Chapter 10: The Healer's Warning

I caught her at the channel.

The tide was coming in and the water was running over the sand in a thin sheet, and Clara was standing at the edge of it with her lantern in one hand and her shawl slipping off her shoulders, and out on the shingle beyond her the steady light I had seen from the hill was moving out toward the island.

"Clara," I said, and she turned and put her hand up flat.

"Quiet. He is going out to the island and I want to see where he lands."

I came up beside her and put my hand on the lantern and pushed it down behind my leg. "Put that out. He will see it."

She cupped her hand over the vent and blew it out and the dark came back, and we stood together at the edge of the channel with the water running cold round our boots. Out past the sand the light went on, steady and slow, and it stopped at the shingle of the island and went up onto the rock and disappeared among the broken walls.

"Who is it?" I said.

"I do not know. I saw it from the schoolhouse window. I have been watching the shore every night since the body and tonight there was a light, so I put my boots on and came down." Her voice was low and even. "He came along the shore from the point and he had a lamp he had covered with his coat, and he went out across the sand like a man who knows the tide to the minute."

"Did he see you?"

"No. He was watching his feet." She turned her head and looked at me. "What is on that island that a man would cross to at night?"

I thought about Nina's book and the lock under the stone and the water running in over the sand. "Nothing good."

We waited. The water came up over our boots and the cold got into my feet and the light on the island stayed among the walls and did not move, and after a while Clara said, in my head, the door open between us, Do you hear that?

I listened. Under the sound of the tide there was another sound, low and even, a sound like a man counting. I could not make out the words and the hair on my arms stood up.

Yes, I thought back. What is he doing?

He is saying something to the stone, Clara said. It is the same rhythm as the old voice that came out of me. He is answering it.

The light on the island went out.

We stood in the dark and the water came up over our boots and I put my hand on Clara's arm and drew her back up the shingle, and we crouched behind the beached boat at the top of the shore and waited. It was a long wait. The moon went behind a cloud and the tide came in and covered the sand and the island was just a dark hump in the water, and then a shape came out of the dark at the edge of the channel and waded across with the water up to his thighs.

He passed within thirty feet of us. He had his coat over his arm and the covered lamp in his hand and his head down, and he went up the shore path toward the village, and I saw his shape against the sky for a moment at the top of the path. It was a big man and he walked with a roll, and there was something familiar in the roll.

"Bram," I said.

Clara was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Your Gamma's boy? The one with the red hair?"

"His father was a boatman on this coast. He would know the tide to the minute." I stood up. "Wait here."

"Elias."

"I am going to follow him and see where he goes. If I am not back in an hour, go to Nina and tell her everything you saw, and do not go out to that island for any reason at all." I put my hand on her shoulder. "Do not touch the water, Clara. I mean it."

I went up the path after Bram.

I did not catch him. He went up through the village and along the back lane and I lost him at the corner where the lane turns by the churchyard wall, and when I came round the corner there was nobody there and the churchyard gate was swinging. I stood in the lane with my arm aching and my feet cold and the smell of the sea on me, and I could not follow him into a churchyard at night without a reason. So I went back down to the schoolhouse and found Clara on the step with her shawl round her shoulders, and she looked up at me and did not say anything.

"He went into the churchyard," I said.

"Then he went to the chapel, and the chapel has a priest in it, and if the priest is awake at this hour he is either praying or he is not alone." She stood up. "I will not go to Nina tonight. Nina is a healer and she will tell me what the books say and nothing more, and I have had enough of books for one week. I want to go home and I want to sleep and tomorrow I want to see the stone on that island in daylight. Not the door. The stone. The table with the bowl in it. If a man is going out there at night to talk to it, then there is something on it that talks back."

We agreed to meet at noon the next day, and she went in and bolted the door, and I went up the hill.

Nina was still up. She opened her door with a candle in her hand and looked at my face and said, "You went to the shore."

"Bram went to the island tonight. He crossed the channel and he stood among the walls with a covered lamp and he was talking to the stone." I sat down on her chair without being asked. "He came back and he went into the churchyard and I lost him."

Nina set the candle on the table and sat down opposite me. She did not look surprised. That was the thing that made me sit up.

"You knew," I said.

"I did not know it was Bram. I knew that someone in this pack has been going out to that island for years." She folded her hands. "Elspeth wrote about it. She wrote that the Alpha of the time would send a wolf to the island at the turn of every season to speak the words over the stone, to keep the lock strong. It is a pack duty. It has been done for a hundred years and the wolf who does it is not told what the words are for."

"And Bram has been doing it."

"Someone has. Marcus has been sending a wolf to the water since he took the rank." She looked at me across the candle. "That is not the thing I have to tell you tonight. I told you a thing in this room and it made you angry and you went out without hearing the rest of it. Sit still and hear the rest."

I sat still.

"Two nights before you woke in the kelp store with silver in your blood, a wolf came to this cottage in the dark and knocked on my door and gave me a bottle." She reached behind her onto the shelf and set a small blue bottle on the table between us. It had a ground stopper and a paper label with no writing on it. "He said, keep this for the Beta. He said, the Alpha will send for it and you will give it to him and you will not ask why."

I looked at the bottle. It was the same shape as the one in my own coat. "Who brought it?"

"Bram."

The candle flame stood up straight and the room was very quiet.

"Bram brought me a bottle of silver in the dark and told me the Alpha would send for it," Nina said. "And two nights later Marcus came to my door before the sun was up and asked me how a wolf might be poisoned without a wolf noticing. I told you that. I did not tell you what I said to him after." She picked up the blue bottle and turned it in the candlelight. "I said to him, silver given to a wolf in wine is slow. It works on the wolf first and the man second, and it takes about a month to do it properly. And Marcus said to me, and I remember the words, he said, it does not need to take a month, it needs to take a night, and the wolf must live. I asked him why it must live. He said, because a dead Beta is a martyr and a weakened Beta is a lesson."

The fire in the grate had gone to ash. I sat in the chair with the bottle in front of me and my bad arm in my lap and the taste of metal in my mouth, and I could not feel the rope in my chest at all.

"A lesson," I said.

"A lesson to the pack. A lesson to you." Nina set the bottle down. "It was not an enemy who put the silver in you, Elias. It was not the rogues and it was not the Council. It was your Alpha, in your cup, in your house, and he did it not to kill you but to make you weak enough to need him, and he has been doing it for longer than you know. That is what the books mean when they say the curse feeds on lies. He is not only lying to the pack. He is lying to himself, and to you, and the thing in his blood eats every lie like a mouthful of bread."

I got up. I got up too fast and the chair went over behind me and the candle guttered, and I stood in the middle of the healer's cottage with my hands in fists and the silver burning up my arm and the room going white at the edges.

"Elias," Nina said.

"He pulled me out of the surf." My voice came out of me in a way I did not recognize. "When I was nine years old he pulled me out of the surf and I have stood at his shoulder for eleven years and I have never once asked him a question he did not want to answer, and he put silver in my cup and called it a lesson." I put my good hand against the wall. "Where is the cup, Nina? The silver cup. The one that went missing from the pack house when we were children. If he is putting silver in cups, then the cup is here, and I want it."

Nina did not answer. She was looking past me at the door.

I turned round. The door was open and Marcus was standing in it with his coat on and his copper red hair loose on his shoulders and the light of a lantern behind him in the lane, and his face in the candlelight was calm and sad and tired, and he said, "Elias. Come up to the house. There is a debt between us and it is time we spoke of it."

Behind him, in the lane, the lantern light moved and there was another figure standing in the dark, and the figure was small and still and had its hood up, and when it stepped forward I saw it was Agnes, and she was holding a silver cup in both hands.