Chapter 180: Ronan's Rage Unleashed

The guards came at me in a line, and the first one learned quickly that a founder wolf does not fight like a Blackthorn wolf. I took his shoulder in my jaws and threw him into the second man, and both of them went down in the shallows. The spring water splashed up gold and red. I could hear everything, the scrape of boots on wet stone, the breath of the man behind me, the slow drip from the ceiling somewhere above us, and under all of it the pulse of the pool, steady now, matching my own heartbeat.

Soren had not moved. He stood with his hands folded and watched me work, and I understood that this was the whole of his plan now. He was waiting to see how much I could take.

Then something struck my flank and the world went hot.

I did not see the blade. I felt it, a line of fire drawn across my side, and the smell of my own blood rose around me, and the water under my paws turned a darker colour. Silver. He had given his guards silver after all. I stumbled sideways and the golden light in the pool dimmed, and Soren smiled at last, a small tight thing, and said, "There. That is the difficulty with bloodlines. They make a wolf bold and then they make her bleed."

I tried to turn. My back leg would not answer properly, and the second guard was already moving in, and I thought, quite clearly, that I was going to die in a pool beneath the Council seat with my fur full of my own blood.

Then the chamber shook.

I do not know how else to describe it. There was a sound from the far arch, a low tearing roar that seemed to come up through the stone, and every wolf in the chamber turned toward it. Ronan was coming. I saw him cross the space between the arch and the guards in a way I had never seen him move, not in the months I had known him, not in any of the fights we had stood through together. His red wolf was a blur against the torchlight, and his eyes were pale green and fixed, and there was nothing of the careful Alpha in them, nothing of the man who measured every word before he spent it.

The first guard he reached went into the wall.

I heard the crack of it, the stone, the body, the breath leaving the man in a rush. Ronan did not stop. He took the second guard by the arm and swung him into the third, and then he was on the man with the silver blade, and that fight lasted as long as it takes to close your hand. The blade went skittering across the floor toward me. Ronan's jaws were at the man's shoulder, and he shook him, and the guard screamed, and Ronan let him go only when he stopped moving.

I had never seen him like this. I want to say that plainly. I had seen Ronan Blackthorn angry many times, and I had seen him cold and proud and frightened, and I had seen him hold himself together through a challenge and a trial and a war. I had never seen him let go. His wolf was not fighting. His wolf was answering something, and the answer was all teeth.

Soren's calm cracked at last. He stepped back, one pace, then another, and his folded hands came apart. "Lorcan," he said, sharply. "Lorcan, the spring. Do not stand there."

Lorcan did not move. His grey eyes were fixed on Ronan, and his face had gone the colour of the water, and I saw his hand at his side curl and uncurl. Whatever he had planned, whatever careful legal architecture he had built around this chamber, it had not included a red wolf with nothing left to lose.

Ronan turned from the fallen guards and looked at Soren, and I felt the mind-link open between us for the first time since the fight began. It came with a rush of heat and rage that nearly put me back on my knees, and under the rage something else, something small and badly frightened, calling my name.

I tried to answer him. What came out was a whine, thin and high, and I hated it. I pushed myself upright in the water, on three legs, and the golden light in the pool came back up around me, and Ronan's head turned toward the sound.

Soren saw the turn. He was old and he was clever, and he had spent two hundred years reading wolves, and he knew exactly what Ronan was looking at. He drew something from inside his coat, a thin silver rod, and he pointed it at me, not at Ronan, and said, "If she is the founder, then she is the one I need. Stand aside, Alpha, and I will let your pack keep its coast."

Ronan's answer was not words. He launched himself at Soren, and two more guards came out of the shadows to meet him, and the chamber dissolved into noise.

I do not remember deciding to move. I remember the pain in my flank going dull and far away, and the water around my paws moving with me, and the silver rod in Soren's hand turning toward my chest. I remember Lorcan's voice, suddenly, cutting through everything, saying, "Soren. The spring is listening to her."

Soren looked down at the pool.

The water had risen. It was over the first step of the carved stone, and it was bright as a lamp, and in the light of it I saw the old markings on the walls begin to show through the grime, line after line of them, and every line was answering me.

Soren's thin face changed. For the first time since I had met him, he looked afraid. "She is waking it," he said. "Lorcan, the rite, stop her before she wakes the whole of it."

Lorcan stepped forward, and the smile came back onto his face, and it was a worse smile than any I had seen from him before, because it was real. "I cannot stop her," he said. "And I think, Elder, that you have finally asked me for something I do not want to give you."

The spring rose another step, and the gold light climbed the walls, and Soren turned on his own envoy with the silver rod still in his hand.