Chapter 20: A Bond I Never Asked For

The meeting at the hall lasted two hours and in the end it came to nothing, which was the best outcome I could have hoped for.

Korkut was courteous. He was more than courteous. He sat me down at the long table with a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits and he asked me about my sister and my work in Dublin and my mother's family, and he wrote nothing down, and every so often he would lean back and say, "Take your time," in a voice like a man settling into a favorite chair. Mairéad sat at the head of the table with her hands folded and her pale green eyes on me and said almost nothing.

Twice Korkut came close to the thing he wanted. The first time he said, "The Council takes an interest in a charter number that has been dormant for twenty years. A weight with a number on it is not a trinket. It is a legal instrument. Have you been given a weight, Miss Niamh?" And I said, "I have been given a great many things since I came here and most of them were casseroles," and he laughed and let it go.

The second time he said, "And do you intend to make a claim on the seat?" and I put my cup down and said, "I intend to bury my sister and settle her affairs and go back to Dublin, and if I were you I would not believe a word of that, because I would not believe it myself." He looked at me for a long moment and then he smiled and said, "That is the most honest thing anyone has said to me in this village all week."

When it was over I walked out of the hall with my hands in my pockets and my heart going like a hammer, because the whole time I had been sitting at that table the frame with the charter in it had been on the wall behind Mairéad's head, and I had not looked at it once. I had thought about water. I had thought about a wall. And when Mairéad had said, at the very end, "You have been very quiet, Niamh," I had said, "I am tired," and she had looked at me with those pale eyes and said, "Yes. I can smell that on you."

I went up to the high ground that evening because Declan had sent word by Cormac that he would meet me there at the old stones and there was a thing he had to show me before Saturday.

He was there before me, standing in the ring with his hands in his pockets and the wind moving his auburn hair, and the sun was going down behind the sea and the whole Atlantic was the colour of a knife.

"You came," he said.

"You sent for me."

"I did not think you would come." He looked at me and then away. "After this morning. After the lie."

"I have not forgiven you for the lie."

"I did not ask you to."

"Good." I stopped a few feet from him. "What is it you have to show me?"

He took his hands out of his pockets and turned round and looked at the ring of stones. "The last time you were here you shifted and stayed. That was the first shift and the first shift is the easy one, because the wolf is new and it does not know what it can do. The second shift is harder. The second shift is where a wolf learns to come back. And if you cannot come back, then on Saturday night you will shift on this hill in front of the pack and you will not be able to stand up on two legs again, and Mairéad will have you."

"So teach me to come back."

"I am going to." He took off his jacket and laid it on the grass. "But there is a thing you have to understand first. Coming back is not a thing you do with your mind. It is a thing you do with the wolf. The wolf has to want to come back, and the wolf only wants to come back for a reason. A wolf that shifts with nothing to come back to will stay a wolf. It will run and it will hunt and it will forget it was ever a woman."

"And what is the reason?"

"The pack. The mate. The fire in the cottage and the boat in the harbor and the person who is waiting for you." He looked at me. "You have no pack. You have no fire. The only thing you have is the bond, and the bond is with me, and this morning I lied to you and you felt it. So the thing you have to come back to is the thing you do not trust. That is the difficulty."

The sun went down behind the sea. The wind came up over the stones.

"Then we had better fix it," I said. "Because I am not going to be a wolf for the rest of my life on a hill in the west of Ireland."

He looked at me for a moment. Then he said, "Shift. And this time, when you feel it go, do not hold on to the woman. Let the wolf come. And when the wolf is there, I am going to put my hand on you and I want you to follow the bond back to me. Not with your mind. With the thing in your chest."

I shifted. It was easier the second time, and worse. The heat came up and the sound went strange and the pain took me down on my hands and knees, and then the wolf was there, standing on four legs in the ring of stones with the wind in its fur. I could smell everything. I could smell the sea and the peat and the old stones and the mouse in the wall of the fallen charter house and the man.

Declan came to me slowly. He put his hand out flat and let me smell it and then he put it on the back of my neck, the way he had in the kitchen, and the spark came through me like a struck match, and the wolf in me went still and quiet and turned its head into his hand.

"Good," he said. "Now follow it back."

I tried to come back. I tried to find the woman. And the wolf did not want to go. The wolf wanted the wind and the hill and the man's hand and the smell of the sea, and it put its head down and it would not move.

"Not with your mind," Declan said. "You are thinking about the woman. Stop thinking about the woman. Follow the thing in your chest."

I followed the bond. It was a rope going from my chest to his, and I went along it, and it was warm and it was strong and it was him, the pine and the wool and the grey eyes and the fear underneath that he had been carrying for a month. And at the end of the rope there was a thing I had not expected, a thing that was not mine and was not his either, a place where the two of us met and were not two.

I came back. It took longer than the first time and it hurt more and when it was done I was lying on the grass with my head in Declan's lap and his hand in my hair and the sky above me going from grey to dark.

"You did it," he said.

"I did it." I sat up and he let me go and the cold came in where his hand had been. "How long was I out?"

"Not long. Ten minutes." He was looking at me with an expression I could not read. "You came back along the bond. That is the hardest way to do it. Most wolves come back for the fire or the boat or the child. You came back for me."

"You are what I have."

He got up. He walked to the far side of the ring and stood with his back to me and his hands on his hips, and the wind pulled at his shirt.

"Declan."

"I have been thinking about this all day," he said, without turning round. "Since you came into the harbor office and told me my son was on his way to me. I have been thinking about what it means that the woman I have a bond with is the woman who is going to bring down the Alpha of this pack, and whether I can stand beside her and do my duty to the seat at the same time."

"You told me you would stand beside me."

"I told you I would keep you alive on Saturday night. That is not the same thing." He turned round. "Niamh. If you bring this off. If you get the ledger and the ring and you stand up in the hall on Sunday and the pack votes, then one of two things happens. You become the Alpha, and I am your Beta, and the bond between us is the bond between an Alpha and her Beta, which the Council has a great deal to say about and none of it is kind. Or Mairéad keeps her seat and you are dead or banished and the bond is torn out of me in front of the whole pack, and I have seen what that does to a wolf and I do not intend to be that wolf."

"So what are you saying?"

"I am saying that I cannot be your reason." He said it flatly. "I cannot be the thing you come back for. I cannot be the thing you lean on. If the bond between us is the only rope you have, then it will break, and it will break at the worst possible moment, and I will be the one who broke it." He picked up his jacket. "You need the pack. You need the village. You need a reason that is not a man. Find it before Saturday, or do not go into that hall."

He walked past me toward the track and I got up off the grass and caught his arm.

"You are afraid," I said. "I can smell it on you. It is the same fear that was on my sister's letter and the same fear that was on you in the harbor office. What are you afraid of, Declan? Not of Mairéad. Of something else."

He looked down at my hand on his arm. Then he looked at me and his grey eyes were very tired.

"I am afraid of what happens to a man who chooses a woman over his pack," he said. "I have seen it once before. It was my father, and the woman was your mother, and the choosing killed him." He took my hand off his arm and let it go. "Ask Ronan. Ask him what happened to my father in 1961. And then ask yourself whether you want to be the second woman in this village to do that to a man."

He went down the track. The moon was up and the sea was dark and the stones stood around me in the wind, and I stood in the middle of the old charter house with the taste of him still in my mouth and the bond in my chest going slack and cold, and I thought about my mother standing in this ring in 1961 with a lamp in her hand and a man who was not my father.