Chapter 31: The Scent of Blood Ritual

Maeve had hot water and dry clothes waiting and she did not say a word while she handed them out, and that was worse than if she had shouted.

I got Ronan up to his room and out of the wet clothes and into a dry shirt and wrapped him in two blankets and put him in the bed with the shutters open so the air could get at him. His arm was bad. The roots had reached past the shoulder now and the skin over them had gone the colour of a plum, and when I put my hand on it he did not flinch, which was worse than flinching.

"Your fever is up again," I said.

"It never went down."

"Then I will bring it down." I sat down on the edge of the bed. "But first I want to look at the mark, and I want to do it properly. Light and air and no interruptions."

He lay back and pulled his shirt up to his collarbone and I brought the candle close.

The mark on his chest was not the same mark it had been three weeks ago. The spiral had gone deeper and darker and the centre of it had a sheen to it, like a wound that is trying to heal over something that should not be inside it. The roots had spread out from it across his ribs in thin lines and they were no longer only under the skin. Some of them had broken the surface and lay on it like threads laid on a table.

And there was a smell.

I had been smelling it for days without knowing what I was smelling. It was under the salt and the sweat and the wool and the wet, faint and sweet and cold, and it sat at the back of my nose the way a memory sits at the back of your mind until you turn round and look at it.

I put my nose close to the mark and breathed in.

Wolfsbane has a smell like a church and a grave. Silver has no smell at all, only a coldness that you feel on your teeth. This was neither of them. This was old blood, and something under the blood, something green and bitter, like the water in a vase where flowers have been standing too long.

I sat back.

"Ronan. Do you know what a blood ritual smells like?"

He did not answer.

"Because I do. My mother taught me when I was a girl. She had a bottle in her case that she kept wrapped in oilcloth and she made me smell it once and she told me that if I ever smelled it on a wolf I was to walk away and not look back." I looked at him. "It smells of old blood and green water and something sweet at the end of it. And that is what your chest smells like."

Ronan shut his eyes.

"Say it," I said.

"It is a blood ritual."

"Say it properly."

"It is a blood ritual," he said, "and it has been on my chest since April, and it is killing me, and I have known it was killing me since May and I have not said it out loud to anyone because saying it out loud would make it real." He opened his eyes. "There. It is real."

I sat with that for a moment.

"You knew in May."

"I knew something was wrong in May. The strength went and the mark ached and I could not shift. I did not know it was a blood ritual until you told me on the beach. But I knew it was killing me. That is why I let you stay." His mouth twisted. "I let you stay because I thought, if a rogue healer with nothing to lose cannot fix it, nobody can, and then at least I will have tried."

"You should have told me."

"You would have gone home."

"I would not have gone home."

"You told me on the first night that you came here to work out three months and leave." He looked at me. "I have had a great many wolves tell me they will stay. They all leave. Bríd left. My cousin left. The Council left when the tithe came due. I have stopped expecting anything else." He turned his head on the pillow. "And then you stood in my kitchen and told a Council envoy that you would not give him your silence, and I thought, that one is not going to leave."

I did not say anything for a while. The candle burned on the table and the sea went on outside and the light through the shutters moved slowly across the floor.

"There is a thing I have to ask you," I said, "and it is not a kind question."

"Ask it."

"When Elara came to the house in the spring and put her hand on your chest and said the words. Did she ask you to say anything back?"

Ronan frowned. "What do you mean?"

"A blood ritual is not one-sided. It is a bargain. Both wolves have to give something or it does not close. She gave you the mark and she took your strength and she got the Council its territory. What did you give her?"

He was quiet for a long moment.

"I gave her my name," he said. "She had a paper with my name at the top of it and a line underneath for my hand, and I signed it in front of Lorcan and two witnesses, and she put her hand on my chest and said the words and I said the words back."

"What words?"

"I do not remember. They were not in any language I know. She said them and I repeated them and I could not tell you one of them now, and every time I try to remember my head goes thick." He rubbed his forehead. "Why?"

"Because a bargain has a price on both sides," I said, "and the price on your side is not just the mark and the name. There is something else in the paper you signed, something you have forgotten. And when Elara offered you the second mark on the road, she was offering to finish what the two of you started. If we can find out what the second half of the bargain is, we may be able to break it without the rite at all."

Ronan sat up slowly.

"The paper," he said. "The copy. It is in the chest under the floor with the box."

I was off the bed and across the room before he had finished saying it. I had the chest open and the false bottom up and the wooden box in my hands and the folded paper under it, and I brought both of them back to the bed and set them down on the quilt.

The paper was one page and it had Ronan's name at the top and a line at the bottom where his hand had signed it, and the seal of the Council in the corner.

Halfway down the page there was a paragraph I had not read before, because Ronan had not shown it to me, and the paragraph was in a language that was not English and not Irish.

"Ronan," I said. "This line. The one in the old script. What does it say?"

He looked at it for a long time.

"I do not know," he said. "I have looked at it a hundred times. Every time I look at it my eyes go over it and then they go past it and I am looking at the next line."

I turned the paper over. There was nothing on the back.

Then I picked up the wooden box, and I put my hand flat on the lid, and the iron spirals went warm under my fingers.

"It has not got a key," I said. "But it has a hole in the bottom, and it has been drinking you, and it knows my hand." I lifted it. "Let us see whether it opens for mine."