Chapter 9: Ronan's Fever Dream

The writ was short and it was worse than I had feared.

Padraig brought it up to the Alpha's room and stood in the doorway reading it aloud by the light of my candle, because his eyes were old and the writing was small. The Council required the Blackthorn Pack to produce its debt healer for examination at the grey house in the harbour within three days, and to surrender all books and papers in her possession for inspection, and to confirm under seal that she had been duly registered as a healer of the Council before taking up her post.

"Registered," I said. "I have never been registered in my life. My mother trained me. She was registered, before she died. But she never put my name on the roll."

Padraig lowered the paper. "Then they have you. An unregistered healer practising on an Alpha is a serious thing. It is a fine, or it is a ban, or it is worse, depending on who is sitting in the chair that day."

"Who wrote this?"

"Lorcan. His hand is on the bottom of it." Padraig folded the paper. "He is not asking for you tomorrow. He is giving you three days. That is a man who wants you to think about it."

Ronan had said nothing through all of this. He was sitting on the edge of his bed with the bandage showing white at the open collar of his shirt, and his face had gone very still in the way I was learning to read, the way a wolf goes still before it moves.

"Leave the writ with me," he said.

Padraig looked at me and I nodded, and the old man put the paper on the table and went out and shut the door.

Ronan did not pick it up. He sat there and looked at it and then he said, "I will go to the grey house myself. In the morning. I will tell Lorcan that you are under my protection and that he can examine me instead."

"That will not work."

"It has worked before."

"With Lorcan? Has it?" I sat down on the chair by the window. "Alpha, he gave you three days. Not to be kind. To be seen to be kind. He wants the pack to watch you fight for me and lose, because that makes you look weak and it makes him look fair. If you go to that house tomorrow and offer yourself up in my place, he will thank you politely and say no, and then he will read the writ aloud to the whole harbour."

Ronan's jaw worked. "Then what am I meant to do?"

"You are meant to get well." I leaned forward. "The registration is a wall. Walls have doors. My mother was registered, and her name is on the roll, and there is a line on that roll beside her name that says who trained under her. If her name is there, mine can be too. It is a matter of finding the right book and the right clerk, and I have three days."

Ronan looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, in a voice that had gone quiet, "You would do that. Go to the Council's own archive and put your name on a list they control."

"I would rather be on a list than in a cage." I stood up. "Now lie down. Your fever is coming back and I want an hour of sleep before it gets here."

He lay down. I meant to go to my own room, but the pull in my chest was steady and unpleasant when I got more than four feet from him, so I dragged the chair over to the window and sat in it with my feet on the sill and my coat over me like a blanket, and I shut my eyes.

I woke because he was talking.

The candle had burned out. The window was grey with the first light. Ronan was lying on his back with his head turned on the pillow and his eyes shut and his lips moving, and the words came out in a low broken run, the way words come out of a man in a fever.

"...not her. Tell them it is not her. Tell them the mark is wrong..."

I sat up slowly.

"...I signed nothing. I said I would not sign. You can take the tithe and the boats and the whole of the harbour, you can have the house, but I will not put my name to that, I will not..."

He turned his head. His hand came up and pressed flat on his chest, over the bandage, and his face twisted.

"...Elara. No. Not her. Not that one. Bring me someone else. Bring me a stranger, bring me a rogue off the road, I will take a rogue before I take her..."

The room was very cold. I had not noticed it before. I got up and went to the bed and knelt down beside him, and the pull in my chest was so strong now that it was almost a pain, and I put my hand on his forehead and his skin was burning.

"Ronan," I said. "Wake up."

"...I will not sign it. Tell Lorcan I will not sign it. He can bring his writ and his ink and he can drown in them..."

Lorcan. His name, in the fever, along with hers. I kept my hand on his forehead and I did not move.

"...give me the other one. The one who does not want it. Give me the one with the herbs, give me the woman on the beach, she was cold and wet and she did not flinch, give me her and I will sign..."

My breath stopped in my throat.

Ronan's eyes came open. They were not focused on anything in the room. They were looking at something I could not see, and his mouth was still moving, and then all at once his whole body went slack and his eyes shut and his breathing evened out into sleep.

I stayed on my knees beside the bed for a long time.

He never chose it. That was the thing I could not get out of my head. A man who chose a false bond would not argue with it in his sleep. A man who chose it would not be offering his boats and his house and his harbour to keep his name off the paper. He had fought them. He had bargained with them. And in the end, whatever they had done to him, he had not wanted it.

And the other thing, the thing I did not want to look at directly.

Give me the one with the herbs. Give me the woman on the beach.

I put my hand flat over my own heart. It was still pulling. It had been pulling since the beach, since the moment his fingers brushed mine in the lamplight on the first night, and I had told myself it was the ritual and the mark and the strangeness of the house. I had told myself a great many things.

The door opened. Maeve stood there with a lamp in her hand and her copper curls loose on her shoulders, and she looked at me kneeling by the Alpha's bed with my hand on my own chest, and her face did something I could not follow.

"The Council's car is at the gate again," she said. "There is a man in it with a leather case. He says he has come to deliver your contract."

She lifted the lamp a little. "He says it is not the same contract you came with."