Chapter 194: The Final Battle

The old keeper was fast for a wolf his age, and he was clever, and neither of those things saved him.

I came in low and took his foreleg out from under him, and Ronan hit him from the other side before he could get his feet back. The pack was on him then, a ring of teeth that closed and opened and closed again, and he fought his way out of it twice and both times we put him back on the rock. The third time he did not get up.

He lay on his side on the grass with his grey flank heaving and blood on his muzzle, and he looked up at me with those pale eyes and said, in the voice that lived inside my head, "You have a mark on your wrist that I did not put there. What is it?"

"You tell me," I said. "You are the one who made it."

His eyes went to my foreleg and the mark on it, and something moved across his face that I had not expected. Not anger. Relief.

"The rite has a witness," he said. "Every rite needs a witness, and the founders wrote it so that the witness could never be the same wolf who performs the work. Soren did not understand that. He thought he was the witness and he was only the hand." He coughed, and there was blood on his teeth. "When you gave your mark to the spring, the spring took a witness. It took your mother."

I stood very still on the grass. Around me the pack had gone quiet, and Ronan was beside me with his red fur pressed against my gold shoulder.

"She has been in the water for ten years," I said. "You told me the spring let her go."

"I told you Soren wrote that it did. Soren wrote a great many things that were not true." He closed his eyes. "The witness cannot be released until the rite is finished. She has been holding the spring shut since the night you put your mark in it. That is why the network broke. That is why the whole thing came down at once." He opened his eyes again. "If you want her out, founder, you will have to finish the rite yourself, and you will have to do it before the next full moon, because the spring is sealed and a sealed spring with a witness still in it will not stay sealed forever."

The mark on my wrist burned. It was hot now, hot the way a coal is hot, and I looked down and saw the small dark keeper's mark on my skin turn from black to red to gold, and then it was gone, and there was only the gold crescent left.

The old keeper's breathing had gone shallow. I shifted back, and the night air was cold on my skin, and I crouched down beside him with my hand on his grey shoulder. He was a wolf who had leashed nine Alphas and put a proxy rite on the man I loved, and he had done it for money, and he had also told me the truth at the end when he did not have to.

"What is your name?" I asked. "Nobody in the Council knows it. I want to know what to put in the record."

His mouth moved. "Cormac."

"Cormac," I said. "I will not thank you. But I will write your name down."

He closed his eyes and did not open them again. I stayed there until his breathing stopped, and then I stood up and Ronan shifted back and put his coat round my shoulders, and I stood on the cliff above the harbour in the moonlight with a dead wolf at my feet and sixty wolves watching me and the whole of the pack house lit up behind us.

Aisling came over with her hand pressed to her shoulder. "That was quick," she said. "I have seen longer fights over a fish."

"It is not finished," I said. "My mother is still in the spring."

Padraig came up the grass with his satchel banging against his hip. He had heard everything, of course, because Padraig always hears everything, and he was already shaking his head.

"Fiadh," he said. "The spring is sealed. Mairéad sealed it herself with salt and iron, and the keepers were certain it would hold."

"The keepers did not know there was a witness still in it. Cormac knew and he did not tell them." I pulled Ronan's coat tighter. "There is one full moon left before the seal fails. If I do not finish the rite by then, the spring opens with my mother still inside it, and I do not know what that does to her or to the coast or to any of us. I have to go back down."

"You cannot go down there alone."

"I know." I looked at Ronan. "I am not going alone."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "The seal was made with salt and iron and old words. What breaks it?"

"Nothing breaks it." I turned to Padraig. "But it was sealed by a keeper who did not know there was a witness, and the witness is a founder. A founder can open what a founder closed. My mother has been holding it shut from the inside for ten years. She has been waiting for me to come and finish it."

Padraig looked at me for a long time. Then he said, "There is one more thing you should know before you go down there, and I should have told you before now. The rite you are going to finish is not the one the keepers performed on the cliff. It is the old one, the founder's rite, and the founder's rite needs three things: a witness, a willing mark, and a wolf to come home to."

"I have a witness," I said. "I have a mark. And I have a wolf."

Ronan took my hand. His fingers were cold from the fight and they closed round mine tight.

"Then we go down in the morning," he said.

"No," I said. "We go down tonight. Because the spring has already begun to open."