Chapter 94: The Hidden Bloodline

I did not go to Colm that night.

I sat in the kitchen with the ledger open and the name on the page in front of me and I thought about a young wolf with a thatch of pale brown hair and a soft anxious face who had carried a poisoned tray into a sickroom because the Beta told him to. I thought about a wolf who had come off the wall in a Council town and said, I am with you. I thought about a wolf who had stood in front of a step in a yard and been the first one to clap.

At dawn I went and found Oisin.

"There is an archive," I said. "Not the one under the Council chamber. The other one."

Oisin was on the slip with a net in his hands and he stopped working when he saw my face.

"Which other one?"

"My mother wrote in her notebook that the founder's line and the Ravenscar line have been joined twice. If that is true there is a record of it somewhere and it is not in the Council's archive because the Council would have burned it." I looked at him. "You have been moving things up and down this coast for twenty years. Where do the old families keep the records they do not want the Council to see?"

Oisin put the net down.

"There is a house in the mountains behind the north cove," he said. "It is not a pack house and it is not a Council house. It is a house that belongs to a family that has been keeping records for three hundred years and has never once let a Council clerk through the door."

"Whose family?"

"A family called Dunmore. There is one of them left and he is ninety one and he is dying." Oisin looked at me. "I can take you there. It is a day's walk and it is a hard one and he will not open the door to a stranger."

"He will open it to me."

"Why?"

"Because I am the founder wolf and he has been waiting three hundred years for one of us to knock."

We went at first light.

Ronan came with us and Padraig came with us and Oisin led the way, and we went up the north track and over the shoulder of the mountain and down into a valley I had never seen. There was a house at the bottom of it, a long low house of grey stone with a slate roof and a wall round it and a stand of old pines behind it.

There was smoke coming out of the chimney.

Oisin knocked at the gate and a wolf came out of the house.

He was not ninety one. He was about fifty and he had grey hair and a broad weathered face and he stood at the gate with his arms folded.

"Oisin," he said. "You have brought wolves."

"I have brought the founder wolf," Oisin said.

The wolf at the gate looked at me.

He looked at me for a long time.

Then he opened the gate.

The house was one long room with a fire at one end and shelves on every wall. There were books on the shelves and boxes under the shelves and papers in the boxes, and there was an old wolf in a chair by the fire with a blanket over his knees and his hands folded in his lap.

He was the one who was ninety one. I knew it the moment I saw him. He had a face like a dried apple and his eyes were clouded and his breathing was shallow and he did not get up.

"Grandfather," the wolf at the gate said. "It is the founder wolf."

The old man lifted his head.

"Bring her here," he said. "Bring her here where I can see her."

I went and knelt down beside the chair.

He looked at my hair and he looked at my eyes and he put out one hand and touched my face.

"Gold," he said. "I have not seen gold since I was a boy. My father had a picture of one and he used to tell me about the day the founder's line came to this house."

"Your family kept records," I said. "I need to see them."

"You need to see one page," the old man said. "And you have come a long way for it and you are going to be disappointed."

He nodded at his grandson and the grandson went to the shelf and brought down a book.

It was a great book with a cracked spine and it was full of names and dates and drawings and it went back three hundred years.

The old man turned the pages with his shaking hands.

"Here," he said. "The founder's line and the Ravenscar line. Joined twice. Once in the year of the great sickness and once sixty years later. There were children both times and the children were recorded and the children died young."

I looked at the page.

There were two names on it and beside each name there was a date and a line that said died in infancy.

"Both of them," I said.

"Both of them." The old man closed the book. "The founder's line and the Ravenscar line have been joined twice and there is no living heir from either joining. That is what the record says and the record has never been wrong."

I sat on the floor beside the chair.

"Then there is no heir," I said. "There is me and there is the line and there is nothing else."

"There is you," the old man said. "And there is a thing I have been keeping for sixty years that nobody has ever asked me for." He looked at his grandson. "Get the box."

The grandson went to the shelf and brought down a small box bound in iron.

The old man put it in my hands.

"There is a letter in there," he said. "It was written by a wolf of the founder's blood who came to this house sixty years ago and asked me to keep it until another one came. I have kept it for sixty years and I have never opened it and I am not going to open it now."

I opened the box.

There was a letter inside and the seal on it was broken and the writing on the front was in a hand I did not know.

I unfolded it.

And in the firelight, in a house in a valley in the mountains, I read the first line.

It said: If you are reading this, you are my daughter and I am not dead.