Chapter 57: The First Shift

They came out of the hut and up the fold of the hill after us and there were four of them and they were fast.

Oisin turned and met the first one with his knife and they went down together in the heather. Ronan shifted. I saw it happen, the ripple and the change, and then there was a big red wolf standing between me and the second one, and the two of them met in the air with a sound like a door slamming.

Elara was pulling Padraig up the hill. I had my pack and the box and I was running and the fourth wolf came round the side of the fold and cut me off.

It was a grey wolf, narrow and quick, and it came at me low with its ears back.

I did not have a knife. I did not have anything at all. I put my pack down and got my hands up and the wolf hit me in the chest and I went over backwards into the heather.

It was on me with its forelegs on my shoulders and its face close to mine and its breath hot and wet, and I got my forearm up under its jaw and held it off.

And then the door in my head came off its hinges.

That is the only way I can describe it. It was not a push and it was not a struggle and it was not a thing I did. The door I had been holding shut for three days and twenty two years came off its hinges and the wolf came out.

There is no pain like the first shift. I have set bones and sewn wounds and I have never felt anything like it. Every bone in my body turned over at once and my skin went tight and then it went loose and my jaw came out of its socket and my spine went down and my hands became something else. It took about four seconds and it felt like an hour and I screamed the whole way through it and the scream came out of a mouth that was not a mouth any more.

The grey wolf on my chest got off.

It got off fast, and it backed away with its ears flat and its tail down, and it stood in the heather staring at me with its head low.

I got up.

I got up on four legs and I did not know how. I stood in the heather with the wind in my fur and the whole valley sharp and bright around me, and I could smell everything. I could smell the grey wolf's fear and the iron of the blood on Oisin's knife and the wet wool of Padraig's coat fifty yards up the hill. I could hear Ronan's breathing and Elara's heartbeat and a mouse in the heather under my front paws.

And I could feel, in my chest, the thing that had been in the empty room for twenty two years, and it was not empty any more.

Get up the hill, said the wolf.

I do not know whether I said it or it said it. There was no difference.

I went up the hill.

The grey wolf did not follow me. It stood in the heather and watched me go and then it turned and ran the other way, down toward the valley and the camp.

I came over the fold of the hill and there was Ronan's red wolf standing over the second wolf with its teeth in its scruff and the second wolf flat on its belly in the heather. Oisin was up and bleeding from the arm and his wolf was down and not moving. Padraig was on the ground with Elara over him.

I came down the hill and Ronan's head came up.

He stared at me.

I have never seen a wolf stare before. He stood over the wolf he had beaten with his mouth open and his tongue out and he looked at me the way a man looks at the sea when he has never seen it before.

I looked down at myself.

I was gold. There was no other word for it. My fur was the colour of the hair on my head and it caught what little light there was in the heather and threw it back, and my paws were big and pale and my chest was broad and I was not a small wolf. I was not as big as Ronan. But I was not small.

Healer, said the wolf in my chest, and it was not a voice and it was not words, but I understood it. Healer. I have been asleep a long time.

I sat down in the heather.

I do not know why. I sat down in the heather on my four legs and I could not move and my whole body was shaking and the world was too sharp and too loud and too much.

Ronan shifted back. I saw it and I did not look away, and then he was a man kneeling in the heather with his hand out.

"Fiadh," he said. "Look at me. Not at the heather. At me."

I looked at him.

"You have shifted," he said. "You have shifted and you are a wolf and you are going to be all right. Now I need you to come back. I need you to shift back and I need you to do it now because Padraig is hurt and Oisin is bleeding and there are four wolves down and a camp a mile away that heard the whole of it."

I looked at the wolf in my chest.

It did not want to go back.

It had been asleep for twenty two years and it had missed the wind and the heather and the smell of the world and it did not want to go back into the dark.

I know, I said to it. I know. But we have to.

It put its head down.

And then it went back, and the change came over me the other way and it hurt just as much, and when it was done I was lying in the heather with my cheek on the wet ground and my hands in front of my face and my whole body aching.

Ronan got his arms round me and pulled me up.

"There you are," he said. "There you are."

"Padraig," I said. My voice came out a scrape. "Where is Padraig?"

"He is all right. Elara has him. He hit his head on a stone when he went down."

I got up on my hands and knees and then on my feet and I stood in the heather swaying.

The gold was gone from my eyes. I could feel it gone. But the wolf was still there in my chest and it was awake and it was not going back to sleep.

Oisin came up the hill with his arm bound in a strip of his own shirt.

"The one you shifted at," he said. "The grey one. It ran."

"Where?"

"Down the valley. Toward the camp." He looked at me. "Fiadh. It saw you. It saw a golden wolf in the heather and it is going to tell them what it saw."

I stood there in the dark with the wind in my hair.

"Then they know," I said. "They know what I am."

Down in the valley, the camp was waking up. Fires were being lit and there were voices and a lantern was coming up the road.