Chapter 28: The Silver Burn

The howl went on for a long time and then it stopped, and nothing came down the north track, and I sat on the kitchen floor until the sky went grey waiting for it.

Padraig fell asleep in his chair. I did not wake him. I got Ronan's arm cleaned and bound and put a cushion under his head and covered him with the blanket, and then I sat with my back against the dresser and watched the door.

The pack came down in the morning. Colm had set the watch and the watch had seen nothing but a fox and reported the north track clear, and the house got up and made porridge and went about its business, and by eight o'clock there were four wolves standing in the kitchen doorway looking at the Alpha asleep on the floor.

I told them he had been up all night and had fallen asleep. It was the truth. It was not the whole of the truth, and I watched them decide whether to believe me.

Maeve was the last. She came down at nine with her sleeves rolled and her hair tied back and stood in the doorway with a bowl in her hand and looked at Ronan on the floor for a long moment.

"He is on the floor," she said.

"He is on the floor."

"In the kitchen. Where the boots go."

"He is on the floor in the kitchen where the boots go," I said, "because he could not climb the stairs last night, and I would rather have him on the floor in the kitchen where I can see him than at the top of the stairs where I cannot."

Maeve looked at me. Then she set the bowl down on the dresser and came into the room and knelt down beside him and put her hand on his forehead the way a mother does.

"He is burning," she said.

"I know."

"You told the pack he was steady."

"I told the pack he was steady because you asked him to name a successor in front of twelve and nine wolves, and if I had told them the truth they would have named you in the morning." I got up. "You can be angry with me, Maeve. You can be angry with me after he is well."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she got up off the floor and picked up her bowl and went out without saying anything at all.

We got him upstairs around ten. He woke halfway up the stairs and insisted on walking the last six steps himself, and it took him a long time and he did not look at me while he did it.

Then I went to work.

Padraig had told me once that a werewolf heals from anything that has not killed him, and that the only things that slow it are silver and wolfsbane. I had seen the roots under Ronan's skin and the black blood and the black grains in the slide, and I had thought I understood it. I did not understand it until I unwound the bandage that afternoon and looked at his shoulder.

There was a mark on it. It was not one I had seen before. It sat on the top of the shoulder, a small round mark the colour of a sixpence, and the skin around it had gone hard and white and had begun to spread.

I put my finger on it and Ronan drew a breath through his teeth.

"How long has that been there?" I said.

"Since the border."

"Which border? The night the rogues came?"

"Before that. There was a night in June when I went out on the ridge alone and someone put a blade into my shoulder." He was lying on his side with his good arm under his head. "It was a rogue. He came out of the heather and he was gone before I could turn. I did not think about it at the time. I had other things to think about."

"A blade. What kind of blade?"

"A thin one. Cold."

I got up and went to my tins and came back with the small bottle and the clean cloth and I cleaned the mark with vinegar and honey and put a salve on it, and I watched the skin while I did it, and the skin did not do what skin does.

"Ronan," I said. "When you were cut in June, did the wound close?"

"Yes. In an hour."

"And this mark? Has it closed?"

He was quiet for a moment.

"No," he said. "It has been open since June."

I sat back on my heels.

Silver, I said to myself. The man in the heather had a rifle with silver in it. Padraig had smelled it on the wind. And there had been a thin cold blade in June on the ridge and a mark on his shoulder that had not closed in four months, and a wolf who had been going downhill since the spring and a bond that was eating him and a healer who had been telling herself that she had found the whole of it.

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

"Someone has been putting silver into you since June," I said. "Not to kill you. A killing blade would have gone through the heart. A thin blade in the shoulder, a little silver in the blood, just enough to keep the wound open and the healing slow. And then the tea in the kitchen, and the false bond on your chest, and the roots going up your arm." I stood up. "It is not one thing that is killing you, Ronan. It is four."

He sat up slowly.

"Four?"

"The bond. The silver. The wolfsbane in the tea. And this." I held up my hand before he could speak. "They are all aimed at the same thing. They all slow your healing. Any one of them alone would not have brought an Alpha down. All four of them together have brought you down in six months, and whoever set them up has been doing it from inside this pack, because someone had to put the blade into your shoulder on a night when nobody else was on the ridge."

The room was very quiet. Ronan was looking at me with an expression I could not read.

"Maeve," he said.

"I did not say Maeve."

"You did not have to. You are thinking it and I am thinking it and neither of us wants to say it out loud." He lay back down. "Fiadh. The night I was cut in June, Maeve was the one who found me on the ridge. She was the one who brought me home."

"Then she was the one who could have put the blade in and then come back for you." I sat down on the edge of the bed. "Or she found you after someone else did and said nothing about it. Or she was not involved at all and I am wrong. I do not know, Ronan. I am a healer and I have been looking at your body for three weeks and I have found four separate things that are killing you, and I am telling you that whoever did this is patient and clever and has had access to you for a long time."

Ronan shut his eyes.

"Get Padraig," he said. "And get the page. I want to hear what the breaking rite costs before I sleep again."

I went to the door. Nessa was at the top of the stairs with a tray in her hands and her mouth open.

"How long have you been there?"

"Long enough," she said. "Healer, there is a man at the door. Not the grey car. A man on foot, with a lantern, and he says he is from the north and he has come to see the woman with the golden hair who smells of herbs."

She looked at me. "He says he knew your mother."

I went down the stairs.

There was a man standing in the hall with the door open behind him and the morning light on him. He was tall and weathered and his hair had been sun-bleached almost white, and he had a sailor's coat and a sailor's way of standing with his weight on one hip. He looked at me and his face did something complicated.

"Fiadh," he said. "You have got your mother's eyes. I am Oisin. I was told to find you if she ever stopped writing."