Chapter 40: The Mind-Link Opens

It came on at noon.

I was standing in the shop with Padraig and Nora, going through the co-op's list of families and marking the ones who had been at the gate in the garden, when the whole world went quiet and then filled up with a voice that was not mine.

It was not words. It was worse than words. It was the smell of the sea from a boat that was going down and the taste of cold water and a boy's face going under and a grief so old and so deep that it had worn a channel in the man and everything in him ran down that channel. And under the grief there was a name, repeated, the way a man repeats a name in the dark when he cannot sleep. Cormac. Cormac. Cormac.

I put my hand on the counter.

"Niamh," Padraig said. "What is it?"

"Declan." I got my breath back. "The bond has opened. The mind-link. I can hear him and he is not saying anything and he is sitting somewhere in this village and he is going through the worst night of his life over and over again."

Nora put down the list. "He does it every day. He has done it every day for a month. He sits in the harbor office at noon and he goes through the boathouse in his head and he cannot stop." She looked at me. "The whole village knows it. Nobody goes to the harbor office at noon."

I found him in the harbor office with the light off and his back to the door and his hands flat on the desk. He did not turn round when I came in and I did not say anything. I sat down on the edge of the desk beside him and put my hand flat on his back and let the mind-link do what it did.

It went through me like weather. The boathouse and the blanket and the rope and his son's hands and the pack voice going into his chest and pulling the strings and the thing he could not do and the thing he did. And under it all the cold, steady knowledge that he had stood in a door and let a thing happen and that no amount of diving on a safe was going to change it.

"Declan," I said, when it had gone quiet enough for words. "You are not going to do this to yourself on the day before we take her down."

He turned his head. His grey eyes were red.

"I am not doing it to myself," he said. "It happens. It happens every day at noon and every night at three and every time I close my eyes." He put his hand over mine on the desk. "You have the bond now. You are going to have to get used to it. This is what is in me. This is what you have taken on."

"I have taken on worse." I turned my hand over and laced my fingers through his. "And there is a thing you should know. The mind-link goes both ways. If you are going to sit in this office at noon and go through the boathouse, I am going to be in it with you. So either you stop doing it alone, or you let me in and we do it together."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, "There is a thing in the link that I have been hiding from you and I am not going to hide it any more. Sit down. Properly. This will take a while."

I sat. He got up and put the kettle on and stood with his back to me and his hands on the counter.

"It is not only my grief in the link," he said. "It is the boy's. Since December, when the Alpha broke the bond, she has been calling Cormac to the hall and she has been putting things in his head. Not orders. Not the pack voice. Things. She has been telling him that his father is weak and that his father cannot protect him and that the only wolf in this village who can keep him safe is her. And the boy believes it. He has been believing it since he was fourteen." He turned round. "And there is a thing in the link that belongs to my son and that I have been able to feel since last night and that I have not been able to say out loud. There is a memory in him of the night your sister was taken to the boathouse and it is not the memory he told you."

The kettle began to whistle. Declan did not move.

"What is in the memory?" I said.

"He is not in the boathouse. He is in the hall. He is on the floor behind the table with his hands over his ears and his eyes shut and he is listening." Declan came and sat down across from me. "And the thing he is listening to is the Alpha and your sister in the room above him, and your sister is saying, no, and the Alpha is saying, yes, and then there is a sound like a chair going over and then there is nothing. And the boy has been carrying that memory since March and he has not told a living soul and I have only got it out of him since the bond opened and I am not sure he knows that I have it."

I sat in the harbor office with my hands round a cup of tea and the bond wide open in my chest and a cold thing going down my spine.

"The Alpha and my sister were alone in the hall on the Thursday night before the claim," I said. "Before the fight. Before the boathouse. And there was a sound like a chair going over."

"There was."

"Then there is a thing that happened in that hall before my sister ever went up to the headland." I put the cup down. "And Cormac heard it and he did not see it and he has been carrying it for a month. And the Alpha has been carrying it too, and she has been using it to keep him quiet."

Declan nodded slowly. "That is what I have been sitting here with all morning. There is a thing in this village that nobody has looked at, and it is not the safe and it is not the deed. It is the two hours between the hall going quiet and the fight on the headland. Your sister did not walk up to that headland from the hall. She was carried." He looked at me. "And if she was carried, then she did not lose the fight. She was already beaten before it began."

The mind-link went tight and warm between us and the whole of it came together in my head.

"Then the challenge was void from the start," I said. "Not because it was ordered. Because there was no fight. She was beaten in the hall and carried up to the headland and the pack was told it was a challenge, and a challenge that was not a challenge is not an answered claim, and an unanswered claim means the seat was never confirmed."

Declan was looking at me. His grey eyes had gone very still.

"Niamh," he said. "If that is true, then Mairéad has not been the Alpha of this pack since March. She has been a woman sitting in a chair."

"And there is a thing I have to ask you," I said. "And I want a straight answer. When you came to my cottage last night and told me about the broken mark and the rejection and the Alpha arranging it, you told me the whole of it. You told me you did not know why she did it. But there is a thing in the link that belongs to you and not to the boy and not to the boathouse, and it is a thing you have been keeping down deep, and I have been feeling it since the link opened and I have been telling myself it is the grief." I looked at him. "What is it?"

Declan looked at the table. The kettle stopped whistling and the office was very quiet.

"In December," he said, "the night of the rejection. After the hall. Your sister came to the harbor office and she stood where you are sitting and she said, Declan, I am sorry, and I said, why, and she said, because she made me do it and if I did not do it she was going to have you killed and there was nothing I could do. And I said, who made you do it, and she said, the Alpha, and I said, then we go to the co-op, and she said, we cannot, because the Alpha has a thing on me that I cannot fight and it is not a thing I can tell you." He looked up. "And then I said a thing to her that I have not been able to take back. I said, if you will not tell me, then I do not want the bond, and I said it three times in the hall in front of the Alpha and the whole co-op, and the third time it broke, and it was not her who broke it. It was me."