The fire had burned down to a grey crust, and the room smelled of salt and wet wool and him. I lay still on the narrow cot in the cliff hut, one arm numb under my ribs, Cillian's hand heavy at my hip. His silver-grey hair had come loose from its tie, and a strand of it lay across my collarbone, moving with my breath. Outside, the storm still worked the sea, though the worst had blown west toward the Aran Islands. I should have pushed him off the cot the moment the wind dropped. I had spent twenty years not touching this man, and now I had touched him until my legs gave out and my wolf had howled herself hoarse in the dark. The old mark on my shoulder sat under his thumb, and his thumb was moving in his sleep. He was not asleep. His breathing was too steady, the way a man breathes when he is counting something. "You are awake," I said. "So are you." His voice had gone rough with the night. He did not open his eyes. "The tide turns in an hour. Two hours and the path down to the harbor floods." "You know the tide times." "I know everything about your pack. The Council pays for the information." He said it as a fact, no bite in it, which was worse than a bite. I sat up, the blanket falling to my waist. Cold came off the stone walls. My hair had come out of its bun at some point, and I gathered the golden length and twisted it back with my fingers, because I needed my hands doing something besides reaching for him. He watched me do it. His eyes were the color of a storm off the cliffs, that grey that can turn black by afternoon, and they followed my hands and then my face and then my hands again. I did not look at his chest. I am not a saint, but I did not look. "You should go before the pack wakes," I said. "Rónán will have a story ready if he finds us like this, and it will not be a story that keeps my people calm." "Rónán has stories ready no matter what we do." He sat up too, and the blanket fell away from him, and I looked at the wall. "Where is my coat?" "On the chair. You threw it over the lantern." He got up. There is no dignity to be had in a hut with a low roof and a man of his height. He ducked, found the chair, and shook out his coat, and a piece of paper slipped from the inner pocket and slid across the floorboards. I saw the seal first. The wax was the deep red the Council uses, stamped with the ring of Alphas, the ring that means a matter of law and not a matter of courtesy. Then I saw the word at the top, in that clerk's hand the court uses, all straight lines and no mercy. DISSOLUTION. My mouth went dry. Cillian had not seen it fall. He was shaking grit from his sleeve, his back to me. I could have put my bare foot on it and pushed it under the cot and said nothing. It would have bought me a week, maybe. But my wolf was awake now, sitting up in the back of my skull, and she was not interested in small things. She wanted to know what this man had carried against us up the cliff path in the dark. "Cillian." He turned. He saw my face. Then he saw the floor, and he went very still, and the stillness of that man is like the sea going flat before a wave hits the rocks. He picked it up. He did not try to hide it. He smoothed it against his thigh with one hand, the way a man does to a paper he has folded and unfolded a hundred times. "You dropped this," I said. "I see that." "So it is true. The Council sent you here to end us." "I did not come here to hide what I carry." He looked at the paper, then at me. "I came to do the work and go home." "Home," I said. "Where is that now, Cillian? The court? A room with a lock on it and a clerk who brings you your warrants?" His jaw tightened. It is a good jaw. It has always been a good jaw, and I hated knowing that after twenty years. I got up and pulled my sweater over my head, and then the paper was in my hand because he held it out to me. I read it twice. The language was Council language, all neat and bloodless. The Carraig pack, having failed to sustain its viability for a period of three years and more, having produced no viable Luna bond, is hereby dissolved, its territory to be placed under Council custody. Then a date. Then a signature. Then, at the bottom, the part that made my stomach turn over. Executioner: Cillian, appointed by the court. "I wrote none of it," he said. "I only sign my name to the report at the end, after the hearing. The warrant comes from the Council." "You are the one who reads it out to my people." "Yes." "You are the one who takes the Alpha's title from my brother." "If the hearing goes against you, yes." "And you came to my hut. In the storm. You could have knocked on the pack house door like an honest man and handed this to me in front of everyone." He said nothing to that. The silence went on long enough that the fire settled and hissed. He picked up his boots and sat on the chair to pull them on, and I watched his hands and hated how well I remembered his hands. "Shall I tell you why I came to the hut?" he said at last. "I am not sure I want to hear it." "Nor am I sure I want to say it." He laced one boot, then the other, and stood, and this time he was too tall for the roof and had to stoop, and the shape of him against the grey light coming through the shutter was the shape of my entire youth. "The bond was dead. I have lived twenty years with it dead in my chest. I walked up that cliff path to read you the warrant and be gone by noon, and then you opened the door, and my wolf came awake in me like a dog that hears its own name." I did not answer. My wolf was not helping. She was leaning against the inside of me, panting, ridiculous. "It was not supposed to happen," he said. "The Council's file says you broke it clean. That is what my superiors believe, and that is what I believed until last night." "The Council's file," I said, and I heard the cold in my own voice, and I did not care. "The Council's file has been wrong about my family before." He looked at me sharply. Then he did up the last button of his coat and pulled the hood up over that silver hair, and the executioner was back in the room with me, and the man was gone. "We will speak at the pack house," he said. "With your brother present. There is a hearing, and there is a date, and the law says I must give you both." "What date?" He put his hand on the door latch. The wind came in through the gap, bringing rain and the smell of the sea, and under it, faint, the smell of him, which my body had decided in the night was the smell of home. "The autumn equinox," he said. "Six weeks to prove your pack is alive, Bríd, or I sign the report and every wolf on this coast is scattered by winter." He opened the door. The rain hit him. "One more thing," he said, without turning round. "Your harbor ward is thin. I felt it when I came up the path, like a tooth gone hollow. If you have not been tending it, tend it tonight. If you have, then you have a bigger problem than me." He went out into the rain. I stood in the doorway of my own hut and watched the executioner walk down my cliff path in the grey morning, his boots finding the wet stones without looking, and my wolf howled once inside me, long and low and shameless, and every wolf in the pack house a quarter mile off heard her, and now there was no hiding anything at all.

I did not sleep after Cillian left. I sat on the cot with the warrant in my lap until the grey light turned white, then washed my face, tied my hair into its bun, and walked up to the pack house with my boots squelching. The kitchen smelled of porridge and smoked mackerel. Maeve had the stove going, her red hair pinned up with a pencil, and she looked at me once and then again. "Not a word," I said. "I said nothing." "You said it with your face." She put a bowl in front of me. "The whole ridge heard a wolf howling before dawn. Half of them think it was you." I picked up my spoon. "Where is Declan?" "Still in his rooms. He had a bad night." She said it too quickly and turned back to the stove. The door opened and let the cold in. Cillian came through it with his coat on his arm, his silver-grey hair tied back, freshly shaved. The room went quiet. Padraig put down his pipe, and the two warriors at the far table stopped chewing. "Good morning," Cillian said to the room. "Where does the Luna take her breakfast?" "At this table," I said, "like everyone else." He sat down across from me and arranged his coat on the back of his chair with a care that suggested he had all the time in the world. Rónán came in last, dark hair wet from the rain, and when he saw Cillian he stopped in the doorway and something crossed his face before he smiled. He has a good smile. It is the kind that gets a man elected to things. "Executioner," he said. "You did not take the guest room. We looked for you." "I slept elsewhere." "So I see." Rónán's pale eyes went to me and then away, and he took the seat on Cillian's other side. "Let us hear the terms, then, before the fish come in." Cillian set down his spoon and put the warrant on the table between us, red seal up. "I will read it in full at the gathering tonight," he said. "Your Alpha will hear it with the rest of you. But you should know now what the law requires of me, so that no one can say I tricked them." "Say it, then," Padraig said from the corner. Cillian turned the paper round. "The Council of Alphas has reviewed the Carraig records for three years. Your wards have failed at the harbor and the north ridge. Your healing has slowed, and your healer will tell you so herself. Your Luna bond was broken twenty years ago and never restored." Maeve's spoon clinked against the pot and stopped. "You have six weeks," Cillian said. "On the autumn equinox the court convenes at the old stone circle above the harbor, and I present my report. If you prove the pack viable, the dissolution is void. If you cannot, the pack is dissolved, the territory passes to Council custody, and your wolves are granted passage to any pack that will take them." He paused. "Most will not take you. You know that." "So we are to be scattered," Rónán said. "A scattering with a signature at the end." "That is what the law is. I did not write it." "You signed it, though." Rónán leaned back. "You have signed a great many. Six packs in four years, I hear." "Seven," Cillian said. "You left out the one in Donegal." The warriors shifted. Padraig knocked his pipe out against the ash pan, slowly, and I could feel the pack looking at me the way a wolf looks when it is deciding whether the Alpha's sister is still worth following. I put my hands in my lap under the table because they had started to shake, and I held them still, finger by finger. "What proof will satisfy the court?" I asked. Cillian looked at me properly for the first time since he walked in. "A viable Luna bond. The bond is the root of the pack's magic, and a pack whose root is dead is not a pack. It is a collection of wolves living on borrowed land." "Or?" "Or a majority vote of the Alphas present. That has happened twice in my time. It is not common." "And if we prove the bond is not dead?" He did not answer at once. He looked at his hands, and his mouth went flat. "Then I have a problem," he said. "Because I am the one who reported it dead, and the court will want to know why I got that wrong." Maeve turned round from the stove. "What happens to an executioner who files a false report?" Cillian met her eyes. "It is not a false report that worries them. It is a compromised one. An executioner bonded to the pack he is sent to judge is no longer impartial. The court will remove me, and they will remove me by whatever means they choose." Nobody said anything. The fire popped. My wolf went very quiet in my skull, the way a dog goes quiet when it sees the gate open. "Well," Rónán said cheerfully. "Then our best hope is to prove the bond alive and ruin the executioner's career. I like this plan. What do you think, Bríd?" "I think you should eat your porridge. It is getting cold." He laughed, and two of the warriors smiled, and I felt the room turn a little further from me. Then the back door opened and everyone stood, because Declan was in the doorway. He should not have been out of bed. His face had gone the color of old paper, his fair hair stuck to his forehead, and he held the door frame as though it were the only thing holding him up. But he wore the Alpha's ring and a proper shirt, and he came to the table on his own feet and sat at the head of it. "Cillian," he said. "You have grown grey." "So have you, Alpha." "Not the same kind of grey." Declan reached for the bread, and his hand shook, and he put the hand down flat on the table instead. "I will hear the terms tonight. But before that, one thing, in this kitchen, in front of my wolves." He turned his head toward me, and his amber eyes were bright and tired and steady. "My sister is the Luna of this pack. She has been since she was seventeen, and no Council paper says otherwise. Anyone who thinks they can win this place by going round her will find me still alive." Rónán's smile did not move. "Nobody said otherwise, Alpha." "Good." Declan picked up the bread, bit into it, chewed, and then said to me, quietly, "The equinox. Six weeks. That is not long." "No," I said. "It is not." He nodded, then turned to Cillian with the voice he uses when he has decided something. "You will stay in the pack house until the equinox. Not the guest room. The room by the old stairs, with a lock on the inside and a lock on the outside, and a wolf of mine at the door every night. If you are to judge us, you will do it from among us." Cillian's grey eyes went to me for a second, then back. "That is not the usual arrangement." "No," Declan said. "It is not." Cillian inclined his head. "Then I accept the room." "Good. You will eat with us and train with us, and when the fish come in you will help carry them, because nobody in this house eats who does not work." Declan put down the bread. "And you will not touch my sister again until the court has ruled. Not once. Do I make myself clear?" The kitchen was so quiet I could hear the rain on the window. Cillian looked at Declan for a long moment. Then he said, "You do." "Bríd," Declan said, without turning his head. "Have you anything to say?" I wanted to say a great many things. I said, "The tide tables are in the boathouse, the ward stones need a second pair of hands tonight, and if the executioner is helping with the fish I want him on the north boat, because the south crew will throw him overboard." Declan almost smiled. Then he coughed, turned his head away into his napkin, and when he turned back he folded the napkin quickly and set it under his plate. But I had seen it before he hid it, and so had Maeve, and so, I think, had Cillian. "You heard her," Declan said, and pushed back his chair. "North boat for the executioner." The kitchen broke up. People got their coats. I stayed until the room was nearly empty, then reached under my brother's plate and took the napkin out, and it was not only blood in it. It was blood and something else that had stained the linen a yellow-brown, like the tea stains at the bottom of a cup. I turned it over in my hands. Across the table, Cillian had not left. He stood with his coat on his arm, looking at the napkin in my fingers, and his face had gone cold and careful. "Show me that," he said.

The gathering was held in the long hall of the pack house, where the beams are black with two hundred years of smoke and the tables are pushed to the walls on nights like this. Every wolf on the ridge came. The fishing crews were there with salt still in their hair, and the older women from the village, and the young ones who had never seen a Council executioner in their lives and stared at Cillian as though he were an animal in a cage. Cillian stood at the head of the hall beside my brother's chair, his coat off and his hands folded in front of him, and he had the look of a man who has done this before in other halls with other wolves watching him. Declan sat in the Alpha's chair with the ring on his hand. He had a blanket over his knees that he did not want anyone to notice, and a mug of tea at his elbow that he did not drink. I stood on his other side, and when the room had gone quiet, I held out my hand to Cillian. "The warrant," I said. "I will read it. It is my pack, and it will be my voice that tells them." He hesitated. It was a small hesitation, but the front row saw it, and I heard someone whisper behind a hand. Then he gave me the paper, and his fingers brushed mine, and the bond moved between us like a hand through water. I have not felt anything like it since I was seventeen years old. My wolf came up in my chest, sudden and warm, and she wanted to press herself against him and stay there. I stepped back. I put the warrant on the table and smoothed it flat with both palms, and I took a breath, and I read. "The Council of Alphas, having reviewed the record of the Carraig pack, finds as follows." My voice carried to the beams. "The pack's harbor ward has failed twice in three years. Its healing has slowed beyond the standard of a viable pack. Its Luna bond, the bond on which the pack's magic rests, was broken by the Luna's own choice and has not been restored." The room did not move. Someone near the door let out a long breath. "Therefore the Council declares the Carraig pack non viable, and its territory is placed under Council custody from the date of the hearing, to be held at the old stone circle on the autumn equinox." I turned the paper over. "The hearing will be conducted by the appointed executioner, who shall present the evidence and sign the final report." I stopped. The next line was the one I did not want to read, and I read it anyway, because they had a right to hear it from me. "The executioner appointed to this matter is Cillian, of the court of Alphas." The hall broke. It did not break loudly. It broke the way a net breaks, thread by thread, with voices rising here and there and a chair scraping back and a woman near the fire saying, "He is standing in this house. He is standing in this house right now." Padraig stood up from his seat by the hearth. "Quiet," he said, and his voice is old but it still carries. "The Luna is reading. Let her finish." "She has finished," Rónán said from the side of the room, and he was smiling, that easy smile. "The executioner is appointed, the date is set, and the whole coast knows it by now. What I want to hear is what the Luna is going to do about it." Every face turned to me. I felt my hands begin to shake again, so I put them flat on the table where the whole hall could see them, and I kept them there. "I am going to prove the pack viable," I said. "I am going to prove the bond is alive, and I am going to do it before the equinox, and the executioner will present the truth of it to the court." "Will he?" Rónán said. "He is the one who reported it dead." "I will present whatever the evidence shows," Cillian said. His voice was flat. "I have no interest in a false report. If the bond is alive, the court will hear it from me." "Spoken like a man who has signed six dissolutions and slept well after each one." "Seven," Cillian said. "And I have not slept well after any of them." That stopped Rónán for a moment. He recovered, because he always does. "Then you will not mind if we ask you plainly, in front of the pack. Did you come here to judge us, or did you come here to end us?" Cillian looked at him. "I came here to do my work. If the work is honest, the pack survives. If it is not, the pack is dissolved and the wolves go elsewhere. I did not choose your politics. I was sent." "And yet you are standing at our Alpha's right hand, in our hall, with your fingers touching our Luna's a minute ago." Cillian's jaw tightened. "Careful." "Why?" Rónán spread his hands. "I am asking what the whole room is thinking. The executioner knows the Luna. He knew her twenty years ago. Everyone in this hall knows the story of the broken bond, even if nobody says it out loud. If there is any chance the bond is still alive, then the executioner is not an impartial judge of this pack, is he? He is the other half of the broken thing." The hall went still again. I could feel the wolves on either side of me deciding things, and I could feel the ones near the back deciding differently. Declan put down his mug. "Rónán," he said, and his voice was quiet. "You are a clever man, and clever men forget that a hall full of wolves can smell fear as well as loyalty. Sit down." Rónán sat down, still smiling, and I knew that he had got what he wanted. He had put the idea in the room, and the idea would not go away now. The executioner and the Luna. The broken bond and the man sent to finish the breaking. I rolled the warrant and held it. "You have heard the law," I said. "You will hear the rest from me in the morning, and I will answer every question you have, one wolf at a time if I must. Tonight, go home and eat and sleep, and do not give the Council the satisfaction of seeing this pack fall apart before they even sit down at their circle." They went. It took a while, and some of them did not look at me as they passed, and some of them looked too long. Padraig touched my elbow as he went by and said nothing. Maeve was last, and she stopped in the doorway and turned back, and her green eyes were wet. "I am sorry," she said. "For what?" She opened her mouth. Then she closed it, and shook her head, and went out. I stood in the empty hall with the warrant in my hand and the fire dying behind me, and then I heard it. A dry cough, short and hard, from the chair at the head of the hall. Declan had turned away with his napkin at his mouth, and his shoulders were shaking, and when he straightened, the napkin was crumpled in his fist and there was blood on the corner of it, and under the blood a yellow-brown stain that had not been there at breakfast. Cillian was already moving. He crossed the hall in four strides and crouched by my brother's chair, and he took the napkin out of Declan's hand without asking, and held it up to the firelight, and sniffed it, once, closely, the way a wolf does when it has caught a smell it does not like. He went very still. "What is it?" I said. "Cillian, what is it?" He looked up at me, and his grey eyes were hard and cold, and his voice was lower than I had ever heard it. "This is not a wasting sickness," he said. "This is wolfsbane."