Chapter 18: Moonlight on the Cliffs

The moon was full that night, and it pulled at the whole house like a hand on a rope.

Nobody slept well. I heard the young wolves moving about in the dormitory and the boards creaking and once a muffled argument about a window. The moon does that. It gets into the blood and it does not let go until the sky goes grey.

I gave up around eleven and put my coat on and went down the back stairs and out, and the air hit me cold and clean and I filled my lungs with it.

The cliffs were white. The moon had come up over the sea and laid a wide silver road across the water, and the grass at the top of the headland looked like frost. I walked north along the path with my hands in my pockets and the wind at my back, and when I got to the flat rock I sat down on it and looked at the sea.

I heard him before I saw him. Boots on the turf, uneven, careful.

"You should be asleep," I said, without turning.

"I could say the same to you." Ronan came up beside the rock and stood there with his hands in his coat pockets. The moonlight made his ginger hair look almost fair and it put shadows in the hollows of his face. "May I sit?"

"There is room."

He sat. Not close. A foot of cold rock between us. The pull in my chest eased a little, the way it always did when he came near, and I hated that I had begun to notice that.

"The moon keeps me up," he said. "It used to be that I could not wait for it. I would go out on the ridge with the pack and we would run until the light came." He looked out at the silver road. "I have not run since the spring. I do not dare. If I shift now I am not sure I can shift back."

"Then do not shift."

"Very simple."

"Most things are simple. People make them complicated because they do not want to do the simple thing." I looked at him. "Take your coat off."

He turned his head.

"Your arm," I said. "I saw you favouring it on the stairs. You have been favouring it for two days. Take the coat off and let me look."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he stood up and took his coat off and rolled up his sleeve, and in the moonlight I saw what he had been hiding. The roots under his skin had reached his elbow, and where they had passed they had left the arm swollen and hot, and there was a long raw line on the inside of the forearm where the skin had split.

"How long has it been open?"

"Since the tea."

"Since the tea." I made a sound in my throat. "You have had an open wound on your arm for two days and you did not come to me."

"You had enough to do."

"Sit down and give me your arm."

He sat down. I got my little kit out of my coat pocket, the one I carry everywhere, with the comfrey salve and the clean linen and the small pot of honey I use for wounds that will not close, and I took his arm in both hands and laid it across my knees.

He was warm. Under the swelling and the heat of the wound he was warm the way a person is warm, and I could feel his pulse under my fingers, slow and strong, and the pull in my chest went quiet and settled into something low and pleasant that I did not want to think about.

"Hold still," I said.

"I am holding still."

"You are not. You are breathing on my ear."

He laughed, very quietly, and moved his head away.

I cleaned the wound first, and he did not flinch, and then I spread the honey and the comfrey salve along the split and pressed the linen over it and wrapped it round, once, twice, three times, and tucked the end in.

It should have taken me two minutes. I took ten.

There was no reason for it. The wound was not a difficult one. But his arm was warm on my knees and the night was cold and the moon was on the water, and my fingers kept finding reasons to go back and smooth a fold that did not need smoothing.

"Fiadh," he said.

"Hm."

"You have been holding my arm for a while now."

I looked down. I had my hand flat on his forearm with the linen under it and my thumb resting on the inside of his wrist, and I had been holding it, and I had not noticed.

I should have let go. I did not.

Neither did he.

The moonlight was on the side of his face and his pale green eyes were very bright, and neither of us said anything for a long moment, and the wind came up off the sea and moved his hair and neither of us moved at all.

"Do you know what happens on a night like this," he said, very quietly, "in a pack where the Alpha is well?"

"Tell me."

"The Alpha runs. The whole pack runs with him. And at the end of it, when the run is done and the moon is going down, the mated pairs go off on their own and the rest of them go back to the house and pretend not to notice." He looked at the sea. "I used to think it was a foolish thing to look forward to. The running was the good part, I thought. The rest was for other people."

"And now?"

He did not answer for a while.

"Now I sit on a rock with a healer at midnight and I cannot even shift," he said. "So it does not matter what I think."

I took my hand off his arm. Slowly, because I did not want to, and that was the trouble.

"Ronan," I said. "There is something I need to tell you, and I have been putting it off because I do not know what it means."

"What is it?"

"The pull. In my chest. The one that started the night I came." I looked at the sea rather than at him. "It is getting stronger. It gets stronger when I am near you and it hurts when I am far away. And I have never felt anything like it before in my life, and I have been telling myself it is the mark and the ritual and the strangeness of this house, and I have run out of ways to tell myself that."

Ronan was very still beside me.

"Fiadh," he said, and his voice had gone strange. "Say that again."

"I have never felt anything like it before. It gets stronger when I am near you."

He stood up so fast he nearly went over the edge of the rock, and he put both hands out in front of him as if he were pushing something away.

"No," he said. "No. Not that. Not now."

"What?"

"Go back to the house." He was backing away from me up the path with his bandaged arm held against his chest. "Fiadh, go back to the house and stay there. Do not come near me tonight."

"Ronan, what is it?"

"Because if you feel what I think you feel," he said, and his voice cracked in the middle of it, "then we have a much worse problem than Lorcan, and I need to think, and I cannot think with you sitting there in the moonlight."

He turned and walked away up the cliff path, fast, and I sat on the rock with my hands in my lap and the sea going on below me and the moon pouring down, and I did not understand anything at all.

Then I heard it. A long howl from the north, from the pines, from the place where the stranger's scent had been. And another answering it, closer.