Chapter 184: The False Bond Broken

We went down the tunnel to meet him because there was nowhere left to run.

The chamber had changed while we were gone. The pool had spread until it filled the whole floor of the carved room, and the markings on the walls were burning now, gold and steady, line after line of them, and in the middle of it all Soren stood on a dry island of stone with six wolves in keeper's robes fanned out behind him. They were chanting, all six of them, a low grinding chant that had no words I recognized, and the water answered them. It rose and fell in a rhythm like breathing.

Padraig was with them. I saw him before I saw anything else, his white beard bright in the gold light, and my stomach turned over. But his hands were at his sides. He was not chanting. He was looking at me with an expression I could not read, and when our eyes met he shook his head once, slowly.

"You brought the healer," Soren said. "Good. I had hoped you would. The spring requires a founder's mark, and she is the last of the line, and I have been waiting a very long time for the last of the line to come to me."

"A mark," I said. "That is what the rite wants. That is what the water has been asking for all along."

"Not asking." Soren's thin face moved in something like pleasure. "Waiting. The founders made the spring to bind a pack's strength to its Alpha, willingly given, freely offered. That was the whole of the old rite. Then my family found what it could do if the offering was made unwilling, by proxy, through a leash. The network followed. You cannot reverse what has been done here with an unwilling mark. The spring will not take it. It must be given by a wolf who knows what she is offering and gives it anyway."

I felt Ronan go rigid at my shoulder. Through the bond I could feel the shape of his fear, and it was not fear for himself.

"No," he said.

"It is the only way," Soren said. "Give me your mark, girl, and I will release every false bond in the network tonight. Nine Alphas. Two hundred years. All of it undone. Or refuse, and I will take it from you the hard way, and the network will stand, and your pack will fall, and the spring will keep eating wolves until there are none left to eat."

He was lying. I knew he was lying the way I know the tide is coming in, from a hundred small things, but the worst of it was that he did not need to lie. The spring wanted a willing mark. He needed me to give it freely. And there was only one mark I could give freely that would mean anything.

Ronan caught my arm. "Fiadh. Look at me."

I looked at him. His pale green eyes were steady, and his hand was warm through the blanket, and I could feel what he was about to say before he said it.

"Do not do it," he said.

"You know the old lore as well as I do. The willing mark can come from any founder blood. I can put it on the spring and it will take the whole network down with it. It will break every leash in the Council's hands at once, and Soren will have nothing."

"And it will kill you."

"It might."

"It will." His grip tightened. "Padraig told me. Weeks ago, before any of this. A willing mark given to the spring costs the giver her wolf at best and her life at worst, and a founder cannot take a mark without meaning it with everything she has. I have known since the northern isles and I did not tell you because I did not want you to have the idea in your head."

I thought about that. I thought about him carrying it alone all this time. I thought about the pack and the coast and the ten years I had spent running from a wolf I did not know was in me.

"Then you should have told me," I said. "Because I am going to do it, and now I will do it knowing what it costs instead of being surprised."

Soren had been watching us. He was old, and he was clever, and he understood what he saw, and for the first time since I had met him he looked genuinely frightened. "You would give your own mark to the spring instead of mine? Do you understand what that will do?"

"Yes," I said, and I stepped forward.

Ronan did not let go. He came with me. He came all the way to the water's edge and he stood beside me while I knelt down and put my hands into the pool, and the gold light came up through my fingers and into my arms, and the spring tasted my bloodline and began to drink.

It hurt more than the shift. I want to be honest about that. It hurt in a way that had no bottom, and I felt the old rite turn its head toward me and reach, and I gave it everything, all the will I had, every hour I had spent running and hiding and telling myself I did not want to belong to anything. I put it in the water. I put my wolf in the water. I felt her go, and she went willing, and she went gold, and behind me the six keepers broke off their chant in one ragged breath.

Then the pool went dark, and every marking on the walls went out, and somewhere far above us, in the Council archive, in the north, in the pack house under the floor of a dead woman's room, I felt something break.

Soren screamed. It was not a wolf's cry. It was a man's, and it did not stop.

I fell forward into the water, and Ronan caught me, and I looked down at my own hands and there was no gold in them anymore, and my chest was empty where she had been, and I could not feel the bond.