Chapter 190: The Healer's Freedom

The grey wolf was gone by the time I got the lamp lit, and Ronan woke to find me standing naked in the middle of the room with the poker in my hand, which took some explaining.

I told him what I had seen. He listened with his ginger hair flat on one side and his jaw going tighter and tighter, and when I had finished he said, "A grey wolf with pale green eyes. That is not a keeper."

"No. It said the keepers were bringing it with them."

"Then we go down to the harbour at first light and we find out what is on that boat." He swung his legs out of bed. "And you do not go alone."

We did go down at first light. The four keepers were standing on the quay with their hoods back and their hands in their sleeves looking cold and uncomfortable, and there was no grey wolf among them and no wolf of any kind, and when Ronan asked them straight out what they had brought with them they looked at each other and then at me and said, "Nothing, Alpha. Only ourselves and the rite we were sent to perform."

I believed them. That was the troubling part.

The rite took the better part of the morning. It was an old one, older than the Council, and the four keepers performed it in the drying shed with the whole pack watching from the crates. There was no water and no basin. There was a bowl of sea salt and a length of clean linen and a small iron knife, and the oldest keeper, a woman named Mairéad with a face like a walnut, cut the linen into strips and bound it round my wrist over the pale crescent and said the old words. I did not understand most of them. I understood the last line, because Padraig had taught it to me in the bothy.

What was given in fear is returned in freedom.

When she took the linen off, the crescent was brighter. It was not a scar anymore. It was a mark, small and clear and gold, and behind my ribs the hollow place was not hollow. There was a warmth there, low and steady, and when Ronan came across the shed floor and took my hand the warmth moved toward him, and he stopped dead and looked at me.

"That is her," he said. "That is your wolf."

"She is not back yet." I could feel the shape of her, the way you feel a cat sitting on the other side of a closed door. "But she is there. She is waiting."

Mairéad nodded as though this were the most ordinary thing in the world. "The spring is a witness, not a prison. Give her a wolf to come home to and she will come." She looked at Ronan when she said it, and then she looked at me. "The mark on your wrist is a founder's mark. It will take a second mark to complete it. That is for the two of you to decide, and I will not be here when you do."

They left on the evening tide. I stood on the quay and watched the boat go out past the harbour mouth and around the headland, and then I walked back up the hill alone.

I had one thing left to do.

The cliffs north of the harbour are the highest on that stretch of coast, and the wind comes off the Atlantic and hits them full on, and there is a shelf of flat rock at the top where the grass has been worn away by generations of wolves sitting and looking at the water. My mother had sat there. Oisin had told me so in the cave, and Padraig had confirmed it, and there was a place in her letters where she wrote about it. The best view in Donegal, she called it. Worth every penny of the debt.

I climbed up in the late afternoon with the tin box under my arm and the sprig of dried herbs in my hand. The wind was strong and the sea was grey and the gulls were riding it, and when I got to the top I sat down on the flat rock with my back to the wind and put the tin beside me.

There was a small cairn of stones at the edge of the shelf. Somebody had built it years ago and the weather had knocked it about, and there was a faded ribbon tied round one of the stones that might once have been blue. I had not known about the cairn. Nobody had told me. I sat and looked at it for a while and then I took the sprig of dried herbs out of my pocket.

Rosemary and something sweeter under it. The smell of a kitchen with a cracked window.

I had carried that sprig for ten years. It had been in my pack when I came to the Blackthorn coast, and it had been in my pocket at the trial, and it had been in the tin box with her letters since Padraig brought it up from the south. It was the last thing my mother had left me, and it was the last of the debt, in a way I could not explain to anybody who had not spent a decade counting coins in the dark.

I put it on the cairn.

"Right then," I said to the wind. "It is paid."

The wind took the words and did nothing with them. The sea went on being the sea. I sat there until my hands were cold and the light had gone long and gold across the water, and I did not cry, and I did not feel her watching me from anywhere. She was dead and in a spring under a Council seat that was not a Council seat anymore, and she had been dead for ten years, and the debt was paid and the wolf was mine and the life was mine.

When I stood up, the mark on my wrist was warm.

I turned round. Ronan was standing at the top of the cliff path with his hands in his pockets and his ginger hair blowing sideways, and he had clearly been there for some time.

"You followed me," I said.

"You walked up a cliff alone at sunset after telling me a grey wolf had been standing in our bedroom. Yes, I followed you." He came across the grass. "I did not want to interrupt."

I looked down at the cairn with the sprig of herbs on it and then at him. The wind was pushing at my coat and the sea was loud below us, and the gold light on the water had gone the same colour as my wolf had been.

"There is a full moon on Friday," Ronan said. "I checked. I have never checked the moon in my life, but I checked it, and Padraig says the founder rite wants a clear sky and a witness, and I thought we could do it on the cliffs here. Where she sat."

I did not answer straight away. I looked at the cairn, and then at the mark on my wrist, and then at the man standing in front of me with his hands in his pockets and his heart on his face.

"What exactly are you asking me, Ronan Blackthorn?"

He took his hands out of his pockets and held one of them out to me, and the wind nearly took his words away.

"I am asking whether you will let me give you the mark again," he said. "Under the moon, on this cliff, with the pack as witness. Not as the Council's Luna. As mine."