All Chapters of Bound to a Dying Man: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

We had an hour of quiet and then the ridge caught fire.I was sitting on the sand with Ronan's head in my lap and my hand on his bare chest where the mark had been, and I had stopped shaking and started to think about what came next, which was nothing, because I could not think of a single thing.Then Elara said, "What is that smell?"We went to the mouth of the cave.The whole north ridge was on fire.It was a long way off and it was coming toward us, and it was not a wildfire because there was no lightning and no wind and the night was still. It was a line of fire going along the top of the ridge from the harbour end, and it was burning the heather as it went."They have set it," Padraig said. "That is a hunt fire. You light the heather and you drive the wolf in front of it and you wait at the other end.""Who?""The Council does not set fires. The Council writes things down." He looked at me. "This is Bran. Or it is Petra with Bran's wolves and a favour called in."The fire was com

The dog barked twice and stopped, and Ronan was at the door of the cottage with his hand on the latch before I got to my feet."Not a dog," Oisin said quietly. "A wolf. Two of them, up on the ridge behind us." He blew out the candle. "They are not hunting. They are sitting on the skyline and looking at the cove.""Council?""Not Council. Council wolves do not sit on a skyline and look at anything. That is a pack wolf and he is counting us." Oisin picked up his coat. "I will go and have a word with them. If I am not back in an hour, take the boat and go north."He went out and we sat in the dark cottage and waited.I want to put down what happened in the pack house on that same night, because I did not see it and I did not learn about it until much later, and it belongs in this story as much as anything I saw with my own eyes.Maeve went to the grey house on the harbour road two days after we left the coast. She went on her own, at dusk, with her coat buttoned and her copper curls tied

We did not go down the road. We went down the mountain on the north side, through the birch wood and along a stream that came down off the shoulder of the hill, and we came into the valley in the dark about a mile above the Council's camp.There was a shepherd's hut in a fold of the hill with a roof and three walls and a hearth, and we got into it and Oisin got the door shut and I sat down on the floor and put my head back against the stone."The river gate is two miles down the valley," Oisin said. "It comes out under the wall by the old mill. I have been through it twice and it is not guarded and it is not locked. But it is a tunnel and it is low and the water is up to your knees.""We go at midnight," Ronan said."We go at midnight," Oisin said, "and I go with you as far as the gate and then I go back to the boat, because I have a face that half the harbour taverns on this coast know and I will not get through a town of Council wolves without being recognised.""Then we go in witho

We did not go down to the river gate that night.Padraig could not walk. He had hit his head on a stone and he was dizzy and sick with it and he could not stand up straight, and Oisin's arm was worse than he had let on, and the whole of the valley was awake with lanterns moving up the road toward the fold of the hill.We went the other way. Up the north shoulder of the mountain and over the top and down into a hanging valley on the far side that Oisin knew from twenty years of moving things in the dark, and we got into a sheep pen with a stone wall and a roof of hurdles and we lay down in the straw and did not move until the sky went grey.Ronan kept watch. I lay in the straw with my hands over my face and my whole body aching and the wolf awake in my chest.I could feel it all night. It was not pushing. It was not fighting. It was lying down in the dark of me with its head on its paws and it was listening to everything, the wind and the sheep and the water and the owls, and every so

It was Nessa.She came up the ladder with a lantern in her hand and her hair wet from the river and her face white, and when she saw us she sat down on the top rung and put her hand over her mouth."You are alive," she said. "I thought you were dead. Maeve said you were dead.""Maeve said a great many things," Ronan said. "How did you find us?""I saw Oisin in the market at dusk. I followed him." She came up the rest of the way and sat down on the floorboards with the lantern between her feet. "I have been in the town for two days. Maeve brought me and Colm and four others. She said the pack had to be represented at the hearing and she needed witnesses.""Witnesses to what?""To you." Nessa looked at me. "She is going to stand up in front of the elders and say the healer is a rogue who came to the pack with a false name and a debt she did not owe and put a bond on the Alpha and turned him against his own Beta. She has been saying it all morning to anyone who will listen and half the t