Chapter 5: My Sister's Boots

Declan did not answer me at once. He sat looking at the folded page on the table between us, and the lamp cast his shadow long across the wall, and outside the rain had come on harder and was drumming the window.

"On Saturday night," he said, "the moon will be full, and the pull will come on you for the first time in your life, and your body will try to turn itself inside out. That is what a first shift is. It is not a choice. It is like a fever coming on. If someone who knows what they are doing is with you, it takes an hour and it hurts and then it is done. If nobody is with you, it takes the night, and you can tear yourself apart trying to hold it back."

"And if I am out on the headland, past the border, with the fleet in and the whole village watching?"

"Then you will shift in front of forty people who have been told that you are a danger and a stranger." He said it without softening. "Mairéad has been telling this village for a month that your sister's claim died with her. On Saturday she takes the boat out to prove it. If a wolf who carries your mother's charter number appears on the headland at the same hour, and no one has prepared the ground for it, there is only one reading the co-op can make. That the claim is not dead. That it has come back in you."

"And that would be bad."

"That would be a challenge, Niamh. Declared by your body, in front of the whole co-op, without a word spoken." He looked up at me. "There is no taking a challenge back. The Alpha answers it or she forfeits the seat. She will answer it. And you will be three days old as a wolf and she will have been one for sixty years."

I sat down slowly in the chair across from him. My legs had made the decision again. I was getting tired of my legs deciding things.

"Then I will not be on the headland on Saturday," I said. "I will be in this cottage with the door bolted and the curtains drawn, and I will sit out the fever in private."

"You will not be able to." He said it quietly. "I am sorry. The pull on a first shift is stronger than any door. There is not a wolf in this village who could hold a first shift inside four walls. They run. Every one of them runs."

"Then what do you suggest?"

"I suggest," he said, and stopped, and rubbed his jaw with the flat of his hand, "that you spend the next three days learning what you are, so that on Saturday night you can run with the pack instead of against it, and shift where you are meant to shift, and come back into this village on two legs with the whole co-op having seen you do it properly. That is how it is done here. That is how it has always been done. A first shift is a public thing. It is the village's way of welcoming a new wolf."

"You are asking me to join them."

"I am asking you to survive Saturday." He stood up and took his jacket off the chair. "And I am asking you to let me help you, because I am the only wolf in this village who has told you the truth and I am running out of ways to prove it."

I looked at him standing there with his jacket over his arm and his auburn hair drying in the warmth of the kitchen, and I felt the pull again, the one that had come when our hands met over the weight, a tug behind the ribs that had nothing to do with my reason. It was a physical thing. It was like being homesick for a place I had never been.

"Go home, Declan," I said. "I need to think, and I cannot think with you in the room."

He nodded once, and went to the door, and then he stopped with his hand on the frame. "The boots," he said.

"What boots?"

"Your sister's boots. The ones by the door. There are two pairs." He did not turn around. "Siobhan had one pair of boots. She wore them until the soles went. I have known her fifteen years and I never once saw her in a second pair. If there are two pairs by that door, then someone else was living in this cottage with her." He opened the door and the rain came in and he stepped out into it. "I will be at the harbor office at six in the morning. If you want to learn what you are, be there."

The door closed. I sat at the table and listened to his footsteps go down the path and out the gate, and then I got up and went to the back door and looked at the boots.

Two pairs. One was Siobhan's, the brown leather work boots she had worn for as long as I could remember, cracked across the toe and mended with a strip of bicycle tyre. The other pair was smaller and newer, black, laced tight, with a heel worn down on the outside in a way that told me the wearer walked with a slight roll to the right foot. I had noticed them on the first night and my mind had slid past them, because grief is a kind of tunnel and it narrows everything to the coffin at the end.

I picked up the black boots and turned them over. There was mud in the treads, red mud, the kind you get up on the high ground where the peat is cut, not the grey sand of the shore. I put them down and I went through the cottage.

I did it properly this time. I did it the way I used to do a flat after a burglary, room by room, drawer by drawer, with a notebook and a pen and a reason for everything I touched. It took me three hours.

I found four things that mattered.

The first was a chart of the co-op's moorings, pinned inside the airing cupboard where no one would look, with the Mary Rose's berth circled in pencil and a note in my sister's handwriting that said, "Ask D about the second key."

The second was a bank book from a branch in Galway, in Siobhan's name, with a balance of four thousand and a withdrawal on the twelfth of March for the whole amount, which was two days after the co-op meeting at which Declan said she had made her claim.

The third was the charter.

It was in the bottom of the linen chest, under the winter blankets, wrapped in oilcloth. It was not the charter the co-op kept in the hall, the one in the frame with the names of the chairmen going back a hundred years. This one was older. The paper was thick and yellow and the writing was a cramped legal hand with flourishes at the top of every letter, and the first page said, in a language I did not know, a line that ended with the words I could read: "Dún Aonghasa, in the county of Galway, and its waters, and its shore, and all that runs upon the land."

I turned the pages. There were rules in it. Rules about the boats and the catch and the moorings, and then rules about other things entirely, about the choosing of the leader and the answering of a challenge and what happened to a wolf who broke the charter. I read three pages and my hands were cold and I had to put the book down twice and walk around the kitchen before I could pick it up again.

The fourth thing was the loose page at the back. It was folded small and pressed into the crease where the binding had come away, and it was in my sister's handwriting, and it was shaky, the letters pressing hard and running together at the ends, the way a hand writes when it is cold or frightened or both.

It said: "N, if you find this then I have lost and the boat has gone to her. Do not trust the weight. Do not trust the healer's kindness. Trust the Beta, but only as far as the boy, because the boy is the only thing in this village that man has never lied about. And if you are reading this, then you are what I was, and you have three nights before the moon takes you. Go to the high ground above the peat cuts on the first night and let it come. Do not let it come in the village. If she finds out what you are before you have shifted, she will not wait for Saturday. She will answer the claim in the dark, and you will not see it coming. I am sorry I never told you. I thought I could keep you out of it, and I was wrong, and I have paid for that. S."

I read it four times. Then I folded it and put it in my pocket with the weight and the page of names, and I sat on the floor of my sister's kitchen with my back against the dresser and the rain on the roof and my sister's voice in my head saying the words she had never said to my face.

Someone else had been living in this cottage. Someone with black boots and a roll to her right foot, who had gone up to the peat cuts. And Siobhan had known about the moon and about the weight and about the boy, and she had written me a letter she had not dared to send.

I got up. I put the charter back in the linen chest, because a woman who has just found a secret book does not leave it on the table. I put the bank book in my coat. I looked at the chart in the airing cupboard for a long moment, and then I left it where it was and went to bed.

I did not sleep. At half four the sky was still dark and I got up and dressed and put my sister's boots on my own feet and laced them tight. The brown ones. The work boots with the tyre mended toe. They fit me. She had bigger feet than me, and I had always teased her about it, and now I stood in her kitchen in her boots and the rain had stopped and there was a light on in the harbor office across the water.

Then I saw the figure on the shore road.

She was coming up from the boathouse, walking slowly, wrapped in a grey shawl with her head down. I knew the walk before I knew the face. It was the tall woman with the grey plaited hair, the one from the wake who had told me to come to her and not to the hall. She stopped at the gate of the cottage and looked up at the window, and I stepped out onto the step so she would see me.

"Mrs O'Rourke," I said. I did not know if that was her name but I knew the shawl and the face and the warning and it was worth a guess.

She did not correct me. She stood at the gate in the grey light and her face was working like a woman who has been arguing with herself for hours and has lost.

"You are up early," she said.

"I am up late. It depends on how you look at it." I came down the path. "You told me at the wake to come to you and not to the hall. I am coming to you now."

Her mouth went tight. She looked past me at the cottage, at the dark window, and then she looked back at me and said, very quietly, "Not here. Not on the road. Walk with me down to the shore where no one can see us from the hall."

I walked with her. The tide was out and the sand was wet and shining and the gulls were already up, and she stopped at the water's edge and looked out at the sea for a long moment before she spoke.

"Your sister came to me in February," she said. "She was frightened. She had been frightened for a while, but in February she came to my door at night and she stood in my kitchen and she told me she had made a mistake, and that she had started something she could not stop, and that she was going to try to put it right before the spring meeting." The woman's hands were gripping the shawl. "Two days later the Alpha came to my house and asked me if I had seen her, and I said no. I lied to the Alpha. I have lived in this village sixty years and I have never lied to the Alpha before."

"What was she going to put right?"

"I do not know. She would not say. She said it was about the charter, and that a thing had been done in her name that she would not stand over." The woman turned and looked at me and her eyes were bright with something that was not quite tears. "You are asking questions about the full moon, and about the boats, and about your sister, and the whole village is talking about it, and the Alpha has ears in every kitchen in this town. So I am going to say the one thing I came here to say and then I am going to go home and you are going to forget we spoke."

"Say it."

"Your sister did not fear the water. She was a fisherman's daughter, she swam before she could walk. She was frightened of the woman with the silver hair, and she was frightened of the thing that woman was going to do on the full moon, and whatever it was, she died a week before it happened." The woman let go of her shawl and took my hand and her grip was very cold and very strong. "I am telling you this because you have your mother's number and you are the only one left who can stand in the way of it, and because if you go up to the high ground above the peat cuts on the wrong night, the Alpha will know before the moon is over your head. Do you hear me? The Alpha always knows."

I held her hand a moment. "How does the Alpha always know?"

The woman looked at me, and then she looked at the sea, and the wind took a strand of her grey plait loose and laid it across her cheek. "Because she can hear what the village hears," she said. "And on the night of the moon, the village is not alone in its own head."

She let go of my hand and walked away up the sand without looking back, and I stood at the water's edge in my sister's boots and felt the cold come through the leather and thought about a woman with silver hair who knew things before they were told, and a page of names with a date beside mine, and a second pair of boots in a dead woman's cottage, and a brother who was the only thing in this village Declan had never lied about.

I turned and looked up at the high ground above the peat cuts. The sky was going grey and gold behind it and there was something moving up there on the ridge, a shape that was too big for a sheep and too quiet for a man.

It was watching me the way the wolf on the headland had watched me. And this time I did not have to wonder who it was, because I could smell the pine and the wet wool on the wind, and I knew the shape of those shoulders.

Cormac was up on the high ground, and he had been up there all night, and he had seen the woman with the grey plait come down to the shore to talk to me.