Chapter 197: The Bond That Stayed

The letter from the keepers sat on the kitchen table for three days before I answered it.

It was a short letter in Mairéad's walnut-faced hand, and it said that the keepers had found a spring on the far west coast with the founder marks still on the walls, and a mark in the water that had not been given in two hundred years, and a young wolf in a fishing village who could not shift and did not know why. They wanted to know whether the Luna of the Blackthorn Pack would come and look at it.

I read it four times. Then I put it under the sugar bowl and went out to help mend the kilns.

On the third evening Ronan found me on the harbour wall with it in my hand and sat down beside me without saying anything. The tide was coming in and the boats were lifting off the mud one by one, and the light was going long and orange over the hills.

"You have not answered it," he said.

"I have been busy."

"You have been mending a kiln that Aisling told you three times not to touch." He put his hands in his pockets. "Fiadh. You are allowed to say no. You have given a mark to a spring, you have had your wolf taken and given back, you have stood in front of a Council and a pack and a war. Nobody in the world would blame you if you put that letter in the fire."

"I know."

"So what is the difficulty?"

I looked at the letter. "My mother spent ten years in the dark so that I would not be owned by a Council. Padraig spent twenty-six years carrying the guilt of what he did to me when I was four. The keepers put the rite on me again on the cliff and it nearly broke my wrist doing it. And now there is a girl on the far coast who cannot shift and does not know why, and there is a mark in a spring that has not been given, and if nobody goes and looks at it, some other Soren will." I folded the letter. "I do not want to go. That is the difficulty. I have a house with a blue door and a pack and a kitchen that smells of bread, and I do not want to get on a boat and go and find another dark room under a hill."

Ronan was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Then do not go alone."

I turned to look at him. His ginger hair was going grey at the temples and there was a new line at the corner of his eye that had not been there in the spring, and his pale green eyes were steady on mine.

"The pack can spare its Alpha for a month," he said. "Aisling has been running the kilns since before I was born and she will not thank me for saying so, but it is true. Nessa can keep the ledgers. Padraig is advisor to the new Council and he will write to every pack on that coast before we get there and tell them what the law says about willing marks. We go, we look at the spring, we find the girl, and then we come home." He paused. "And we take Oisin's boat, because I am not getting on a fishing trawler with you for three days."

I laughed. It came out of me before I could stop it, and it echoed off the harbour wall, and the gulls lifted and complained.

"Right then," I said. "We go in the spring."

We went up the cliff path that evening because I wanted to see the cairn before the light went.

The wind had dropped and the sea was calm and grey and the sky over the water was going the colour of old pewter. The cairn was still there at the edge of the shelf, and the sprig of dried herbs was still on it, brown now and weathered, and there were fresh stones on top of the heap that somebody had put there since I last climbed up. Aisling, probably. Or Nessa. Somebody in the pack who had known to do it.

Ronan stood beside me with his hands in his pockets and looked out at the water.

"Are you going to shift?" he asked.

"I might."

"Then I will too."

We left our clothes folded on the flat rock and the shift came up through me quick and warm, gold fur rising along my back, and beside me Ronan's red wolf shook himself out and stretched his forelegs and yawned in a way that was not dignified at all.

We ran the cliff path north with the sea on our left and the hills on our right, and my paws hit the turf and the wind came through my fur and the mark on my foreleg was warm as a coal. Below us the harbour lights came on one by one and the boats sat at their moorings and the pack house stood on its hill with its new roof and its blue door. I could smell the smoke from its chimney and the bread in its kitchen and the whole of my pack in the air, and I ran with my red wolf beside me and the tide going out under the cliffs, and for the first time in my life I knew exactly where I was and exactly where I was going and exactly who I was going there with.

We stopped at the top of the headland where the ground falls away to the sea, and Ronan sat down on his haunches beside me and we looked out at the water together. The moon was coming up over the hills, not full, a few nights short of it, and its light lay on the Atlantic in a long path that went all the way out to the edge of the world.

I put my head against his shoulder. He turned and put his muzzle against my ear and made a sound low in his chest that was not quite a growl and not quite a sigh, and through the mark between us I felt the whole of what he was feeling, steady as a tide and warm as a hand, and I sent it back to him doubled.

The bond stayed. It had been broken and given again and broken and given again, and it had outlasted a false leash and a Council and a spring, and it stayed. We stayed. The coast stayed.

The moon climbed. The sea went on being the sea. And beside me my red wolf sat with his flank against mine and watched it with me, and neither of us moved for a long time.