Chapter 34: Fiadh's Silence

The boat came in at the slip an hour later and the man at the oars was Oisin, and he had a bundle under his seat wrapped in oilcloth and a face that said he had been rowing all night.

"Fiadh," he said, tying off. "I went north. I found the woman's cottage on the coast road and it had been gone through, and there was a man in the heather with a rifle who did not want company." He lifted the bundle out. "I got this out of the chimney before he came back. Your mother left it with the woman there and the woman left it with me."

I took the bundle and unwrapped it on the slip.

It was a book. Small, bound in oilcloth, the leather gone soft at the corners, and when I opened it the first page had my mother's handwriting on it.

I sat down on the edge of the slip with the book in my lap and I did not get up for a long time.

Oisin sat down beside me and did not talk. That is a rare thing in a man. He just sat there with his elbows on his knees and looked at the water while I turned the pages.

The book was a healer's notebook, the kind my mother kept all her life. It had remedies in it and dosages and the names of wolves she had treated, and then about a third of the way through it changed. The writing got smaller and quicker and the remedies stopped and the notes began.

The notes were about me.

She had written down the date of my birth and the colour of my eyes and the first time I had held a pestle. She had written down the day I had asked her why I could not hear the wolf in my chest, and what she had told me, and what she had not told me. She had written, in a hand that shook, that she was sorry.

And then, near the back, there was a page that was not about me at all.

It was about the Council. It was about a room in the northern seat and a list of names and a rite that was not in any book, and at the top of the page she had written a single line.

If my daughter ever reads this, she is to burn it and run.

I shut the book.

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

"It is my mother's," I said. "It is the rest of the story."

I went back up to the house and I did not go to the kitchen and I did not go to the sickroom. I went to my own room and shut the door and sat on the bed with the book in my lap and did not open it again.

I sat there for the rest of the afternoon.

It was not that I could not read it. It was that if I read it, I would know, and once I knew I would have to do something about it, and I was not sure I had the strength to do anything about anything.

My mother had written a page about the Council and told me to burn it and run. She had known what I was and she had hidden it from me for twenty two years. She had put a lock on the door in my head and she had never told me there was a door. And now she was dead and the book was in my lap and there was a man with a rifle in the heather and a Council envoy with a paper in his hand and eleven days on a calendar in the kitchen.

Ronan came to the door at dusk.

"Fiadh." A knock. "Fiadh, you have not eaten."

"I am not hungry."

"You have not eaten since yesterday." Another knock. "Open the door."

"I need another hour."

"You said that at noon." His voice had gone quieter. "Fiadh, open the door."

I did not open the door.

I heard him stand there for a while. Then I heard him go away down the corridor.

He came back at nine with a tray and left it outside the door, and I heard the plate go down on the boards and his footsteps go away again, and I sat on the bed with my hands in my lap and did not touch it.

He came back at eleven.

"Fiadh." A flat knock this time, and a flat voice. "I am going to say something and you do not have to answer it. This afternoon I stood on the slip and held out my hand and you did not take it. Since then you have been in that room with the door shut and you have not come out for food or water or anything else, and I have been standing in my own house trying to work out what I did." A pause. "If it is the bloodline, I understand. If it is me, say so and I will deal with it. But do not sit in there in the dark and leave me out here guessing."

I put my hand on the door.

"It is not you," I said.

"Then what is it?"

"It is my mother," I said. "It is everything she never told me. It is a hundred years of a pack writing my name in a book and not one wolf thinking to mention it. It is the fact that I have eleven days to save your life and the only way to do it is to give you all my strength and I do not know whether I will get it back." My voice cracked. "And it is the fact that I am frightened, Ronan. I have not been frightened of anything for ten years and I am frightened now."

The corridor was quiet.

"Open the door," he said.

"I cannot."

"Why not?"

"Because if I open it I will cry, and I have not cried since my mother died, and I do not know what will happen to me if I start."

There was a long silence.

"Right," Ronan said. "I am going to sit down on the floor out here. And I am going to stay here until you open the door, and if that is in an hour or in the morning or on the twenty eighth, it does not matter to me. I have nowhere else to be."

I heard him sit down. I heard the boards creak and his back settle against the door.

I sat on the bed with my hand on the wood, and the pull in my chest was steady and warm and it was coming from the other side of the door, and it did not go away.

I did not open the door.

At some point in the night I fell asleep sitting up, and when I woke the sky was grey and there was no sound in the corridor. I got up and put my hand on the door and opened it.

Ronan was gone. The tray was gone. In its place on the boards there was a folded paper, and on the paper, in his hand, there were three lines.

I picked it up and read it.

It said: I have gone to the grey house to speak to Elara myself. Do not follow me. If I am not back by dark, take the book and the box and go north to Oisin's boat.

I read it twice. Then I was down the stairs and out the door with the paper in my fist and my coat half on.