Chapter 39: A Healer's Hands

Colm was in the hall with his coat still on and his face grey.

"Seven of them," he said. "On the north ridge, where the heather starts. They have got a pole with a bit of cloth tied to it and they are standing there in the open and they are not moving."

"Did they say anything?"

"One of them called out. He said they wanted to speak to the Alpha and he said they would wait." Colm looked at me. "Healer, they have not crossed the border. They are standing on the line with a flag."

Ronan came down the stairs behind me. He had his shirt on and his arm bound and his face was still white, but he came down on his own two feet and he came down straight.

"Then we go and speak to them," he said.

"Ronan, your shoulder."

"My shoulder has been open since June and it will still be open when I get back." He took his coat off the peg. "Colm, get four warriors and meet me at the north gate. Not more than four. If they wanted a fight they would not be carrying a flag."

I got my coat and my kit and went with him. Padraig came too, and Nessa would have come if I had not told her to stay and mind the house.

The north gate was a gap in a drystone wall where the track went up into the heather, and the four warriors were waiting there with Colm, and beyond them on the ridge there were seven wolves standing in a line with a pole and a bit of grey cloth tied to the top.

We walked up the track and stopped twenty yards short and Ronan stepped forward on his own.

"I am the Alpha of the Blackthorn Pack," he called. "Say what you have come to say."

One of the seven came forward. He was a big grey wolf with a scarred ear and a coat like old rope, and when he got to the middle of the space between us he stopped and shifted.

He came up out of the wolf shape in the way they do, and then he was a man of fifty or so with grey hair and a broken nose and a coat that had been mended more than once.

"My name is Bran," he said. "I am the one they call the Rogue King, though I do not call myself a king and I have never had a crown." He looked at Ronan. "I have come to talk about the Council."

The four warriors behind us shifted their weight. Ronan did not move.

"The Council and I have a disagreement," Bran said. "It started thirty years ago when they took my pack's territory and gave it to a wolf who had done them a favour. I have been living on the edges of it ever since, and so have the wolves who came with me." He jerked his head at the six behind him. "I have heard a thing about the Blackthorn Pack. I have heard the Council has put a false bond on its Alpha and is coming to take the territory on the twenty eighth. Is that true?"

"Who told you?"

"Lorcan's clerk has a loose mouth in a harbour tavern." Bran smiled without any warmth in it. "I have been waiting thirty years for a reason to make trouble for the Council, Alpha. You are the reason."

Ronan looked at him for a long moment.

"Come down to the house," he said. "And bring two of yours. Not seven."

Bran nodded. "Two."

We came back down the track with the rogues behind us and the whole pack came out onto the wall to watch, and I heard the whispering start before we were halfway down.

We put Bran and his two in the kitchen with the door shut and the warriors outside it, and Nessa made tea because Nessa made tea in every situation, and Bran sat down at the table and looked round the room.

"This house has not been painted in twenty years," he said. "I like it. It has the look of a place that has been too busy staying alive to worry about paint."

"Tell me about the Council," Ronan said.

And Bran told us. He told us about the territory that had been taken, and the Council's binders, and the wolves he had known over the years who had gone thin and strange and died with marks on their chests, and the names of three packs on the western coast that had lost their Alphas the same way.

I listened to all of it and I did not say a word, and my hands were under the table and they were shaking.

They had been shaking since the cliff. They shook when I poured the tea and they shook when I set the cup down and I had been hiding it in my pockets and behind my back for two days.

Ronan noticed.

He noticed in the middle of Bran talking about a pack in Mayo, and he did not say anything then, but when Bran stopped to drink his tea Ronan stood up and said, "Fiadh, come and look at my shoulder," and took me out into the sickroom and shut the door.

"Sit down," he said.

"I do not need to sit down."

"You do. Your hands are shaking and you have been hiding it since the cliff." He sat down on the cot and pulled me down beside him. "Fiadh. How long?"

"Since the boathouse."

"Three days."

"Four." I put my hands in my lap and looked at them. They were my hands. They had the same calluses from the pestle and the knife and the same small burn mark on the left thumb from a spilled tincture when I was nineteen. They shook like an old woman's hands.

"It is not the bond," Ronan said. "Is it?"

"No." I looked up at him. "It is you. It is the mark on your chest and the roots under your skin and the silver in your shoulder and the poison in your tea. It is the fact that I have been treating you for three weeks and you are still dying, and every day I get up and I think, today I will find the thing that fixes it, and every day I do not." My voice cracked. "I have never lost a patient, Ronan. Not one. Not in ten years. I have sewn up miners and set the bones of fishermen and brought a woman through a fever that should have killed her, and I have never once had a wolf die under my hands."

"And now?"

"And now I have one." I looked at him. "You. And I am frightened. Not of the bond, and not of the Council, and not of what the rite will cost me. I am frightened of the day I put my hand on your chest and there is nothing there."

Ronan did not say anything for a while.

Then he took my shaking hands in both of his and held them.

"You have not lost me yet," he said.

"Not yet."

"Then we will keep it that way." He lifted my hands and kissed the knuckles of each one, and the pull in my chest went warm and steady. "Now. Come back into the kitchen and listen to the Rogue King, because he has just offered me an army and I need a healer to tell me whether I am well enough to use it."

I stood up. My hands were still shaking and it did not matter.

When we came back into the kitchen Bran was on his feet with his cup in his hand and Colm was in the doorway with his face white.

"Alpha," Colm said. "There is a boat coming into the harbour. It has a Council flag on it and there are twelve wolves on the deck."

Bran set his cup down.

"Twelve," he said. "That is not an envoy. That is a raiding party."