Chapter 25: The Ritual Book

Padraig's cottage stood at the end of a track that ran north from the harbour and stopped at the heather. It was low and white and old, with a slate roof and a chimney that had not been swept in years, and when we got to the door there was a lamp burning inside and no answer to our knocking.

Ronan put his shoulder to the door and it gave on the second try.

The cottage was one room and a scullery. A fire was burning low in the grate. There was a chair pulled up to the fire and a cup on the arm of it with the tea gone cold, and Padraig's stick was leaning against the wall by the door, and Padraig was not there.

"His coat is gone," Ronan said from the scullery. "His boots are gone. He has taken the lantern."

"Then he went out on his own feet." I stood in the middle of the room and turned round slowly. "He went out and he left the fire burning and the door unbolted. A man who means to be gone for a while bolts his door on this coast."

Ronan came back into the room. He looked at the fire and then at the chair and then at me.

"Fiadh. Look at this."

The shelf above the fire had three books on it. Two were old and cracked and one had a strip of leather for a bookmark. Ronan took down the third and laid it on the table and opened it, and it was a ritual book, old, with the pages gone brown at the edges and the writing in a hand that was not Padraig's.

The first half of it was a history of the old rites, written in a tight cramped script with drawings in the margins. The second half was instructions. I turned the pages slowly with one finger.

Then I turned one and stopped.

The page had been torn out. It had been torn out recently, because the edge was ragged and clean and the tear had not darkened with age, and the pages either side of it had come loose in the binding where someone had pulled.

"Which rite is this?" Ronan said.

I looked at the pages before and after. The one before was a rite for the naming of a child. The one after was a rite for the laying of a dead wolf in the ground. Between them, in the place where a page had been, there was a heading at the bottom of the left hand page, cut off by the tear.

The heading said: Of the breaking of bonds made by force.

"That is it," I said. "That is what we came for. The breaking rite is on the torn page."

Ronan sat down slowly on the edge of the table.

"He tore it out," he said. "Padraig tore it out of his own book and took it with him and went out into the dark."

"Or someone tore it out and Padraig went after them." I turned the book round. "Do not decide he is a traitor yet."

"Fiadh. The man has been telling us since the first week that we should leave. He warned you off blood rituals. He would not tell you what he knew. And now the one page that could save my life is missing and he is missing with it." Ronan's voice had gone flat. "That is not a coincidence. That is a pattern."

I did not answer him. I was looking at the shelf.

There was a second book behind the first two, pushed back against the wall where the light did not reach it. It was smaller than the ritual book and it had no title on the spine, and when I pulled it out it was a ledger, old and soft with handling, and the pages were covered in a healer's hand.

"His case book," I said. "Forty years of patients."

I opened it. It was not a case book.

It was a list. Names and dates, one to a line, and beside each name a small neat note. Some of the notes said a year, some said a place, some said nothing at all. There were forty or fifty names on the first twenty pages. I turned them slowly, and the names were all different, and the dates went back thirty years and more.

Then I found a name I knew.

Siobhan. And under it, in the same hand, a note that said: suppression, complete, child of six. No further renewal required.

I stood very still with the book open in my hands.

"Fiadh?" Ronan said. "What is it?"

"Siobhan," I said. "My mother. She is in this book. And beside her name it says suppression, complete, child of six." I looked up at him. "Padraig wrote my mother's name in this book. He wrote that a suppression was completed on a child of six. And I was six years old when my mother took me to a woman in a cottage up a glen and made me drink bitter tea."

The fire cracked in the grate. Ronan did not say anything.

"He did it," I said. "Or he knew about it. He wrote it down in his own book in his own hand." I turned another page and then another, and the names went on and on, and half of them had the same word beside them. Suppression. Suppression. Suppression.

"Fiadh," Ronan said. "Put the book down."

"He has been in this pack for forty years and he has been putting wolves to sleep in their own bodies for forty years, and the one page that could save you is torn out of his book and he is gone out into the dark." I shut the ledger and held it against my chest. "I trusted him. I stood on the slip with him and I told him I had no pack and he told me to go home, and I thought he was frightened, and he was frightened, but not of Lorcan. He was frightened of me finding out."

"Fiadh."

"And my mother." My voice cracked and I did not care. "My mother took me to him. She let him do it. She held my hand while I drank it and she never said a word, not in twenty years, not on her deathbed, not ever."

Ronan got up and crossed the room and took the ledger out of my hands and set it down on the table. Then he took both my hands in his and held them, and the pull in my chest came up through my wrists and into my arms, and it was warm and it was steady and it did not help at all.

"Breathe," he said.

"I am breathing."

"You are not. You are shaking." He held on. "Look at me."

I looked at him. His pale green eyes were very close and very steady and the dimples were gone from his face.

"Whatever Padraig has done," he said, "he did not do it tonight. Tonight someone came to this cottage and someone tore a page out of that book, and Padraig went after them, and he took his stick and his lantern and he left the door unbolted because he meant to come back." He let go of one of my hands and picked up the ledger. "And this book has a name in it for every wolf he ever treated, and if he was doing something wrong he would not have kept it on a shelf where any visitor could reach it. He would have burned it."

I stared at him.

"That is a very good argument," I said, "for a man you called a traitor two minutes ago."

"I am making it up as I go." He put the ledger down. "We take the book and the ledger and we go back to the house. In the morning I will send Colm and two others out to look for him."

I nodded. I picked up the ritual book and the ledger and held them against my chest.

At the door, Ronan stopped and looked back into the room.

"The fire," he said. "It is still burning. He has been gone for hours and the fire is still burning."

I looked at the grate. The fire was low, but it was not out. There was a good bed of ash under it and one log still red at the heart.

"Someone has been in here," I said. "Someone has been keeping it fed."

The front door of the cottage opened behind us, and a voice came out of the dark.

"Put the book down," Padraig said, "and step away from the shelf, both of you. There is a wolf outside this cottage with a rifle and silver in it, and he is not mine."