."

I did not say anything.

"I told him no. I told him four times. I told him I would not take a mate I had never met for the price of a few boats." Ronan's hands closed on his knees. "And then in April the rogues came over the north border and burned the storehouse, and we lost the whole winter's dried fish, and I sat in this room and did the sums and there was nothing left. Nothing. My pack was going to starve by summer or scatter by autumn and either way the Blackthorn name would be finished on this coast." He looked up at me. "So I signed."

"You signed a false bond."

"I did not know it was a false bond. I thought I was signing a marriage contract with a woman I had never met. Lorcan brought the paper and I signed it and he took it away and two weeks later he brought the woman and she put her hand on my chest and said words I did not understand, and then she was gone and I had a mark that burned." His voice had gone very quiet. "I did not know what it was until the strength started going. By then it was too late to unsign it."

I sat with that for a while. The candle guttered. Out in the harbour a boat creaked at its mooring.

"You should have told me on the first night," I said.

"Yes."

"You let me treat you for a week. You let me go to Lorcan with my questions and my tins and my contract and you never once said, healer, there is a paper with my name on it and a woman in a green scarf and a box under my floor that drinks my blood." I stood up. "I could have been killed, Ronan. I could have walked into that grey house and said the wrong thing to the wrong man and never walked out, and you would have known why and you would not have warned me."

"I know."

"Do not say I know. It is the cheapest thing in the language."

He got up. He was unsteady on his feet and he put a hand on the bedpost and he looked at me with his pale green eyes and there was nothing proud left in his face at all.

"I was ashamed," he said. "That is the whole of it. I am the Alpha of this pack and I sold myself for a storehouse and a few boats, and every wolf in that hall looks at me and thinks, there is the wolf who keeps us safe, and I cannot look any of them in the eye. When you came, you looked at the mark and you named it in a week, and I thought, if she knows, she will tell them, and then they will all know what I am." He stopped. "I would rather have died of it than have my pack know what I signed."

The room was very quiet. I stood there with the cup in my hand and I looked at him, at the ginger hair gone dull and the dimples that only came out now when he was trying not to cry, and something in me that had been hard since the beach went a little softer, and I did not want it to.

"I am not going to forgive you," I said. "Not tonight. You put me in danger and you did it on purpose and a kind word does not undo that."

"No."

"But I will tell you what I told you in the sickroom. I do not judge you for signing it. Any Alpha worth the name would have signed it. You were sold a paper by a man who knew exactly what he was selling, and you did not have the whole of the story, and you did the best you could with what you had." I put the cup down beside him on the table. "That is not the same as forgiveness. That is me telling you that I understand it."

Ronan looked at the cup. Then he picked it up and drank the whole of it in one go, and set it down, and his hand was shaking so hard the china rang against the wood.

"Fiadh," he said.

"Drink it and sleep. I will be in the corridor."

"Fiadh."

I stopped at the door.

"Tomorrow," he said, "I am going to show you the paper."

I turned round.

"What paper?"

"The one I signed. I kept a copy. It is in the chest under the floor with the box." He looked at me across the room. "I have never shown it to anyone. Not Padraig. Not Maeve. It has a line on it that I did not understand when I signed it and I have thought about it every night since." He lay back on the bed and shut his eyes. "It says the bargain is not finished until the second mark is given. I have one mark on my chest and one on my arm and I do not know what the second one means, and I think you should see it before the Council does."

I stood in the doorway with my hand on the frame and the pull in my chest going steady and warm.

"Tomorrow," I said. "Before the light. And Ronan. Do not stand in the doorway again. Not for me, not for anyone."

I went out and pulled his door to and stood in the dark corridor with my back against the wall and my eyes shut, and I stayed there until my legs ached.