Chapter 26: A Name in the Margin

Padraig came in and shut the door behind him and put his back against it.

He was wet to the knees and there was heather in his bootlaces and his white beard was plastered flat to his chest with rain, and he was holding a lantern in one hand and his stick in the other and he was not holding either of them steady.

"There is a man in the heather," he said. "He has been there since dark. He has a rifle and I smelled the silver on it from the door."

"Where is he?" Ronan said.

"Two hundred yards north, behind the peat stack. He came up the track after you did and he has not moved since." Padraig set the lantern down on the table. "He is not one of ours. He smells of the south and of gun oil."

I put the ritual book down on the table and kept my hand on it.

"Padraig," I said. "The page is torn out of your book."

The old man looked at the book and then at me and then at the floor.

"I know," he said.

"Who tore it out?"

"I did." He came away from the door and sat down heavily in his chair by the fire. "This afternoon. After the meeting. I came out here and I tore it out and I put it in the fire."

Ronan moved before I did. He crossed the room in three strides and had Padraig up out of the chair by the front of his coat, and the old man's stick went over and rolled across the floor.

"You burned it," Ronan said. His voice was very quiet. "You burned the one thing in this world that could have saved me."

"Let go of me, Alpha."

"Answer the question."

"I did not burn it." Padraig's hands came up and closed on Ronan's wrists and held them. "I tore it out and I put it in my pocket and I came back out here to burn the book, and when I got here the fire was lit and there was a man in the heather and I have been out there in the wet since dark trying to get a look at him. The page is in my pocket. Let go of me."

Ronan let go. Padraig sat back down and put his hand inside his coat and brought out a folded piece of paper, soft at the creases, and laid it on the table.

"There," he said. "Take it. I am too old to be shaken about by Alphas."

I unfolded it.

It was a single page, brown at the edges, and the writing on it was old and cramped and had been copied out by someone who was not the original author. At the top it said, Of the breaking of bonds made by force, and under that there were four paragraphs of instructions and a drawing of a mark.

I read it twice. The second time I read it slowly.

"You need three," I said. "The wolf who is bound, the wolf he is bound to, and one of the old blood."

"Yes."

"And it has to be done where the bond was made, or where the thing that made it is kept."

"Yes."

"And it says here, in the last paragraph, that the breaking must be done before the second mark is given, because after the second mark the bond and the wolf are one thing and cannot be told apart." I looked up. "What does that mean, Padraig?"

The old man rubbed his face with both hands.

"It means what it says," he said. "A false bond is a rope tied round a post. You can cut a rope. But if you leave it long enough, the rope grows into the post, and after that you are not cutting a rope any more, you are cutting the post." He looked at Ronan. "The second mark is when it grows in."

The room was quiet. Out in the heather something moved, and all three of us went still.

"How long?" I said.

"From the first mark? Six months to a year, depending on the wolf and how strong he was to begin with." Padraig looked at Ronan. "You have been going since the spring. That is seven months. You are near the end of your rope, Alpha, and I am sorry to say it in front of you."

Ronan said nothing. He was looking at the page on the table.

I turned it over. There was writing on the back, small and faint and in a different hand, and I held it closer to the lantern.

It was a note. Two lines, in a cramped quick hand that leaned to the right, and the ink was brown and old.

It said: If the bond is tied to a life, the breaking will take the life with it. Do not attempt without a healer who can hold the thread.

I knew that hand.

I had seen it on the bottom of receipts and on the labels of tinctures and on the inside cover of a book of herbs. I had seen it on the note my mother left on the kitchen table the last time she went out and did not come back.

"That is my mother's writing," I said.

Padraig's head came up. "What?"

"That is my mother's hand. This is her note on the back of the page." I held it out to him. "She wrote this. She had this page in her hands and she turned it over and she wrote on the back of it. Padraig, where did you get this book?"

The old man was staring at the paper. His face had gone the colour of the ash in the grate.

"From your mother," he said.

The rain came on harder against the window.

"Say that again," I said.

"Your mother gave me the book. Twenty two years ago. She came to this cottage in the night with a child asleep in her arms and a book under her coat, and she gave me the book and she asked me to keep it and she asked me to do a thing for her, and I did it." Padraig's voice had gone very quiet. "I did the suppression on you. I wrote it in my ledger and I have looked at that line every year since. You were six years old and you sat in that chair by the fire and you drank the tea and you did not cry, and your mother held your hand and she did not cry either, and when it was done she took you home and she never came back."

I stood there with the page in my hand and the fire going and the rain on the window, and my mother was in the room with me, in her own handwriting, telling me that the breaking of a false bond could take a life with it, and that it should not be attempted without a healer who could hold the thread.

She had known. She had known all of it, and she had written a note about it on the back of a page, and then she had given the page to Padraig and told him to keep it, and never told me a word.

"Fiadh," Ronan said.

There was a shot.

The window went in. Glass came across the room and the lantern went over and the flame went out, and I was on the floor with the page under my hand and Ronan's body over mine, and outside in the heather a second shot came, and then a third, and this one went through the door.