All Chapters of Bound to a Dying Man: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

The hall did not come down for a long time.I stood in the middle of the floor with my hand still on my chest and the silver showing and the whole of the north roaring, and I watched Maeve's face in the gallery.She had gone white.The herald struck the floor four times and the noise died."The keeper will speak," he said.Cael stood with the paper in his hand."I have been a keeper for seventy years," he said. "I have kept the blood and I have kept the record and I have kept the debt, and I am not going to stand in this chamber and pretend that I did not know what the debt was for. It was for keeping wolves of the founder's line in a place where they could be used." He looked at me. "I did it. I have done it my whole life and I have done it to this wolf's mother and her grandmother before her and I am not going to do it to her."The hall was silent."The record names four generations," Cael said. "The first was taken north in the year of the great sickness. The second was raised in t

The trial was at nine and the great chamber was full by eight.I have never seen anything like it. The gallery went round three sides of the hall and it was packed to the rail, and there were wolves standing in the aisles and wolves on the stairs and wolves in the doorway with the cold coming in behind them. There were Blackthorn wolves in the front row of the gallery, the fourteen of them, and Colm's brother was at the front with his hands on the rail.The eight were on the other side of the gallery with Maeve at the front.The five elders were at the table and the four keepers were beside them and Cael was in the middle of the four.And in the middle of the floor, with the whole of the north watching, there was me.And Ronan."Herald," Ronan said. "Before the trial begins, there is a thing I have to say and I am going to say it in front of this chamber and this Council and the whole of the north."The herald looked at the elders and the elders looked at each other and Ilsa nodded."

We went up to the room at the top of the east stair and Oisin stood by the window with his coat still on and his hands behind his back."Tell me all of it," I said. "From the beginning."Oisin looked out at the square."Your mother came to me in the north when you were six years old," he said. "She had a child on her back and a book under her coat and she had been walking for two days. She told me what she had done and what she had asked Padraig to do and she told me that the Council would be looking for her and that she could not go back to Galway." He turned round. "She asked me to take the purse and to keep an eye on the child and to send word to her twice a year. And I took the purse and I did it.""For twenty two years.""For twenty two years." He came away from the window. "I followed you from Galway to the north and back again. I was in the mining town when you were nineteen and I was in the harbour town when you were twenty one and I was in the rented room when your mother die

We did not ride north that night.We went back into the room of the north and we took everything.Tomas held the door and Ronan and I went through the boxes on the left-hand shelf while Padraig and Oisin went through the ones on the right, and we did not stop until the sky outside the high window went grey.There was more in that room than letters about children.There was a ledger. It was old and it was bound in red and it was on the bottom shelf behind a box of binding records, and when I opened it the first page had a name at the top of it.Soren."Ronan," I said. "Look at this."He came and knelt down beside me.The ledger was a record of payments. It went back two hundred years and it had four columns. The date, the binder, the wolf who was bound, and the sum paid.And the sum was always paid to the same family."Soren's family," Ronan said."Soren's family." I turned the pages slowly. "Every binding in this book has been paid for by Soren's family. Two hundred years of them. The

The chamber broke.There is no other word for it. Forty wolves in a gallery and a hundred in the aisles and every one of them on their feet at once, and the guards at the doors were shouting and the herald was striking the floor and nobody was listening to anybody.Ilsa stood up on the table."The chamber will be cleared," she shouted. "Every wolf who is not a guard or an elder will go out through the south door and go to their houses and bolt their doors."The chamber did not clear.Ronan took my arm."Fiadh," he said. "The coast.""The coast is four days away.""The coast is four days away by road and two by water and there is a boat on the water with a Ravenscar flag and a boat on the water with Maeve's flag." He was already moving. "Bran has forty wolves on the north road and he has not come to hold a square.""He came to hold a square this morning.""He came to hold a square this morning and then a witness stood up in a chamber and said you murdered your mother and the whole of t