Chapter 93: The First Clue

I did not sleep that night.

I sat up in the sickroom with my mother's notebook open on the table and a lamp beside it and the stone in my pocket warm against my leg. The fire had burned down to a red glow and the window was black and the sea was going on below the house the way it always did, and I could hear the timbers of the pack house creaking in the wind.

It was the notebook Oisin had brought me from the north coast. I had read the letter and I had read the page about the cave and the marks, and I had not read the rest of it because there had been a Council trial and a broken bond and a house to take back.

I read the rest of it that night.

Most of it was what a healer's notebook is. Remedies and dosages and the names of wolves she had treated, written in a hand that got quicker as the years went on. There were eleven pages at the front that were not remedies at all.

They were drawings.

I turned them slowly, one at a time, with the lamp pulled close.

There was a wolf standing on a ridge with a moon behind it. There was a circle with a wolf's head in it and four lines going out to the corners of the page. There was a hand with a spiral on the palm, drawn from the palm side, the way a healer draws a thing she has seen on a patient.

And then, on the seventh page, there was a crest.

It was small and it had been drawn in ink and it had been drawn carefully, the way a thing is drawn when it matters. It was a shield with a wolf's head in the middle and three stars above it and a line of writing underneath that was too small to read.

I got the lamp closer and held my breath so the flame would not move.

The writing said: the house of the founder, and there were three names under it.

I read them.

The first name was a family name I did not know. The second name was a family name I did not know either. The third name was Ravenscar.

I sat in the sickroom with the lamp in my hand and the notebook on the table and the fire going down behind me.

Ravenscar.

I turned the page.

There was more writing on the back of it, in the same careful hand, and it was a list of the founding families of the Council of Alphas. There were five of them. The first was the founder's own line and it did not have a name, it had a drawing of a spiral beside it. The other four had names and one of them was Ravenscar.

And under the list, at the bottom of the page, there was a line in my mother's hand that was not careful at all. The ink was darker and the letters were bigger and the pen had pressed hard enough to mark the paper underneath.

It said: the founder's line and the Ravenscar line have been joined twice. If the Council finds out it will not be a binding. It will be a marriage.

I put the lamp down.

The door opened and Ronan came in with a blanket round his shoulders and his hair on end.

"You have not come to bed," he said.

"Ronan. Look at this."

He came and sat down beside me and I turned the notebook round.

He looked at the crest and he looked at the names and he read the line at the bottom twice.

"Ravenscar is a founding family," he said.

"Ravenscar is a founding family and my mother wrote that the founder's line and the Ravenscar line have been joined twice." I looked at him. "I do not know what that means. It could mean a marriage and it could mean a child and it could mean something worse. But it means that Callum of Ravenscar is not a wolf who was given his territory by Soren forty years ago. He is a wolf whose family has been in the Council since the beginning, and he has a claim on the founder's blood that is older than any claim the Council has."

Ronan sat very still with the notebook in his hands.

"Fiadh," he said. "If Callum has a claim on the founder's line and he is married into it, then he is not Soren's wolf. He is his own wolf and he has been waiting for a very long time."

"Then the alliance he offered Maeve is not a trap for us," I said. "It is a trap for Soren. Callum wants the seat and he wants the founder's blood and he has been waiting thirty years for a reason to move, and Maeve walked into his house with a ledger that has thirty one names in it."

"Do you trust her?"

"I do not know." I looked at the notebook. "She brought the alliance into this house and she brought the ledger with it and she has been sitting in that kitchen since midnight reading it. I have been in nine packs and I have learned one thing about a wolf who has done a bad thing and is trying to do a good one. You cannot tell by looking at her. You can only tell by what she does next."

The door opened and Padraig came in with his stick.

"Healer," he said. "The Ravenscar wolves have gone. The four that came with Maeve. They went out of the yard an hour ago and they took the flag and they rode north."

I stood up.

"And Maeve?"

"Maeve is in the kitchen. She has been in the kitchen since midnight and she has not moved and she has not spoken to anyone." Padraig looked at me. "She has the ledger in front of her and she is reading it."

I went down.

Maeve was at the kitchen table with the ledger open and a cup of cold tea beside her and her copper curls loose on her shoulders. The fire was low and the kitchen was cold and she had not put a log on it.

She looked up when I came in.

"They have gone," she said.

"I know."

"They went north and they took the flag and they did not tell me." She put her hand flat on the ledger. "Fiadh. I have been reading this for an hour and there is a thing in it I did not see when I took it out of the Council house."

"What?"

"The name at the bottom of the Ravenscar page." She turned the ledger round. "It is not Soren's. It is Callum's. He has been paying the binders for thirty years and Soren has been taking the credit."

I sat down.

"Then Callum is not Soren's wolf," I said.

"No." Maeve looked at me. "Callum is the wolf at the top. And I brought his alliance into this house and he has had a man in this pack since the spring."

"Who?"

Maeve's jaw worked.

"There is a name on the page before this one," she said. "It is a Blackthorn name and it is not yours and it is not Ronan's."

She turned the page.

I looked at the name.

It was Colm.