Chapter 7: The Healer's First Diagnosis

Padraig came up from the pier with a canvas bag over one shoulder and his white beard blowing sideways in the wind, and he did not look pleased to see me. He was a tall old man, stooped at the neck, with blue eyes gone watery at the edges and hands like knotted rope. The Council man walked a step behind him and did not say a word.

"So you're the one," Padraig said, and walked past me into the house.

The Council man stopped in front of me. He was youngish, with a plain face and a grey coat cut the same way as Lorcan's, which told me whose he was.

"Fiadh the healer," he said. "Envoy Lorcan asks that you attend him at the grey house in the harbour at four this afternoon. He wishes to discuss your findings regarding the Alpha's health."

"Tell him I'll come at five."

"He said four."

"Then he can discuss it with the wall until five." I went after Padraig.

I found him in the sickroom with my tins on the shelf and his bag on the cot, and he was picking up my comfrey and sniffing it with an expression I did not care for.

"Who packed these?" he said.

"I did."

"You dried the meadowsweet too fast. It's got no scent left in it at all. Useless." He set it down. "And you've got the wolfsbane in wax. That's sensible, I'll give you that."

"Padraig. I need to know what you know about the Alpha's mark."

The old man's hands stopped moving. He looked at the shelf for a moment, and then at me, and his watery blue eyes were not watery at all now.

"You've seen it, then."

"I've seen it, and I've seen the grains in his blood, and I've seen the mark glow red when I touched it, and I've seen roots running up his arm under the skin. So don't stand there telling me about meadowsweet. Tell me what it is."

Padraig sat down on the cot. He looked at his own knees for a long while and then he said, "It's a false bond. Or it's meant to look like a bond. I saw the like of it once, forty years ago, in a wolf from a pack up the coast. He came to me because his mark ached and his strength was going and no one could tell him why. He was dead inside four months. I was young. I did not know what I was looking at."

"And now you do."

"Now I know what I am looking at." He rubbed his face with both hands. "It is a ritual, girl. A thing done with words and blood and a mark cut into the skin with something that is not a knife. It ties a wolf to another wolf by force, and it takes from the one and gives to the other, and the one it takes from withers and the one it gives to grows fat. That is all I know. I have never done one and I would not know how. And I will tell you what I told the Council when they came asking in the spring. I told them I did not know what was wrong with the Alpha, because I was afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Afraid of the ones who did it," Padraig said. "And I was right to be. You should be afraid too."

He got up and went out. I sat in the sickroom for a while with my hands in my lap.

Then I went upstairs and knocked on the Alpha's door.

Ronan opened it himself. He had his shirt half on and his hair was wet, and when he saw it was me he did not close the door, which I took as progress.

"I need to look at the mark properly," I said. "With good light. And then I need to tell you what I think, and you are going to stand there and listen to the whole of it."

He stepped back. His room was large and plain, with a window over the harbour and a bed with a folded quilt and a table with a jug and a bowl on it. The afternoon sun came through the window and laid a bright square on the floor, and I made him sit in the middle of it.

The mark was worse than it had been at midnight. The centre had gone from wet-looking to raw, and the roots under his skin had spread past his elbow, thin dark lines going up toward the shoulder.

I put my fingers on the edge of it and this time I was ready for the pull in my chest. It came anyway. Warm, steady, a tug like a rope with weight on the other end. I kept my hand there and did not take it away, and I made myself look at the mark while it was happening.

"Tell me what you feel," I said.

"It burns."

"Where?"

"Under the mark. And out here." He touched his chest, a hand's width to the left. "It's a different burn. It's a pulling feeling. It has been there since the beach."

"Does it get worse when I touch the mark?"

He was quiet. "Yes."

I took my hand away and sat back on my heels and said it.

"This is not a mate bond. A mate bond sits on the skin and it is silver and it is warm and it never hurts, not once, not for anything. What you have is a mark that burns, that spreads, that drinks your strength, and that reacts to a stranger's hand. It was put on you by someone. It is still being fed by someone. And whoever it is, they are getting something out of it, because that is what these things are for."

Ronan looked at the window. The sun was on his face and his pale green eyes were very still.

"I know," he said.

"Then say it. Say what it is."

"It's a false bond."

"Say who put it there."

His jaw worked. "I can't."

"Cannot or will not?"

"Both." He stood up and went to the window and put his hand flat on the frame. "If I tell you, you become dangerous to them. If I tell you, you become someone they need to deal with, and I have watched what happens to people they need to deal with." He turned round. "You are a healer with a debt contract and no pack. You have no one behind you. Do you understand what that means? If they come for you, there is not a wolf on this coast who will stand up and say no."

"Then I'll stand up myself."

"You don't even know what you'd be standing against."

"Then tell me!"

The words came out louder than I meant them to. The room went quiet. Ronan looked at me and I looked at him and something passed between us in the sunlight that had nothing to do with marks or rituals or dying men.

He crossed the room and took my hand. Not the way a man takes a woman's hand. He turned it over and looked at my palm, at the small calluses from the pestle and the knife, and he ran his thumb across them once.

"You have healer's hands," he said. "I noticed them the first night. In the lamplight." He let go. "I will tell you everything. But not today. Today I have a pack to hold together and a Council envoy to keep off my neck, and a Beta who is watching me the way a cat watches a bird. Tomorrow. I promise you tomorrow."

I went out with my heart going and my palm still warm from his thumb.

On the landing I stopped. Maeve was standing at the top of the stairs with a basket of linen on her hip, and she had been there long enough to hear something, because her face had gone smooth and hard in a way I had not seen before.

"The mark reacted to you," she said. "I heard him say it. He said the mark glowed when you touched it." She set the basket down on the floor. "Do you know what that means, healer? That means you are part of it now, whether you like it or not, and this pack will want to know what part."

She went past me down the stairs, and I stood on the landing with my hand still warm and my chest still pulling, and through the window I saw the grey car come up the harbour road and stop at the gate.