Chapter 49: The Spark Between Us

Declan was gone two hours. I sat at the kitchen table with the notebook and the weight and the phone and the fire going down and did not sleep, and at six in the morning he came back with his coat wet and his face grey and said, "He knows. I told him all of it. He sat in that chair and he did not say a word for half an hour and then he got up and went out to the boat and he has been sitting on it since."

"Where is he now?"

"On the Cormorant at the end of the pier with his back to the harbor." Declan sat down heavily in the chair. "I told him about the false bond and the margin note and the boy being the proof. And I told him about his mother and the grave on the hill. And he looked at me at the end of it and he said, Da, did you know that the Alpha told me she was my mother before you told me she was not." He put his hands over his eyes. "He is twenty two years old and he has been in the hand of that woman since he was fourteen and he asked me the one question I could not answer. He said, why did you not stop her."

The fire ticked. I got up and poured him tea and put it in his hands.

"He is not asking you a question," I said. "He is asking himself one and he is putting it in your mouth because it is easier than saying it. He is sitting on that boat at six in the morning with a thing in his chest that has no name. He is not going to be all right today and he is not going to be all right tomorrow." I sat down across from him. "He will be all right on Sunday, if we get through Saturday."

Declan looked at the cup in his hands. The mind-link between us was open and I could feel the fear in him, and it was not the fear of the Alpha and it was not the fear of the fight. It was the fear of a man who has one thing in the world and has just watched it walk down the pier and sit on a boat with its back to him.

"He is all I have," Declan said. "There is nothing else. There is no other son and there is no other woman and there is no other thing in this village that I have ever loved the way I love that boy. And if he stands up in front of the co-op on Saturday and says what he heard in the hall, then he is a witness and the Alpha will come at him with everything she has. She will not kill him. She wrote that he is not to be harmed. But she will do the other thing. She will tell the co-op that he is a liar and a rogue and the son of a broken man, and she will make him watch his own father be banished from this territory, and he will be alone in this village with her in the hall for the rest of his life." He looked at me. "And I cannot do that to him. I have been sitting on that boat with him for an hour and I cannot look at him and ask him to do it."

I put my cup down.

"Then I will ask him," I said.

Declan looked up.

"He is not your boy to protect from this," I said. "He is a man of twenty two and he is the witness to a crime and he has been carrying it for a month because you could not look at it. You told me in the harbor office that you stood in a door and let a thing happen because you could not fight the voice. You have been standing in that door for a month. Let the boy walk through it and he will not be alone. You will be on one side of him and I will be on the other and Ronan will be behind him with the notebook and Padraig will be in the hall with the print of her hand." I leaned across the table. "He is not a thing you have to protect from the truth. He is a man who has been told the truth by a woman who is a liar for eight years and he has just been told the truth by his father for the first time in his life. And he is sitting on that boat at six in the morning with his back to the harbor because he does not know which of you to believe."

Declan was quiet for a long time.

"There is a thing I have not told you," he said. "In the harbor office on the first day. When you came in and told me you had counted the boats and none of them had sailed. I said to you that the men take a night off now and then. And you looked at me and you did not believe me and I knew you did not believe me and I did not care." He looked at me. "And then you put your hand on the weight and I put my hand on the weight and the spark came up through my arm and I stood in that office and I could not breathe. And I have been trying to get that moment out of my head since and I have not been able to."

"I remember."

"I did not want it. I was a man with a broken mark and a dead woman on my conscience and a son in the hand of the Alpha and I did not want a woman with gold hair and her sister's eyes coming into my office and pulling the ground out from under me." He put his cup down. "And then you came into the cottage that first night and you stood in the rain with your hand on the flowerpot and you looked at me like a woman who had been told a lie and was deciding whether to bother with the truth. And I stood in that doorway and I thought, this is a woman who is going to take this village apart, and I have to decide whether I am going to stand in her way or stand beside her."

"And which did you decide?"

"I decided on the first night and I have been arguing with myself ever since."

He got up and came round the table and put his hand out and I took it and he pulled me up and put his arms round me and held me against his chest with his chin on the top of my head and the mind-link opened up between us like a door.

The fear came through it first, the fear of losing his son, and under the fear there was the other thing, the thing that had been in the link since it opened and that neither of us had said out loud. It was not a thing he could put into words. It was the smell of rain on hot stone and the sound of a boat knocking against a wall in the dark and the whole of a man who had been alone in a village for twenty years and had stopped believing that a thing like this could happen to him.

"There is a thing I have to say to you and I am going to say it badly," he said into my hair. "If we get through Saturday. If the co-op votes and the Alpha falls and I am still in this territory. I want to stand in that hall with you in front of the whole co-op and I want them to see the mark on my throat and the mark on yours and I want them to know that the bond the Alpha broke in December was a counterfeit and the bond she could not touch is the one that is standing in front of them."

I lifted my head and looked at him.

"That is not saying it badly," I said. "That is the best thing anyone has said to me since I came to this coast."

He kissed me. The fire was going down and the light was coming up grey at the window and the men at the gate were talking to each other on the road. And then the kitchen door opened and Cormac was standing in it with his coat off and his hair wet from the harbor and his face white.

"I went out to the boat," he said. "And there was a thing on the deck. There was a note under the rope and the note was in her hand and it said, the woman in the coastguard cottage is not to see Saturday." He looked at his father. "She knows. She knows we have found out about the cottage and she is going to do a thing to the woman in it before we get there."

Declan was at the door before Cormac had finished.

"Where is the note?"

"On the boat. I left it on the boat."

"Then go and get it and bring it to the church and do not stop for anyone." Declan pulled his coat on. "Niamh. We go now. We go along the shore under the headland and up the north side and we go now, before she gets there."