Chapter 15: The Full Moon Fleet

The moon rose at a quarter past nine, and by half past the village was empty.

I stood at the window of the cottage with the curtain pulled back an inch and watched it happen. The lights went out in the cottages one by one, up the hill and along the shore road and down by the water, until there was not a lamp burning in Dún Aonghasa except the one in the hall and the one in my sister's kitchen. Then the doors opened.

They came out quietly. Nobody called to anybody. A man and a woman from the house by the shop, walking up the road in their coats. The post office woman and her sister, with a lantern hooded in a cloth. Tom and Hannah and the baby in Hannah's arms. Leo, who did not sleep, walking slowly with a stick. Twenty, thirty, forty of them, moving up the shore road toward the headland like a congregation going to a late mass.

And the boats stayed in. Twenty boats, and not one engine turned over, and the tide came in over the slip and knocked them against the wall.

Declan had told me to stay in the cottage. He had stood on my step at eight and said, "Do not come up tonight. The first run of the moon is not a thing you should see from the outside. On Saturday you will run with us and it will be different." And I had said, "All right," and he had looked at me for a moment with his grey eyes and said, "You are lying to me," and I had said, "Yes," and he had gone away down the path shaking his head.

I waited until the last of them was past the boathouse and then I put on my coat and went out.

The night was clear and cold and the moon was enormous, a white coin over the sea, and the wind had dropped to nothing. I went up the shore road in the shadow of the wall and then off the road onto the track, and I could hear them ahead of me, not talking, just the sound of forty people walking on wet grass.

They stopped at the headland. I stopped in the furze a hundred yards back where the ground rose and I lay down flat and put my chin on my hands and watched.

Mairéad was standing on the flat stone in the middle of the ring. Her silver hair was down and her black coat was off and she was wearing a grey dress that came to her knees, and she stood with her arms at her sides and her face turned up to the moon. The forty stood around her in a loose circle and nobody spoke.

Then she raised one hand.

I do not know how to describe what happened next in a way that makes it sound like a thing that happened in the world. It was not a performance. It was not a ceremony. It was a woman on a stone lifting her hand, and forty people in a ring going down onto the grass at once, and then the sound of it, the wet crack of bone and the tearing of cloth and a low chorus of breath going out of forty throats, and under all of it a smell that came up over the headland like weather, warm and animal and alive.

When it was done there were forty wolves on the grass and one wolf on the stone.

I had seen it before, in my own kitchen, in my own body. I had not seen it from the outside, and I had not seen a pack do it together. They were different sizes and different colours, black and brown and grey and one that was nearly white, and they stood up out of the grass one by one and shook themselves and turned their heads and looked at the one on the stone. She was silver, Mairéad's wolf, big and lean with a long muzzle and a coat like frost, and she stood on the stone with her head up and her tail straight and she did not move a muscle while the others came to her.

They came to her one at a time. Each wolf walked up to the stone and put its nose to hers and then went back into the ring. It took a while. Nobody hurried it. When the last one had done it, Mairéad's wolf lifted her head and gave a sound that was not a howl, a short sharp bark that carried across the headland, and the pack turned as one and went up over the ridge and out of sight.

I lay in the furze with my heart going like a bird in my chest.

The wind came up. The moon was high and white. And on the flat stone where Mairéad had stood, there was a thing I had not noticed before, a shape moving in the dark at the back of the ring, and I put my head up to see it better and the shape came out of the shadow of the stones and stood in the moonlight.

It was Cormac's wolf. I knew it from the headland, from the first night, from the colour and the size of it. It was young and rangy and its coat was the same dark auburn as his hair, and it stood where the Alpha had stood and it did not follow the pack. It stood with its head down and its tail low and it was looking at the ground.

Then it lifted its head and looked straight at the furze where I was lying.

I did not move. I could not have moved. Its eyes were yellow in the moonlight and it held my gaze for a long moment and I felt the pull in my chest go tight, the bond not to Cormac but to the pack, to the whole of it, and something in me wanted to get up and go to him and put my nose to his.

Cormac's wolf turned and went down the far side of the ridge, away from the pack, alone, and the headland was empty.

I got up when I could not hear them any more. I went back down the track with the moon on my back and the village dark below me, and I had almost reached the shore road when I smelled it.

Smoke. Not woodsmoke. Petrol smoke, thin and sharp, and it was coming from the boathouse.

The burned shell was ahead of me on the shore, black against the grey water, and there was a light moving in it. I went down the bank quietly and came up on the landward side, where the wall was highest, and I put my eye to a gap in the stones.

There was a lamp on the ground in the middle of the burned floor, and Cormac was kneeling beside it in his human shape with a coat thrown over his shoulders and his hands in his lap, and he was shaking. There was a rope in front of him on the stones. It was a length of old tarred rope, the kind they used on the boats, and it was dark with something that was not tar and had not been tar for a month, and there was a stain on the stones around it that the rain had not washed out.

Cormac was looking at the rope and his face was wet.

I came round the wall and into the shell of the boathouse and he heard me and his head came up.

"Niamh," he said. His voice was a wreck. "You are not supposed to be here. You are supposed to be in the cottage."

"So is everyone." I stopped a few feet from him. The smell of the stain on the stones was old and cold and it was blood, and the rope had been cut through in the middle, and the two ends lay a little apart. "Cormac. What is that rope?"

He did not answer. He looked at it and then at me and his face did a thing I had seen on men in interview rooms, the thing where the whole of them is deciding whether to lie.

"It is a mooring rope," he said.

"It is a rope with blood on it and it has been cut." I crouched down so that I was at his level. "You were here the night my sister died. You told your father you were ordered to be here. I am not the Alpha and I am not the Council and I am not going to punish you for a thing you did because a woman with a silver voice told you to do it. But I am going to find out what happened in this boathouse, and you are going to tell me, because you have been carrying that rope around in your head for a month and it is eating you alive."

Cormac looked at me. The lamp flickered between us and the wind came through the burned walls and somewhere out on the water a seal barked.

"She was not in the water when they said she was," he said.

"Go on."

"She was here. In the boathouse. For three days." He wiped his face with the back of his hand. "The Alpha told the pack she had gone into the water at the headland and the sea had taken her. And she was here the whole time. And I brought her water. I brought her water and bread and I sat with her at night because she was frightened of the dark and she said..." He stopped.

"She said what?"

"She said, tell my sister I am sorry I did not write." Cormac's voice broke. "And then on the Sunday the Alpha came with the rope and she said it was time, and I said time for what, and she said, time for the sea to take her. And I said, she is alive, and the Alpha said, she is not going to be."

The lamp guttered. The stain on the stones was dark and old and I could smell it, copper and salt, and I could smell the fear on the boy so strongly that it was like standing in a fog.

"Who cut the rope, Cormac?"

"I did." He looked at the two ends on the stones. "She told me to do it. She said, tie it and cut it and let the sea have her. And I could not. And she said it in the pack voice, and my hands did it, and I have not slept since." He looked up at me and his eyes were Cormac's eyes and they were also, for a moment, the eyes of the wolf on the headland. "And then she came back three days later with the boat and put the body in the water off the rocks so that the coroner would find it and say it was a drowning, and she made me help her do that too, and I have not told my father, and I have not told anyone, and I am telling you because you are the only person in this village she cannot hear."

The wind came through the walls. I stood up. I looked at the rope and the stain and the boy on his knees in the ashes of the boathouse, and I thought about my sister sitting in this cold shell in the dark for three days with a boy bringing her bread, waiting for a woman with silver hair to come and decide when she would die.

And then, from the shore road, I heard the sound of a car.

Cormac heard it too. He got up fast and put the lamp out with his hand and we stood in the dark of the burned walls and listened to the engine come along the road slow with no lights on and stop at the boathouse. A door opened. A door closed. Feet on the gravel, a man's feet in town shoes.

"Get down," I said. "Get behind the wall."

We crouched behind the fallen stones at the seaward end and I put my hand over Cormac's mouth and the smell of him was terror and salt and the wet ashes of the boathouse. A torch came on and swung across the floor and lit up the rope and the stain and the lamp, and a man's voice said, "Someone has been here."

And a woman's voice, low and warm and musical, said, "Not someone. Two of them. One of them is the boy and the other one is the sister, and they are behind that wall."