Chapter 51: Ronan's Wolf Speaks

The voice came into my head the way a smell comes into a room, all at once and from no direction.

Healer. Get him off the stone.

I sat up so fast I knocked the pot over.

"Who said that?"

Padraig looked at me. "Said what?"

"Somebody said get him off the stone." I looked round the cave. Elara was against the wall with her eyes open and her hands in her lap. Ronan was on the shingle with his eyes shut and his chest going. There was nobody else in the cave.

"Healer." Padraig's voice was careful. "There is no one here but us."

"Somebody said it." I put my hand on Ronan's chest and the mark was hot under my palm and the pull in my chest turned over. "It came through the bond. It was not his voice. It was a different voice."

Padraig knelt down beside me.

"The wolf," he said. "His wolf spoke to you. That happens when the bond is deep and the man is close to the change. The wolf does not talk the way a man talks. It gives you the thing it wants and it is not polite about it." He put his hand on Ronan's forehead. "It wants him off the cold stone. It is trying to keep him alive and it cannot do it on the shingle."

I got the blanket out from under him and dragged it up the cave to the dry sand at the back and Padraig took his shoulders and Elara took his feet and we got him onto it.

He did not wake.

Healer. The ritual is hunting him.

I stood very still.

"What did it say?" Padraig said.

"It said the ritual is hunting him."

"The wolf is right. A false bond is not a thing that sits still. It feeds and it grows and when it cannot feed it goes looking." He got up. "We have to do the rite tonight. Not tomorrow. Tonight."

I looked down at Ronan on the blanket with the mark black on his throat.

"Then tell me what to do and I will do it."

Padraig laid it out.

Elara would sit at the head of the circle and speak the binding words backwards, because a binding is a knot and a knot is untied by pulling the end back through the way it came. I would sit at the foot of the circle with the salve on my hands and hold the thread, which meant I would put my hands on Ronan's chest and take what came out of him and hold it, and I would not let go until Padraig told me to let go.

"And the box?" I said.

"The box is the anchor. The bond was made with a box and the box is the thing that holds it to him. Set it on his chest and do not take your hands off it until Elara has finished the words."

"And if I let go?"

"Then the bond snaps back into him and it will be worse than it was and he will not have the strength for another attempt."

I nodded.

Padraig put the fire in the middle of the circle and set the four lamps at the four points and laid the page out on the sand beside him. Elara knelt at the head of the circle and put her bag down and took out the bone knife.

"Fiadh," she said. "When I begin, the bond will feel it. It will fight. It will try to make you let go. It will use whatever it has got."

"What has it got?"

"His pain. His fear. His voice." She looked at me. "It will sound like him and it will say things he would never say and it will know every soft place in you because it has been inside him for seven months and it has learned how he loves you."

I sat down at the foot of the circle and put my hands on Ronan's chest.

"Start," I said.

Elara began to speak.

The words were not in any language I know. They came out of her in a long run, low and even, and the moment she said the first one the lamps went out and the fire in the middle of the circle went down to a red glow and the marks on the walls of the cave came up in the dark.

They were gold. All of them. The spirals and the circles and the lines, every mark on that wall, lit from inside like coals.

The cold came off the shingle and up into my hands.

And then the bond fought back.

It came into my chest like a hand closing round my heart. I heard myself gasp and I felt my hands want to come off his chest and I put them back down and held them there and the box under my palms was cold and the mark under the box was hot and the two of them fought through me.

Healer. The voice again, but it was not the wolf this time. It was the bond, and it was wearing Ronan's voice, and it was very good.

Fiadh. It hurts. Please. Take your hands off me.

I shut my eyes.

Fiadh. I am begging you. You are killing me.

"You are not him," I said through my teeth. "You are a thing that got into him and I am going to pull you out."

The voice changed. It stopped begging and it started to laugh, and the laugh was Ronan's laugh, the good one, the one I had heard twice.

Then it stopped laughing and it showed me the beach.

I do not know how else to say it. It put a picture in my head. The beach at dawn and the tide out and a man on his knees in the shallows with his hand on his chest and the grey in his face. And then it showed me the same beach and the same man and nobody kneeling down beside him.

I saw it. I saw him die there. I saw the tide come up over him and the gulls come down and the pack find him three days later.

"Fiadh." That was Padraig. "Hold. Hold the thread."

I held.

The picture went. The cold in my hands went up my arms and into my shoulders and my teeth were chattering and I was on my knees on the sand with my hands flat on the box on his chest and I could not feel my fingers.

Elara's voice was getting faster.

And then the mark on Ronan's chest opened.

It opened the way the wound on his arm had opened, but this time it did not weep black blood. It opened like a mouth and something came out of it, a grey thing, smoke, a thin rope of it, and it went up into the dark of the cave and the marks on the walls flared.

"Now," Padraig shouted. "Fiadh, now, pull it."

I pulled.

I do not know what I pulled with. My hands were on the box and the box was on his chest and the grey thing came out of him and into the box and the box went from cold to burning in my palms and I held it.

I held it.

I held it.

And then Ronan screamed.

It was not the bond wearing his voice. It was him. He came up off the blanket with his back arched and his mouth open and his eyes wide and he screamed, and the grey rope broke, and the box went dark, and he fell back.

The lamps came back on.

The marks on the wall went out.

Ronan was lying on the blanket with his chest going and his eyes shut and the mark on his chest was gone. There was nothing there. Only skin.

Padraig crawled over to him and put his ear to his chest and listened for a long time.

"He is breathing," he said.

I sat back on my heels with the box in my lap and my hands shaking and my arms aching to the shoulder.

And in the back of my head, in the dark room where there had never been anything at all, the wolf put its shoulder against the door and pushed, and the door moved half an inch, and I felt fur.