Chapter 70: The Debt Paid

The bell was still ringing when there was a knock at the mill door.

Oisin went to it with his knife in his hand and opened it six inches, and there was a young wolf on the step in a clerk's coat with a leather satchel over his shoulder.

"I am looking for the healer Fiadh," he said.

"Who wants her?"

"The Council's clerk's office. I have a paper to deliver." He held up a sealed envelope. "It came in on the morning post from the south and it is marked for the healer and it is marked urgent and I have been told to deliver it before the trial."

Oisin took the envelope and shut the door and brought it to me.

It was a small envelope, good paper, and the seal on the back was not the Council's. It was a plain seal with no device on it.

I broke it open.

There was a single sheet of paper inside and it was a receipt, and it was stamped at the top with the seal of the Council's treasury and at the bottom with the seal of the clerk's office.

It said that the debt of Siobhan, healer, deceased, had been settled in full, and that the name of Fiadh, healer, had been entered on the roll of healers of the Council, and that all claims against her were extinguished.

I read it three times.

"Fiadh?" Ronan said. "What is it?"

"It is a receipt," I said. "The debt is paid. It is paid in full and my name is on the roll of healers and there are no claims against me."

The mill went quiet.

"Paid by who?" Oisin said.

I turned the paper over. There was nothing on the back but a stamp and a date.

"There is no name on it," I said. "It says the debt was settled by a benefactor who does not wish to be named."

Oisin came round the table.

"Let me see that."

I gave it to him and he read it and his face changed.

"Oisin," I said.

"It is not me," he said. "I have not got two pennies to rub together and I could not pay a Council debt if it was the price of a loaf of bread."

"I know it is not you. You have been in a boat for a month." I looked at him. "But you know something. You have got a face on you like a man who has just seen a ghost."

Oisin put the paper down on the table.

"Your mother," he said. "She paid it before she died."

"She could not have paid it. She died in a rented room in Galway with a case of tins beside the bed and no money to bury herself. I paid for the burial."

"She did not pay it in money." Oisin sat down heavily on the bench. "Fiadh. The purse she gave me was not only money. It was a purse and a paper and the paper said that if I kept you out of the Council's hands until your twenty eighth year the debt was cleared and the purse was mine and I could go back to the north. I have been carrying that paper for twenty two years and I have read it a hundred times and I have never once read the last line of it properly."

"What does the last line say?"

"It says that on the day the healer comes of age and is entered on the roll, the debt of her mother shall be settled from the estate of Siobhan, healer, held in trust by the Council's treasury." He looked up at me. "She put money in trust. Twenty two years ago. She put it in the treasury before she ran and she put a condition on it that it could not be touched until you were twenty eight and entered on the roll." He wiped his mouth. "That is why there was a page missing out of her file. The page with the trust on it. Somebody in that office took it out because a trust in the treasury is a thing the Council cannot explain away."

I sat down on the bench.

"The debt was never a debt," I said. "It was a trust. My mother put money away for me and the Council turned it into a debt and hung it round my neck and sent me to a dying Alpha's house to work it off."

"And the anonymous benefactor," Oisin said, "is your mother. Twenty two years dead and paying off a debt that was never owed."

I put my hand over my mouth.

Ronan came and sat down beside me and put his arm round my shoulders.

"Fiadh," he said.

"She knew," I said. "She knew they would turn it into a debt and she knew they would send me somewhere and she put the money in trust anyway, because she knew that one day somebody would look at the paper and see it for what it was." I looked at him. "She was three steps ahead of them for twenty two years and she did it from a rented room in Galway with a case of tins."

Maeve was standing by the window.

"There is a thing you should know," she said. "About the roll of healers."

I looked at her.

"Go on."

"The roll is kept in the chamber. It is a book and it is on the table at every trial and every elder can open it." She turned round. "If your name is on that roll, and it is, then you are a healer of the Council. Not a rogue. Not a debtor. A registered healer with a licence and a name and a standing." She looked at me. "And a registered healer cannot be tried for unlawful practice. That is the whole of the charge against you, Fiadh. The whole of it. Without it there is nothing to try."

The mill was very quiet.

"Then the trial is over before it begins," Ronan said.

"No," Maeve said. "The trial is not over. Soren is not a fool and he will have read the charge and he will have seen the receipt and he will have had the whole morning to work out what to do about it." She picked up her coat. "But he will be angry and he will be quick and he will make a mistake. And we will be there to see it."

Down the street the bell stopped.

"Come on," I said. "Let us go and see what the oldest wolf on the Council does when he is angry."