Chapter 24: Fiadh's Lie

Eithne's room was empty. The lamp was still burning on the desk and the chair was pushed back and the box of copies was gone from the shelf, and the cat was under the table with its ears flat.

I stood in the middle of it with the boy from the pier at my shoulder and looked at the desk. There was a cup of tea gone cold and a pen laid across an open ledger with a line half written and a scatter of sand on the page where she had been drying her work.

"She was writing," I said. "She stopped in the middle of a line and she got up and she went out. Or she was taken."

The boy was maybe twelve and he was frightened. "I only came to tell you. I did not touch anything."

"Did anyone come down the pier last night?"

"There was a grey car on the harbour road about two in the morning. I heard it because it woke my sister. It went up toward the pines and then it came back and went north." He shifted from foot to foot. "There was no lamp on the pier after that. Not for a long while."

I went back to the house fast and found Ronan still in the long room with the letter in his hand.

"Eithne is gone," I said. "The box is gone. The lamp was still burning and the ledger was open and the cat was under the table. That is not a woman who went out for a walk."

Ronan put the letter down. "Lorcan."

"Of course it is Lorcan. She had thirty years of copies of the Council's own papers and she was going to give them to me and now she is gone, and I have nothing. I have no file, I have no copy of my mother's paper, I have no line in the margin to show anyone." I put both hands on the table. "And I have eleven days."

Ronan did not answer for a moment. Then he said, "What do we tell the pack?"

The pack. Twelve and nine. A house full of frightened wolves who had just watched their Alpha stand up and admit he had signed his own death warrant, and a Beta who was counting the days.

"We tell them you are stable," I said. "We tell them the healer has found the cause and the healer is treating it and the Alpha is not getting worse. That buys us time. If they think you are going to drop dead on the stairs they will follow Maeve tomorrow."

Ronan looked at me.

"You want me to lie to my pack."

"I want you to say nothing and let me say it." I straightened. "You have told them the truth and it split the room in half. Truth is expensive in a pack, Alpha. You have eleven days and you need twelve and nine to be one and one. Let me give them a week of quiet."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"Do it," he said.

The pack was gathered in the hall, because nobody had gone home after the meeting and Nessa had been crying and the boy from the pier had told everyone about the empty room and the lamp. They went quiet when I came out to the top of the stairs.

"Listen to me," I said. "I am the healer and I have been in this house long enough to know what is wrong with your Alpha. The bond is a false one and it is a ritual and it can be broken. I have been working on it for a week and I am close to finding the way."

Somebody at the back said, "How close?"

"Close enough to say this. The Alpha is not getting worse. Since I stopped the tea and treated the wound on his arm he has been steady, and if he stays steady for eleven days he will stand in front of the Council on the twenty eighth and he will not fall down." I looked at Maeve, who was at the bottom of the stairs with her arms folded. "He is not going to die on the stairs. He is going to walk into that chamber on his own feet."

I heard the breath go through the hall. It was not belief, exactly. It was the sound of people who had been holding something heavy deciding they could put it down for a while.

"Eleven days is not a long time," I said, "but it is enough. Keep the borders. Keep the boats. Keep the house in order. And do not, any of you, come to me with your doubts in the next week, because I do not have the time to hear them."

They went out. Some of them looked at me as though I had given them a present. Some of them did not look at me at all. Maeve looked at me the whole time, and when the last of them had gone she came up the stairs and stopped on the step below me.

"He is not steady," she said. "I saw his hand at the meeting. He could not hold a cup."

"He is steady enough to stand."

"That is not what you told them." She looked at me with her brown eyes and her face was not angry, it was tired and a little sad. "You have bought yourself eleven days and a lie, and lies are a debt too, healer. They get called in like everything else."

She went past me down the corridor.

I went into the long room and shut the door and stood in it with my back against the wood.

"That went well," I said.

"It did not." Ronan was standing by the window with his back to me. "You made me look strong."

"That is the point."

"It is not the point. It is a lie dressed up as medicine." He turned round. His face was white with anger and his hands at his sides had gone into fists. "I stood in front of my pack on Sunday and I told them the truth, and it was the first honest thing I have done in six months, and you have undone it in a single minute in a stairwell. Now they think I am getting better. Now they will look at me at supper and wait for me to stand up straight, and I will stand up straight, and when the twenty eighth comes and I am still dying they will remember that the Alpha's healer stood on the stairs and told them he was not getting worse."

"By the twenty eighth you will be cured or we will all be dead. It does not matter what they remember."

"It matters to me."

"Then be angry with me." I came away from the door. "Be angry with me, Ronan, but do not stand there and tell me I was wrong, because you are the one who is dying and I am the one who has to watch it, and I will lie to every wolf in this house if it buys us a week."

He stared at me.

Then the anger went out of his face, all at once, and something else came in behind it that was worse than anger.

"Do not do that again," he said, very quietly. "Do not make me into a thing you have to manage. I have spent six months being a thing that has to be managed. I would rather have the pack know the truth and lose the seat."

There was a knock at the long room door, small and quick.

Nessa put her head in. "Healer. Padraig has gone out to his cottage. He took his coat and his stick and a lantern and he has not come back and it is getting dark."

I looked at Ronan. He looked at me.

Padraig's cottage was at the edge of the pack lands, alone, with nothing near it but heather and the sea.

"Stay in the house," I said.

"I am not staying in the house."

"Ronan."

"I am not staying in the house," he said again, and picked up his coat.