Chapter 193: The Last Enemy

We went north to Falcarragh the next morning with eight wolves and Padraig, and the mark on my wrist stayed cold the whole way.

The road up the coast is a narrow thing that runs between the sea and the hills, and the wind comes off the water without anything to stop it. I sat in the back of the cart with my coat collar up and watched the mark on the inside of my wrist. It had not warmed since the Council steps. It sat there beside the gold crescent, small and dark, and every mile we put behind us it seemed to me it got a little colder, the way a stone gets colder the deeper you dig it out of the shade.

Nobody talked much. Padraig had his old leather satchel on his knees and his blue eyes fixed on the horizon, and Ronan drove the cart himself with his jaw set, and the eight Blackthorn wolves who had come along ran the verge on four feet in a loose scatter, and their breath showed in the air.

The old house at Falcarragh stood on its own above a stony beach, a long low farmhouse with a slate roof and windows that had been broken a long time ago and mended with boards. There was a wooden gate hanging off one hinge. There was a well in the yard with a rope still on the windlass, and a row of flowerpots on the sill that had been dead so long there was nothing left in them but soil.

We searched the house twice over. The first time fast, in case somebody was still in it, and the second time slow. There was a bed in the back room with blankets on it that had been slept in and turned back, and a fire in the grate that had been banked rather than let out, still warm at the heart of the ash. There was a bowl of water on the table with a cloth beside it and a small iron knife, and a plate with the crumbs of a meal on it, and a chair pushed back from the table as though the man who had sat in it had got up in a hurry.

On the wall above the table, pinned flat with four nails, there was a map of the coast. It was old and soft at the folds, and it had been marked in ink in three places. One was the Blackthorn harbour. One was a cove I did not know up near the northern point. And the third was the headland where my mother's cairn stood, and the ink on that one was darker than the rest, not yet dry when it went onto the paper.

"He has gone south," Ronan said. He had his hand flat on the map and his pale green eyes were moving over it. "Look at the fire. He banked it and he left the plate and he has not been gone a full day."

"He knew we would come here," Padraig said. "He wanted us to find the map."

I looked at the three marks. The cove meant nothing to me. The harbour had sixty wolves in it and a pack house with a hole in the roof that was not quite fixed. The cairn stood on a cliff with nothing on it but a heap of stones and a sprig of dried herbs.

"We go back tonight," I said.

We came down the coast road with the moon already up and the sea loud on our left, and we smelled the smoke before we saw the harbour. It was not a big fire. It was one small fire on the cliff above the pack house, built neatly on the flat rock, and it gave just enough light to show the man standing beside it with his hands folded into his sleeves.

He was old. Older than Padraig, older than Soren had been, and his face was long and thin and there was a scar down one side of it that pulled at the corner of his mouth. He stood the way a man stands when his bones no longer agree with each other, a little bent, a little careful, and he watched us come up the last of the road without moving at all.

The pack was already out of the house. I heard the door bang and boots on gravel, and Aisling came out with a fish knife in her hand and her grey hair down, and Oisin behind her with a boat hook, and Nessa at the back with her freckled face white as paper. They arranged themselves on the grass without anyone telling them to, in a line between the old keeper and the house, and I felt the mark on my wrist go from cold to warm.

"Founder," the old man said. "You have grown."

"You made the proxy rite on Ronan," I said. "You put the leash on him."

"I did what I was paid to do. Soren paid me for forty years and I did not ask what the work was for." His voice was dry as a stick, and he did not raise it. "I am not here to fight your pack, founder. I am here to finish the rite. There is one founder left alive and she has given her mark in freedom, and the spring is sealed, and the whole of the old network is finished, and I am the last keeper who knows how to tie it all together again." He unfolded his hands. "Give me your wrist and it will be done in a moment, and not one wolf in that house will be harmed. Refuse me, and I will take it, and I am not as gentle as I used to be."

Behind me the pack moved. Not one wolf. All of them at once, a shuffle of feet and a low growl that went down the line. Aisling came forward and stood at my left shoulder with the fish knife held low and businesslike, the way she had held a gutting knife for forty years. Oisin came round my right. The eight wolves from the cart spread out along the grass and lowered their heads.

The old keeper looked at all of them and did not seem surprised. If anything he looked tired.

"You have a pack now," he said. "Soren said you would be alone at the end. He said a founder wolf with no family and no name and no money would be alone when the keepers came for her." He tilted his head, and the scar pulled at his mouth. "He was wrong about a great many things at the end."

"He was wrong about me," I said.

Then he shifted, and the night filled up with a grey wolf the size of a horse.

I had never seen a wolf that big. His fur was grey streaked with black and his eyes were pale and his shoulders came up to Ronan's chest, and he crossed the grass at me without a sound. Aisling went at him with the fish knife and he knocked her aside with one shoulder and she went down hard on the rock. Oisin threw the boat hook and it clanged off the grey flank and did nothing at all, and then Ronan was there in his red wolf shape and the two of them went over together in the grass.

I shifted. It came faster now, quick and warm, the way it had come on the cliff, and the gold fur rose along my back and my paws hit the ground, and I was bigger than the old keeper and I had been waiting for this since the Council chamber.

I hit him from the side and he came off Ronan and went into the rocks. The pack came in behind me, all sixty of them, Aisling up again with blood on her shoulder and Nessa with her teeth bared and the old white bitch leading the young ones round the back of the fire. The grey wolf got up and turned in a circle and there was no gap in the line anywhere he looked.

He was bleeding from the shoulder and one ear was torn, and he stood there breathing hard and looked at me and then at the wolves around him, and he made a sound that was almost a laugh.

"Sixty wolves against one keeper," he said. "Soren would have called that unfair."

"Soren," I said, "is in a cell."

Then I went at him, and Ronan came with me, and the pack closed round the old grey wolf on the cliff above the harbour.