All Chapters of Bound to a Dying Man: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The page was old and soft at the folds and the writing on it was a clerk's neat hand, and at the bottom of it, in the small neat hand that was not a clerk's, there was the line.This matter is to be held.I read it twice before I could make sense of the words.It was a record of a hearing. It was dated twenty two years ago and it was a hearing before three elders of the Council on a matter concerning a child of the founder's blood, and the child was named as the daughter of Siobhan, healer, of no fixed pack. The hearing had been called to decide whether the child should be taken into Council custody for the protection of the bloodline.The elders had decided that it should.The taking had been ordered for the fourteenth day of that month. And on the fourteenth day, in a note added at the bottom in the same small neat hand, it said that the mother and the child had not been found and the matter was to be held.I sat on the floorboards of the mill loft with the page in my hands."They w

The car went past the mill and up the road to the Council house and we stood in the loft and listened to it go."Eight hours," Ronan said. "Eight hours early and nobody knew he was coming but the driver and the outriders.""He knew the hearing was at noon and he came in the dark so that nobody would see him arrive." I sat down on the floorboards. "That is a man who does not want to be seen walking into a Council house.""Or a man who wants to be seen walking into it and does not want anyone to see what he does in the night first."Oisin came up the ladder."There is a light on in the top of the Council house," he said. "One window. It has been on since the car went past."We sat in the loft and watched the light.Around four in the morning I felt it.It came through the bond without warning, the way the pain had come in the sickroom, but it was not pain. It was a pulling, a hard steady pulling, as though a rope had been tied round my chest and somebody at the other end of it had start

The grey coats came down the steps and there were twelve of them and they had a paper in the hand of the one at the front."Fiadh the healer," he called. "Stand where you are."I did not stand where I was.I ran.There is a lane behind the Council house that goes down to the river and there is a bridge at the end of it, and I went down the lane with my boots slipping on the wet stone and the grey coats coming behind me. Oisin shouted something. Ronan shouted my name. I did not stop.The bridge was old and narrow and there were two Council wolves on it.I turned left along the river bank instead and went into the pine wood on the far side.The wood was thick and dark and the ground was soft with needles and there were roots under the needles that caught at my boots. I ran the way a healer runs, which is not fast and not well, and behind me the grey coats came into the wood and spread out.I could hear them. I could hear everything. The wolf was awake in my chest and it had opened my ea

Oisin sat down on the planks by the fire and held his hands out to it."There is more," he said. "And you are not going to like it.""Tell me.""The trial is open to the town. That means any wolf can walk in and any wolf can speak. Soren has called it that way on purpose." Oisin looked at me. "He wants an audience. He wants the town to watch him try a founder wolf and a rogue Alpha and a binder and an old man with a book, and he wants them to go home afterwards and tell their neighbours that the Council was fair.""He wants a show," Ronan said."He wants a show and he has got one. There is a town crier on every corner reading out the charge. The charge is that the healer Fiadh entered the Blackthorn territory under a false name with a false debt and put a false bond on the Alpha, and that she is a founder wolf who has been hiding from the Council for twenty two years." Oisin's voice was flat. "He has made you the villain, Fiadh. He has made you a wolf who came to a dying pack and took

We came down into the town at ten in the morning with the mark on my chest and the box in Ronan's pack and the whole of the north valley grey and quiet below us. The mist was still lying in the bottom of it and the roofs came up out of the mist one by one as we came down the track, and the river went through the middle of it the colour of lead.Maeve was waiting at the mill.She was standing on the step with her coat buttoned and her copper curls tied back and her hands folded in front of her, and there was a bruise coming up on her mouth where Ronan had hit her. It had gone the colour of a plum and it made her look older than she was."Alpha," she said."Maeve.""I want a word with the healer." She looked at me. "Alone."Ronan did not move."It is all right," I said. "Wait inside."He looked at me for a moment and then he went in, and Oisin went in after him, and Nessa went in, and Padraig stood in the doorway with his stick and did not go in at all. He was old and he was tired and h