Chapter 30: The Night in the Boathouse

The water was at our knees and the wind was screaming in the roof and the rowing boat beside us was knocking against the wall, and Ronan sat in the dark with his back against the timber and said, "There is something I have to tell you."

"Then tell me."

"I did not sign the paper in April because of the boats."

I turned my head. It was too dark to see his face.

"You told me the storehouse burned and the pack was going to starve."

"That is true, and I would sign it again for the same reason." His voice was quiet. "But that is not why I signed it in the end. In April I sat in my room with the sums and there was nothing left, and I was not thinking about the boats. I was thinking about a wolf I used to know."

"Who?"

"Her name was Bríd. She was my mate. The true one. The first one."

The water lapped at the wall. I did not say anything.

"She died eight years ago," Ronan said. "There was a sickness in the pack and she was a Gamma and she went into the north to bring a family out and she did not come back. I found her four days later in the snow." He was quiet for a moment. "The mark was on her neck. It was silver, like Nessa told you. It never hurt a day in its life, and on the day she died it went cold and then it went grey and then it faded, and I felt it happen. I was standing in the hall and I felt it go, and I sat down on the floor and I could not get up for two days."

"Ronan."

"I am not telling you this to make you sorry for me. I am telling you because you should know what you are getting." His voice had gone flat and careful. "When the mark faded I thought I would die of it. I did not. I got up and I ran the pack and I did not take another mate and I told myself a wolf only gets one and I had had mine. And then in April Lorcan came with his paper and I signed it, and I told myself it was for the boats. It was not. It was because I thought a false mark was better than no mark at all."

The rowing boat knocked against the wall. I could feel him beside me in the dark, warm and shaking, and the pull in my chest had gone past warmth into something that ached.

"There is a thing you should know about me too," I said.

"Tell me."

"I have never shifted. Not once in twenty eight years." I said it flatly, because it was the only way I could say it. "There is no wolf in me. I have looked for twenty years and there is an empty room where the wolf should be, and a locked door at the back of it. My mother had me suppressed when I was six. Padraig did it. He told me so last night."

Ronan did not say anything.

"So when you look at me, you are not looking at a wolf. You are looking at a healer with a box of tins and a debt that does not exist and a door in her head that somebody locked when she was six years old. I do not know what I am. I have never known."

"Fiadh."

"And now I have a true bond with the Alpha of a pack, and the Alpha has a true bond with a woman who cannot shift and cannot fight and has no pack and no name and no one behind her. On the twenty eighth I will stand up in that Council chamber and the elders will ask what I am, and I will have no answer for them."

The wind took the roof and shook it. Water was over my knees now and my boots were full and my feet had gone numb.

Ronan's hand found mine in the dark. His fingers were cold and they closed round mine and held on.

"Then let me tell you what you are," he said. "You are the healer who walked into a dying man's house and named the thing that was killing him in a week when every physician in the north had looked and seen nothing. You are the woman who stood in front of Lorcan and refused to give him your silence. You are the one who found the silver in my shoulder and the poison in my tea and the ritual on my chest, and you did it with a case of tins and no pack behind you. And this morning you carried me up my own stairs." His fingers tightened. "I do not care whether you can shift. I would rather have you at my back than a hundred of the others."

I sat in the dark and the water and my eyes stung and I did not let go of his hand.

"Ronan."

"What?"

"The bond." I turned toward him and my knee came up against his and neither of us moved away. "The true one. It is not going to go away and it is not going to get better. It is going to get stronger and it is going to hurt, and there is a false bond on your chest that will fight it, and Elara said they will tear you apart from the inside. What do we do about that?"

"There is nothing to do."

"There is something and I want you to hear me say it." I got my hand free of his and put it on his face. His cheek was cold and wet and his jaw was rough under my palm. "If we are going to die on the twenty eighth, I would rather have had the bond first. All of it. The mark and the mind-link and whatever comes with it. I have spent twenty eight years not being anybody's and I am not going to spend my last eleven days not being yours."

He did not answer for a long moment. The water was at my thigh.

"You do not know what you are asking."

"I know exactly what I am asking."

"If I mark you and the false bond breaks me, you will feel it. You will feel every hour of it and there will be nothing you can do." His voice cracked. "I watched Bríd go cold in my arms through a true bond. I would not wish that on anyone."

"Then it is a good thing it is not your choice." I moved my hand to the back of his neck and pulled him toward me. "It is mine."

He came. In the dark of the boathouse with the water round us, he came, and his mouth found mine, and the pull in my chest that had been a quiet steady thing for three weeks turned over all at once and became heat.

He kissed me like a man who had been holding himself back for a very long time and had just decided to stop. His hand came up into my wet hair and the other went round my back and pulled me in against him, and I made a sound against his mouth and he answered it, and the cold went out of the water and out of the wood and out of my bones.

Then the wall of the boathouse gave a long creak and the door at the end of it shifted six inches and a sheet of grey water came through the gap and took us both by surprise.

We broke apart. Ronan laughed, and it was a real laugh, and I had not heard one of those from him before.

"Tide is turning," he said.

I got my hand back into his and held it. "Tide is turning."

We sat in the boathouse with the water going down and the storm easing and our hands together in the dark. Toward dawn he put his arm round me and I put my head on his shoulder, and the pull in my chest settled into something I had no name for.

When the door was open and the sky was grey we came out onto the slip together with our clothes wet through and our hair flat and our hands still linked, and the whole pack was on the harbour wall looking down at us.

Maeve was at the front of them.

"Get inside," she said. "Both of you. Before you freeze."

Then she looked at our hands, and her face went smooth and hard and she turned and walked away up the wall with four wolves behind her.