Chapter 37: The Kiss He Shouldn't Have

For a moment he did not move at all.

Then his hands came up and closed round my wrists and pulled them away from his face, and he held them between us and looked at me with the wind pulling at his hair.

"Fiadh," he said. "Think about what you are doing."

"I have thought about it for three weeks. I am tired of thinking about it."

"If I kiss you back, the bond will close."

"I know."

"It will close and it will not open again, and every wolf on this coast will smell it on the two of us by morning, and Lorcan will have it written down before noon." His voice was rough. "And if the rite kills you, I will have to live with the fact that I took this from you on a cliff in the dark because I was too tired to say no."

"You did not take anything." I got one hand free and put it flat on his chest, over the mark through his shirt. "I have been nobody's for twenty eight years. I have walked out of nine packs and never once looked back and I have never wanted to belong to anything in my life. And then I came to this coast and a man with a false mark on his chest held out a piece of paper and his fingers brushed mine and I have not been able to think straight since." I looked up at him. "I am not asking you to take anything. I am telling you what I want."

His jaw worked.

"You are a very difficult woman."

"I know."

"If this goes wrong."

"Then it goes wrong. But it will not go wrong because I did not try." I put my other hand on his neck. "Ronan. Kiss me. Or tell me to go down that path and I will go and I will not ask again."

He kissed me.

It was not like the boathouse. In the boathouse it had been dark and cold and there had been water round our knees and the whole thing had felt like something stolen in the middle of a storm. This was different. The cliff was quiet and the wind had dropped and the moon was coming up over the sea, and when his mouth came down on mine there was nothing between us at all.

His hand went into my hair and the other one went round my waist and pulled me in against him, and I put my arms round his neck and held on. The pull in my chest, which had been steady and patient for three weeks, turned over and became heat, and it did not stop at my chest. It went through my whole body, down into my knees and my belly and the tips of my fingers, and where it went it left a warm, humming ache.

I heard him make a sound against my mouth. He broke away for a second, breathing hard, and then he came back and kissed me again, and this time it was slower and deeper and I felt his hand come up under my coat, flat on my back through my shirt, and the heat of it went straight through me.

The bond closed.

I felt it happen. There is no other way to say it. It was like a door opening in a room I had lived in all my life and had never known was there, and behind the door there was warmth and light and a presence, and the presence was Ronan.

He felt it too. He pulled back and looked at me with his eyes wide and his breath going hard, and I could feel what he was feeling the way you feel the heat of a fire from across a room. Relief. Wonder. And under both of them a fear so deep it made my stomach turn.

"There," I said. "It is done."

"It is done." He put his forehead against mine. "Fiadh, your hands are shaking."

"They have been shaking for a week. I have just been hiding it."

He laughed, and it was the good laugh, the one I had heard twice now, and he pulled me in against his chest and held me there with his chin on the top of my head. I could hear his heart going under my ear.

We stood like that for a long time. The moon came up over the water and laid the silver road across it and the wind off the sea smelled of salt and heather and the cold clean smell of the cliff grass.

Then he said, quietly, "There is something I have to tell you, and you are not going to like it."

"What?"

"I have been thinking about the rite." His hand was still on my back. "You said you would give me your strength. Padraig said you might not get it back. But there is a thing neither of you said." He pulled back to look at me. "A true bond is not a thing that runs one way. If we are mated, properly mated and marked, then what is yours is mine and what is mine is yours. If I am strong, you are strong. If you are weak, I am weak."

I looked at him.

"So if you give me your strength in the rite."

"Then you may get some of it back through me." He said it slowly, as though he were working it out as he spoke. "The false bond is a chain. A true bond is a rope. If the rope is tied properly, it holds both ways."

I stood there on the cliff with my hands on his chest and my heart going.

"That could work," I said. "That could actually work."

"It could. Or it could work the other way." He looked down at me. "If the false bond takes from me during the rite, and the true bond carries it, then it takes from you too."

"Then we will have to be quick."

"Fiadh."

"I am not going to stand here and weigh it." I took his face in my hands. "You have eleven days. I am not going to spend them arguing about which of us dies first."

He opened his mouth to answer, and then he stopped.

His hand came off my back and went to his chest. His face changed. He stumbled back a step and sat down hard on the flat rock, and his breath came out of him in a long, torn gasp.

"Ronan."

"It is the mark." He had both hands on his chest now. "It is burning. It has not burned like this since the spring."

I got down beside him and pulled his shirt up and looked at the mark, and I could not see it properly in the dark, and I got my hand on it and the heat of it came up through my palm like a coal.

"It is fighting," I said. "The true bond and the false one. They are fighting."

He grabbed my wrist.

"Fiadh," he said. "If this kills me tonight, take the page and the book and the box and get on Oisin's boat and go north. Do not stay for the twenty eighth."

"It will not kill you tonight."

"You do not know that."

"I know it because I am sitting here on this rock with you and I can feel your heart through my own chest and it is still going." I put my forehead against his. "Breathe with me. In. Out. In."

He breathed with me.

The burning went down slowly. It took a long time. When it was over he lay back on the rock with his eyes shut and his shirt open and the sweat on his face, and the mark was dark and angry but the roots had not moved.

"We are going to need a better plan," he said.

"We are going to need a great many things." I sat up. "And the first is Elara. Because she is the binder and she knows the words and she is the only one in the world who can tell us what we are doing."

Down at the foot of the cliff, on the harbour road, a lantern was coming up toward the house.