Chapter 101: The Cliff and the Whisper

The pier was full of lamps and the whole co-op was on it and my sister was walking up the planks with a grey coat over her arm.

I did not go to her. I went to Padraig.

He was standing on the planks in front of the man in the hood with his teeth bared and his coat in a heap behind him and his shoulders up, and there was a cut on his foreleg where a bullet had gone through the loose skin and nothing else. He was a wolf and he had been a wolf for a week and he had shifted in front of a man with a gun to keep him off the pier.

The man in the hood had the gun down at his side. He was looking at the whole co-op on the pier and at the wolf in front of him and at the woman with gold hair coming up the planks behind him and he was not moving.

“Put it down,” I said. “There are forty wolves on this pier and there is not a thing you can do with that gun that will get you off it.”

He put it down on the deck. He put it down slowly and he took his hood back and he was a man somewhere in his thirties with a thin face and a shaved head and a mark on his jaw like a burn.

“My name is Sean,” he said. “I am from Galway and I have been on this coast since April and I have been doing what a woman in Galway told me to do and I am not going to do it any more.”

“What did she tell you to do?”

“She told me to take the ring off the deck of this boat in the fog and take it up to the hall and give it to the Alpha and tell her that the woman in Athlone had sent it.” He looked at my sister. “And she told me to take the woman in Athlone and put her on this boat and bring her down this coast tonight and put her on the pier at Dún Aonghasa in front of the whole co-op so that the co-op would see a claimant who had been in the north for twenty years and who had come back with a man in a hood and a gun.”

My sister came up the pier and stopped in front of me.

She was thinner than she had been in April. There was grey in her gold hair that had not been there in April and there was a scar on her throat that had not healed and there was a way she held her left hand that told me it had been broken and had not been set properly.

“You are alive,” I said.

“I am alive.” She put her hand out and took mine and her hand was warm and dry and it was the hand of a woman who had been on a boat all night. “I have been in Athlone since April and I have been waiting for a wolf to come for me and there was a wolf who wrote me letters every week and told me to stay and I stayed because I believed him.” She looked past me at Declan. “And there is a thing about the letters that I have to say in front of the whole co-op. The last one came on the twelfth of June and it was not in the hand of the man who wrote the others. It was in a hand I did not know and it said, the co-op is going to vote on a woman from Dublin and the woman from Dublin is a rogue and she is to be put out of the territory. And it said, if you come down that shore road you will be taken and the woman from Dublin will be blamed for it.”

The whole pier was silent.

“So I did not come down that shore road,” my sister said. “I got on a boat with a man in a hood who told me he was taking me to my sister and I came down this coast in the dark and I have been on the water since six o’clock and I am going to sit down on these planks in a minute because I have been sick twice and I have not slept.”

She sat down on the planks.

The whole co-op stood round her with lamps and did not say a word.

And then Mairéad came down the pier with her silver hair down and her black coat on and the whole co-op went quiet in a different way.

“There is a thing I have to say,” Mairéad said, “and I am going to say it to the woman who is sitting on those planks and then I am going to go up to the hall and I am going to do the thing I have been putting off since 1961.” She stopped in front of my sister. “I put a rope round your neck. Not with my own hands. I had it done and I signed the paper and I said, this was ordered, and I have been saying this was ordered since I was nineteen years old. And there is a thing about that which I have to say to you now. You were not ordered by the Council. You were ordered by my sister and my sister ordered it because you made a claim and because a claim makes a noise and because a noise brings a man from Galway down this coast to look at a deed that was signed in 1961 by a woman who had burned the Alpha in her own house.” She put her hand out and did not touch my sister. “I am going to Galway in the morning and I am going to bring my sister back and I am going to put her in front of the co-op and the enforcer and I am going to say the whole of it.”

My sister looked up at her.

“There is a thing about you that I have known since I was a girl,” she said. “And it is that you are a woman who does the wrong thing and then does a great right thing at the end of it and thinks the right thing pays for the wrong thing.” She put her hand on the planks. “It does not pay for it. But it is the only thing you have and I am not going to stand in the way of it.”

Mairéad turned round and went up the pier.

And then, when she was at the top of the slip, she stopped and looked back at me and said, “There is a thing I have to say to you and it is not for the co-op and it is not for the record and I am going to say it once and then I am going to go up to that hall.” She came back down the pier and put her hand on my arm and her voice dropped to a thing that only I could hear. “The false bond. The one in December. The one between your sister and the Beta. It was not made by my sister and it was not made by me. It was made by the enforcer of this region and it was bought with a thing that no wolf in this village knows about.” She looked at me. “Korkut bought this pack's silence with a false mate bond in 1994. He made a bond between a wolf in this village and a wolf in the north and he broke it and he used the breaking to keep the co-op quiet about the deed. And the wolf in the north was Bridget and the wolf in this village was the Beta's son.”

The pier was quiet. The whole co-op was quiet.

“Cormac,” I said.

“Cormac,” Mairéad said. “In 1994 the boy was nineteen years old and Korkut made a false bond on him with a wolf in the north and broke it and told the boy that if he said a word about it the whole co-op would know that the Beta's son had been in the north with a woman who was banished. And the boy has been carrying a broken mark since he was nineteen and he has never said a word about it and he has been in my hand ever since because a boy with a broken mark and a secret is a boy who does what he is told.” She let go of my arm. “That is the thing I have been keeping since 1994 and that I am giving you now because I am going to Galway in the morning and I am not going to come back.”

She went up the pier.

I stood on the planks with my sister at my feet and the whole co-op around me and the thing Mairéad had said going through me like the cold coming in off the sea.

And then I looked at the cliff at the end of the headland and there was a figure standing on it in the dark.

It was Cormac. He was standing on the edge of the cliff with his back to the whole village and his shoulders up and he was looking down at the water.

I went up the shore road at a run.