Chapter 48: The Smuggler's Price

The cough would not stop.

I got him sat up and got my hand on his back between his shoulder blades and held him there while it went through him, and it was a wet cough and it took a long time and when it was over he lay back on the planks with his eyes shut and his breath going in and out of him like a bellows with a hole in it.

Padraig came in with his bag and knelt down and put his ear to Ronan's chest and listened.

"It is the roots," he said. "They have got into the throat and the chest. When he coughs it moves them."

"Can you do anything?"

"I can make him comfortable." The old man looked at me. "Fiadh. We are a long way from the box and a long way from the pack house and he has not got the strength to walk back over those mountains."

"He does not have to walk. Oisin has a boat."

"Oisin has a boat and the Council has two." Padraig sat back on his heels. "You cannot go back to the pack house. Petra is sitting on it with twelve wolves and Lorcan is waiting for you to walk into his hands."

I sat down on the floor with my back against the planks.

I sat there for a long time.

Then I got up and went outside.

Oisin was on the shingle with his hands in his pockets.

"You said you would name your price," I said.

"I said I would tell you the rest of it when we were on dry land." He turned round. "The purse your mother gave me was not only money. It was a purse and a paper. The paper said that if I kept you out of the Council's hands until your twenty eighth year, the debt was cleared and the purse was mine and I could go back to the north and never look at this coast again."

"And if you did not?"

"Then the debt stayed on the purse and the purse stayed on me and I stayed on this coast." He shrugged. "I have been on this coast for twenty two years, Fiadh. I have been in every harbour from Galway to Rathlin and I have watched you grow up from a distance and I have kept the Council off your trail three times and I have wanted to walk away a hundred times and I could not because your mother's paper would not let me."

I stood on the shingle with the sea going in and out and looked at him.

"Twenty eight," I said. "That is this year."

"That is this year."

"So the debt is cleared now. The purse is yours and you can go."

Oisin did not answer.

"Oisin," I said. "The paper was written for a girl with no pack and no ties and no trouble. It did not say anything about a dying Alpha and a false bond and a Council guard on a boat. If you take me back to that pack house to get the box, you are not keeping a debt. You are walking into a fight the paper never asked you to walk into."

"I know."

"Then why are you still here?"

Oisin looked out at the water for a while.

"Because I was eighteen years old and I had just got into trouble with a pack up the coast and a healer with golden hair hid me in a cove for a week and fed me on bread and fish and told me to stop being a fool," he said. "And because I have watched you for twenty two years from a distance and I have never once spoken to you until this month, and I find that I would like to keep doing it." He turned round. "I will take you back to the pack house. I will put you on the beach below the harbour wall at midnight and I will wait for you off the point. But the boat is small and the Council has two and I will not be able to wait for long."

"How long?"

"An hour. Two at most."

"And the price?"

Oisin was quiet for a moment.

"The price is that you let me tell you the rest of it," he said. "All of it. Not just the purse. The things your mother told me that you do not know. The reason she hid you and the reason she ran and the reason she died in a rented room in Galway with a debt on her name that she did not owe." He looked at me. "You have been walking around this coast for a month working out a puzzle that was written down before you were born. I have had twenty two years to read it. Let me tell you what I know."

I stood on the shingle and looked at him.

"After," I said. "When Ronan is well. Then you tell me all of it and I will listen to every word."

Oisin nodded. "After."

We went back up to the bothy.

Padraig had got Ronan propped up on the planks with a blanket under his head and the fire going and a cup of something in his hand. Elara was sitting by the fire with her knees up and her eyes on the flames.

"We go tonight," I said. "Oisin takes us back down the coast and puts us on the beach under the harbour wall at midnight and we get the box out of the chest and we come back."

Padraig looked at me. "And the Council guard?"

"The guard is on the boat and the boat is at the pier and the pier is the other side of the harbour." I knelt down beside Ronan. "Ronan. Do you hear me?"

His eyes came open.

"I hear you."

"We are going back tonight. Oisin's boat. We get the box and we come back here and we do the rite tomorrow at dawn."

He looked up at me.

"You are going to break into your own house," he said.

"I am going to break into your house. It is not mine."

"It is yours." His hand found mine. "You have sewn up eleven wolves in it and you have slept in it for a month and you have argued with my Beta in the kitchen. It is yours."

I did not answer that.

We went down to the boat at dusk. Oisin took the oars and Padraig took the tiller and Elara sat in the bow and I sat beside Ronan with my hand on his chest, and we went out of the bay and turned south along the coast in the dark.

An hour out, Oisin stopped rowing.

"Fiadh," he said quietly. "Look at the point."

I looked. There was a light on the point, and then another, and then a third.

"That is not the Council," Oisin said. "The Council does not light three fires on a headland. That is a signal."

"To who?"

"To whoever is on the water." He shipped the oars. "There is a cave under that point that I have used for twenty years and nobody knows about it. We will put in there and wait until the fires go out."

We put in at the cave.

It was a wide mouth in the base of the cliff with a shingle floor and a roof that went up into the dark, and Oisin ran the boat up onto the stones and got out and pulled her in.

I got out after him with the lantern and held it up.

And then I stopped.

The walls of the cave were covered in marks. Spirals, cut into the stone, one after another, going back into the dark, and under the spirals there were other things, shapes I did not know, lines that crossed and recrossed, and in the middle of them all a single great circle with a wolf's head inside it.

"Fiadh?" Oisin said.

I was not listening. I had my hand out and I was touching the stone, and under my fingers the marks were warm.

"I have seen this," I said. "This circle. This wolf's head." I turned round. "It is in my mother's notebook. She drew it on the last page."

Above us, on the point, a fourth fire was lit.