Chapter 87: The Pack in Danger

We left the Council town at dawn.

Oisin had the boat at the mill and we went down through the market in the half-light with the whole of the Blackthorn Pack behind us and the Council clerk at the front with a satchel of papers and two Council guards for the archive. The market was empty and the shutters were still closed and the only sound was our own boots on the cobbles.

Ronan walked down to the river on his own feet. He had eaten something and slept a few hours and he was still grey about the mouth, but he walked, and I walked beside him with my hand under his elbow and did not say anything about it.

"Fiadh," he said, as we came down to the mill. "The pack house has the wounded in it."

"I know."

"There are eleven wolves in that house with bandages on and a Council flag on the wall above them." He stopped on the mill step. "I am not going to stand on a boat for two days while that is happening."

"You are going to stand on a boat for two days because there is no other way to get there and if you shift and run over the mountains with a heart that stopped in a Council chamber two days ago you will not get there at all." I looked at him. "I have kept you alive for two months. I am not going to lose you in the last week because you were in a hurry."

He looked at me.

"You are very difficult," he said.

"I know."

We got on the boat.

It was two days down the coast and the wind was against us for the first of them, and we sat in the lee of the sail with the spray coming over the bow and the whole of the pack crammed in behind us. Elara sat with her knees up and her green scarf round her head. Nessa sat with Colm and did not talk. Padraig sat in the stern with his stick and his bag and his grandson beside him and did not say a word to him for the first day.

On the second morning I sat down beside Padraig.

"You have not spoken to Rónán," I said.

"I do not know what to say to him."

"You could say, I am sorry I have not seen you in four years."

Padraig looked at his hands.

"His mother was my daughter," he said. "She died when he was twelve and his father took him north and I did not fight it because I was a coward and I have been a coward about a great many things." He wiped his mouth. "He has been a clerk in that house for six years and he has been writing files on wolves who were bound and he has not said a word to me."

"Then say a word to him."

Padraig got up and went and sat down beside his grandson.

I did not hear what they said. But by the afternoon they were sitting together with the bag between them and Rónán was showing him something in a paper and Padraig was nodding.

We came into the Blackthorn harbour at dusk on the second day.

The pack house was on the hill above the harbour with the light on in four windows and a flag on the wall. It was not the Blackthorn flag. It was a grey flag with a wolf's head on it and it was hanging limp in the evening air, and the sight of it made something in my chest go cold.

Oisin brought the boat in slowly.

"There is a wolf on the wall," he said. "And there is a wolf on the slip and there is a boat at the pier with a Ravenscar sail."

I stood up in the boat.

The wolf on the slip was a big grey wolf with a scarred ear and a coat like old rope and he was standing with his hands behind his back and his feet apart.

Bran.

He had a wolf on either side of him and a third one behind him on the wall.

"Alpha," he called across the water. "You are early. I did not expect you for another day."

Ronan stood up in the boat.

"Get off my slip," he said.

"I will get off your slip when you have heard what I have come to say." Bran came down to the edge of the water. "I have held this house for three days and I have not harmed a wolf in it. There are eleven wounded in there and they have been fed and bandaged and the woman who runs your kitchen has been allowed to run it. I am not a raider, Alpha. I am a wolf with a claim."

"You have no claim on this territory."

"I have a claim on the Council seat and the Council seat comes with the territory." Bran put his hands in his pockets. "I am going to make you an offer and I am going to make it in front of your pack and your healer and the Council clerk on that boat. Give me the seat. Stand down and give me the Blackthorn name and the coast and the boats and I will let every wolf in that house walk out of it tonight."

Ronan looked at him.

"And if I do not?"

"Then I will hold this house until the Council sits in seven days and I will tell them that the Alpha of the Blackthorn Pack abandoned his territory and his wounded and went north to argue with elders." Bran smiled. "It is not a lie, Alpha. You did leave. You left a house full of wounded wolves and a hole in the roof and you went north."

Ronan stood in the boat with the wind in his ginger hair.

"Fiadh," he said, quietly.

"I heard him."

"What do I do?"

I looked at Bran on the slip and the three wolves behind him and the grey flag on the wall and the eleven wounded wolves in that house.

"You do not give him the seat," I said. "You give him something else."

"What?"

"The truth," I said. "In front of his own wolves."

Ronan looked at me for a moment.

Then he stepped out of the boat onto the slip.