Chapter 21: Lorcan's Questions

Lorcan came at nine the next morning, and he came alone, which was worse than the car and the physician and the writ.

I was in the front room with the window open because the house smelled of wet wool and smoke, and I saw him walk up the path with his coat over his arm and his notebook in his hand, and I had about ten seconds to decide what my face was going to do.

"Fiadh," he said from the door. "Good morning. I hope I am not too early."

"You are always too early."

"I have been told it is one of my failings." He came in and set his coat on the arm of the chair and sat down without being asked. "I will not keep you long. I have three questions and then I will leave you to your herbs."

"Ask."

He opened his notebook. The pages were covered in his small neat hand, and there were more of them than there had been on the first visit.

"On Thursday night," he said, "a wolf on the north ridge was heard to howl, and it was answered from the pines by the harbour road. That is not a rogue. That is a pack operating inside Blackthorn territory. Do you know anything about it?"

"No."

"Did the Alpha mention it to you?"

"He mentioned that there were wolves on the ridge. I heard the howling myself. I was on the cliff."

"You were on the cliff." Lorcan wrote something down. "At what hour?"

"Eleven. Maybe twelve."

"Alone?"

I did not like the pause before the answer, and I did not like the fact that I noticed it.

"Alone," I said.

"Mm." He wrote it down. "Second question. I had a report this morning from my clerk at the harbour, who walks the pier at dawn. He says that yesterday evening a woman came to the green door at the end of the pier and knocked, and that the woman was you." He looked up. "Eithne is a retired Council clerk. Did she tell you anything useful?"

I had my pestle in my hand and I put it down on the table and I looked at him.

"You have a clerk who watches the pier at dawn."

"I have a clerk who walks the pier at dawn. The dawn walk is very good for the constitution." Lorcan smiled. "What did Eithne tell you?"

"That my mother's file is incomplete and that the archive is a mess. She is seventy eight years old and she talked for an hour about the state of the filing system in her day." I shrugged. "I went because Padraig said she had a bad back. She did not want to be treated and she gave me tea and told me about the filing system."

Lorcan looked at me for a long moment.

"You are a very bad liar," he said.

"I am a healer."

"You are a healer who is a very bad liar, and I am a Council envoy who has spent twenty years listening to bad liars, and I would like you to know that I am not angry about it. I find it refreshing." He closed his notebook. "Now the third question, and this is the one I really came for. Last night, on the road, a woman in a green scarf sat in a black car and spoke to you and the Alpha. After she left, did the Alpha touch you?"

My mouth went dry.

"What?"

"It is a simple question. Did he touch you? On the hand, on the arm, on the face. Anywhere."

I thought about his hand on my cheek and the spark coming up through my skin and the sound I had made.

"No," I said. "Why would he touch me? I bound his arm and told him to sleep. He went to his room."

Lorcan looked at me for a long moment, and then he smiled, and it was not a pleasant smile, and he picked up his notebook and opened it again.

"Because last night," he said, "I was standing on the harbour wall below the cliff path at midnight, and I smelled something. It came down on the wind from the top of the cliffs and it was very clear, and I have smelled it once before in my life." He tapped the page. "It is the smell of a true mate bond forming. It is a particular thing. It is not easy to describe and it is impossible to mistake. It smells of heat and green things and something that is a great deal like a struck flint, and it was coming off the two of you in a cloud."

The room was very quiet.

"I do not know what you mean," I said.

"Of course you do not." He wrote a line. "I am going to ask you one more time, and then I am going to stop asking, and after that I am going to start writing to the Council. Did the Alpha touch you last night?"

And then Ronan was in the doorway.

He was pale and his arm was bandaged and he was still in the shirt he had slept in, and he came into the room and stood beside me with his hands loose at his sides and said, "Yes."

Lorcan's pen stopped.

"Alpha," he said. "How nice of you to join us."

"He touched me," Ronan said. "On the cheek. I took his face in my hand on the top of the cliff path at midnight and he did not ask me to and I should not have done it." He looked at Lorcan. "There is your answer. Write it down."

Lorcan wrote it down. He took his time about it.

"Thank you," he said, and closed the notebook. "That is the first true thing anyone in this house has said to me in eight days." He stood up and put his coat on. "I will not insult either of you by pretending this changes nothing. A true mate bond between an Alpha and an unregistered healer with a debt over her head is a matter the Council will want to look at very closely. There will be a letter. I would expect it within the week." He picked up his hat from the chair. "In the meantime, Fiadh, I would advise you to think very carefully about what you want. A healer with a true bond to a dying Alpha is in a great deal of danger, and not all of it comes from the Council."

He went out. The front door shut behind him. Through the window I watched him walk down the path to the grey car and get in, and the car did not start for a long time.

"That was a mistake," I said.

"I know."

"You told him the truth and he wrote it down."

"I know." Ronan sat down slowly on the edge of the chair Lorcan had left warm. "But he already knew, Fiadh. He knew before he asked. He came here to see whether we would lie about it, and if we had both lied he would have written down that we lied, and then he would have had the lie as well as the bond." He looked up at me. "Now he has only the bond. He does not know how far it has gone."

I sat down opposite him. My hands were shaking.

"Ronan. If the Council takes this to the elders, they can declare the bond unlawful. They can force a rejection."

"They can try."

"A forced rejection will kill you. You have not got the strength for it. It will kill you before the false bond does."

He looked at me and the pale green of his eyes was steady.

"Then we have a week," he said, "and after that we will need to be somewhere the Council cannot reach us."

Outside, the grey car started at last and went down the road, and Maeve came through from the kitchen with a cloth in her hands and a look on her face that I could not read at all.