Chapter 33: The Founder's Bloodline

Lorcan came into the kitchen with the letter in his hand and his grey coat buttoned to the throat, and he looked at the three of us and the ledger on the table and the chair Ronan had knocked over, and his smile was very small.

"Am I interrupting?"

"Yes," I said.

"I thought so." He set the letter down and turned it round to face Ronan. "The Council has considered your position. You will present yourself at the northern seat on the twenty eighth and confirm before the elders that the bond placed on you in April was entered into freely and in good faith. In exchange, the Council will seal the second mark at no further cost to your pack, and the tithe will be forgiven for five years." He straightened. "That is a better offer than you deserve."

Ronan did not pick the letter up.

"That offer is a confession," he said. "If I confirm the bond was entered into freely, I am saying I asked for it. And then the Council has a paper with my name on it that no one can ever challenge."

"Yes," Lorcan said. "That is exactly what it is."

"You are not even going to pretend."

"There is no point pretending with you. You have a healer who has spent three weeks taking you apart and putting you back together and she has told you what the bond is." He glanced at me. "You are a remarkable woman, Fiadh, and I mean that. I have never seen a rogue healer make so much trouble so quickly. But you have eleven days and a dying Alpha and half a pack that will not follow him, and I have the Council and the law and a paper with his name on it." He picked up his hat. "Take the offer. It is the only way either of you comes out of this alive."

He went out. Through the window I watched the grey car go down the road and turn at the harbour, and then I sat down at the table and pulled the ledger round to face me.

"Fiadh," Ronan said.

"Give me a minute."

I read the page with my finger under each line. It was an old list of the pack's healers, going back a hundred years and more, with the dates they had served and the names of the wolves who had trained under them. Siobhan was in the second column, with a note beside her name that said she had served the Blackthorn Pack for a season when she was young and had gone away again before her training was finished.

And under her name, in the same old hand, there was a line that made my hands go cold.

The line said: of the founder's bloodline, third removed.

I read it four times.

"Padraig," I said. "Come here and look at this line and tell me what it means."

The old man came round the table and bent over the ledger. Then he straightened up and put his hand over his mouth.

"It means the pack has known for a hundred years that your family carries the founder's blood," he said. "It means your mother served in this pack as a girl and they knew what she was and they wrote it down. It means the Council could have come for you at any time and they did not."

"Why not?"

"Because a founder's blood is worth more in the line than out of it. If they take you and breed you, they get one generation. If they let you run and watch you, they get a hundred years of a bloodline they can use when they need it." He sat down heavily. "Your mother knew that. That is why she ran. That is why she hid you."

I looked at the ledger.

"Who wrote this page?"

"The old Alpha's grandmother. She was the pack's record keeper in her day." Padraig turned the page. "There is a note at the bottom. It says the line is to be watched and not touched. That is a Council instruction, Fiadh. Somebody from the Council wrote to this pack a hundred years ago and told them to watch my mother's family and not touch it, and the pack has been doing it ever since."

I put my hand flat on the page.

"So the Blackthorn Pack has known what I was since before I was born."

"Not the pack. The Alpha and the record keeper and whoever they chose to tell. Ronan did not know. His father did not know. It was kept in the records and it was not spoken of." Padraig closed the ledger. "That is how the Council works. It does not put a guard on your door. It writes a line in a book and lets the book do the work."

I sat there with my hands in my lap.

The whole of it was coming together. The debt that did not exist. The contract that had brought me to this coast. It had not been chance that put me on the ferry to Donegal. Somebody had chosen me. Somebody had written a line in a book and let the book do the work.

"Fiadh," Ronan said. "Say something."

I stood up.

"I need some air," I said, and went out.

I went down to the slip and stood at the end of it with the wind off the water and my hands in my pockets.

Behind me the door of the pack house opened and closed, and Ronan's footsteps came down the stones, and then stopped.

"Fiadh," he said. "Talk to me."

"I am talking to nobody at the moment."

"You have been reading that book and your face went white and then it went hard and you have not said a word since." He came down two steps. "Whatever it says, we can deal with it."

"You do not know that."

"No. But standing on a slip with your back to me is not dealing with it." He came down the rest of the steps and stood beside me. "What did the line say?"

I looked at the water.

"It said founder's bloodline, third removed. It said the line is to be watched and not touched." I turned to face him. "Your pack knew what I was before I was born, Ronan. Your Alpha's grandmother wrote it down and the Council told her to watch my family and not touch it. And then somebody in the Council decided it was time to touch it, and a debt appeared out of nowhere, and a contract came to me in Galway, and I got on a boat and came to this coast."

Ronan's face changed.

"Fiadh."

"I was brought here. Not sent by chance. Brought here on purpose by someone who knew what my blood was worth, and I have been walking around this pack for three weeks telling myself I came to work out a debt." I looked at him. "Somebody is playing a long game and I am a piece on the board."

Ronan was quiet for a moment.

"Then we take the game off the board," he said. "You are my mate and you are the third one and you are the only wolf in this world who can break that bond."

"And if breaking it kills me?"

"Then it kills us both and I will be standing beside you when it does." He held out his hand. "Come back inside. It is cold and you have no coat, and there is a ledger on the table with a hundred years of lies in it, and I want to read it with you."

I looked at his hand.

I did not take it.

"Not yet," I said. "I need an hour. On my own."

His hand stayed out for a moment. Then he let it drop, and his face did something I did not want to see.

"An hour," he said, and went back up the slip.

I turned back to the water and put my hands in my pockets, and out in the harbour a small boat was coming in from the north with a single figure at the oars.