Chapter 58: The Wolf in the Mirror

We did not go down to the river gate that night.

Padraig could not walk. He had hit his head on a stone and he was dizzy and sick with it and he could not stand up straight, and Oisin's arm was worse than he had let on, and the whole of the valley was awake with lanterns moving up the road toward the fold of the hill.

We went the other way. Up the north shoulder of the mountain and over the top and down into a hanging valley on the far side that Oisin knew from twenty years of moving things in the dark, and we got into a sheep pen with a stone wall and a roof of hurdles and we lay down in the straw and did not move until the sky went grey.

Ronan kept watch. I lay in the straw with my hands over my face and my whole body aching and the wolf awake in my chest.

I could feel it all night. It was not pushing. It was not fighting. It was lying down in the dark of me with its head on its paws and it was listening to everything, the wind and the sheep and the water and the owls, and every so often it would lift its head and I would smell something I had not smelled before.

I did not sleep.

In the morning I got up and went out of the pen and down to the stream.

There was a pool below the pen where the stream came over a lip of rock and lay still, and the water was black and clear and there was no wind to break it.

I knelt down and looked into it.

A wolf looked back.

It was gold. The morning light was on the water and the gold of the fur came up out of it like something burning, and the eyes were green, bright green, my green, and the ears were up and the muzzle was long and the chest was broad and pale.

I put my hand out to the water and the wolf in the pool put out a paw.

I sat back on my heels.

I do not know how long I knelt there. Long enough for the sun to come over the lip of the valley. Long enough for my knees to go numb.

Ronan came down the bank and sat down beside me.

He did not say anything for a while. He looked at the pool and then at me.

"You have seen it," he said.

"I have seen it."

"It is a fine wolf."

"It is a gold wolf." I looked at him. "There are no gold wolves. There is no such thing as a gold wolf."

"There is." He picked up a stone and turned it over in his fingers. "I have seen one once before. In a book my father kept, in the old script, with a picture in the margin. A gold wolf standing on a ridge with a moon behind it. The book said it was the mark of the founder's line and that it had not been seen in a hundred years."

"Your father had a book about my family."

"My father had a book about a great many things and he did not tell me about most of them." Ronan put the stone down. "Fiadh. There is something I have to tell you and I have been putting it off since the heather."

"Tell me."

"Last night. When you shifted. I felt it." He looked at me. "Through the bond. I felt the door come off its hinges and I felt the wolf come out and I felt what it felt. And it was not a new thing." He turned to face me. "It was an old thing. It was a wolf that had been in you since the day you were born and had been put to sleep and had been waiting. It knew the heather. It knew how to run. It came up out of you like a thing that had been doing it all its life."

I sat with that for a moment.

"Padraig said it would be like that."

"Padraig said it would come and it would come all at once and you should not fight it. He did not say what it would be." Ronan took my hand. "Fiadh. You are not a healer with no wolf. You are a founder wolf with a healer's hands and a locked door in her head and twenty two years of a suppression in her blood. There is no such thing as a wolf who cannot shift. There is only a wolf who has been stopped."

I looked at the pool. The gold was still there.

"I have spent my whole life thinking there was something wrong with me," I said. "I have been in nine packs and I have watched every wolf in them shift and run and I have sat on the edge of it with my hands in my lap and told myself that a healer does not need a wolf. I have told myself that for twenty years." My voice cracked. "And it was there the whole time. It was there and it was asleep and nobody told me."

"Your mother told Padraig."

"My mother told Padraig and Padraig told nobody and my mother died in a rented room in Galway without telling me a single word of it." I put my face in my hands and I cried.

I cried the way I had not cried since she died. I sat on the bank of a stream in a hanging valley with my hands over my face and I cried for a long time, and Ronan sat beside me and put his arm round my shoulders and did not say anything at all.

When it was done I wiped my face on my sleeve and sat up.

"Right then," I said. "That is enough of that."

Ronan laughed.

"You are a very practical woman," he said.

"I am a healer. We have no time for anything else." I stood up and held out my hand. "Come on. Padraig needs looking at and we have a town to get into and a hearing to stop."

He took my hand and got up.

We went back up the bank to the sheep pen and I got Padraig's head looked at and put a cold cloth on it and told him to lie still, and Oisin sat by the wall with his arm out and I cleaned it and bound it and told him he was a fool for not telling me it was worse than he said.

It was midday when we heard the horses.

They came up the hanging valley from the east, four of them, with two wolves running ahead and a grey coat on the leading rider.

Lorcan.

He stopped his horse twenty yards from the pen and sat there with his hands on the reins and looked at us.

"Good morning," he said. "I have been looking for you all night. You have led me a merry dance over these mountains and I am too old for it." He took a folded paper out of his coat. "I have a writ here with the Council's seal on it. It names the healer Fiadh as a rogue and a thief of pack magic and it orders her taken into Council custody pending the hearing."

He held it up.

"And I have a hundred wolves in that camp and eight of them behind me." He looked at me. "Come down, healer. Or I will take the Alpha as well and the old man and the smuggler and the woman in the green scarf, and I will put all five of you in a cell and let the elders sort it out in their own time."

Behind him the two wolves came forward out of the heather.