Chapter 98: The Midpoint Twist

The bell was the harbour bell and it was ringing because a third boat had come in.

I did not go down to the slip. I stood in the hall of the Blackthorn house with the guards taking Cael and Lorcan out through the door at the back and the whole of the pack on the benches and I could not move.

"Fiadh," Ronan said. "Sit down."

"I am all right."

"You are not. Sit down."

I sat down on the bottom step of the stairs.

The hall was still full. Ilsa had not sent anyone out. She was standing at the top of it with her shawl round her shoulders and her old face set and the four elders behind her and she was looking at me.

"Healer," she said. "There is a thing we need to say out loud in this hall before the night is over and I am going to say it because I am the oldest wolf on this Council and it is my place."

"Say it."

"Lorcan has served the keepers for twenty years and he has written down everything they told him to write and he has signed thirty one orders for them. Cael has kept the founder's bloodline for seventy years and he has put a debt on your name and a contract on your head and he has sent you to this coast on purpose." Ilsa looked at me. "That is not the Council. That is a family that has been sitting behind the Council for three hundred years and using it the way a wolf uses a horse."

The hall was quiet.

"And there is a second thing," Ilsa said. "The keeper said you were the heir of the line. He said it in front of this hall and he said it in front of four elders and he did not hedge it and he did not qualify it. I have been reading the record of the bloodline for thirty years and I have never once seen a keeper name an heir out loud."

I looked at her.

"What does it mean?"

"It means the line has been declared," Ilsa said. "It means that from tonight there is a founder's heir in the north and every wolf on this coast will know it by morning. It means that the Council cannot try you as a rogue and it cannot put you in a cell and it cannot call you a debtor, because a declared heir of the founder's line is not a wolf of any pack. She is a wolf of the blood and the blood is older than the Council."

The hall went up.

Ilsa struck the table.

"The hall will be silent," she said. "And the healer will answer a question."

"Ask it."

"Will you go north to the seat and be recorded?"

I sat on the bottom step of the stairs.

The whole of the hall was looking at me. The pack and the elders and the guards and Padraig by the fire and Nessa with her hands pressed together and Colm in the sickroom behind a locked door and Ronan at my shoulder with his hand on my back.

"No," I said.

Ilsa's face did not change.

"Say why."

"Because the house in the north is the house my mother was bred in. Because there are wolves in it right now who were taken from their mothers and I have a stone in my pocket and a box on a table and a pack in this hall that has stood with me when it did not have to." I stood up. "I will not be recorded as the heir of a house that keeps wolves in it. I will be recorded as the heir of the line and the line is not the house and it is not the keepers and it is not the Council. The line is older than all of them and it does not need a keeper."

The hall was silent.

"The keeper offered me the records," I said. "Three hundred years of them. I want them. I want every name and every order and every wolf who paid. But I am not going to walk through the door of that house to get them. He can bring them to me."

Ilsa looked at me for a long moment.

"He will not bring them," she said.

"Then he will have nothing to bargain with and neither will we." I looked round the hall. "There is a reading in six days and there is an archive on that table and there are four hundred pages of it. That is enough to bring this Council down without the keepers and without the north. We do not need them. We have never needed them."

The hall went up.

And this time nobody struck the table.

They were on their feet. Colm's brother was on his feet and Nessa was on her feet and the woman who had signed Maeve's paper and had come back to the house was on her feet. The sound of it went up and filled the hall and went out through the door and down the hill to the harbour.

Ronan put his hand on my back.

"Fiadh," he said. "Turn round."

I turned round.

Cael was standing in the doorway at the back of the hall with two guards behind him.

"Let me go," he said. "I have heard what you said and I will not fight it and I am ninety years old and I want to go home."

"Then go home," I said. "And take your records with you."

Cael looked at me.

"You are making a mistake," he said. "The keepers have kept the line for three hundred years. Without us the line has nothing."

"The line has me," I said.

Cael went out.

And in the doorway behind him, where the light from the hall fell on the flags, there was a wolf standing with her copper curls loose on her shoulders and her coat open.

Maeve.

"Alpha," she said. "Luna. There is a thing I have to say in front of the hall and I would rather say it now than later."

Ronan turned round.

"Say it."

Maeve came into the hall.

"I have heard what was said tonight," she said. "About the keepers and the heir and the north. And there is a thing in it that does not add up." She looked at me. "You said the founder's line has no living heir. The record in the Dunmore house says both children died in infancy. And now a keeper has stood in this hall and declared you the heir because it suited him." She looked round the hall. "I am not saying she is lying. I am saying that a wolf who has been declared an heir by a keeper in the middle of the night, with no record and no witness and no proof, is a wolf who could be declared an impostor by the same keeper in the morning. And this pack has been asked to stand behind her."

The hall was silent.

"What are you asking for?" Ilsa said.

"I am asking for a trial," Maeve said. "A proper one. Before the reading. To establish whether the founder's claim is real."

The hall went up.