Chapter 183: Lorcan's Choice

The guards came through the tunnel in a wedge, and we met them in the round room with the basin at our backs. There were six of them, not nine, and the rogue from Bran's band took the first two before any of us could move, and then Ronan was in among them and I was behind him with a length of broken stone in my hand because I had not had time to shift again. Nessa fought beside me. She was not a warrior, she had never been a warrior, but she had grown up in a fishing pack and she knew how to put her shoulder into a man and she did it twice, and both times it worked.

Then the fighting stopped, because the men in the grey uniforms were not looking at us anymore. They were looking past us, at the split in the stone, and Lorcan was standing in it.

He had come alone. That was the first thing I noticed. No escort, no Council writ, no tailored calm. His coat was missing and his black hair with the silver streak through it had come loose from where he kept it, and there was a long graze down the side of his face that somebody had given him. His grey eyes went round the room, and they stopped on the empty basin, and something in his face closed.

"Where is Maeve?" he asked.

"Gone," Ronan said. "The spring took her."

Lorcan was quiet for a moment. Then he said, to the guards, "Put your blades down."

They did not move. One of them, an older man with a grey beard, said, "Envoy, the Elder gave his orders."

"The Elder," Lorcan said, "is no longer your concern. Put them down, Colm, or I will have your name struck from the roll and your pension with it, and you know I can do it." His voice had not risen. It was the same voice he had used in the pack house when he had smiled at me and asked about my credentials, and it worked exactly as well now as it had then. The blades went down, one after another, and the guards backed out through the tunnel with their hands open.

I lowered my length of stone and looked at him. "You have changed sides."

"I have been on my own side from the beginning." He stepped into the room and looked at the dry basin, and his jaw worked. "You are going to ask me why, and I am going to tell you, because there is very little time and I would rather you understood before Soren gets here."

"Then tell me."

He turned to face me. Up close, in the lantern light, I saw what I had not seen in all the months of his tailored coats and his patient smile. There were lines at the corners of his mouth that had not been there at the trial. His hands were not still. He was afraid, and he had been afraid for a long while, and he had spent every ounce of his considerable cleverness hiding it.

"I was eleven when Soren took me out of the Council orphanage," he said. "He chose me because I was quiet and I could read and I did not cry when the other boys hit me. He gave me an education and a place at his table and a future, and in return I have done for him what a good dog does for a man who has fed it well. I have written his letters. I have carried his threats. I have smiled at wolves he meant to ruin and made them believe I was their friend while I put the leash on their necks." He paused. "Ronan's bond was not the first I have managed. It was the ninth."

Ronan made a sound low in his throat. Lorcan looked at him and did not flinch.

"I am not asking your forgiveness," he said. "I am telling you that when Soren gave the order to seal the chamber with you all inside it, I understood that I had come to the end of what I was willing to do. He does not need me anymore. He has the spring and he has the network and I am a loose thread, and he will cut me the way he cut Maeve and he will not lose a night's sleep over it." He took a breath. "So I am a loose thread that has decided to hang somebody else with itself."

"The ledgers," I said. "Maeve told us. Under the floor of her old room."

Something moved across his face, and I think it was surprise. "She told you that?"

"She told us before she stepped into the basin."

He was quiet. Then he said, "There are three copies. The pack house, the Council archive, and a place in the north that only I know about. If I give them all to you, and if I stand before the elders and say what I have just said to you, then this will go further than Soren. The whole system comes into the light." He looked at me hard. "And I will be finished. Not ruined. Finished. There is not a pack on this island that will have me."

I thought about it. The basin behind me was dry and the spring under the floor was still awake and hungry, and this man had built the leash that had been draining Ronan for two years, and I could still smell the smoke of the forest fire he had set in motion. I did not forgive him. I do not think I ever will.

But there was a war in the tunnel behind him and a Council seat that needed to fall, and I have been poor and I have been owned and I know what it costs to be used by powerful men.

"Then be finished," I said. "Stand up and be finished in front of them. That is the price."

He nodded once, and the careful smile came back onto his face, and I saw for the first time what was underneath it. Not cruelty. Fear, old and steady, of a man who had been a boy in an orphanage and had never once stopped being afraid.

Then the water in the basin began to move again, and Lorcan's head turned toward it, and every wolf in that room went still.

"He is coming," Lorcan said. "And he is not alone. He has called the ritual keepers. I heard him on the stair, and I swear to you, Fiadh, he is going to try to wake the whole spring at once."