Chapter 6: Maeve's Welcome

By the time the house woke, the spiral on the beach had gone under the water and Ronan had gone back to his own room, and I had washed my face twice in cold water and was still not awake.

I went down to the kitchen for tea and Maeve was there with her sleeves rolled up and her copper curls tied back with a bit of string, and she poured me a cup before I asked and set it in front of me with the handle turned just so.

"You were up in the night," she said.

It was not a question. I looked at her and she looked back, and her brown eyes were pleasant and steady and gave away nothing at all.

"The Alpha was feverish," I said. "I heard him in the corridor."

"He came to you, then." She sat down across from me with her own cup. "He would not come to me. He would not come to anyone. He's been sleeping in that room of his and shutting the door on all of us since the spring, and now he walks down the corridor to a woman he met two days ago." She blew on her tea. "That is interesting, is what I'm saying."

"There's nothing interesting about a man with a fever."

"No," Maeve said. "There isn't."

We drank our tea. The kitchen filled up around us. Nessa came in with an armful of kindling and a boy came in after her with a bucket of winkles and a woman I did not know started cutting bread, and every one of them said good morning to Maeve and then looked at me and said good morning to me too, a half second late, the way people greet a guest they have not decided about.

"How long have you been Beta here?" I asked.

"Nine years." Maeve tore a corner off the bread and did not eat it. "Since my father died. He was Beta before me, and his father before him. It runs in the family, the way your herbs run in yours."

"And the Alpha? Has he been Alpha long?"

"Eleven years." She looked at the bread in her hand. "Since the old Alpha died and Ronan won the challenge against his own cousin. He was twenty one. Youngest Alpha on this coast in living memory. The pack was not sure about him then. They are sure now." She looked up. "Mostly."

There was a great deal in that last word.

"What does that mean?"

"It means a pack wants its Alpha strong," Maeve said, and set the bread down. "It wants him standing up on the ridge with the wind in his face and his wolf in his eyes. It wants to look at him and think, there is the wolf who will keep me and mine safe, there is the wolf who will tear the throat out of anything that comes over the border. That is what a pack wants." She picked up her cup. "What it has is a man who cannot run two hundred yards without falling over. You tell me what a pack is meant to do with that."

"You're his Beta," I said. "You're meant to hold the pack steady until he's well."

"I am meant to do a great many things." She smiled at me, and for the first time I saw the whole of it, the mouth moving and the eyes staying still and cold behind it. "You have not been in a pack in a while, have you, Fiadh. You have not been in this one for a day and a half. Things are not as simple as you would like them to be."

She got up and carried her cup to the basin, and then she turned round with her hands on her hips.

"I'll be honest with you, because I think you're the sort of woman who smells a lie before she sees it. I love this pack. I have run this house since before Ronan was Alpha and I will run it after. When the old Alpha died, my father put my name forward and the wolves chose Ronan instead, and I have never once said a word about that in nine years, not one word, and there is not a wolf here who can say I did. I have been loyal. I have been so loyal it makes my teeth ache." She picked up a cloth and folded it, once, twice. "But I will not stand by and watch this pack go down with a dying man, and if the day comes when the wolves turn to me and say, Maeve, take the seat, then I will take it. That is not a threat. That is a fact of the world. Do you understand me?"

I understood her very well. I understood that she had told me the whole of her plan in the middle of a kitchen with bread crumbs on the table, in a voice that never rose, and that she had done it on purpose.

"I'm not part of this pack," I said. "I'm a healer with a contract and three months to run."

Maeve smiled. This time it almost reached her eyes.

"You say that now," she said. "You haven't met Padraig yet. He'll tell you the same thing I'm telling you, only he'll be ruder about it, and he'll have a book in his hand." She hung the cloth on its hook. "He comes back on the morning tide. You'll want to be ready for him. He was this pack's healer for forty years and he did not want to go to the islands and he did not want a woman with a case of tins taking his sickroom. That's the other thing you should know, while I'm being honest. There's no place for you here when he comes back."

"Then I'll make one," I said.

Maeve looked at me for a long moment, and something crossed her face that I could not name. Then she nodded, once, as if I had passed a test I had not known I was sitting, and went out into the hall to shout at the boy about the winkles.

I finished my tea alone. The kitchen was warm and full of noise and everyone in it had known each other for years. I thought about Maeve's folded cloth and her nine years of loyalty and the way she had said the word mostly.

Then Ronan came down. He looked better, which meant he had slept and eaten nothing and put on a clean shirt, and he stopped in the doorway of the kitchen and nodded to me, and the nod was the nod of a man to a healer he had hired, nothing more.

"Padraig's boat is coming in," he said. "You'll want to be on the pier."

"I'll want to see your arm first."

"It can wait."

"It has waited all summer. It will not wait another day." I stood up. "Alpha. The mark on your chest. Is it a true mark? Yes or no. Look at me and tell me."

The kitchen went quiet. Somebody put a spoon down.

Ronan looked at me for a long moment, and I saw his jaw work once, and I saw the answer before he said it, because it was sitting in his face like a stone.

"No," he said. "It is not."

"Then who gave it to you?"

"That," he said, "is a question you are not going to like the answer to, and I am not going to give it to you in my own kitchen."

He turned and walked out. I followed him into the hall, and he stopped at the bottom of the stairs with his back to me and his hand on the rail, and I saw the tremor start in his fingers again.

"The woman in the green scarf," I said. "Nessa saw her. She came in the spring with Lorcan and she left before supper. Was that your mate?"

Ronan turned round. His face had gone pale and still and his eyes were very bright, and when he spoke his voice was quiet in a way that made the hairs on my arms lift.

"If you say that name in this house again," he said, "I will put you on the bus to Galway myself, and hang the debt. Do you hear me?"

He went up the stairs. I stood in the hall with my heart going, and the front door opened behind me and Nessa came running in from the pier.

"Padraig's boat!" she called. "They're tying up now, and Padraig's on it, and there's a man with him from the Council, and the man is asking for you by name."