Chapter 84: The Truth About Her Mother

The letter was four pages long and it was written in my mother's cramped quick hand and it had been written over a long time, because the ink changed partway through.

I read it sitting on the edge of Ronan's bed with the fire going and Padraig in the chair and the whole Council house quiet below us.

She started with my birth. She wrote that I was born in a cottage on the north coast in the spring and that the midwife had said I was the quietest child she had ever delivered, and that my father had cried.

Then she wrote about the year I turned six.

She wrote that a clerk from the Council had come to the village where we were living and had asked questions about a healer with golden hair and a child. She wrote that she had packed that night and that we had left before dawn and that she had carried me on her back for two days.

She wrote that the Council had a program. It had been running for a hundred and fifty years and it was not written down anywhere and it had no name, and it took wolves of the founder's blood and put them in a house in the northern seat and bred them with wolves the Council chose. She wrote that the children were taken from their mothers at birth and that the mothers were told the children had died and that some of the mothers believed it and some of them did not.

She wrote that she had been in that house. When she was nineteen she had been taken and she had been in that house for two years and she had been bred twice and both children had been taken from her.

I stopped reading.

"Fiadh," Ronan said.

"Give me a minute."

I read the rest.

She wrote that she had escaped in the winter of her twenty first year and that she had run south and changed her name and become a healer again in a town where nobody knew her. She wrote that she had met my father in Galway and that he had known what she was and had not cared, and that they had been happy for four years.

She wrote that when the clerk came asking questions about a child she had known what it meant. She wrote that she had taken me to Padraig and had him put the wolf to sleep and had written a letter saying I was dead.

And then she wrote the last page, and the last page was written years later, because the ink was different and the hand was slower.

She wrote: I have been ill for a year and I have not told you. I am not going to get better. I have put money in the treasury in trust so that when you are twenty eight and on the roll the debt that they will put on you will be paid, because they will put a debt on you, they always do, it is how they keep hold of a wolf.

She wrote: They will come for you eventually. They always come. When they do, do not run like I did. Find the cave with the marks and find the stone and find the wolf in your chest and make them answer for it in a room with the doors open.

She wrote: I am sorry I never told you. I am sorry I let you think you were nothing. You were never nothing. You were the last of a line that has been running from them for two hundred years and I have spent your whole life trying to make sure you got further than I did.

And then, at the bottom, in a hand that was almost unreadable: Do not let them have the wall.

I put the letter down.

Ronan did not say anything. He put his hand on my back and left it there.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.

"She was in the house," I said. "She was nineteen and she was in that house and they took two children off her and she never told me. I have spent my whole life thinking she was a healer with a case of tins who could not manage her money."

"She was a healer with a case of tins who could not manage her money," Ronan said. "And she was also that. Both of those things are true."

I wiped my face.

"There is a house in the northern seat," I said. "And there are wolves in it. Right now. Tonight."

"I know."

"And Soren is going north to Bran with a rifle and a grey coat and the money from thirty one dead wolves, and he is going to sit in that house and write letters and do it again." I stood up. "We go north. Tonight. Not tomorrow."

Padraig got up out of his chair.

"Healer," he said. "The Alpha cannot travel. His heart is steady but it is not strong and a night on a boat will put him back in that bed for a week."

"Then he stays and I go."

"No," Ronan said.

"Ronan."

"No." He got his legs out of the bed and sat on the edge of it and looked at me. "I have been left behind in a bed while you went up a mountain and into a Council chamber and out of a cell. I am not doing it again." He stood up. He was unsteady and he put his hand on the post of the bed, but he stood. "We go north together or we do not go at all."

I looked at him.

"You will slow us down."

"I will slow you down." He took my hand. "But I will be there when you find that house, and there will be a wolf standing beside you with a true mark on his chest who has been in one of those cells himself."

The door opened and Nessa came in.

"Healer," she said. "There is a wolf at the door. It is the envoy. He says he has a deal to offer and he will only offer it to you."

I went down.

Lorcan was standing in the hall with a paper in his hand and a lamp on the table beside him.

"Healer," he said. "I have been writing for three hours and I have written down everything I know and I have given it to Ilsa and it is under seal." He held up the paper. "And now I have a thing to offer you."

"What is it?"

"Your freedom and the Alpha's life," he said, "in exchange for your silence about the ritual network."

I looked at him.

"Say that again."

"I will go north with you," Lorcan said. "I will stand in front of the wolves in that house and I will tell them what the Council has been doing. I will give you every name and every order and every paper. And in exchange you will not tell anyone that I signed the orders and you will let me keep my pension and my house and my name."

I stood in the hall of the Council house and looked at him.

"You want me to buy your silence with the lives of thirty one wolves," I said.

"I want you to let me help you take down a man who would have had you in a cell by now," Lorcan said. "And I want to walk away from it with a pension."

Down the corridor, a door opened and Ronan came out of it on his own two feet with a blanket round his shoulders.

"Fiadh," he said. "What does he want?"

I looked at Lorcan.

"He wants a deal," I said.