Chapter 32: Padraig's Story

The box did not open.

I held it for a long time with my hand flat on the lid and the iron spirals warm under my fingers, and I tried everything I knew. I tried the words my mother used to say over a wound. I tried the old tongue she used for the herb names. I tried the names of the old rites out of the torn page and out of the ritual book. Nothing.

The box stayed shut and the hole in the bottom of it stayed open and the cold of it went up my wrist and into my arm like water going into a sleeve.

"How long do we have?" Ronan said from the bed.

"Padraig said days. The rite has to be done before the second mark is given, and the second mark is when the bond grows into the wolf." I sat down on the edge of the bed. "He also said there is a cost to the third one. The one of the old blood. And then the storm came and I did not get to hear the rest."

"Then let us go and hear it now."

Padraig was in the kitchen with a cup of tea and his stick across his knees. He looked older than he had on the night of the shooting, and his hands had a tremor in them that had not been there a week ago.

"Sit down, both of you," he said. "I will tell you the story, and then you will understand why I have been a coward."

He had had forty years to learn how to tell it.

"There was a wolf two hundred years ago, called the first of the old blood. Nobody knows his name now. He was a healer and a strong one and he had a daughter, and the daughter was taken by a wolf of another pack who wanted her for her blood. He went to the Council of that time and asked for justice, and the Council said there was no law that covered it. So he made one."

"Made one?" I said.

"He made the first false bond. He took the old rites, the ones for the naming of children and the laying of the dead, and he made a thing that was not in any book. It ties a wolf to a wolf by force. It takes from one and gives to the other. He used it on the wolf who had taken his daughter, and it worked, and the wolf died of it in a year." Padraig turned his cup round on the table. "And then the Council came for him. Not because he had made it. Because he had made it and not told them. They took the rite off him and put it in their own hands and they have kept it there ever since."

I sat very still.

"The Council uses it," I said.

"For two hundred years. Not often. Not openly. But there are wolves in this world who are bound to other wolves by force and do not know it, and the strength goes out of them and into the Council's hands, and nobody can prove a thing because there is no law that covers it." Padraig looked at Ronan. "The first false bond was made to right a wrong. It has been used ever since to keep the Council in its seat."

"And Elara?"

"Elara is one of the Council's binders. There are not many. They are trained in the northern seat and they are told the words and the marks and not much else. She will have been paid well and told that the wolf she was binding had agreed to it." He looked at Ronan. "You did agree to it. That is the clever part. There is a paper with your name on it and a Council seal in the corner, and if you go to the elders and say this was a false bond, they will hold up the paper and say you signed it."

Ronan's jaw worked.

"Then we break it. You know the rite. You have the page."

"I have the page. I do not have the third one."

"You said the third one was a wolf of the old blood." I looked at him. "The first of the old blood was a healer. His daughter was taken for her blood. And my mother wrote a note on the back of that page saying the breaking must not be attempted without a healer who can hold the thread." I put my hand flat on the table. "Padraig. Who was my mother?"

The old man looked at me for a long time.

"Your mother was of the old blood," he said. "She never told me how far back it went and I never asked, because in those days a wolf who asked about the old blood did not live long. But she came to me in the night with a child in her arms and a book under her coat and she asked me to put the wolf in that child to sleep, and she told me that if the Council ever found out what the child was they would take her and breed her and there would be no end to it." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "And I did it. I have been sorry for it every day for twenty two years."

"So I am the third one," I said.

"You are the third one, or you would be if you could hold the thread. And that is the cost I did not tell you." He looked at me and there was real fear in his watery blue eyes. "The breaking is done by the third one. It is not a thing you watch, it is a thing you do. It takes the strength out of the third one and puts it into the wolf who is bound, because the bond has to be given something to hold on to while it is cut, and the only thing it will take is a wolf of the old blood. So you would give him your strength, Fiadh. All of it. And a wolf who gives all of her strength to a breaking rite does not always get it back."

Ronan stood up so fast the chair went over.

"No," he said.

"Alpha."

"She is not doing it."

"Ronan," I said.

"She has no wolf. She cannot shift. She has an empty room where the wolf should be and you want to put her in the middle of a rite that takes strength out of the one who does it." His voice had gone up and his hands were shaking. "Find another way."

"There is no other way," Padraig said.

"Then we do the second mark and I take my chances with the Council."

"Ronan." I got up and stood in front of him. "Look at me."

He looked at me. His pale green eyes were bright and his jaw was set and his face was the face of a man who had made a decision and would not be moved from it.

"I am the third one," I said. "There is no one else. And I am not going to stand in this kitchen and listen to you argue about whether I am allowed to save your life."

"Fiadh."

"Go and sit down. You have a fever and you have been on your feet since dawn and you are not thinking clearly." I turned to Padraig. "Where is your ledger? The one with the names in it."

"On the shelf in the sickroom."

"Get it." I looked back at Ronan. "There is a thing I have been meaning to look at for three days. If the old blood is in my mother's line, it is in the pack records somewhere, and if it is in the pack records then the Council knew about it before I was born."

Padraig went out and came back with the ledger and set it on the table, and I opened it at the first page.

The first name was not one I knew. The second name was Siobhan, and beside it, in Padraig's small neat hand, there was a word I had seen a hundred times in that book and had never once read properly.

The word was founder.

I put my finger on it and looked up.

"Padraig," I said. "What does this word mean?"

Padraig did not answer.

And out in the hall the front door opened, and a voice I knew came up the stairs.

"Good morning," Lorcan called. "I have brought the Council's answer to your letter, Alpha. I think you will want to read it standing up."