Chapter 55: The Traitor's Scent

We were on the water for two days and they were not good days.

The wind turned on the first afternoon and blew against us, and Oisin had to take the sail down and row, and rowing a boat that size with five people in it is a slow business. We put in at a cove on the second night and slept in the boat under a tarpaulin with the sea slapping at the hull, and on the morning of the twenty first we came into a bay below the northern mountains with the sun on the water and the whole coast green and quiet.

"There is a track up from this bay," Oisin said. "It goes over the mountains and down into the northern seat. It is a day's walk if you are strong and two if you are not."

"We are strong," Ronan said.

"You are strong. The old man is not."

Padraig was sitting in the bow with his stick across his knees and his white beard flat against his chest.

"I am sixty eight years old," he said. "I have walked over worse mountains than this with a bag of herbs on my back. Get me out of this boat."

We got him out of the boat.

The track went up through a birch wood and then out onto open heather and the mountain went up in front of us. It was a long way. It was the sort of long way that does not look far until you have been walking for four hours and the top is no closer than it was.

We stopped at noon to rest and I got the bread out and we sat on a rock with our backs to the wind.

That was when I caught the scent.

It came on the wind from behind us, from the way we had come, and it was faint and it was old, a day old maybe, but I knew it.

It was the smell of the pack house. Woodsmoke and wet wool and the particular smell of a wolf who had been in the pack house for years. And under that there was something else, something sharp and green, like the inside of a stem.

I stood up.

"Fiadh?" Ronan said.

I walked back down the track twenty yards with my nose up and my eyes shut.

The scent was on the path. It had come up the path from the bay and it had stopped at the rock and then it had gone on, up the mountain, ahead of us.

It was a day old. It was the scent of a wolf who had come this way the day before and gone on toward the northern seat.

"Fiadh," Ronan said, behind me. "What is it?"

I turned round.

"Somebody came up this track yesterday," I said. "Somebody from the pack house. I know the smell of that house and I know the smell of that wolf and I have smelled it every day for a month."

Ronan's face changed.

"Who?"

"I do not know. It is a wolf from the Blackthorn Pack and it is not you and it is not Nessa and it is not Colm." I came back up the track. "It is somebody who left the pack house the day before yesterday and came north on the same road we did and went up this mountain ahead of us."

Oisin had his hand on the knife at his belt.

"One wolf?"

"One wolf. And they are not hurrying. The scent is a day old and it goes on up the track and it does not come back down." I looked at Ronan. "Somebody has gone to the northern seat ahead of us. Somebody who knows this road and knows the way and has had a day to do it in."

Ronan stood on the track with the wind in his ginger hair.

"Maeve," he said.

"I told you in the cottage that I did not want to say it and I am saying it now. Maeve knows this coast and Maeve knows where we went and Maeve has been in the pack house every day for nine years. She smelled of that house before I ever set foot in it." I looked at him. "She went to Lorcan. Oisin told us she asked for the hearing herself. What did you think she was going to trade for it?"

Ronan did not answer.

"She was going to trade us," I said. "She was going to trade you and me and the whole of it for a territory and a confirmed seat."

Ronan walked a few steps away from me and stood with his back to us and his hands on his hips.

"Maeve held that house together for nine years," he said. "She stood in the hall in front of forty wolves and told Lorcan that the Council does not get to walk into her house and take a wolf out of it."

"She did that when you were still Alpha," I said. "And then you lost the challenge and you left and you have been gone five days and she does not know if you are alive."

Ronan turned round.

"Then we had better get to the northern seat before she does any more damage," he said. "How far?"

"Six hours if we do not stop," Oisin said.

"Then we do not stop."

We went up the mountain.

It was a hard afternoon. Padraig went slowly and Elara went slowly and Ronan went up in front with his shoulders squared and his jaw set and did not say a word to anyone. I walked behind him with the box in my pack and the bundle on my back and my eyes on the track.

We came over the top at dusk.

The northern seat was below us in the valley. It was a town, bigger than I had expected, with a wall round it and a river through the middle and a great grey building at the far end with towers on it and a hundred windows.

And on the road down into the town there was a camp. Tents and fires and horses, and above the biggest tent there was a flag with a wolf's head on it.

"Council," Oisin said quietly. "That is the guard's camp. They have put it on the road so that nobody comes into the town without being seen."

Ronan stood on the top of the mountain and looked down at it.

"Then we do not go down the road," he said.

"There is a way in through the river," Oisin said. "It comes out under the wall by the old mill and there is a gate there that is not guarded because it has not been used in thirty years."

"Then we go in through the river."

We started down the mountain in the dark, and I had gone about a hundred yards when I stopped.

The scent was back. It was on the track in front of us, going down, and it was fresh now, hours old, and there was something else with it.

There was a second wolf. A wolf who smelled of paper and clean linen and a car.

Lorcan.

I looked down the mountain at the camp and the fires and the flag.

"Ronan," I said. "They know we are coming. There is a wolf down there who has been waiting for us since yesterday, and she has brought Lorcan with her, and they have put a camp on the road."