Chapter 5: The Alpha's Welcome

We came back across the channel with the water already climbing over the sand, and Clara rode on my back again with the lantern held out to one side and her chin against my shoulder, and neither of us said anything until we reached the shore.

She slid down. Her feet found the shingle and she stood there a moment with her hand on my arm, and then she took it away and said, "I want to go home."

"I'll walk you."

"I can walk myself."

"Clara."

She turned round. Her face in the lantern light was pale and set and there was still a wet shine at the corner of her eye. "I have had a man's voice come out of my mouth on a stone table in the dark. I have been told by the healer's books that I am the only thing that can save your wolf. I have been made to swear an oath in a cold chapel by an Alpha who watches me from his window like a cat at a mouse hole. I do not want to be walked home. I want to go home and I want to sit by my fire and I want to be alone with this for one hour before anybody asks me another question."

So I let her go. She went up the shore path with the lantern swinging and the dark closing round her, and I stood on the shingle until the light of it was gone behind the wall of the schoolhouse yard. Then I went up the hill to the pack house and into the study where Marcus was waiting.

He was sitting behind his desk with the fire low and a glass at his elbow. He did not offer me one. That was the first wrong thing. He had poured for me in that study a hundred times since we were young men, and tonight he sat with his own glass and his hands flat on the desk and looked at me.

"Tell me everything."

I told him about the island. I told him about the door under the water and the crescent mark on it and the stone that hummed and the voice that came out of Clara's mouth, and I watched his face as I said it. He did not look surprised. He looked tired.

"The voice said 'not yet'?" he asked.

"Three words in the old tongue and then 'not yet' in the common speech."

"Can you say the three words?"

"I did not catch them."

"Try." He leaned forward. The firelight moved across his face and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and I noticed for the first time that his hands were trembling on the desk. "Try, Elias. It matters."

"I cannot say them. I told you true."

He sat back. He picked up his glass and drank the whole of it and set it down and said, "The fragment has woken. That is what the old ones called it. A piece of the first Alpha left in the stone on that island, and it comes to a wolf who shifts there for the first time, and it speaks through them when the stone calls. It has been asleep for a long while." He looked at the fire. "I had hoped it would stay asleep."

"Marcus. What is it for?"

"It is a thing my father knew about and never spoke of in front of me." He got up and went to the window and stood looking out at the dark, and his voice was quiet. "There is a Council of Alphas, Elias. You know that. They sit on the mainland in a hall I have never been allowed inside, and they send a messenger once a year to count our wolves and our territory and to ask questions I do not like. They believe the fragments are a danger. They believe a pack that keeps one should be broken up and its wolves given to other Alphas to hold. If they learn that a first shift on our island has woken something in a woman who has the old blood in her, they will come here with soldiers and they will take her, and they will take the school and the village and the boats and they will call it the law."

"That is why the oath."

"That is part of why the oath." He turned round. "You will keep the bond quiet. Both of you. If the Council hears that a Beta who cannot shift has found a mate in a late bloomer with old blood, they will not wait for their soldiers. They will send their questioners, and the questioners do not ask nicely." He came away from the window. "Say it to me. Say you will keep it quiet."

"I will keep it quiet."

"Good man." He picked up the glass and went to the decanter and poured another, and his hand was steadier now. "Bring her into the pack tomorrow. Properly. The pack house at noon. Agnes will put on a spread and the Gamma will present her and I will name her a guest of the pack under my protection, and the Council will hear nothing but that a schoolteacher swore an oath and was welcomed. That is a story nobody will look twice at."

"She will not want a spread."

"She will come anyway. She is not a fool." He drank. "And Elias. Stay close to her. Not too close. Close enough."

The fire spat. I stood there a moment with my hand on the back of the chair and the taste of metal in my mouth from the arm that was still burning and the rope in my chest that had been pulled tight all evening, and I said the thing that had been sitting on my tongue since the chapel.

"You knew about the cup, Marcus. When I told you what she said about her father and the silver cup, you knew what it was. What is the cup?"

He did not turn round.

"It is a thing from the old time. It was in my father's house. It went missing before he died." His voice was even. "If Clara's father carried it out of this village, then her father knows something about my family that I would like to know myself. That is why I want her close."

That was not the whole of it. Nina had said that to me once, in her clinical way, and I heard her voice saying it now. But I did not press him. I said goodnight and went out, and I did not sleep well.

At noon the next day Clara came up the hill.

She came in her grey dress with her hair pinned and her chin up, and the pack filled the long room and Agnes had indeed put on a spread, bread and cold herring and a pot of the winter preserve and a big pie with a lid of crust that she would not let anyone cut until the Alpha said. Marcus stood at the head of the table and gave a speech about the school and the village and the old families of the coast, and he told the pack that Clara was a guest under his protection and that any wolf who harmed her or her school would answer to him. It was a good speech. He was good at speeches. When he had finished he raised his glass, and the pack raised theirs, and Bram did a small cheer that got a laugh out of the far end of the table, and Clara stood there with her hands folded and her eyes going round the room.

Nina was at the far end by the door with her own glass, and she did not drink. She watched Clara over the rim of it and Clara watched her back, and I stood between them with my bad arm at my side and understood that the two women in this room knew more about what was happening to me than I did.

After the pie was cut Marcus drew me aside to the window.

"Two things," he said quietly. "The first is that the messenger from the Council is due in the village any day now. If he asks, Clara is a schoolteacher and nothing more."

"Understood."

"The second is the kelp. Two of the men who went out to the south beds yesterday have not come back. Their boat is on the shingle at the point, turned over and empty. I want you to go down there and look at it before the tide takes it."

We went down together. The boat lay on its side on the shingle with its hull up and a long tear in the planking, and the oars were gone, and there was a smell in the air over the boat that I knew and Marcus knew and neither of us said.

"Rogues," I said.

"Or a storm."

"There is no storm, Marcus. Look at the sky."

He looked at the sky. Then he walked round the boat and crouched and looked at the sand on the far side of it, and his shoulders went still.

"Elias," he said, in a voice I did not know. "Come and see this."

I went round the boat. In the sand at the bow, where the water had not yet reached, there was a body. It was a man, a wolf who had died in human form, and he had been in the water some days and the fish had been at him and his hair was plastered dark across his face. Someone had carved into his chest, deep and deliberate, a word that I could read at a glance because it was written in the common speech and not in the old tongue.

It said Cragmoor.

Marcus stood up. His face was the color of the sand and his hands were fists and he said, very quietly, "I have seen him before. That is the man who carried the cup for my father."

I looked down at the dead man with the word carved in him and the dark water running at his feet, and I heard Clara's voice in my head on the island, saying, my father came home from the harbour with a silver cup in his coat, and I felt the rope in my chest pull tight and the silver in my arm burn, and I understood that whatever had come up out of the sea had been sent by someone who knew about the cup, and that Marcus had not told me the whole of it, and that the man at my shoulder had been lying to me since before I lost my wolf.