Chapter 195: The Price of Peace

The spring took three days to open, and in those three days the Blackthorn Pack counted what it had lost.

I did not go down to the Council seat on the first night. Padraig put his hand on my shoulder on the cliff and said, very quietly, "A spring that has been sealed for ten years does not open in an hour. You will need all your strength for the rite, and you will not have it if you go down there tonight with a dead wolf at your feet and a fight still in your blood." I did not like it. I stood on that headland with the wind pulling at my coat and the old keeper's body laid out on the grass behind me and I wanted to go down the hill and into the dark that same hour. Padraig waited. He has a great deal of patience, and he has spent a good part of his life using it on me.

"You are no good to her dead," he said.

That was the argument that worked. I went back to the pack house and Ronan brought me a bowl of soup that I do not remember eating, and I slept for sixteen hours with the mark on my wrist warm as a hand on my arm.

The next morning we began the count.

It was Aisling who started it. She came into the drying shed with a slate under her arm and a piece of chalk in her fist and said, "We are not going to sit about the harbour looking grim for a week. We are going to write the names down and read them out, and then we are going to mend the kilns, because the kilns will not mend themselves and the seaweed will not wait." She sat down on a crate with her grey hair still wet from the rain and put the slate on her knee. "Who is first?"

The names took most of a day. There were the four wolves who had died in the ritual network before any of us was born, whose names Padraig had recovered from Soren's files and checked against two other archives before he would say them aloud. There was Bran, the Rogue King, who had given his life at the gate of the Council seat. There were two Blackthorn warriors who had fallen at the border in the spring, and a third who had died of his wounds a week later in the pack house with his sister holding his hand. There was a young wolf from Ravenscar whose name nobody in the shed knew, and Aisling wrote down Ravenscar Wolf in her square chalk letters and said, "Somebody there will know him. We will send word and we will put his proper name in."

And there was Maeve.

Nobody wanted to say her name. The shed went quiet when Aisling's chalk hovered over the slate, and I could see the old anger moving round the crates, and a grey haired man near the door said something under his breath that I did not catch and did not want to. Nessa stood up. Her freckled face was very pale and her hands were shaking, and she said, in a small clear voice that carried to every corner of that shed, "She took the ledgers out of Lorcan's chamber and she hid them where they would be found. She did that before she stepped into the water. Whatever else she was, she did that." She looked round at all of them. "Write her down."

Aisling wrote her down.

Ronan read the names aloud on the third evening, standing on the harbour wall with the whole pack round him and the tide coming in behind, and when he had finished he folded the paper and put it in his coat.

"We are not going to pretend that all of them were good wolves," he said. "Some of them were not. Maeve tried to take this pack apart with her own hands and I will not stand here and tell you she was a saint. But she was ours. She was born on this coast and she died in the dark under a hill trying to put right a thing she had set wrong, and the sea does not care whether we forgive her. We will keep her name on the slate with the rest, and the coast is poorer without them all."

He looked down at the paper in his hand and then up at the pack. "That is all I have to say. Aisling has the beer."

The pack stayed on the harbour wall until the moon was high. There was crying and there was laughing, and at one point Oisin fell off the wall into the shallow water and had to be hauled out by two young wolves who thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen, and Aisling threw a boot at him and missed. I stood with Ronan's arm round my shoulders and watched them all, and the mark on my wrist was warm and steady, and I thought about my mother holding a spring shut in the dark under a hill for ten years while the pack she had never met learned to laugh again.

On the third night the spring spoke to me.

I was asleep. I woke in the dark with the mark burning on my wrist and a taste in my mouth like iron and salt, and I knew, the way you know the tide has turned, that the seal was failing. I got up and pulled on my clothes and Ronan was already awake and pulling on his, and neither of us said anything. We went down the hill together in the dark with a lantern and a coil of rope, and Padraig came behind us with his satchel banging against his hip and his face grey in the light.

The stair under the Council seat was cold and the air got colder as we went down. The round room was full of water. Not the pool, the room, the whole floor of it, black and moving slow, and the old markings on the walls were faintly gold again, and in the middle of it the stone basin stood with its rim just breaking the surface.

Padraig stood at the edge with the lantern and did not go in. "The rite needs a witness, a mark and a wolf to come home to," he said. "The witness is inside. The mark is on your wrist. The wolf is standing beside you. Whatever happens down there, Fiadh, you must finish it. If you leave the water before it is done, the spring will close with both of you in it."

I looked at the black water. I thought about my mother, who had stepped into a spring rather than let the Council have me, and who had been holding a door shut in the dark ever since.

"Right then," I said, and I took Ronan's hand, and we walked down into the water together.

It came up over my knees and then my waist and then my chest, and it was cold as the sea in February, and the gold light came up around us from below. The mark on my wrist was blazing. Somewhere in the dark ahead of me something moved, something that had been waiting a very long time, and a voice I had not heard since I was sixteen said my name.

Then the water closed over my head, and the spring took me.