Chapter 192: The Council Reformed

The new law was passed in a room that smelled of fresh paint because the old Council chamber had been scrubbed out and the scrubbing had gone deeper than anyone expected. I went down for the vote because Ronan went down for the vote and because the Blackthorn Pack had a stake in it, and I sat in the gallery with Nessa on one side and Oisin on the other, and I listened to eleven Alphas argue about the future of the coast for six hours.

The old Council of Alphas had been nine elders and a rule that said whatever the elders decided was law. The new one was different in every way that mattered. Every pack on the island got a seat and a vote, the elders lost the power to make bonds or rule on territory, and the whole thing was written down on paper that any wolf could ask to see. Ronan had drafted half of it in the fishing gear room with a pencil stub and a mug of cold tea, and when Elder Colm read the clause about willing marks aloud the gallery stood up and cheered for so long that Colm had to knock the table three times to get order back.

Padraig was named advisor to the new Council before the afternoon was out. He did not want it. He stood up and said so, in his old cracked voice, and told the assembled Alphas exactly what he had done to me when I was four years old and told them he did not think a man who had done that should be advising anybody.

Elder Aoife, the small one with iron grey hair, listened to all of it and then said, "Padraig, you are the only wolf on this island who knows the old lore well enough to tell us what we are looking at when the next Soren comes. I am not asking you to be forgiven. I am asking you to be useful."

He took the seat. He has been useful ever since.

The spring was sealed on the last day of the session. Mairéad and her keepers did it, and I was asked to be there because I was the founder and the spring knew my blood, and I went down the stair with Ronan and Padraig and stood in the round room where Maeve had stepped into the water and watched the keepers work.

They sealed it with salt and iron and the old words, and when they were finished the basin was full of dry stone and the markings on the walls had gone dark for good. It took most of a morning. Nobody said very much. When it was done I put my hand on the dry stone for a moment and thought about my mother, who had held on in that water for two years, and then I took my hand away and went back up the stair.

The last piece of business was Lorcan.

He came before the new Council on the final afternoon, thin and grey faced in his prison clothes, and he read out his own crimes again because the new law required it, and then he stood and waited while the Alphas decided what to do with him. Colm wanted exile. Lord Callum of Ravenscar wanted him held for ten years. In the end they gave him the north, a cold stretch of coast with no pack on it and a hut that had belonged to a dead shepherd, and they told him he could live there as long as he never came south of the river again. It was not mercy and it was not justice. It was what the law allowed.

When it was over he stopped in the doorway and looked up at the gallery and found me.

"Luna," he said. "I hear you have a new mark."

"I have."

"Then I hope it serves you better than the ones I made." His grey eyes were steady and his mouth was not smiling. "There is one thing I should tell you before I go north. Soren had a keeper in the old house at Falcarragh, a wolf who came and went by night and never gave a name. I saw him twice. He was old and he had a scar down his face and he did not speak to me, and I do not know what he was to Soren or what he is doing now." He paused. "But he was the one who performed the proxy rite on Ronan. Not me. I only held the pen."

The gallery had gone quiet around me. Nessa's hand found my arm.

"Why are you telling me this now?" I asked.

"Because I am going north and I have nothing left to lose, and because a wolf who is finished might as well be honest on his way out." He turned and went through the door, and the two keepers on guard closed it behind him.

The session ended at dusk. The Alphas filed out and the gallery emptied and Nessa and Oisin went down to the harbour to find a boat, and I stood on the steps of the Council house with Ronan beside me and the new law in my hand, one copy of it, still warm from the copying room.

The mark on my wrist had gone cold again.

I looked down at it. The gold crescent was there, clear as ever, and beside it, faint and new, was a second mark. I had not put it there. I did not know what it was.

Ronan saw me looking. "Fiadh?"

"There is a mark on my wrist that I did not give anybody," I said.

He took my hand and turned it to the light, and his face changed. The second mark was small and dark, like a burn, and it was shaped like the keeper's seal on the letter Padraig had shown me on the cliff, the letter with the name on it that nobody in the Council recognized.

"That is the same mark," Ronan said. "That is the one from Falcarragh."