Chapter 7: A Wolf Without a Moon

I stood in the schoolroom with Clara's hand on my chest and her father's name in the air between us, and the first thing I felt was not anger. It was a kind of tiredness, the tiredness of a man who has been carrying a weight up a hill for years and has just been told it was never his to carry.

"Your father wrote to you," I said.

"In the spring. A letter came to the school in Perth where I was teaching. Two sheets of paper and no name signed at the bottom, but I knew the hand." She took her hand away from my chest and went back round the desk and sat down in her chair, and she did it slowly, like a woman who has decided to stop pretending she is not tired. "He told me to come back. He said there was a thing in this village that had been taken from him and that he had carried away with him and that he had not been able to keep, and that the man who wanted it back would pay any price for it. He said I was not to speak to the Alpha about it. He said if I did, I would be in danger, and so would anyone I told."

"And you told me."

"You came into my schoolroom with rain in your hair and told me you had lied to your Alpha for the first time in eleven years." She looked at me across the desk. "I am a schoolteacher, Elias. I know what it looks like when a person has decided to stop being told what to think."

I sat down on a child's bench by the wall. It was too low for me and my knees came up and I did not care. The rain was easing off outside and the light in the window was going grey and the fire in the stove was down to its last red. I thought about Marcus standing in the door of the pack house with Peter in front of him and the cup in Peter's hands, and I tried to remember what year it had been, and the memory would not come clear. I had been a boy. I had been sent to bed. That was all.

"Your father is alive," I said. "Where is he?"

"I do not know. The letter came from Oban but he would not be so stupid as to stay in Oban." She turned the chalk over in her fingers. "He said he would find me when the time was right. That was five months ago and I have not heard from him since."

"Then he is either dead or hiding very well."

"He is hiding very well." She said it with a flat certainty. "My father was a boatman and a liar and a coward, and he was very good at all three. He is alive."

The stove ticked. I got up off the bench and went to the window and looked out at the green and the wet road and the pines going black up the hill, and I said, "I have to tell Marcus."

"You cannot."

"I know I cannot. That is the trouble." I turned round. "Every day I do not tell him is a day I am lying to my Alpha. Every day I do tell him is a day I put you and your father and this whole village in his hands, and I do not know anymore what his hands are for." I put my palm against the cold glass. "I have to know what happened to my wolf, Clara. If there is a cure and the cure runs through you, then I cannot go on being a Beta who cannot shift, because a Beta who cannot shift is a dead man in this pack. Marcus has been protecting me from that. Or he has been keeping me weak. I cannot tell the difference and it is making me stupid."

Clara got up. She came and stood beside me at the window and she did not touch me this time, and she said, "Then find out. Tonight. The moon is up and there is nobody on this green but us and the rain has stopped, and if there is a wolf in you at all it will hear me call it."

"Clara."

"You told me the healer said a mate can draw the silver out. I am the mate. I did not ask for it and neither did you, and I do not know what it means, and I am not going to sit in this schoolroom and watch you die of a wound because we are both too polite to try." She picked up her shawl. "Come out to the green."

The rain had stopped. The cloud was breaking up and the moon was behind it somewhere, and the green was wet and shining in the last of the light from her window. She stood in the middle of the green with her shawl round her shoulders and her champagne hair coming loose from its pins and she said, "Take off your coat."

"My coat."

"Your arm. I want to see it."

I took off my coat and rolled my sleeve up, and she came close and looked at the cut in the grey light. The grey threads had spread further since the morning. They had gone past my elbow and up over the muscle of my shoulder, and where they had gone the skin was cold to the touch, and the cut itself had not closed, and it was weeping something clear and thin.

"That is not a wound," she said. "That is a poison that has got into the whole of you. Why did you not show me this before?"

"Because you would have looked at me the way you are looking at me now."

She put her fingers on the cut. The touch went through me like the first drink of a cold morning, and the rope in my chest pulled so tight that I made a sound I did not mean to make, and then it happened.

I felt her.

Not her hand. Her. It came into my head like a voice through a wall, low and clear, and it was not a voice I had ever heard, because it was not made of sound. It said: Elias.

I sat down on the wet grass.

It was that simple and that sudden. One moment I was standing in the green with a woman's fingers on my arm, and the next I was on my knees in the grass with my own head in my hands and something on the other side of the wall in my chest pressing its face against the brick.

"What is it?" Clara was down on her knees beside me with her hands on my shoulders. "Elias, what is happening?"

"I can hear you."

"You can hear me with your ears. I am right here."

"No." I looked up at her. The moon had come out from behind the cloud and it was on her face and her eyes were wide and frightened and her lips were parted, and I said, "I can hear you in my head. Say something. Say something I could not hear with my ears."

She stared at me. Then her mouth moved and no sound came out of it, and in my head, clear as a bell across the green, her voice said: I am not afraid of you.

I laughed. I could not help it. It came out of me in a short ugly bark and I put my hand over my mouth and the rope in my chest went slack and warm for the first time since the shore.

"Say something else," I said.

Her lips moved again. The wall in my chest was thin now, thin enough to lean on, and her voice came through it: You look like a fool sitting in the wet grass.

"You look like a fool sitting in the wet grass," I said out loud, and she put her hand over her own mouth and her eyes went bright and wet.

"It works," she said. "It works both ways. That has not happened before. I have heard the other one, the old one in the stone, and it was not like this. This is a door." She took her hands away from her mouth. "This is a door and I can open it."

"Then open it and call the wolf."

She got up off her knees and stood over me, and the moon was full on her now, white and round and half eaten at the edge by the last of the cloud, and she said out loud, "Elias. I am going to call you and you are going to answer. If it hurts, you tell me and I stop."

"It will hurt whether I tell you or not."

"Then do not tell me and I will not stop." She put both hands on my head, on the crown of it, and her palms were warm, and she closed her eyes and she said, in the room in my chest, in a voice that was not a voice: Come out. I know you are in there. Come out.

I felt him.

For one moment I felt him, and it was like the first spring after a hard winter, like the ice going off a loch. He was far down and small and curled and he turned over in his sleep, and I felt the shape of him and the warmth of him and the smell of him, and I reached for him with everything I had.

The silver came up.

It came out of the cut and up my arm and into my chest and it met the place where he was turning over, and it burned. There is no other word for it. It burned like a rope of fire and it went through my shoulder and into my back and I was on the grass on my side with my body folding round the pain, and Clara was calling my name out loud and in my head at the same time, and the wolf went back down into the dark and curled up and went still.

The moon was still up. The green was still wet. Somewhere up the hill a dog was barking at the noise we were making.

I lay on my side and breathed until the burning went down to an ache and the ache went down to the ordinary cold of the ground, and then I sat up. Clara was kneeling in the grass with her hands in her lap and her face white in the moonlight.

"You stopped," I said.

"The silver stopped you. I called him and he came up and the silver met him and it threw him back down." Her hands were shaking. She looked at them and then at me. "I felt all of it. Through the door. I felt the burning. It went through me too."

I looked at her wrist. There was a mark on it, a small pale crescent, the shape of a new moon, and it had not been there before we came out onto the green. I took her hand and turned it over in the moonlight and she looked at the mark and went very still.

"That was not there this morning," she said.

"No."

"Elias, what is this?"

"I do not know." I let go of her hand. "Nina will know. She will not want to tell us, but she will know."

We got up off the grass and I put my coat on and she wrapped her shawl round her shoulders and we stood in the middle of the wet green with the moon on us and the village dark around us, and I felt the door in my chest standing open and her on the other side of it, and I did not want it to close.

"Clara," I said. "When your father wrote to you, did he tell you what the thing was? The thing he carried away and could not keep?"

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "He called it a cup in the letter, but he wrote it in a strange way. He put the word in the middle of a sentence that had nothing to do with it, the way you would write a thing you did not want anyone to read over your shoulder. I thought it was because he was afraid someone would read the letter. Now I think it was because he was afraid someone would read the word."

"What word?"

"He wrote it as k e l p." She looked at me. "Then he wrote the next line in the old tongue, which he taught me as a child and told me never to speak to anyone. It said, the cup holds what the Alpha could not hold. I did not know what it meant. I thought it was a riddle."

It was not a riddle. It was a thing I had heard before, in another mouth, on another night, and I could not place it yet, and the not placing of it sat in my chest like a stone.

Down the hill, in the harbour, a light was moving where no light should have been. It came along the shore from the point, a small steady glow that swung as if a man were carrying it, and it stopped at the place where Peter had come ashore, and it stayed there.

Clara saw it too. She stood very still at my side and said, in my head, without moving her lips: Someone is looking for the cup.