Chapter 187: Ronan's Healing

The Elara business took three days and I will not spend much time on it here, because it turned out to be a good deal less dramatic than the name on the gate suggested. She was a thin, tired woman with a pinched mouth and brown hair going grey at the temples, and she stood in the Council chamber and told the elders everything about the proxy rite that had been worked on her and on Ronan, and when she had finished she asked permission to leave the island and never come back. Colm granted it. She was on the boat by evening.

What matters is what she said before she went, when Ronan stopped her at the harbour wall.

She looked at him for a long moment, and she said, "I was paid to be a name and a scent on a piece of paper. I did not know it was tied to your life until the trial. I am sorry for it."

Ronan said, "You did not build it. He did."

"No," she said. "But I took the money." And she got on the boat.

That was the day his healing began.

Padraig had told me it would be slow. The false bond had been drinking from him for two years and the breaking of it had torn something in his chest that no herb could reach, and his wolf had been running on rage and seawater for weeks. What he needed was rest and food and the ordinary rhythm of a pack, and he needed it without a war on the other side of the door.

So I made him rest. That was my whole contribution, and it was harder than any fight I have been in.

For the first four days he slept in the small room at the top of the pack house where the old Alpha used to keep his fishing gear, because he would not sleep in the Alpha's quarters, and I could not get a reason out of him. I brought him broth and I changed the dressing on the cut that was still healing on his arm, and I sat in the chair by the window while he slept, and on the fifth day he woke up hungry for the first time since the spring.

He ate two bowls of stew and half a loaf of soda bread and then he looked at me across the table and said, "You are not sleeping either."

"I sleep."

"You have circles under your eyes that would frighten a badger, healer."

"I have been busy. The Council has a hundred wolves to interview and half of them want to talk to me."

"That is not why."

I put down the bread knife. He was watching me with his pale green eyes, and the bond was gone, and I could not feel what he was feeling, and I found that I could read it off his face anyway. It was a strange sort of comfort. All the months I had leaned on the bond to tell me what he would not say, and here he was with his jaw set and his hands on the table and his whole heart on his face, and I did not need anything but my own eyes.

"No," I said. "It is not why. I keep reaching for her. My wolf. Fifty times a day. I reach and there is nothing there, and it is like putting my hand out for a stair that has been taken away."

Ronan was quiet. Then he reached across the table and turned my hand over and put his thumb in the middle of my palm, and it was such a small thing, and my eyes stung.

"She went willing," he said. "You told me that. She went gold and she went willing."

"She did."

"Then she is not gone. She is in the spring, and the spring is empty, and an empty spring is a place where a wolf could come back from." He looked up. "Padraig thinks so too. He has been reading the old lore day and night. He says the rite that took her can be turned, and he says it will take a founder's mark to do it, and it will have to be given under the moon by a wolf who knows what she is doing."

"I gave my mark to the spring already."

"You gave it to the water. A mark is given to a wolf, Fiadh. Padraig says you cannot mark a pool and call it a bond. The founder rite was always a mark between two living wolves, and the spring was only the witness." He turned my hand over and looked at the bare skin of my wrist. "It will take a witness who has been in the water. It will take a founder who has given a mark and lived. That is not in the lore. Padraig worked it out from your mother's letters."

I stared at him. "You have been reading my mother's letters."

"I have been reading everything Padraig could put in front of me. I have had a lot of time in that room." He gave me the ghost of his old grin, the one with the deep dimples, and it was the first time I had seen it since the mountain. "I am not a good patient, healer. You know this."

The next morning I woke before dawn and my wrist was warm.

I sat up in bed and looked at it in the grey light. There was a mark on the inside of my wrist, small and pale, shaped like a crescent moon, the exact colour of the gold my wolf had been. It had not been there the night before. I put my finger on it and it was warm as a cup of tea, and behind my ribs, in the hollow place where the bond had been, something turned over once and settled.

I was out of the bed and down the corridor and through the door of the fishing gear room before I had thought about whether I should knock.

Ronan was asleep on his back with one arm flung out. He woke when the door hit the wall and he was half shifted before he saw me, and then he was not, and he was sitting up with his ginger hair sticking out at all angles and his eyes wide.

"What. What is it."

I held out my wrist.

He looked at it for a long moment. Then he took my hand in both of his and put his thumb on the crescent, and the mark warmed under his touch and the hollow place behind my ribs turned over again, stronger this time, and I felt the faintest brush of something on the other side of it. Not a voice. Not yet. But a presence, like a wolf breathing in another room.

Ronan's head came up. "I felt that."

"So did I."

"That is not possible," he said. "The bond is broken. The spring is empty. I felt you."

"Then it is not the bond," I said, and I sat down on the edge of his bed, and outside the window the first light was coming up over the harbour, and I could hear the gulls starting. "It is something new."