My Brother's Poisoner

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.