Chapter 191: The Mark Renewed

The full moon came up over the Donegal hills on Friday like a coin being pushed across a table.

I spent the day being useless. Nessa dragged me down to the harbour to look at the boats and then up to the drying shed to look at the kilns and then back to the pack house to look at a dress that Aisling had found somewhere in a chest, and which was grey wool and plain and had been mended at the shoulder, and which I liked very much because it was warm and did not pretend to be anything it was not.

The pack gathered on the cliff at dusk. All sixty of them, and the four keepers' boat had come back with Mairéad and two of her people, and Oisin was there in a coat that had been respectable at some point in its life, and Padraig stood at the front with his white beard combed and his blue eyes bright in his old face. Somebody had carried a lantern up, and somebody else had brought a barrel of beer, and there was a smell of wet grass and sea salt and the whole thing felt less like a ceremony than a party that had got slightly out of hand.

I stood at the cairn with the grey wool dress on my back and the wind pulling at my hair, and I looked out at the water while the pack arranged itself in a half circle behind me.

Ronan came last.

He had washed and combed his ginger hair and he was wearing a dark coat that fitted him properly, and he walked up the cliff path with his pale green eyes fixed on me and his hands at his sides, and the whole pack went quiet as he passed. He stopped in front of me.

"Fiadh," he said. "You are not bound to me. You never have been. There is no debt on your name tonight and no Council writ and no bond that could hold you if you decided to walk down this hill and take the morning boat. I am not offering you a leash. I am offering you the Blackthorn Pack and the coast and a house with a roof that Padraig says will be fixed before the winter. And I am offering you myself, which is a smaller thing, but it is what I have."

I looked at him. Behind him the pack was watching, and Nessa had her hands over her mouth, and Aisling was nodding like a woman at a horse market.

"You have rehearsed that," I said.

"I have rehearsed that four times. I did it in the mirror twice." He swallowed. "It was better in the mirror."

"It was very good. I have one condition."

"Name it."

"You will not vote against me in any Council chamber again. Not for the pack, not for the coast, not for anything. If I am wrong you will tell me to my face and then you will stand beside me while I am wrong."

He did not look away. "I will."

"Then give me the mark."

Mairéad stepped forward with the iron knife and the bowl of sea salt and the strip of clean linen, and she did the old rite again, but properly this time, the way a founder's rite was meant to be done. She cut the linen into two strips and gave one to each of us. She bound my wrist over the pale crescent and she bound Ronan's wrist with the other strip, and she said the old words in the old language while the moon climbed over the hills and the sea went silver below us.

Then she said, in English, "Give the mark."

Ronan took my wrist and turned it over and pressed his mouth to the crescent. I felt the warmth go out of him and into me, steady and sure, and behind my ribs the hollow place was not hollow at all. She was there. My wolf was there, sitting just on the other side of a closed door with her ears up, and the door was not locked anymore.

I took his wrist and put my mouth on the inside of it, and I meant it with everything I had. Not the way I had meant it at the spring, with the water pulling at me and Soren screaming and a war behind me. I meant it here, in the cold, with the smell of the sea and the wet grass and a barrel of beer, and the whole Blackthorn Pack watching.

The mark came up on his skin under my lips, gold on the inside of his wrist, and the pack made a sound like a single long breath.

The moon was full above us. I felt my wolf get up.

The shift did not hurt this time. It came up through me slow and warm, the way the tide comes in over a flat beach, and my bones moved and my skin changed and my hands went down to the grass, and when it was done I stood on four feet at the edge of the cliff with the wind in my gold fur and the sea below me, and every wolf on that headland was staring at me.

Ronan shifted beside me. His red wolf was smaller than I was now, and he came and stood at my shoulder, and I felt him through the mark, clear as a bell, warm as a hand.

The pack followed. Sixty wolves on the cliff at once, grey and brown and black and one old bitch who was nearly white, and the sound of them singing came up off the rock and went out over the Atlantic. I lifted my head and sang with them, and my voice was the loudest there, and it was mine.

Afterwards, when we had all shifted back and somebody had opened the beer, Padraig came over to me with his glass in his hand and a folded paper in the other. He did not look like a man at a party.

"The Council sits tomorrow to pass the new law," he said. "Colm sent word up the coast this afternoon. There is one elder who has not been heard from since the judgment, an old wolf named Fionn, and they have found something in his house." He held out the paper. "A letter from Soren, written three years ago. It names four wolves who were marked with the founder's blood before you were born, Fiadh. Three of them are dead. The fourth one is still alive, and Colm says the address is in the north, and he says the name on it is not one that anybody in the Council recognizes."

I took the paper and read it by the lantern light. The name was written in Soren's thin careful hand, and it was not a name I had ever heard.

"Who is this?" I said.

Padraig's face was very still. "That is what I am asking myself. Because there is a keeper's mark on the seal, and the keepers told me today that they have never heard of him either."