Chapter 186: Fiadh's Mother's Truth

Padraig came to my door that evening with a tin box under his arm and a bottle of something amber in his other hand, and he did not ask whether I wanted company. He set the box on the table, poured two glasses, and sat down in the chair by the window.

"Before the gathering tomorrow," he said, "you should know what your mother did and why she did it. I have been carrying it for twenty-six years and I am too old to carry it through a trial."

I sat down opposite him. The box was dented at one corner and the lid had a faded pattern of harebells on it, and I knew it before he opened it. I had seen it on the shelf above my mother's bed for the whole of my childhood, and I had never once been allowed to touch it.

"How did you get this?"

"Oisin brought it up from the south. She left it with him the year before she died, along with instructions that were not to be opened until you had shifted or until the Council fell, whichever came first." Padraig's blue eyes were steady. "I would have brought it to you sooner if I had known which of those came first."

I opened the lid. Inside were letters, a bundle of them tied with string, and a small leather notebook, and a sprig of dried herbs wrapped in a scrap of linen. I picked up the herbs first. Rosemary and something sweeter under it, and the smell of them took me straight back to a kitchen in a rented house with a cracked window and my mother at the stove.

"She was a founder," Padraig said. "The last daughter of the line that built the spring. When the Council found out she was pregnant, they sent Soren to her with a contract of protection, and she signed it because she was young and frightened and alone, and the contract said that any child of her blood would be raised in the Council's care and bound to the Council's service when it came of age."

"Bound how?"

"Bred, Fiadh. That is the plain word. There has not been a founder daughter in two hundred years who was allowed to choose her mate. They would have found you a wolf of their choosing and put a false bond on you before your first shift, and you would have spent your life feeding the spring." He drank some of the amber. "Your mother found out what the contract meant three months before you were born. She ran. She broke the contract, which is why the debt was written against her name, and she came north to me, and I did the suppression rite on you when you were four years old, and it is the worst thing I have ever done."

I turned the sprig of herbs over in my fingers. "Why four?"

"Because that is when a wolf first stirs. You had begun to dream of running. She brought you to me in the night and we put the old words on you and your wolf went quiet, and your mother cried for a week. She told me it was like putting a child in a cupboard to keep her from a fire." Padraig's voice had gone rough. "I have told myself for twenty-six years that we were saving your life. Some nights I believe it."

I untied the bundle of letters. The top one was dated the year I turned sixteen, and the handwriting was small and square and very like my own.

Fiadh. If you are reading this then I am dead and Padraig has decided you are old enough to be angry with me. I want you to know that I did not hide your wolf because I was ashamed of it. I hid it because there were men who would have put a collar on you before you could speak, and I would rather have had a daughter with no wolf than a daughter with a leash. I know what it costs. I have paid it every day since the rite. The debt, the running, the packs that would not have us, all of it was worth it if you got to choose your own life. Choose it well. Do not let them tell you what you are.

I read it twice. Then I read the next one, dated two years later, and the next, and they were all the same in their bones. Small square handwriting, ordinary news, a recipe for a cough syrup, a complaint about the landlord, and in every one of them the same sentence in different words. Do not let them tell you what you are.

The last letter was not in the tin. Padraig took it from his coat and put it on the table between us.

"This came from the Council archive. Soren kept a file on her. It is his record of the day she died."

I did not want to read it. I read it anyway. Soren's thin, careful hand, the date, the place, a note about the terms of the contract and the failure of the subject to comply. And then a single line, the last line, that said, The subject was given the choice of the contract renewed or the spring, and she chose the spring.

I sat there with the paper in my hands for a long time. The amber in my glass went warm and then cold.

"She did not die of the debt," I said. "She did not die running. She walked into the spring rather than let them have me."

"She did." Padraig's voice was very quiet. "And the spring did not take her the way it took Maeve. She was a founder. It kept her for two years before it let her go. Soren wrote it down because he was proud of it."

The fire in the grate cracked and settled. I folded the letter and put it in the tin with the others and closed the lid, and I sat with my hands flat on the table and listened to the wind come in off the sea.

I had been angry with her for ten years. Angry at a woman who had left me a debt and a silence and a wolf I could not reach. She had been in a spring beneath the Council seat, holding on for two years so that I could grow up in rented rooms and learn herbs and never once be collared.

"I will not be able to say this tomorrow," I said. "In front of the gathering. But I am saying it to you now, Padraig. I am not angry with her anymore."

Padraig nodded and wiped his eye with the back of his hand and did not say anything at all.

The door opened. Ronan stood in it with his ginger hair flat from the rain and his pale green eyes on the tin box, and behind him the corridor was dark.

"There is a wolf at the gate," he said. "She says her name is Elara, and she says she was my false mate, and she has come to testify."