The rain had been falling since Galway, and by the time the bus left me at the top of the harbour road it had settled into the kind of grey, patient drizzle that soaks through wool and makes every stone in Donegal look like it has been weeping for a century. I stood with my case at my feet and counted the fishing boats in the harbour. Nine. Then I counted the lights in the windows of the big house on the hill. Four. Then I picked up the case and started walking, because a healer with a debt contract does not get to stand in the rain feeling sorry for herself. The pack house smelled of salt and wet dog and something warm underneath it, bread maybe, or the ghost of bread. A woman with short copper curls opened the door before I knocked. She looked me up and down, took in the case and the damp coat, and smiled with her mouth only. "You'll be the healer," she said. "Maeve. Beta. I run this house, so if you need anything, you ask me and not one of the young ones, they'll only tell you wrong." "Fiadh," I said. "Where's the Alpha?" "Out." She stepped back to let me in. "He's always out. You'll find him before he finds you, I'd wager." The hall was long and low, lined with pegs and boots and a smell of wet rope. A fire burned at the far end, and someone had hung seaweed over the beams to dry. I have stayed in worse places. I have stayed in better. I put my case down, and when I turned around a man was standing in the doorway to the kitchen with a towel over one shoulder and his sleeves rolled past his elbows. He was tall, taller than the door frame wanted him to be, with short ginger hair gone dark at the edges from water and pale green eyes that found me and stayed there. His face had dimples even when he was not smiling, which was strange, because he was not smiling. "You're early," he said. "The bus was early." I held out the contract, folded and sealed. "Fiadh. Healer. Three months, starting tonight." He did not take the paper. He looked at my hands instead, then at my face, and I felt my skin go warm under the scrutiny in a way that had nothing to do with the fire. "Ronan," he said. "Alpha of this pack. Nobody told me the Council was sending a woman." "Nobody told me the Alpha was rude." Maeve made a small sound behind me that might have been a laugh, quickly buried. Ronan's mouth twitched. He reached out then and took the contract, and his fingers brushed mine, and the whole room tilted. I do not have a word for it. Warmth came up my arm like water finding a crack in a wall. His eyes widened a fraction, and he pulled his hand back fast, the way you pull back from a stove. The paper dropped between us and neither of us bent for it. "You feel that," I said. It was not a question. "I felt the cold," he said. "You're soaked through. Maeve, find her a room." He was gone before I could say another word, out through the back door into the rain, and I stood there with my heart going like a rabbit's and my hand still tingling. That was the first hour. I should have left then. I have thought about it since, many times. Maeve gave me a room at the end of the corridor, small, with a window that looked down on the beach. She talked while I unpacked, about the seaweed harvest and the boats and the Council and the weather, and I let her talk and made the right noises, and all the while I was thinking about the spark in my hand and the way the Alpha had looked at me, as if I were a door he had not expected to find in his own house. "There's a curfew on the beach after dark," Maeve said at the door. "Rogues have been seen on the north side of the bay. I'd not go wandering if I were you." "I never wander," I said. I wandered. Of course I wandered. I have never once in my life done as I was told. I woke before dawn because the gulls started screaming, and I could not get back to sleep, and the window showed a strip of silver sea that I could not ignore. I put on my coat and went down the back stairs and out onto the sand. The tide was out. The beach at that hour is a wide grey plain of weed and shell and shining wet stone, and the air tasted of iron. I walked north along the waterline, counting the breakers. Eleven. Then twelve. Then a shape at the far end of the strand that was not a rock. I ran. Ronan was on his knees in the shallows with one hand pressed to the sand and the other to his chest. His shirt was open and his skin was grey, grey the way a fish is grey, and there was a mark on his chest above the heart, a dark spiral thing like a burn that had healed badly. He did not look up when I reached him. He was breathing in short pulls, and each breath made a sound I did not like. "Alpha," I said, and knelt in the water beside him. "Ronan. Look at me." His hand came up and caught my wrist. His grip was strong for a dying man. "Go back to the house," he said. His voice came out in pieces. "This is not your trouble." "You hired a healer," I said. "This is exactly my trouble. Let go of my wrist." He let go. I got my arm around him and got him up, which was not easy, because he was heavy and the sand was soft and the sea kept pulling at my boots. He leaned on me and I felt the heat of him through the wet cloth, and under the heat something else, something wrong and cold that moved when his chest moved. The mark on his chest caught my eye again. I had seen marks like that once before, in a book my mother had kept wrapped in oilcloth at the bottom of a trunk. "Right then," I said, because my mouth says that when my mind is running. "We're going to walk to the house and you're going to tell me who put that bond on you." Ronan stopped walking. His head came up and his pale green eyes found mine, and there was something in them I had not seen yet, fear, real fear, the kind a wolf does not show to his own pack. "Nobody put anything on me," he said. I looked past him, up the beach to the line of dark pines above the tidemark, and saw a man standing there in a long grey coat with his hands folded in front of him. His hair was black with silver at the temples and he was watching us the way a farmer watches a sick animal in a field. He was too far away to hear, and I knew he was smiling anyway. "Then who's that?" I said. Ronan turned his head, and the fear in his eyes went hard and flat and old. "That," he said, "is Lorcan. And you should be very careful what you say to him, healer, because he writes everything down." The man in the grey coat raised one hand in a greeting that was not a greeting, and the wind came off the water and brought his scent to me across the sand. Clean linen. Paper. And underneath, faint as a stain, the smell of blood that has been spilled on purpose. My wolf, who had not spoken in twenty-eight years, stirred once in the dark of me and went still again.

By the time we reached the pack house, Ronan had stopped leaning on me. He walked the last twenty yards on his own, upright, chin level, and if I had not watched his knees nearly go twice on the sand I would have believed him well. Maeve was in the kitchen with a pot of tea and she took one look at him and set the pot down hard enough to slop it. "What happened?" "Nothing happened," Ronan said. "The healer got lost on the beach." "The healer found you on your knees in the water," I said, "and I would like a towel, and then I would like to know who put a bond mark on the chest of the Alpha of this pack." The kitchen went quiet. Maeve looked at Ronan, and Ronan looked at the window, and a boy by the stove picked up a bucket and left the room in a hurry. "We'll talk after breakfast," Ronan said, and went upstairs. I did not wait for breakfast. I went to my room and opened my case on the bed. The herbs travel in tins, six of them, packed in straw. I laid them out on the quilt and checked each one the way my mother taught me, a pinch rubbed between the fingers, a sniff, a look at the colour in the light. Yarrow, still sharp. Comfrey, the roots dry but sound. Meadowsweet, past its best, I would need to gather more before winter. Wolfsbane, sealed in wax and wrapped twice in cloth, because wolfsbane kills wolves and a healer who keeps it must be careful with her hands and her name. Valerian. Willow bark. Under the tins was the contract. It was one page, thick and yellowish, and the seal at the bottom was the Council's, a wolf's head inside a circle of stars. I had read it so many times on the journey that I knew it by heart. This agreement binds the healer known as Fiadh to the service of the Blackthorn Pack for the term of three months, in settlement of the debt of her mother, Siobhan, deceased. On completion of the term the debt shall stand cleared and the said healer shall be free of all obligation to the Council and to any pack under its law. Should the healer leave before the term is complete, the debt shall be doubled and her name struck from the roll of healers. Doubled. There was no amount written next to the original debt, which was the part that bothered me most. A debt with no number on it can be any size at all. I folded it and sat on the edge of the bed with my hands on my knees. Three months. Ninety days, give or take. I had lived in worse places for longer. There is a trick to leaving. You keep your things packed. You learn the roads out. You never let a pack start thinking of you as theirs. I went to the window. The beach was empty now, the tide coming back in over the place where Ronan had knelt. Up on the ridge where the pines began, a small grey figure was walking slowly east. Lorcan. He stopped once and looked down at the house, and I stepped back from the glass before I had decided to do it. Then I went downstairs and started earning my keep. The pack house has a sickroom off the kitchen, a narrow room with a cot and a cupboard and a window too high to see out of. I swept it, aired it, laid my tins out on the shelf in the order I like them. Nessa found me there around noon. She had freckles and hazel eyes and a way of standing in the doorway as if she had been sent and was not sure she wanted to arrive. "You're the healer," she said. "I am." "Padraig won't like that. He's the old healer. He went to the islands. But he'll come back and he won't like you." "Then he can tell me himself. What's your name?" "Nessa. I'm Omega. Well, I'm not really Omega, I just help in the kitchen and Maeve says I talk too much, so I suppose that makes me Omega." I liked her immediately, which is always a warning sign. She stayed while I ground willow bark and asked questions about every tin, and I answered about half of them. In exchange she told me the Alpha had been ill since the spring, that the Council had sent Lorcan to look into it, and that nobody liked Lorcan, not even the wolves who agreed with him. "And there was a woman," she said. "She came in a car with him, back at the start. I only saw her from the kitchen window. Green scarf. She didn't stay long." A woman in a green scarf who came and went and left a mark behind her. I filed that away in the place where I keep the things I do not yet understand. Ronan came down in the afternoon, washed and shaved and wearing a clean shirt, and if he was still grey around the mouth he had decided not to show it. He found me in the sickroom and stood in the door with his arms folded. "I owe you an explanation," he said. "You do." "You won't get one." "Then why are you here?" He came in and sat on the cot and looked at my tins on the shelf for a while. "I want to know what you saw on the beach. The mark. What did it look like to you?" I told him the truth, because a healer who lies about what she sees is no use to anyone. I told him it was a bond mark and it was not a true one, that true mate marks sit flat and warm and this one sat like a stone set in a ring, and that whatever was underneath it was eating him from the inside. I told him I had seen a mark like it once in a book, and that I would need to look at the book again before I said more. He did not say anything for a long time. The light through the high window moved across the floor. "Can you fix it?" he said. "I don't know yet." "That's not an answer I can use." "It's the only one I have." I sat down on the stool opposite him. "Alpha. I came here to work out my three months and go. I don't want your secrets and I don't want your pack. But if you want me to cure you, you have to let me look at the whole of it, and you have to tell me who put that mark on you and why. Otherwise I'm just a woman with herbs and a contract, and we'll both be wasting our time." Ronan looked at me then, and the pale green of his eyes went a shade darker, and the space between us got smaller though neither of us moved. "You'll want to leave before the three months are up," he said. "Everyone does. The coast does that to people. It gets into them and then they run, or they stay and get bitter." He stood. "I'll tell you what I can, healer. Not tonight. But soon." He was at the door when Nessa came running down the corridor, out of breath and white in the face. "There's a car," she said. "A grey car with a Council flag on it. It's Lorcan, and he's brought a man with him, and Maeve says you're to put on your coat and come to the front room and not say a word unless you're asked." Ronan's jaw tightened. He looked at me, and there was something new in his face, something careful. "He'll ask about your credentials," he said. "Where you trained, who your mother was, how you came by the contract. Answer him plainly and answer him short. And healer. Whatever he offers you, do not take it." The front door opened below us and a voice came up the stairs, pleasant and unhurried, the voice of a man who had never once had to raise it to be heard. "Ronan," it called. "I've brought someone I'd like your healer to meet. She's been waiting a long time for this introduction."

Lorcan was already seated when I came down, which told me something about him. A guest waits to be invited to sit. Lorcan had chosen the chair nearest the fire, the one with the good cushion, and he had his coat folded over the arm of it as if he were doing the room a favour by staying. The coat was grey wool, cut close, and it had not a speck of the coast on it. No salt, no rain, no dog hair. Beside him stood a man I did not know, broad and quiet, with sandy hair and a jaw like a door. "You must be Fiadh," Lorcan said, and rose, and took my hand. His fingers were cool and dry and he held mine a moment longer than politeness asks. "I am Lorcan, envoy of the Council of Alphas. I have been looking after the Blackthorn Pack's interests in this difficult season. This is Eamon, my assistant." "Envoy," I said. "That's a fine word." "It keeps me busy." He smiled. He had grey eyes and black hair silvered at the temples, and the smile was the sort that a man practises in a mirror. "Sit, please. I have a few questions about your credentials. Council procedure, nothing more." Ronan came in behind me and took his place by the mantel with his arms folded. He did not sit. Lorcan noticed, and his smile widened a fraction, and he went on as though the Alpha were a piece of furniture. "Where did you train, Fiadh?" "With my mother. She was a healer before me. Before that, her mother." "Family trade. Charming. And your mother's name?" "Siobhan." "Ah." Lorcan's pen moved on his paper, a small neat stroke. "And she is deceased." "She is." "Five years now, isn't it?" "Six." He wrote that down too. I kept my face still and my hands in my lap and thought about the contract with the blank space where a number should be. "Your mother had dealings with the Council," Lorcan said. "A debt, I believe. Which you have kindly agreed to settle by service. That is a generous arrangement, and unusual. Most children of debtors simply vanish." "I'm not most children." "So I see." He turned a page. "What do you make of our Alpha's condition?" "Early days," I said. "I'll know more when I've had a week." "Take a guess. Between friends." Eamon shifted his weight by the door. Ronan said nothing, which I understood as permission. "Something is draining him," I said. "His pulse is wrong and his healing is slow and there's a mark on his chest that should not be there. I'll know more when I've had a week." "You already said that." Lorcan's pen stopped. "The mark. Describe it to me." "No." The room changed. Eamon's head came round slowly, the way a big dog's does when it hears a gate. Ronan did not move at all. Lorcan set his pen down and looked at me with his head tilted, and for the first time the pleasantness slipped, just at the edges, like a tablecloth pulled a half inch out of place. "I'm sorry?" "I'm a healer. What I see on a patient's body stays with me and my patient. Council procedure or no Council procedure." I smiled at him. "I'm sure you have your own physicians for that sort of thing." Lorcan picked his pen back up. "Of course. I respect a professional." He wrote something, though I could not see what. "One more question. Have you ever heard the term blood ritual?" Behind me, Ronan's breathing changed. It was a small thing, half a beat, but I heard it. "I've heard the term," I said. "Where?" "In a book. My mother's book. There was a picture of a mark and a page about a rite that ties two wolves together by force. She told me it was old nonsense and I should forget it." I shrugged. "I forgot it." "Did you." Lorcan smiled again, and this time it reached his eyes, and I did not like what was in them. "Your mother was a careful woman, I think. Careful women leave careful daughters. I wonder what else you forgot." He closed his notebook and stood and put on the grey coat with two precise movements, and Eamon opened the door for him. "Alpha," Lorcan said, turning at the threshold. "You look better than you did last week. I am glad the healer is helping. But I would remind you that the Council's patience is not endless, and the summons for your health assessment stands. Six weeks. If you are not fit by then, the Council will have to consider whether the Blackthorn Pack is properly led." He nodded to me. "Fiadh. We shall speak again." The door shut. The car started. Nobody in the room breathed for a good five seconds. "Six weeks," Ronan said, and his voice came out flat. "He gave me six weeks." "You knew about the summons," I said. "I knew." He walked to the window and stood with his back to me. "I did not know he would say it in front of you." "He was testing me. He wanted to see if I'd flinch." I got up and straightened the cushion Lorcan had been sitting on, because it annoyed me to leave it as he had left it. "He knows something about that mark, Alpha. He wrote down every word I said about it and he did not once look surprised." "I know." "Then why is he still walking in and out of your house with a notebook?" Ronan turned round. His face had gone hard in a way I had not seen before, and there was something under the hardness that I could only call fear, though he wore it badly. "Because if I throw him out," he said, "the Council sends a Gamma and twenty wolves to assess the territory, and they find a pack that has not paid its harvest tithe in two years and an Alpha who cannot shift without falling over. And then Lorcan is not the problem any more. He is the man who writes the report." He came away from the window. "I do not need a healer, Fiadh. What I need is a way to be strong again by the end of six weeks. If you cannot give me that, say so now and I will have Maeve put you on the bus to Galway myself." I looked at him. Six weeks. I had three months of contract and a debt with no number on it and a Council envoy who wrote everything down, and the man in front of me was dying and too proud to admit the size of it. "Right then," I said. "Roll up your sleeve. I'm going to take some blood." He stared at me. "Now?" "Now. Before you change your mind and decide you don't need me again." I went to the sickroom and came back with my bowl and my knife, and when I returned Ronan was sitting on the chair by the fire with his sleeve already rolled up, and his pale green eyes followed me all the way across the room. "This will hurt," I said. "It always does." I made the cut small and quick. The blood came slow, slower than it should have, and it was dark, and when I spread it on the glass slide and held it up to the lamplight I saw the whole problem in one drop. Wolves heal fast. Their blood knits and thickens and closes. Ronan's blood was full of tiny black grains, like sand in a river, and the grains were moving against the flow. "What is it?" he said. I set the slide down and wiped my hands, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "It's not an illness, Alpha. There's something in your blood that isn't yours, and it's eating you from the inside. And I have seen those grains once before, in my mother's book, on the page she told me to forget." Ronan's sleeve was still rolled up. On his forearm, faint as a watermark, there was a second spiral mark I had not seen on the beach. "When did that appear?" I asked. He looked down at his own arm as if it belonged to someone else. "This morning," he said. "Before dawn. I woke up and it was there."