Chapter 4: A Bond That Shouldn't Hurt

Pack dinner happened at seven, in the long room at the back of the house where three tables had been pushed together and the benches were worn pale by years of the same backsides in the same places. I had meant to eat in the sickroom and keep working, but Maeve put her head round the door and told me, pleasantly, that the healer ate with the pack or the pack would think the healer was too good for them, and I know a threat when it is dressed up as an invitation.

The room was warm and loud. There were sixteen wolves at the table, which Nessa whispered was most of the pack, and the rest were on the north border or out on the boats. Stew in a big pot. Bread. A jug of milk going round and round. Someone had brought in a bowl of winkles and there was a great deal of noise about who had gathered the most.

Ronan sat at the head with Maeve on his left and an empty place on his right, and when I came in he nodded at the empty place and I sat down in it and the room went half a shade quieter before it got loud again.

"Sixteen," I said, under my breath, to Nessa.

"Twenty two, all told." She tore her bread. "The rest will be back with the morning tide. You'll see them all at Sunday."

I ate, and I watched. A healer's first job in a new pack is to watch. You learn who sits close to the Alpha and who does not want to. You learn who flinches when the Beta speaks. You learn which of the young ones have the twitch in their hands that means the first shift is close, and which of the old ones have the cough that means the lungs are going, and there was one old woman at the far end with a chest like a paper bag that I would be visiting with honey and thyme before the week was out.

Ronan ate almost nothing. He moved the stew around his plate with the back of his spoon and drank half a cup of water and answered whoever spoke to him, and once, when Maeve said something about the harvest, he laughed and his dimples came out and for about four seconds he looked like a man of thirty two should look.

Then his left hand started to shake.

It was small at first. A tremble in the fingers where they rested on the table. He noticed it and put the hand in his lap. A minute later it was his whole arm, and I saw him press his elbow into his side to keep it still, and the line of his jaw went tight.

I set my spoon down.

"Alpha," I said, quietly. "Your cup."

He looked at the cup. The water in it was shivering in rings, a tiny trembling circle that spread from the centre, and it was coming from the table, from the hand he had hidden under it.

"I'm cold," he said.

"You're not cold."

"I am cold, healer, and I am tired, and I would like to finish my dinner in peace." He said it low and even, and the wolf two places down from him did not hear it, and I did. Then he did the thing I had been waiting for. He lifted his hand to his chest and pressed it flat over the mark, through his shirt, and he pressed hard, and his face went whiter.

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

"It always hurts."

"Since when?"

"Since always." He picked up his spoon again. "It's a mark. Marks ache. You're the healer, you tell me."

I had a mouthful of stew and about nine questions and I chose none of them, because half the table was listening now even if they were pretending not to. Maeve especially was not pretending. She had her head bent to her plate and her eyes were up under her brows and she was taking in every word.

So I said something dull about the tide and the weather, and the table went back to the winkles, and under it I watched Ronan's hand.

He touched the mark six times before the pudding. Every time, the same way. Flat palm, hard press, a quick stop of breath. And every time, when he took his hand away, his fingers were shaking worse than before.

That is not a mark, I thought. Or it is not only a mark. A bond mark does not need pressing. A bond mark sits on the skin and glows a little when the mate is near and that is all it does, and when you touch it, it is warm, and it is a comfort. Everyone knows that. Every pup in every pack knows that.

You do not press a comfort. You press a wound, to see how bad it is.

After dinner I found Nessa scraping the plates and asked her if the Alpha had always had the mark.

"Not always," she said. "Only since the spring, when he got sick. Before that he had a different one, on his neck, from his real mate." She stopped scraping. "I'm not supposed to talk about that. I'm really not."

"His real mate."

"She died a long time ago. Before I came to the pack. Nobody talks about her and Maeve gets cross if you ask." Nessa pushed the scraps into the bin. "But I know he had a mark. I saw it, once, when he was out on the boat and his shirt came off. It was on his neck, just here." She touched the side of her own throat. "It was silver. Like a line of moonlight."

"Silver," I said.

"A true mark is silver. That's what my mother told me. A true mark is silver and it never hurts." She looked at me with her hazel eyes. "The one he has now is dark, isn't it. I saw it through his shirt. Dark like a bruise."

I went out onto the step after that and stood in the cold with my arms folded and thought about silver marks and dark marks and a dead mate nobody was allowed to mention, and about a woman in a green scarf who came and went in the spring.

The door opened behind me. Ronan came out with a lantern in his hand, going down to the boats, and he stopped when he saw me and neither of us said anything for a moment.

"You asked if it hurts," he said. "It does. All the time now. It's worse when I'm tired and it's worse when I'm near you."

"Near me?"

He looked at the lantern rather than at me. "Since you came to this house, the mark has burned like a coal under my shirt. I thought it was the journey. I thought I was imagining it." His jaw worked. "I am not imagining it."

I took a step down toward him before I had decided to, and he took a step back, and the lantern swung between us.

"Alpha," I said. "A true mark never hurts. Never, not for anything. Whoever told you that marks ache was lying to you."

"I know," he said. "I have known since the spring. I have been hoping I was wrong."

He turned and went down to the boats with the lantern swinging, and I watched him go, and the strange thing was that my own chest ached. Right over my heart, where I have no mark at all, there was a small persistent pull, like a hook in a fish's mouth, and it was pulling me down the path after him.

I went inside and closed the door and pressed my own hand flat over my own heart, and it hurt worse.