Chapter 182: Maeve's End

She came through the tunnel alone, and she came slowly, and that was the first thing that told me something had gone wrong for her. Maeve had never entered a room slowly in her life. She moved like a copper haired storm wherever she went, and now she came out of the split in the stone with her hands open at her sides and her warm brown eyes fixed on Ronan, and I saw that her sleeve was torn and there was blood on her knuckles that was not hers.

Ronan had shifted half a step toward the wolf before he caught himself. He stood in the lantern light in his human skin with the bandage bright on his arm, and he said, "You are not welcome here."

"I know." Her voice was hoarse. "I am not here for a welcome. I am here because Soren has sealed the chamber behind me and there are nine guards between the spring and the outer door, and I thought you would want to know that before he sends them through this tunnel."

Nessa had come back in from the tunnel mouth and stood at my shoulder with her jaw set. "Why would you tell us that?"

Maeve's mouth twisted. "Because he sealed me in with you. I have stopped being useful to him. It took me longer than it should have to notice."

I pulled the blanket tighter round my shoulders and got to my feet. My side pulled and I ignored it. "Maeve. Look at me."

She did. Her face was dirty and there was a scrape down her cheek, and she looked at me the way she had looked at me at the trial, with that old banked fury, except the fury was not burning the way it used to. It had gone thin and tired. "You want to gloat," she said. "Go on, then. The rogue healer is the Luna and the Beta is a traitor and the Council has eaten its own. Say it."

"I was going to ask what you did with the ledgers you took from Lorcan's chamber."

She blinked. It was a small thing, the way her eyes widened, and it told me everything about how far gone she thought she was. "In the pack house. Under the floor of my old room, in the tin where I kept my mother's rings. I took them to use against him and then I found out what was in them and I did not know who I could give them to." Her voice dropped. "Fiadh. There are names in those ledgers. Every Alpha on the Council who has taken a false bond and paid for it in strength. Two hundred years of it. It is not a secret, it is a system, and it is written down in his own hand."

"Then we will get them," I said. "You will take Ronan's word before the Council and you will put those ledgers in front of the elders, and the whole thing comes down."

She laughed. It was a raw, cracked sound, and there was no humour anywhere in it. "You are offering me mercy."

"I am offering you a way to be something other than what you have been."

The water in the basin behind me made a sound. I turned. It had been still since we came into the room, and now the surface was moving, a slow turn in the centre like a finger stirring it, and the old markings on the wall had begun to show again through the grime, faint, gold at the edges.

Maeve saw it too. She looked at the water and her face changed, and I understood then that she had not come through that tunnel to warn us.

"Fiadh," she said. "I have been in this chamber before. Last winter. Soren brought me down here and he showed me the pool and he told me what it could do for a wolf who had been passed over. He said I could have the Alpha seat and the bond and the pack, and all it would cost was a little of my own strength fed into the spring." Her hands had started to shake. "I gave him some. I did not think it was much. And then Ronan's bond began to fail and I knew what I had done, and I have been trying to get it back ever since."

The water turned faster.

Ronan stepped forward. "Maeve. Step away from the basin."

"I cannot." Her voice was very quiet. "It is in me. It has been in me since the winter, and it knows I am standing here, and it is pulling."

I felt it then, the way I had felt it when the pool answered my paws in the chamber below. The spring was not a thing, it was a hunger, and it had been fed for two hundred years by wolves who thought they were making a bargain, and it had learned to call them back. Maeve took one step toward the basin without seeming to choose it. Then another.

I lunged and caught her by the wrist. The gold light was climbing the walls, and the water in the basin was rising, and her skin under my fingers was cold.

"Maeve, listen to me. You do not have to pay it. Give me your hand and I can hold it off, I have the blood for it now, I can break the claim."

She looked at me, and for one long moment I saw the wolf she might have been if the world had been kinder to her, and she smiled at me with real warmth, and she pulled her wrist free of my hand.

"No," she said. "You cannot save everyone, Fiadh. And I do not want to be saved by you."

She stepped into the basin. The water came up over her ankles and then her knees, and she turned her face to Ronan and said something I could not hear over the sound of it, and the gold light closed over her like a hand.

Ronan shouted her name and went after her, and I caught him round the chest and held him back, and we both watched the light fade and the water go still and the basin empty, with nothing in it but stone.

Nessa was crying behind us. The rogue in the tunnel was shouting something about the guards.

I let go of Ronan and looked down at the dry basin, and then at the pool in the chamber beyond the tunnel, which was bright and moving and full of a light I had never seen before.

"That is what it does," I said. "That is what it has always done. And it is still hungry."