Chapter 185: The Council's Judgment

I woke in the pack house with a blanket over me and the smell of the sea coming through an open window.

For a long while I did not move. There was a weight on my chest that had nothing to do with the wound in my side, and I lay still and took stock of it. The bond was gone. Where Ronan had been, in that place behind my ribs that I had grown used to, there was a hollow, smooth as a worn stone. My wolf was gone too. I reached for her the way I had reached for her all my life, and there was nothing but the reaching.

I must have made a sound, because Nessa was at my bedside in a moment, her freckled face pinched with worry, and behind her came Padraig with his white beard and his blue eyes, and he sat down on the edge of the bed and took my wrist and held it.

"Three days," he said. "You have been asleep for three days, girl. The pack thought you were gone."

"How is Ronan?"

Padraig and Nessa looked at each other. It was Nessa who answered. "He has not left the corridor outside this door. He sits on the floor with his back to the wall and he will not come in and he will not go to his own room and when anyone speaks to him he answers in single words." She bit her lip. "He says he cannot feel you."

"He cannot. There is nothing left to feel." I sat up, and the room tilted, and I waited for it to settle. "The Council. What happened after I fell?"

Padraig's face did something complicated. "Soren is in the cells beneath the Council seat. He has been screaming about his rights for three days. The keepers turned on each other the moment the network broke, and two of them have already offered testimony in exchange for clemency. The ledgers were recovered from all three places Lorcan named. There are eleven elders on the Council and nine of them have signed a false bond in the last century. It is the largest thing to happen to the packs in two hundred years, and it has only just begun."

"Lorcan?"

"He stood before them the morning after. He read out his own name and his own crimes in a flat voice and he did not ask for anything. They have him in a cell as well, but he is not screaming."

I swung my legs out of the bed and stood. My knees held. I found my clothes folded on a chair and I put them on with my back to both of them, and neither of them said a word about it.

The Council chamber was two floors up in the old stone building on the hill, and it was full when I walked in. The surviving elders sat in a half circle behind a long table, and the galleries above were packed with wolves from a dozen packs, and there was a smell in the room of wet wool and nerves. Ronan was in the front row with the Blackthorn wolves, and he turned when the door opened, and I saw his face go through something I did not have the words for, because the bond was gone and I could not feel it anymore.

Elder Colm, an old wolf with a grey plait down his back, struck the table with his hand. "The healer is here. Sit, Fiadh, and hear the judgment."

I did not sit. I stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the half circle of elders.

"The Council finds that Elder Soren is guilty of the unlawful binding of nine Alphas, of the maintenance of a ritual network for the extraction of pack strength, of the deaths of four wolves whose names we have recovered, and of the concealment of the founder bloodline for the purpose of breeding it." Colm's voice was dry as paper. "He is stripped of his seat and his name, and he will be held for the gathering of the packs, and the gathering will decide what is done with him."

There was a low rumble in the galleries. Colm waited for it to die.

"The Council further finds that Lorcan, envoy, is guilty of carrying out the said bindings, of the coercion of witnesses, and of the arson of Blackthorn forest. He has named his own crimes and has asked for no clemency. He is stripped of his title and his place and will be held for the gathering."

Colm's eyes came to rest on me. "And the Council finds that the elders who signed these bindings, who took the strength of their own Alphas into their hands and called it law, are guilty with them. Nine seats are vacant this morning. The survivors are Elder Aoife, Elder Tomas, and myself. We will not be deciding our own fate. The gathering will decide it, and whatever it decides, we will accept."

The chamber erupted. It took Colm a long time to quiet it, and while it was loud Ronan crossed the floor and stood beside me, and he did not touch me, and I did not touch him, and we stood there together in front of the whole of the Council and waited.

When the noise had died down, Elder Aoife, a small woman with iron grey hair, leaned forward. "There is one more matter. The founder's mark given to the spring has broken the network, but it has also emptied the spring, and the old rite that bound an Alpha to his pack through the water is gone with it. There are packs on this coast that have relied on that rite for a hundred years. They will need something to replace it." She looked at me. "You are the last of the founder line. What do you say to that?"

I thought about the hollow place behind my ribs and the wolf I could no longer reach. I thought about the nine Alphas who had been leashed and the four wolves who had died for it and the woman who had stepped into a basin rather than be saved by me.

"I say you had better build something that asks the wolf first," I said.

Then the door at the back of the chamber opened, and a young wolf in a keeper's robe came in with a letter in his hand and a face like bad weather, and he walked straight to Elder Colm and put the letter down in front of him.

Colm read it. His face went grey. He looked up at me, and then at Ronan, and he said, "The gathering has been called for tomorrow. And Soren has demanded the right to speak at it. He says he has something to say about the founder's daughter that will change everything."