Chapter 21: The Challenge Clause

I did not go home. I went to Ronan's cottage with the moon on my back and the bond still cold in my chest, and I knocked on his door until he opened it in his nightshirt with a candle in his hand and a face like a man who had expected me.

"You heard what Declan said to me," I said.

"I heard nothing. I was asleep."

"Then you will hear it now. He told me his father chose a woman over his pack in 1961 and it killed him, and the woman was my mother." I came in past him and shut the door. "You have been telling me half of this story for two days. You told me about the fire and the cache and the ring and the sister who was taken out of the village. You did not tell me about Declan's father."

Ronan put the candle down on the table and sat down slowly in his chair and looked into the embers of the fire.

"His name was Fionn," he said. "He was the Beta of this pack before his son, and he was my friend for forty years, and he was a better man than anyone in this village has given him credit for. He was Beta to Maeve, your grandmother. And when Maeve died in the fire, he did not go over to Eileen. He stood against her. He stood against her for two years and he kept the wolves who would not bend to her in this territory, and the wolves who would not bend were your mother and your aunt and a dozen others, and he kept them alive."

"What happened?"

"Eileen could not kill him. He was too well liked and too strong and there were too many wolves who would have answered for it. So she did the other thing. She found the one thing in this village that Fionn would break the law for, and she made certain that everyone knew it." Ronan looked up. "Fionn and your mother were not mates. There was no bond between them. But he loved her and she loved him and everyone in this village knew it, and Eileen put it about that they had been together while your father was alive, and that your sister was Fionn's child and not your father's."

I sat down in the other chair.

"Was it true?"

"Siobhan was your father's daughter. I delivered her. I know." Ronan's old face was very still. "It did not matter whether it was true. It mattered that the village believed it, and the village believed it because Eileen told them and because a village will believe a thing about a woman that it would not believe about a man. And Fionn could not stand it. He was the Beta and the Beta cannot be a man who has broken the peace, and every wolf in this territory was looking at him, and Eileen said to him, in front of the whole co-op, Fionn, you have chosen a woman over your pack, and you are not fit to hold the rank." Ronan's hands were folded in his lap. "He gave up the Beta's seat that night. He went home and he did not come out of his house for a month. And then in the spring he went out with the boats on a day when the sea was wrong and he did not come back."

"Declan was a boy."

"Declan was nine years old. He was standing on the pier when they brought his father in." Ronan looked at me. "And he has been the Beta of this pack for twenty years and he has never once looked at a woman in this village, and every wolf here thinks it is because he is a cold man. It is not. It is because he watched his father die of a thing that was said about him."

The fire settled. The wind came down the chimney and made the candle gutter.

"Ronan," I said. "The charter. The challenge clause. I need to read it with my own eyes."

He got up and took the book from the shelf and put it on the table and turned the pages and found the place, and I read it with the candle between us.

The hand was old and cramped and the spelling was strange, and it took me a while to find the rhythm of it, but the words were plain enough once I did. A challenge is made by a weight in the presence of a witness. The Alpha answers it or forfeits the seat. The answering is on the headland at the full moon and it is between the challenger and the Alpha and no other wolf. And then, in the middle of the page, in a different hand and a later ink, there was the clause I had come for.

"If the challenger is slain, the challenge is answered and the seat is confirmed in the holder. If the challenger is not slain but is taken and held, the challenge is not answered and the seat is vacant until the challenger is brought before the co-op and the matter is settled in the hall. If the challenger is slain in a fight that was ordered by a third party, the challenge is void and the seat is vacant and the co-op must choose."

I read it three times. Then I put my finger on the last line.

"Ordered by a third party," I said. "That is the word Cormac heard her say. This was ordered. She said it in the hall with my sister on the floor and Declan standing there with her in his arms. She said it to a witness who was twelve years old at the time and who is now a man and who has told me the whole of it."

"Cormac is a boy who cannot lie to the Alpha and cannot stand in front of the co-op without shaking."

"Cormac is a witness to a legal proceeding, and in this village a witness is a witness. The charter does not say the witness must be old. It does not say the witness must be brave. It says the challenge is void if it was ordered, and it does not say who must prove it." I looked up. "And there is another thing. The clause says if the challenger is taken and held, the challenge is not answered and the seat is vacant until the challenger is brought before the co-op. My sister was taken and held for three days in the boathouse. She was not brought before the co-op. She was put in the water."

Ronan's eyes were bright in the candlelight. "That is a second door into the same room."

"It is a second door and it does not need a boy to stand up in front of the co-op and accuse the Alpha of murder." I sat back. "All it needs is proof that she was held. And there is proof. There is a boy who brought her bread for three days. There is a rope with blood on it and a stain on the stones of the boathouse. And there is a letter in my pocket in my sister's hand that says she was alive on the Sunday, because she wrote it in the cottage on the Wednesday before she made the claim and she wrote on the bottom of it, if I am taken, look in the boathouse."

"Does the letter say that?"

"It says, if I am taken." I took it out and unfolded it and read the line aloud. "If I am taken and held, do not come to the hall. Go to the boathouse and look under the third flagstone from the slip and you will find the thing I could not carry with me. I read that line four times and I did not see it. I saw the ring and the key and the name of the woman from Galway. I did not see that my sister had written down, in her own hand, before she died, that she expected to be taken and held."

Ronan put his hand out and I gave him the letter. He read the line and then he read the whole of it through and his old face worked.

"The third flagstone from the slip," he said. "Have you looked?"

"I have not. The boathouse burned the morning after I found the letter and I have not been back inside it since the night Cormac showed me the rope." I stood up. "There is a flagstone floor under the ash. If she put a thing under a flagstone in that boathouse it will still be there, because stone does not burn."

"It is the middle of the night."

"It is the best time." I put the letter back in my coat. "There is no moon tonight and the pack has run and the Alpha will be in the hall with the enforcer and there is not a wolf in this village who will be on the shore road at two in the morning."

Ronan got up and put his coat on over his nightshirt. "I am coming with you."

"You are eighty years old."

"I am eighty years old and I am the only person in this village who knew your grandmother and I am not going to sit in this chair while you go into that burned shed alone." He picked up the candle. "And there is another reason. If that flagstone has a thing under it, and that thing is what I think it is, then you will need a witness who has been the healer of this pack for fifty years and whose word the co-op will take over the word of a woman from Dublin."

We went out into the dark. The lane was black and the shore road was black and the sea was a sound on our left and nothing else. We came down to the burned shell of the boathouse and Ronan held the candle while I went in through the gap in the seaward wall, and the ash was soft under my boots and the smell of it was still there under the rain.

I counted the flagstones from the slip. One, two, three. The third was cracked across the middle and the ash had got into the crack and the rain had made it a paste. I got my fingers into the crack and lifted and the stone came up and Ronan brought the candle down and we both looked into the hollow underneath.

There was an oilskin pouch there, small and flat and tied at the neck with a length of tarred twine. I took it out and opened it. Inside there was a single sheet of paper, folded small, and on it there was a list in my sister's hand. Names and dates and the words paid and council and a sum of money beside each one, and at the top of the page, in ink that had been written over twice, the name of the man in the town coat and the name of the boat he had come in on.

At the bottom of the page there was a line in a different hand, thin and elegant and sloping to the right. It said: "Received for the Council, Korkut. Second instalment. The debt is not yet cleared."

Ronan sat down on the stones and put his face in his hands. I stood in the burned boathouse with the candle guttering and the paper in my hand and the sea coming in over the slip, and I looked at the sloping hand and I thought about the man with the face of a retired schoolmaster who had sat me down at a long table with a plate of biscuits and said, take your time.

And then, out on the shore road, a light came on. It was a torch, and it was coming down toward the boathouse at a walk, and behind it there was another light, and another, and the sound of several people on wet gravel.