Chapter 99: The Fallout

The hall went up and it did not come down for a long time.

I stood on the bottom step of the stairs and let it happen. There is nothing else you can do with a hall full of wolves who have just been told the thing they were standing on might be a lie. You cannot shout them down and you cannot argue with forty voices. You have to let them get to the end of it.

Ilsa struck the table four times before the noise died.

"The hall will be silent," she said, "and the Beta will say what she has come to say in front of the whole of it."

Maeve stood in the middle of the floor with her copper curls loose and her coat open.

"I have not come to make a speech," she said. "I have come to ask a question and the question is this. Six days from now this Council sits in this house and reads out four hundred pages of archive in front of the whole coast. And on the first page of it there is a wolf who says she is the heir of the founder's line because a keeper told her so in the middle of the night." She looked round the hall. "What happens when Soren's wolves stand up in that reading and say she is a fraud? What happens when the four hundred pages are read out and there is nothing in them but a debt and a contract and a woman with golden hair who arrived on a bus?"

The hall was quiet.

"That is the question," Maeve said. "And I am not asking it to hurt her. I am asking it because the answer decides whether this pack stands or falls."

Ilsa looked at me.

"Healer," she said. "Answer it."

I came down off the step.

"There is a record in the Dunmore house," I said. "It is three hundred years old and it says the founder's line and the Ravenscar line were joined twice and that both children died in infancy. There is a portrait in the Council's own book of a wolf called Mairead with golden hair and green eyes who died in a Council cell a hundred and twenty years ago. There is a cave on this coast with marks in it that are older than the Council and a hollow in the wall where my mother hid a book and a pot of salve. And there is a keeper in the north who stood in this hall tonight and named me heir in front of four elders and forty wolves."

I looked at Maeve.

"None of that is proof," I said. "I know it is not. It is a pile of old paper and a portrait and a cave and a wolf who says a thing. If Soren's wolves stand up in that reading and call me a fraud they will have a case, and I will answer it with the same pile of old paper and the same cave and the same portrait, and the Council will decide."

"Then let the Council decide now," Maeve said. "Before the reading. A trial of the claim, in this house, with the doors open."

The hall went up again.

Ilsa struck the table.

"The Beta is asking for a trial of the claim," she said. "Is there a second?"

"I will second it," said one of the elders on her right.

The thin wolf with the long neck. Rannoch.

Ilsa looked at him.

"Elder Rannoch," she said. "You have not had an opinion in thirty years."

"I have an opinion now," Rannoch said. "I have been reading the archive for four days and I have read the founder's page and the Ravenscar page and the record of Mairead, and there is a thing in it that nobody has said out loud." He looked at me. "The record of Mairead says she died in custody and there is no cause of death and no trial and no sentence. It also says the matter is closed. Somebody closed it. And a closed matter is not the same as a proved one."

The hall was silent.

"Then the trial is granted," Ilsa said. "It will be held in this house in three days, before the reading, and the doors will be open." She looked at me. "Healer. You will answer the claim and you will be given every chance to prove it."

"I will answer it," I said.

The hall broke up.

The pack went out through the door and down to the kitchen and the yard and the harbour, and the elders went up the stairs to the rooms that had been made ready for them, and Maeve went out last of all with her coat round her and her copper curls and did not look at me.

Ronan stood beside me.

"Three days," he said.

"Three days."

"Fiadh. She is not wrong." He said it quietly. "She is doing it to hurt you and she is doing it because she wants the seat and she is also right. We have a cave and a portrait and a keeper's word. That is not proof."

"I know it is not proof."

"Then what are we going to do?"

I sat down on the step.

"I do not know yet," I said. "But there is a thing in all of this that nobody has said and it has been sitting at the back of my head since the Dunmore house." I looked up at him. "The record in the Dunmore house says both children died in infancy. My mother wrote that the founder's line and the Ravenscar line were joined twice. Cael stood in this hall and named me heir in front of forty wolves and did not hedge it."

"And?"

"And a keeper does not name an heir unless he is certain of the line," I said. "Cael is ninety years old and he has kept the records for seventy of them. He would not have said it in front of a hall if there was a chance it was wrong. So there is a record somewhere that proves it and he has seen it and he did not bring it with him."

Ronan looked at me.

"Then we find it," he said.

"Where?"

"There is one place in this world that has a record of every founder's heir and it is not the Council and it is not Dunmore." He sat down beside me. "It is the keepers' own house. And Cael is going home tonight with a boat and a guard and no records at all."

The door of the hall opened and Oisin came in with his coat on.

"Healer," he said. "The keeper's boat has gone. It went out of the harbour ten minutes ago and it is going north."

I stood up.

"Then we go north after it," I said.

And through the bond, in the back of my head, I felt Ronan go still.

"Fiadh," he said. "There is a thing I have not told you."

"What?"

"Three days ago in the Dunmore house I read the record of Mairead and I did not tell you the whole of it." He looked at me. "There was a line at the bottom of the page that said the matter is closed, and under it there was another line in a different hand that said the heir was removed to the north and the record amended."

I stared at him.

"Amended," I said. "Somebody amended the record."

"Somebody amended the record." Ronan looked at me. "And I have been sitting on it for three days because I did not know what it meant, and now a keeper has named you heir and I think I know what it means."

Down in the harbour the keeper's boat went out of the mouth of the bay and turned north.