Chapter 179: Fiadh's First Shift in Battle

The spring water had gone the colour of old iron, and my hands were still in it when the first guard reached me.

I had been kneeling at the pool's edge for what felt like an hour, saying the words Padraig had drilled into me, the old ones, the ones the Council had sanded down and rewritten until they meant nothing. The water had listened the way a wall listens. It pushed back against every line I spoke, and somewhere below the stone floor a low pulse beat against my palms, patient and wrong, like a heart that had been taught to beat out of time.

Then boots came down the tunnel, and the rite broke apart in my mouth.

The first man through the arch was Council, silver-grey uniform, a short blade in his right hand. He saw me alone at the pool and he smiled, because to him I was a healer kneeling in the dirt. His mistake lasted about three seconds. I came up off my knees with the ritual knife still in my fist and opened his forearm before he could close the distance. He swore, dropped back, and two more came through behind him.

"Fiadh!" Ronan's voice from the far end of the chamber, ragged. He was holding the other arch with three Blackthorn wolves, and I could not look at him, because the guard with the blade had found his courage again.

I should tell you what it is like to stand in a fight and know that your body is a lie. Ten years I had carried a wolf inside me that never answered. Ten years of reaching for her in quiet rooms and getting back a silence like a shut door. I had learned to fight with knives and my hands and the flat of my feet, and I was decent at it, and none of it had ever felt like enough.

The guard lunged. I twisted, took the blade across my ribs instead of my gut, and the pain came bright and clean, and in the middle of it something in my chest turned over.

It was not a voice. It was a pressure, low and enormous, like a tide coming up under a floorboard. My wolf. Not speaking. Rising.

I dropped the knife.

The change took me the way a wave takes a swimmer, without asking. My spine bowed backward and my jaw locked, and the world went white at the edges. Bone moved. That is the only honest way I can put it. I felt my own skeleton rearrange itself under my skin, felt the long bones of my legs shorten and thicken, felt my hands curl into something that was no longer hands. The pain was not like a wound. It was like being unmade and remade by something with no interest in my opinion.

I heard myself make a sound that was not a scream.

When it ended I was on four feet, and the floor was much closer than it should have been, and I could smell everything. Iron. Sweat. The guard's fear, sharp and sour as green apples. I could smell Ronan across the chamber, and under the blood and the smoke there was the particular warmth of him that I had come to know through the bond, and my whole body turned toward it before my mind caught up.

I was not a small wolf. I want to be clear about that. The Blackthorn warriors were big animals, heavy in the shoulder, built for the coast. I stood taller than the guard in front of me, and my fur came up gold, bright as straw in the torchlight, so bright that the men at the arch stopped and stared. Gold in a wolf is not common. It is not even rare. It is simply not supposed to exist anymore, and every wolf in that chamber knew it.

The guard's blade came round. I took it on my shoulder and barely felt it, and then I had his arm in my jaws and I put him on the ground with a single turn of my neck, careful enough to break the grip and not the bone. He lay still.

The spring behind me made a sound.

I turned, and the water had gone from iron to light. Not glowing, exactly. Bright the way a pool is bright when the cloud cover breaks over it, except there was no cloud and no sun, only the old carved stone and my own four feet standing in the shallows. The pulse I had felt under the floor was gone. In its place the water moved toward me, a small ring widening from where my paws had broken the surface, and I understood with a cold, certain clarity that the rite had not been resisting me.

It had been waiting to see what I was.

"Fiadh," Ronan said again, and this time his voice was different. Quiet. Almost afraid. I lifted my head and looked down the length of the chamber at him, and I saw him properly for the first time through these new eyes. The ginger of his hair looked deeper, the pale green of his eyes almost silver in the torchlight. There was blood down his sleeve from a cut I had not treated. He had gone very still, and his wolf was looking out at me from behind his face, and I could feel the pull of him through the bond like a rope going taut.

Soren's voice came from the shadows beyond the arch. "Interesting."

I hated that word in his mouth. I hated the calm of it. He stepped forward with his hands folded, this old grey wolf in his good coat, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a coin he has just found in the street.

"A founder," he said. "Whole. Unbound. I had wondered whether your mother had managed the hiding properly. It seems she did, and then wasted the work by letting you walk back to me."

The growl came out of me before I chose it. Deep and rolling, and the sound of it filled the chamber, and behind Soren two of his guards stepped back without meaning to.

Lorcan stood at his master's shoulder, and for once the tailored coat and the patient smile did not sit right on him. He was staring at me. His grey eyes had gone wide and flat, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed, and I thought, with a small mean satisfaction, that he had not planned for this. He had planned for a rogue healer with a debt. He had not planned for gold.

"Ronan," I tried to say, and what came out was a short, sharp bark. Not words. Not yet. The mind-link between us stayed shut, and I felt the other end of it like a hand pressed against a closed door.

Then Soren lifted one finger, and the guards came on again, and the last thing I heard before the chamber filled with movement was Lorcan's voice, low and urgent, saying something to Soren that I could not catch.

I set my feet in the spring water and waited for them, gold fur bright as a struck match, and the pool behind me answered with its light.