Chapter 66: The Bothy in the Glen

I sat on the planks with my arm strapped to my chest and the fire going and Ronan kneeling in front of me with his hands on my face.

"Stay," he said.

"I have been trying to leave this coast for a month," I said. "I have had a contract and a debt and a pack that does not want me and a Council that wants me in a cell. And every time I have gone to the door there has been a reason not to walk out of it." I looked at him. "You are the reason. You have been the reason since the first night in the lamplight."

"Then stay."

"I am staying."

He kissed me.

It was not like the cliff. There was no wind and no moonlight and no storm. There was a fire and a peat smell and a plank bed and his hands on my face, and he kissed me slowly and carefully, the way a man kisses a thing he thinks he might lose.

I got my good hand into his hair and pulled him closer.

"Fiadh," he said against my mouth. "Your arm."

"My arm is fine."

"Your arm is strapped to your chest."

"Then do not make me use it."

He laughed, and then he stopped laughing and his mouth came back down on mine, and I did not think about anything for a while.

The bothy was warm. The fire had caught and the peat was glowing and the little room was full of the smell of it and the sound of the wind outside and the sea a long way below. He got my coat off me and my wet shirt and he was careful with the arm, and I got his shirt off and put my hand flat on his chest where the mark had been.

There was nothing there. Only skin and the beat of his heart under my palm.

"It is gone," I said.

"It is gone." He put his hand over mine. "You did that."

"You did that. I only held the thread."

He kissed me again, and this time it was not careful. This time his hand came round the back of my neck and his mouth was hard on mine and I made a sound I did not mean to make, and he answered it, and the fire crackled and the wind went on outside and neither of us said anything for a long time after that.

I do not have the words for the rest of it. I am a healer and I have spent my life writing things down plainly and this is the one thing I cannot write plainly. What I can say is that I had never been touched like that before. I had never been looked at like that before. He kept saying my name, quietly, against my shoulder and my throat and my hair, and I kept saying his, and the bond between us pulled tight and warm and stayed tight, and somewhere in the middle of it I started to cry and he stopped and lifted his head.

"What is it?" he said. "What did I do?"

"Nothing. Nothing." I got my hand on his face. "I have been alone for ten years. I have been in nine packs and I have never once been anybody's. And now I am lying on a plank bed in a bothy in the mountains with a wolf in my chest and a mate on top of me and a Council looking for me and I do not know how I got here."

He kissed my forehead.

"You walked here," he said. "On your own two feet. With a case of tins."

I laughed, and it turned into something else, and after that there was no more talking for a while.

We lay on the planks afterwards with the fire burning down and his arm under my head and my hand on his chest.

"Stay," he said again, quietly.

"I have said I will stay."

"Say it again."

"I will stay." I turned my head. "I will stay and I will stand in that chamber with you and I will put the box on the table and I will tell them what a false bond is, and if they will not listen I will shift in front of the whole Council and show them what a founder wolf looks like."

He was quiet for a moment.

"You cannot do that," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because Soren is the oldest wolf on the Council and he has been sitting in that seat for forty years and he will have seen a founder wolf before. He will know what it means and he will know what to do about it." He turned his head. "I have been thinking about the cell under the chamber. Elara said there are iron rings in the wall and a door with a bolt on the outside. That is not a cell for a wolf who is going to be tried. That is a cell for a wolf who is going to be kept."

I lay on the planks and looked at the fire.

"Then we do not let them keep me," I said.

Outside, on the ridge, a wolf howled.

Ronan was up and at the door before I could sit up, and he had his hand on the latch and his shoulder against the wood.

"Stay where you are," he said.

The howl came again, closer, and then a second one, and then a voice from the ridge.

"Alpha! It is Oisin. Come out with your hands where I can see them and bring the healer."

Ronan opened the door.

Oisin came down the ridge with a lantern in his hand and Padraig behind him and Nessa behind Padraig, and they came into the bothy and Oisin shut the door and put his back against it.

"The Council has summoned you to a formal trial," he said. "It is not a hearing any more. Soren has called it himself and it is set for noon tomorrow and it is in the elders' chamber and it is open to the town."

Ronan looked at him.

"And if I do not come?"

"Then the Council declares the Blackthorn territory vacant and takes it in the name of the Council and there is no pack and no seat and no name." Oisin looked at me. "And there is a cell under the chamber with a bolt on the door and they have already put a guard on it."

The fire cracked.

"Right then," I said. "We go to the trial."

Ronan turned round.

"Fiadh."

"We go to the trial," I said again. "And we take the box and the page and the ledger and the list of names that Tomas gave me, and we put them on the table, and we make Soren explain them in front of the whole town."