Chapter 196: The Homecoming

I came up out of the spring with my mother's hand in mine.

She was lighter than a wolf should be. I carried her up the stair with Ronan on her other side and Padraig going ahead with the lantern, and the water ran off her grey coat and left a trail on the stone, and none of us said a word until we were out in the open air under the stars. Then she opened her eyes and looked at the sky for a long time and said, "Is that the same moon?"

"It is a different moon," Padraig said. "Ten years of them."

She thought about that. She was very thin and her fur had gone the colour of ash, and when she shifted back into her human shape she was so light that Ronan took off his coat and wrapped her in it and carried her the rest of the way up the hill. She had grey hair, my mother, and green eyes like mine, and a face I had not seen since I was sixteen years old.

The pack house was full when we came in. Aisling had got the fire going and the kettle on and there was a clean bed made up in the small room at the top of the stairs, the one Ronan had slept in while he was healing, and my mother was put into it and given broth and bread and told to sleep. She would not sleep. She held my hand and looked at me in the firelight and said, "You shifted."

"I did."

"Was it terrible?"

"The first time. Not after."

She nodded slowly. "I always wondered. I used to lie in the water and wonder whether you had managed it or whether the rite had held you quiet for the whole of your life. That was the worst of it. The wondering." Her grip on my hand tightened. "They told me the debt would be the end of you. That is what Soren said when he put me in. He said the debt would grind you down and the Council would pick up the pieces, and I lay in that water for ten years thinking about a girl on her own in a rented room counting coins."

"I paid it," I said. "The last of it. On the cliff. There is a sprig of your herbs on the cairn."

She closed her eyes. After a while she said, "Good," and then she was asleep.

She stayed with the pack for a month and then she went south to a cottage near Oisin's people, because she said she had spent ten years in the dark and she wanted to spend the rest of her life somewhere with a great deal of light. We write. She is not a warm woman and she never was. But she writes, every fortnight, in her small square hand, and she signs every letter the same way. Choose it well.

The homecoming came in the autumn, on the day the roof was finished.

Padraig had said it would be done before the winter and he was right, and the whole pack turned out to watch the last of the slates go on. It was a grey day with a wind coming off the water and the smell of rain in it, and the roofers were two brothers from the town who did not know what the pack was and had been paid in cash and fish. Aisling stood in the yard with her hands on her hips and shouted up at them about the flashing, and they shouted back that they had been doing roofs for thirty years and knew about flashing, and the argument went on pleasantly for most of the afternoon.

I sat on the harbour wall and watched. It was the same wall I had sat on the night Lorcan's offer came, and the same wall I had stood on with Ronan when the law was passed, and it was the same wall where he had read the names out in the spring. The harbour had not changed. The boats were still hauled up on the mud at low tide and the gulls still argued over the fish heads and the old white bitch still slept in the same patch of sun by the boathouse door. The pack house had changed. It had a roof on it, and the windows had been reglazed, and somebody had painted the door blue.

I went up the hill after the roofers had gone and stood in the yard and looked at it. It was a long low building with a stone chimney and a blue door and a bench outside that Aisling had put there because she said an Alpha needed somewhere to sit and be told things. It had a kitchen that smelled of bread and a corridor with a squeaky floorboard and a small room at the top of the stairs where my mother had slept. There was a hole in the wall in the drying shed where a young wolf had put a pitchfork through it during the war, and nobody had mended it because Nessa said it was a historical monument.

A year ago I had come up this hill with a contract in my pack and three months of service ahead of me and a plan to be gone by the spring. I had looked at that door and seen a cage with a lock on it.

Ronan came out of the house with two mugs of tea and handed me one. "You are standing in the yard staring at the door."

"I am."

"Should I be worried?"

"No." I took the tea. "I was thinking about the first night I came here. I was counting the months until I could leave."

He leaned against the wall beside me. "And now?"

"Now I am counting the slates on the roof. There are three hundred and forty of them on the front, and the roofer says the back has more because of the pitch." I drank some of the tea. "It is a good house."

"It is a good house," he said. "It has a blue door."

"That was my idea."

"I know. I was there."

We stood in the yard for a while with our tea going cold, and the wind dropped, and the sky over the hills went a long pale gold. Aisling came out and told us the supper was on the table and if we wanted to stand about in the yard all evening we could do it after we had eaten, and we went in, and the whole pack was crowded into the kitchen and there was bread and fish and a great deal of talking.

I sat at the long table with Ronan's knee against mine and looked at the door I had walked through a year ago and counted the months until I could leave. Then somebody knocked over a jug of water and Aisling shouted and Nessa laughed so hard she had to put her head on the table, and I thought, quite clearly, that I was home, and that the word had never meant anything to me before.

The next morning Ronan was up before me and standing in the yard with his boots on and a strange look on his face, and when I asked him what was wrong he said, "There is a letter come up from the town. The keepers have sent it. They have found another founder mark, Fiadh. In a spring on the other coast."