Chapter 49: The Hidden Cave

I went into the cave with the lantern and the others came behind me, and the marks went back and back into the dark.

They were on both walls and on the roof where the roof was low enough to reach, and they were not carved the way a mason carves. They were cut deep and smooth, each spiral turning into the next, and where the lantern light fell on them the stone was not grey. It was a warm brown, like old wax.

"These are old," Padraig said. He had his hand out and was touching one of the spirals with two fingers. "Older than the Council. Older than any pack on this coast."

"How do you know?"

"Because the Council marks its works. It puts a seal on everything. There is no seal here." He looked up at the roof. "This was made before the Council existed."

I held the lantern up to the great circle with the wolf's head in it and got my mother's notebook out of my coat.

I had carried it since Oisin brought it to me on the slip. I opened it at the last page.

She had drawn it in ink and it was a small thing, a circle with a wolf's head in the middle and four lines going out from it to the corners of the page. But it was the same. It was the same shape, down to the way the ears lay flat and the way the muzzle was drawn long.

"It is here," I said. "It is in the cave."

"Let me see." Padraig took the notebook and held it close to the lantern. "She drew this from memory. She must have seen the cave."

"She was here."

"Or she was told about it." Padraig turned the page. "Fiadh. Look at the lines going out from the circle. Four of them. Where do they go?"

I looked at the notebook and then at the wall. The great circle was in the middle of the wall and there were four lines going out from it, and each line went to a smaller circle, and each smaller circle had marks around it.

"They are the old rites," I said. "Naming, the laying of the dead, the binding of a mate. And the fourth." I held the lantern close. "The fourth is the breaking."

Oisin came up behind me.

"Fiadh," he said quietly. "The fires on the point have gone out."

I turned round.

"We can go. But we should go now."

Padraig was still looking at the wall.

"There is something under the marks," he said. "Under the fourth circle. The stone is different."

I looked. He was right. The stone in the middle of the fourth circle had been cut out and set back in, a round piece the size of a plate, and the join around it was fine but it was there.

"Someone has been at this," I said.

"Someone has been at this, and it was not the Council, because the Council would have taken the whole wall." Padraig put his hand flat on the round stone. "This was put here by a healer. This was put here to be found by a healer."

The stone was warm under his hand.

"Take it out," I said.

Oisin got a knife from his belt and worked it into the join and the round stone came out in one piece. Behind it there was a hollow in the wall, and in the hollow there was a bundle wrapped in oilcloth.

I took it out and put it on the shingle and unwrapped it with my hands not steady.

There was a book inside. And a small pot of something black. And a page folded in four, and when I unfolded it the writing was my mother's.

I sat down on the shingle of the cave with the page in my hands and the lantern beside me and read it.

It was not long. It was six lines, and the ink was brown and the paper was soft, and it had been written in a hurry.

It said: If you are reading this, you are my daughter and you have found the cave. The marks on this wall are older than the Council and the Council has been trying to buy them for two hundred years. The circle in the middle is the breaking and the stone was put there by my grandmother, who was a healer of the old blood. Everything you need is in the hollow. The book is hers. The black pot is the salve for the third one, and you must put it on your hands before you touch the bound wolf. Do not let the Council have the wall. Burn this page.

I read it twice.

Then I got up and walked to the fire that Oisin had built at the mouth of the cave and I put the page in it and watched it burn.

"Why did you do that?" Oisin said.

"Because she told me to." I went back to the bundle and picked up the book. It was small and bound in leather and it had no title on the spine. "And because the Council has been looking for this wall for two hundred years and I am not going to leave them a map."

Padraig was on the shingle with the black pot in his hand.

"Fiadh," he said. "The salve. If this is what I think it is, it is the thing that holds the thread. It is the thing your mother wrote about on the back of the page." He looked up at me. "This is what we have been missing. This is what the rite needs."

I sat down heavily on the shingle.

Ronan was lying in the boat with a blanket over him and his eyes open, and he had been watching all of it and had not said a word.

"Fiadh," he said. "Come here."

I went and knelt beside the boat.

"You have your mother's book and your mother's salve and your mother's cave," he said. "You have been looking for her for a month and you have found her in the last place you thought to look."

I put my hand on his face.

"She is not here," I said.

"She is." He turned his head and kissed my palm. "She has been here the whole time. She wrote that page in a hurry and she hid it in a wall and she told you to burn it and you burned it, and she is the reason we are standing in this cave with the thing we need."

I sat there on the shingle with my hand on his face.

"Oisin," I said. "Put the boat back in the water. We are going to the pack house."

Oisin did not move.

"Fiadh," he said. "The fires have gone out but the Council boats are still on the water and it is a long row to the harbour wall."

"Then we had better start."

We put out from the cave at midnight with the bundle in the bow and the lantern doused, and we rowed south along the coast with the cliffs black above us and the sea black below.

At the point, where the four fires had been, there was nothing but dark.

An hour later, Oisin stopped rowing.

"Fiadh," he said quietly. "There is a boat behind us."

I looked back. There was a light on the water, far off, and then another, and then a third.

"They are not rowing," Padraig said. "They are sailing and they are running before the wind and they are coming fast."

Oisin pulled on the oars.

"We will not make the harbour wall," he said. "I can put you on the beach below the headland but we will have to go through the rocks and the tide is coming in."

"Then put us on the beach."

We went in at the beach below the headland with the boat grinding on the shingle and the three lights coming up behind us, and I got Ronan out and Padraig got the bundle and Elara got her bag, and Oisin pushed the boat off again and took it out into the dark.

"An hour," he called. "I will be off the point for an hour."

We went up the beach.

The pack house was dark. There were no lanterns on the harbour wall and no guard on the slip, and that was the first thing I noticed and the first thing I did not like.

Ronan stopped on the shingle.

"Fiadh," he said. "Where is Colm's brother? He was supposed to be on the wall with a lamp."

There was nobody on the wall.

The pack house door was open.