All Chapters of Bound to a Dying Man: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Lorcan came at nine the next morning, and he came alone, which was worse than the car and the physician and the writ.I was in the front room with the window open because the house smelled of wet wool and smoke, and I saw him walk up the path with his coat over his arm and his notebook in his hand, and I had about ten seconds to decide what my face was going to do."Fiadh," he said from the door. "Good morning. I hope I am not too early.""You are always too early.""I have been told it is one of my failings." He came in and set his coat on the arm of the chair and sat down without being asked. "I will not keep you long. I have three questions and then I will leave you to your herbs.""Ask."He opened his notebook. The pages were covered in his small neat hand, and there were more of them than there had been on the first visit."On Thursday night," he said, "a wolf on the north ridge was heard to howl, and it was answered from the pines by the harbour road. That is not a rogue. That i

The pack meeting was on Sunday at noon, in the long room with the tables pushed back against the walls and the benches in two rows facing the head of the room where the Alpha's chair stood on a low platform of worn boards.I had never seen the whole pack in one room. Twenty two wolves, and the ones who had been out on the boats and the north border had come in for it, and the room was hot and loud and smelled of wet wool and salt and twenty two different people's dinners. Nessa had saved me a place at the end of the second row. Padraig was on the first row by the wall with his stick across his knees. Maeve stood at the front with her hands folded, not sitting, and the wolves came in and looked at her and then at the empty chair.Ronan came in last. He walked the length of the room with his shoulders back and his head up, and every wolf in there watched him do it, and I saw them see what I saw. The grey in his face. The way his left hand stayed close to his side. The bandage showing at

Padraig's cottage stood at the end of a track that ran north from the harbour and stopped at the heather. It was low and white and old, with a slate roof and a chimney that had not been swept in years, and when we got to the door there was a lamp burning inside and no answer to our knocking.Ronan put his shoulder to the door and it gave on the second try.The cottage was one room and a scullery. A fire was burning low in the grate. There was a chair pulled up to the fire and a cup on the arm of it with the tea gone cold, and Padraig's stick was leaning against the wall by the door, and Padraig was not there."His coat is gone," Ronan said from the scullery. "His boots are gone. He has taken the lantern.""Then he went out on his own feet." I stood in the middle of the room and turned round slowly. "He went out and he left the fire burning and the door unbolted. A man who means to be gone for a while bolts his door on this coast."Ronan came back into the room. He looked at the fire a

We got out through the scullery with the page folded in my coat and the ledger under my arm and Padraig between us, and we went north along the heather in the dark with the rain in our faces and the shots going over our heads into the night.Nobody followed us. That was the strange thing. The rifle went quiet after the third shot and there was no torch in the heather behind us and no sound of boots on the track, and when we stopped at the top of a rise and looked back the cottage was a black shape with no lamp in it at all."He has gone," Padraig said. "He got what he came for.""What did he come for?""The book. He came for the book. He did not know I had already torn the page out of it." The old man wiped the rain off his face. "That is the second time this week someone has come looking for a book in my house."We came down into the harbour at midnight with the rain easing off and the lights of the pack house yellow in the dark. Ronan had said nothing for the last mile. He walked wi

Oisin sat in the kitchen for an hour and told me about my mother.He had known her before I was born, he said, when she was a young healer working the northern coast and he was a young smuggler running tobacco and letters between the islands. She had patched him up twice and saved his hand once, and when she left the north she had given him an address in Galway and told him that if she ever stopped writing he was to go and find her daughter."She stopped writing in the spring," he said. "Five years ago. I looked for you then and I could not find you. You were not on any roll and you were not in any pack and nobody had heard of you." He turned his cup round on the table. "Then a woman I know at the end of the pier sent word that a healer with golden hair had come to the Blackthorn house, and I came south on the morning tide.""You came because my mother asked you to.""I came because I owe her." He looked at me. "And because she told me, the last time I saw her, that if the Council eve