Chapter 27: Ronan's Strength Fails

We got out through the scullery with the page folded in my coat and the ledger under my arm and Padraig between us, and we went north along the heather in the dark with the rain in our faces and the shots going over our heads into the night.

Nobody followed us. That was the strange thing. The rifle went quiet after the third shot and there was no torch in the heather behind us and no sound of boots on the track, and when we stopped at the top of a rise and looked back the cottage was a black shape with no lamp in it at all.

"He has gone," Padraig said. "He got what he came for."

"What did he come for?"

"The book. He came for the book. He did not know I had already torn the page out of it." The old man wiped the rain off his face. "That is the second time this week someone has come looking for a book in my house."

We came down into the harbour at midnight with the rain easing off and the lights of the pack house yellow in the dark. Ronan had said nothing for the last mile. He walked with his shoulders hunched and his good hand in his pocket and every hundred yards or so he would stop for a moment and then start again, and the third time he stopped I put my hand on his arm.

"Ronan."

"It is the cold," he said. "The cold gets into the arm."

"Your arm is bandaged and your shirt is wet through. Of course it is the cold." I looked at his face in the light of Padraig's lantern. He was grey to the lips. "When did you last eat?"

"This morning."

"That was eighteen hours ago." I got under his arm. "Lean on me."

"I am not leaning on you in the middle of the harbour road."

"You are leaning on me or you are falling over, and if you fall over I will have to drag you, and then the whole pack will see it." I took his weight. "Lean."

He leaned. We got him up the path and in the back door and into the kitchen, and Nessa took one look at us and put the kettle on without being asked. I got his wet coat off and his wet shirt off and sat him down by the stove with a blanket round his shoulders, and Padraig sat down on the other side of the stove and put his hands out to the heat and did not say a word for a long time.

"Eleven days," Padraig said at last. "And a page with your mother's writing on it and a man in the heather with a rifle. That is what we have."

"That is more than we had this morning," I said.

"Morning." Ronan laughed, or tried to. "It is tomorrow already."

He stood up.

"Sit down," I said.

"I need to speak to the warriors. If there is a man in the heather with a rifle then the north track needs a watch on it tonight."

"Ronan, you cannot walk to the barracks. It is three hundred yards up a hill and you have not eaten since morning."

"I can walk three hundred yards."

He got two steps.

I have seen a great many men fall in my life and it is never graceful. He went down sideways and his shoulder caught the edge of the table and the table went over and the cup went with it and he ended up on the flags with his arm under him and his face against the floor, and he did not get up.

"Ronan."

"I am all right."

"You are on the floor."

"I am resting on the floor." His voice was muffled. "It is a good floor. It is a very good floor."

Nessa was at the door with the kettle in her hand and her face white. Padraig had not moved from his chair.

"Out," I said to Nessa. "Go and find Colm and tell him there is a watch to be set on the north track and it is the Alpha's order. And then go to bed and do not come down again tonight."

She went. I knelt down on the flags beside Ronan and got my hands under him and turned him over. His face was grey and his eyes were open and he was breathing, at least, but the bandage on his arm was wet through with something that was not rain, and when I put my hand on his forehead he was hot.

"Padraig," I said. "The comfrey and the willow bark are in the sickroom. Bring them. And bring the small brown bottle and a clean cloth and the honey."

The old man got up and went.

Ronan looked at me from the floor.

"You said it went well," he said. "On the stairs. You told the pack I had steadied."

"I lied."

"You did." His hand came up and found my sleeve and held it. "You lied to twelve and nine wolves in a stairwell and now I am lying on the kitchen floor and it is the middle of the night and I cannot get up."

I put my hand over his and held it there.

"You will get up tomorrow," I said. "You will get up tomorrow and you will eat something and you will walk to the barracks on your own two feet and the pack will see you do it. But tonight you are going to lie on this floor and let me work, and you are not going to say another word about it."

He shut his eyes. His fingers were still on my sleeve.

"Fiadh."

"What?"

"Thank you for carrying me home."

I did not answer him. I could not. I sat on the kitchen floor with his hand in mine and the rain going on outside and waited for Padraig to come back with my tins, and after a while I heard Ronan's breathing go slow and even, and I looked down and he was asleep on the flags with his head on his good arm.

Padraig came back with the tins and set them down and looked at the two of us on the floor.

"His strength has gone," he said quietly. "That is not the cold and it is not the walk. That is the bond eating the last of him."

"I know."

"Three weeks, I said. That was four days ago." Padraig knelt down stiffly on the other side of him. "Fiadh. Look at him. He has not got three weeks. He has not got eleven days to the twenty eighth and he has not got three weeks. He has got days."

I unwound the wet bandage from Ronan's arm and looked at what was underneath it.

The wound had closed, the way a werewolf's wound closes. But the skin around it had gone hard and dark and the roots underneath had reached the shoulder, and there was a smell coming off it now, faint and sweet and cold, the smell of a thing that is rotting from the inside.

"Then we have days," I said. "And we will use them."

I looked up. Padraig was watching me across the sleeping man on the floor and his watery blue eyes were very steady.

"There is one thing I have not told you," he said. "About the breaking rite. About what it costs the third one. The one of the old blood."

"What does it cost?"

Padraig opened his mouth to answer, and above us, from the direction of the north track, there came the long low howl of a wolf calling to its pack.