All Chapters of Bound to a Dying Man: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

The Council came to the Blackthorn house four days later, two days before the reading, and they came in three cars with an escort of twelve and a clerk in each car with a box of papers.Ilsa came in the first car.She came up the path with her white hair pinned up and her shawl round her shoulders and she looked at the house and the yard and the flag on the wall and she said, "It is smaller than I expected.""It is a pack house," I said. "Not a Council seat.""It will do." She went up the steps. "Where is the Alpha?""In the kitchen. He has been up since dawn reading the archive.""He should be in bed.""He should. He will not." I opened the door. "Elder. Before you go in, there is a thing you should know.""Which is?""There are nine wolves in this pack who signed a paper against me and walked out of this hall when I was named Luna. They are still in the house and they are still in the pack and they will be in that kitchen when you go into it."Ilsa looked at me."Then I will meet th

I did not sleep that night.I sat up in the sickroom with my mother's notebook open on the table and a lamp beside it and the stone in my pocket warm against my leg. The fire had burned down to a red glow and the window was black and the sea was going on below the house the way it always did, and I could hear the timbers of the pack house creaking in the wind.It was the notebook Oisin had brought me from the north coast. I had read the letter and I had read the page about the cave and the marks, and I had not read the rest of it because there had been a Council trial and a broken bond and a house to take back.I read the rest of it that night.Most of it was what a healer's notebook is. Remedies and dosages and the names of wolves she had treated, written in a hand that got quicker as the years went on. There were eleven pages at the front that were not remedies at all.They were drawings.I turned them slowly, one at a time, with the lamp pulled close.There was a wolf standing on a

I read the first line again.It said: If you are reading this, you are my daughter and I am not dead.I sat on the floor of the Dunmore house with the letter in my hands and the fire going and the old man in his chair and I could not read any further."Fiadh," Ronan said. "What is it?""It is from my father." My voice came out strange. "It says he is not dead."The old man in the chair lifted his head."Your father," he said. "That is a name I have not heard in sixty years.""You knew him.""I knew him." The old man put his hands on the arms of the chair. "He came to this house in the winter of the year I turned thirty and he was young and he was frightened and he had a wound in his side that had gone bad. My father took him in and hid him in the loft for a month and my mother sewed up his side and fed him on broth. And when he was well enough to walk he asked my father to keep a letter and my father kept it and I have kept it after him.""What was his name?""His name was Aodh." The

The bell was the harbour bell and it was ringing because a boat had come in."Stay here," I said to Colm. "Do not move and do not open that door until I come back."I went out.The harbour was full of lanterns. There were three boats at the pier and a fourth coming in, and the wolves on the wall had lit the beacons and the whole of the pack was down on the slip.Oisin met me at the bottom of the path."It is the Council's boat," he said. "From the north. It came in under a white flag and there is a wolf on it who says he has come to speak to the Council in session.""Which Council?""The one in this house." Oisin looked at me. "It is a keeper, Fiadh. He says he is a keeper of the northern seat and he has come to claim the debt."I went down to the slip.The wolf who came off the boat was old and he was small and he wore a plain grey coat and he had no guards and no clerk and no paper in his hand."My name is Cael," he said. "I am a keeper of the northern seat.""The keepers," I said.

The hall went up and it did not come down for a long time.I stood on the bottom step of the stairs and let it happen. There is nothing else you can do with a hall full of wolves who have just been told the thing they were standing on might be a lie. You cannot shout them down and you cannot argue with forty voices. You have to let them get to the end of it.Ilsa struck the table four times before the noise died."The hall will be silent," she said, "and the Beta will say what she has come to say in front of the whole of it."Maeve stood in the middle of the floor with her copper curls loose and her coat open."I have not come to make a speech," she said. "I have come to ask a question and the question is this. Six days from now this Council sits in this house and reads out four hundred pages of archive in front of the whole coast. And on the first page of it there is a wolf who says she is the heir of the founder's line because a keeper told her so in the middle of the night." She lo