Chapter 22: The Council Letter

The letter came on Tuesday, which was four days earlier than Lorcan had led us to expect, and it did not come by car. It came by boat.

I was on the slip with Nessa, sorting through a crate of dried dulse for the ones that had gone mouldy, when a lad from the morning ferry came down the pier with a canvas bag and asked for the Alpha. The bag had a Council seal on the outside of it and a tag with Ronan's name and title written on it in a clerk's hand.

"Where did this come from?" I said.

"Ferry from the north," the lad said. "It was put on at Rathlin yesterday evening. The man who put it on paid the fare and did not give a name."

I took the bag up to the house myself.

Ronan opened it at the kitchen table with me on one side of him and Padraig on the other, and Maeve standing by the window with her arms folded. The letter was one page, and the seal on it was the Council's, and it did not waste any words.

The Alpha of the Blackthorn Pack was summoned to appear before the Council of Alphas at the northern seat on the twenty eighth day of the month, to give an account of his health and of the state of his pack, and to answer the complaint lodged against him by the Council's envoy, Lorcan, concerning an unlawful bond. He was to travel with an escort provided by the Council. He was to bring with him his healer and all papers relating to his treatment. If he failed to appear, the Council would consider the Blackthorn territory vacant and would appoint a steward to administer it in the Council's name.

The twenty eighth. I counted it out on my fingers twice.

"Eleven days," I said.

Ronan set the letter down flat on the table.

"Eleven days," he said.

"That is not weeks. That is not even a fortnight. Eleven days and they will have you in a chair in front of the elders with a steward waiting outside the door." I got up and went to the window and came back again. "You cannot travel. You cannot sit in a boat for two days and then stand up in front of the Council and answer questions. You would not last the crossing."

"I know."

"Then you will not go."

"Then they declare the territory vacant and send a steward, and the steward brings twenty wolves, and my pack is turned out of its own house by the end of the month." Ronan rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "I have to go, Fiadh. There is nothing else."

"There is something else." Padraig had not spoken until now. He was sitting with his old hands flat on the table and his blue eyes on the letter. "There is the second mark."

Maeve turned round from the window.

"What second mark?" she said.

"The one Elara offered him on the road. The one that closes the false bond and finishes the bargain." Padraig looked at her. "If the second mark is given, the bond closes, and Ronan lives, and the Council gets its territory and its name on a paper in perpetuity. That is what the letter is for. They are not summoning a sick man to answer questions. They are summoning him to a room where the only door out has a price on it."

The kitchen was very quiet. The kettle on the stove began to whistle and nobody moved to take it off.

"You are not to take the second mark," I said.

"Fiadh."

"Ronan. Look at me. If you take it, the bond closes and the Council owns this pack and you live, and you live as a wolf who sold his territory and his name and his mate to keep his own skin. That is not living. That is being kept." I sat down opposite him. "And there is another way. There has to be. The false bond is a thing that was made by a person, and a thing that was made by a person can be unmade."

Padraig said, very quietly, "It is not that simple."

"Then explain it to me."

The old man looked at Ronan and Ronan looked at the table and neither of them said anything.

"Padraig," I said. "Eleven days. If there is something you know, now is the time."

"There is a rite," Padraig said. "It is very old and it is not in the Council's books, and I have only ever seen it described in one place, in a book my grandmother kept. It is a breaking rite. It cuts a false bond out of a wolf without killing him."

"Where is the book?"

"I do not know. My grandmother's cottage was on the north coast and it burned down forty years ago." He held up a hand. "But I remember the shape of the rite and I remember what it needs. It needs the wolf who is bound and the wolf who is bound to him, and it needs a third, one who carries the old blood. And it needs the thing that made the bond, because a thing cannot be unmade unless you have it in your hands."

"The thing that made the bond," I said. "The box."

Ronan's head came up.

"The box is in the chest under my floor," he said, "and it does not open."

"It will open," I said, "if we have the wolf who closed it. Elara said she would be at the grey house until Friday. That is three days."

Maeve came away from the window.

"You are talking about taking a Council envoy's guest out of a house in the harbour," she said. "In front of Lorcan. In the middle of the day."

"I did not say it would be easy."

"It is not easy, it is suicide, and I will not have it." Maeve put both hands on the back of a chair. "Alpha. I have been patient. I have held this house together while you have been too weak to hold a cup. But if this pack is to be saved, it will be saved by a wolf who can still stand up in front of the Council and argue, and that is not you." She straightened. "On Sunday, at the pack meeting, I am going to ask you to name a successor. And I am going to ask in front of the whole pack, and you will answer in front of the whole pack, and whatever you say I will accept it."

She went out.

Padraig got up and went after her without a word. The kettle was still whistling. I took it off the stove and set it on the cold flag and stood there with my hand on the handle.

"Eleven days," Ronan said, behind me. "And on Sunday I have to stand up in front of my pack and tell them whether I am still their Alpha."

I turned round. He was still sitting at the table with the letter in front of him and his bandaged arm on the wood, and he looked like a man who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time and had just been told it was going to get heavier.

"You will tell them the truth," I said.

"The truth is that I am dying and I have no successor and the Council is coming."

"Then that is what you will tell them." I came back to the table. "And then you will tell them that we have eleven days and a box that will not open and a rite that Padraig half remembers, and that there is a healer in this house who has never once left a patient behind. And they will look at you and they will decide."

"And if they decide against me?"

I put my hand out and laid it flat on the table beside his, close enough to touch and not touching.

"Then I will still be here," I said. "And I have been told I am very difficult to get rid of."

Ronan looked at my hand and then at me, and something in his face gave way, just a little, and he put his own hand down beside mine so that our little fingers touched, and the pull in my chest turned warm and steady and did not go away.

Nessa put her head round the kitchen door.

"Healer," she said. "There is a boy on the step. He says he has come from the woman at the end of the pier and he will not give his name. He says to tell you the grey door is open."