Chapter 2: Herbs and Debts

By the time we reached the pack house, Ronan had stopped leaning on me. He walked the last twenty yards on his own, upright, chin level, and if I had not watched his knees nearly go twice on the sand I would have believed him well. Maeve was in the kitchen with a pot of tea and she took one look at him and set the pot down hard enough to slop it.

"What happened?"

"Nothing happened," Ronan said. "The healer got lost on the beach."

"The healer found you on your knees in the water," I said, "and I would like a towel, and then I would like to know who put a bond mark on the chest of the Alpha of this pack."

The kitchen went quiet. Maeve looked at Ronan, and Ronan looked at the window, and a boy by the stove picked up a bucket and left the room in a hurry.

"We'll talk after breakfast," Ronan said, and went upstairs.

I did not wait for breakfast. I went to my room and opened my case on the bed.

The herbs travel in tins, six of them, packed in straw. I laid them out on the quilt and checked each one the way my mother taught me, a pinch rubbed between the fingers, a sniff, a look at the colour in the light. Yarrow, still sharp. Comfrey, the roots dry but sound. Meadowsweet, past its best, I would need to gather more before winter. Wolfsbane, sealed in wax and wrapped twice in cloth, because wolfsbane kills wolves and a healer who keeps it must be careful with her hands and her name. Valerian. Willow bark.

Under the tins was the contract.

It was one page, thick and yellowish, and the seal at the bottom was the Council's, a wolf's head inside a circle of stars. I had read it so many times on the journey that I knew it by heart. This agreement binds the healer known as Fiadh to the service of the Blackthorn Pack for the term of three months, in settlement of the debt of her mother, Siobhan, deceased. On completion of the term the debt shall stand cleared and the said healer shall be free of all obligation to the Council and to any pack under its law. Should the healer leave before the term is complete, the debt shall be doubled and her name struck from the roll of healers.

Doubled. There was no amount written next to the original debt, which was the part that bothered me most. A debt with no number on it can be any size at all.

I folded it and sat on the edge of the bed with my hands on my knees. Three months. Ninety days, give or take. I had lived in worse places for longer. There is a trick to leaving. You keep your things packed. You learn the roads out. You never let a pack start thinking of you as theirs.

I went to the window. The beach was empty now, the tide coming back in over the place where Ronan had knelt. Up on the ridge where the pines began, a small grey figure was walking slowly east. Lorcan. He stopped once and looked down at the house, and I stepped back from the glass before I had decided to do it.

Then I went downstairs and started earning my keep.

The pack house has a sickroom off the kitchen, a narrow room with a cot and a cupboard and a window too high to see out of. I swept it, aired it, laid my tins out on the shelf in the order I like them. Nessa found me there around noon. She had freckles and hazel eyes and a way of standing in the doorway as if she had been sent and was not sure she wanted to arrive.

"You're the healer," she said.

"I am."

"Padraig won't like that. He's the old healer. He went to the islands. But he'll come back and he won't like you."

"Then he can tell me himself. What's your name?"

"Nessa. I'm Omega. Well, I'm not really Omega, I just help in the kitchen and Maeve says I talk too much, so I suppose that makes me Omega."

I liked her immediately, which is always a warning sign.

She stayed while I ground willow bark and asked questions about every tin, and I answered about half of them. In exchange she told me the Alpha had been ill since the spring, that the Council had sent Lorcan to look into it, and that nobody liked Lorcan, not even the wolves who agreed with him.

"And there was a woman," she said. "She came in a car with him, back at the start. I only saw her from the kitchen window. Green scarf. She didn't stay long."

A woman in a green scarf who came and went and left a mark behind her. I filed that away in the place where I keep the things I do not yet understand.

Ronan came down in the afternoon, washed and shaved and wearing a clean shirt, and if he was still grey around the mouth he had decided not to show it. He found me in the sickroom and stood in the door with his arms folded.

"I owe you an explanation," he said.

"You do."

"You won't get one."

"Then why are you here?"

He came in and sat on the cot and looked at my tins on the shelf for a while. "I want to know what you saw on the beach. The mark. What did it look like to you?"

I told him the truth, because a healer who lies about what she sees is no use to anyone. I told him it was a bond mark and it was not a true one, that true mate marks sit flat and warm and this one sat like a stone set in a ring, and that whatever was underneath it was eating him from the inside. I told him I had seen a mark like it once in a book, and that I would need to look at the book again before I said more.

He did not say anything for a long time. The light through the high window moved across the floor.

"Can you fix it?" he said.

"I don't know yet."

"That's not an answer I can use."

"It's the only one I have." I sat down on the stool opposite him. "Alpha. I came here to work out my three months and go. I don't want your secrets and I don't want your pack. But if you want me to cure you, you have to let me look at the whole of it, and you have to tell me who put that mark on you and why. Otherwise I'm just a woman with herbs and a contract, and we'll both be wasting our time."

Ronan looked at me then, and the pale green of his eyes went a shade darker, and the space between us got smaller though neither of us moved.

"You'll want to leave before the three months are up," he said. "Everyone does. The coast does that to people. It gets into them and then they run, or they stay and get bitter." He stood. "I'll tell you what I can, healer. Not tonight. But soon."

He was at the door when Nessa came running down the corridor, out of breath and white in the face.

"There's a car," she said. "A grey car with a Council flag on it. It's Lorcan, and he's brought a man with him, and Maeve says you're to put on your coat and come to the front room and not say a word unless you're asked."

Ronan's jaw tightened. He looked at me, and there was something new in his face, something careful.

"He'll ask about your credentials," he said. "Where you trained, who your mother was, how you came by the contract. Answer him plainly and answer him short. And healer. Whatever he offers you, do not take it."

The front door opened below us and a voice came up the stairs, pleasant and unhurried, the voice of a man who had never once had to raise it to be heard.

"Ronan," it called. "I've brought someone I'd like your healer to meet. She's been waiting a long time for this introduction."