Chapter 8: Blood on the Linen

The grey car stayed at the gate for an hour and then went away again, and nobody in the house said a word about it.

I did not sleep well that night. I lay in my narrow bed and listened to the sea and the small sounds of a house full of wolves settling down, and every time I drifted off the pull in my chest woke me again, a patient tug, like a hand closing and opening.

Around three in the morning I heard him.

It came through the wall, faint and muffled: a sound like a man being held under water. Then a thud that shook the panelling. Then nothing.

I was out of bed and down the corridor before I had my coat on properly. His door was not locked. I pushed it open and the moonlight showed me the room and the man in it, and for a moment I could not make sense of what I was seeing.

Ronan was on the floor beside the bed with the quilt tangled round his legs. He had knocked the jug off the table and there was water spreading across the boards. His hands were at his chest, both of them, pressing, and his face was turned up to the ceiling and his mouth was open and he was not breathing.

"Ronan."

I got down on the floor and pulled his hands away. His chest under his shirt was burning hot, and the mark under the cloth was glowing, a dull red the colour of a coal at the edge of a fire.

"Ronan. Breathe."

His back arched and he took a breath, a great tearing one, and then another, and then he was breathing on his own, fast and shallow, and his eyes came open and found me.

"You," he said. His voice was a ruin. "You're here."

"I'm here. Sit up. Slowly."

He sat up with his back against the bed and his head hanging. I got the candle lit and came back to him and that was when I saw the blood.

It was on the quilt. It was on his shirt, a dark stain spreading from the mark. And it was on his hands, both of them, where he had pressed them to his own chest.

"Where are you hurt?" I said. "Show me."

He would not take his shirt off. I did it for him, and I was not gentle about it, and the mark when I saw it made me swear out loud.

The centre of the spiral had opened. Not a cut, nothing a knife could have made. A small round wound that wept dark blood, and the roots under his skin had gone from thin dark lines to something thicker, and the blood that came out of him was not the healthy dark red I had seen on the slide. It was black.

"Fiadh," he said.

"Quiet. I'm working."

I got my basin and my clean cloths and the comfrey and the yarrow, and I cleaned the wound and packed it and bound it, and all the while he sat with his head back against the bed and his eyes shut and his jaw clenched, and the pull in my chest was so strong I could feel it in my teeth.

When it was done I sat back on my heels. My hands were red to the wrist.

"How often does this happen?" I said.

"Twice before. This is the third."

"Twice before, and you did not think to mention it?"

"There was nothing anyone could do about it." He opened his eyes. "It happens in the night. I dream, and the mark opens, and in the morning it has closed again. It is closing now. Look."

He was right. The edges of the little wound were drawing together already, the way a werewolf's skin always does, and if the blood had been healthy it would have been gone by noon. But the black blood still seeped at the edges, and the roots were still there, and the whole mark looked angry in a way no healing skin should.

"What do you dream about?" I said.

He did not answer.

"Ronan. What do you dream about?"

"Things I would rather not say in the dark."

I got up and went round the room with the candle, because a healer does not waste a chance to look at a patient's room. There was the bed, the window, the table, a chest with a spare quilt in it. Two pairs of boots by the door. A shelf with a few books on it and a stone from the beach and a tin cup with a chipped rim. There was nothing else at all.

Except that the chest had a floor to it that was an inch too high.

I found it because I sat down on the chest to put my stockings straight and my heel knocked hollow. I had the lid up and the spare quilt out and my fingers on the false bottom before Ronan's voice came from behind me.

"Don't."

I looked round. He was still sitting against the bed with the bandage across his chest, and his face in the candlelight was not angry. It was frightened.

"What's in it?" I said.

"Fiadh. Leave it."

I lifted the false bottom. There was one thing in the space beneath, and it was a box. Wooden, dark with age, no bigger than a book, with a lock on the front of it that no smith had made. Iron, worked all over with little spirals, and the spirals were the same spirals as the mark on his chest.

I picked it up. It was cold in a way that made my fingers ache, and the pull in my chest turned over and went tight, and I heard, far away in the back of my head, that small distant whine again.

"Where did you get this?"

"From the same person who gave me the mark."

"Open it."

"I cannot."

"Cannot, or will not?"

"Neither." He laughed, and it was not a good laugh. "There is no key. There was never a key. She said the box would open on its own when the bargain was finished, and the bargain is not finished, and it will not open, and I have tried. I have tried with a hammer and a chisel and once with an axe, and the axe is in the harbour now."

I turned the box over in the candlelight. The iron spirals did not catch the light the way iron should. They seemed to drink it.

"The woman in the green scarf," I said. "She gave you this."

"Yes."

"Her name."

"Fiadh."

"Her name, Ronan."

He shut his eyes. In the candlelight his mouth was a hard line and his hands on the quilt were trembling.

"Elara," he said. "Her name is Elara, and she is not my mate, and I did not want any of this, and if you say that name in this house again the walls will hear it."

I put the box back in the chest and the quilt over it and closed the lid. Then I went and sat on the floor beside him, close enough that our shoulders touched, and we stayed like that for a long while with the sea going outside and the candle burning down.

"It has a hole in the bottom of it," I said.

"What has?"

"The box. You have not turned it upside down in a while. There is a hole in the bottom, small, the size of a pin, and the edges of the hole are smooth. Something comes out of it, or something goes in." I looked at him. "I think it is drinking you. I think it has been drinking you since the spring, and it is hungrier now than it was."

Ronan turned his head and looked at me with those pale green eyes, and in the last of the candlelight his face was open in a way I had not seen it yet.

"Then I am glad it was you who found it," he said, "and not Maeve."

Downstairs, the front door opened, and someone came in out of the night with their boots loud on the flags, and a voice carried up the stairwell. It was Padraig's voice, and he was not alone.

"Ronan!" he called. "Come down. The Council's man is back, and this time he has brought a writ with the Council's seal on it, and it names your healer."