The Drunk Wolf novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Heir's Seal

Sorcha takes Morag into her household in front of the Regent's council, Morag tells the truth about Struan's mother, and Struan's ledger shows every wolfless child in thirty years had a Grey grandparent, Ailsa's brother among them.

They had put Morag in the guardroom under the east tower, on a bench, with her cardigan buttoned wrong.

I didn't go to the guardroom.

I went to breakfast.

My uncle's council sat at the long table in the little hall every morning at eight. Five chiefs were there that day, the ones who'd stayed the night after the feast.

There were kippers and toast and a silver pot of coffee.

Tormod was buttering his toast when I walked in, still in last night's velvet, with my father's seal on its chain in my fist.

Struan came in behind me in my old Guard jumper and a pair of borrowed trousers.

Ailsa came behind him.

The steward started to say something about the door.

"Good morning, Uncle," I said.

"Sorcha. You look tired." He set down the knife. "And you've brought your pet."

"I've brought my consort."

"Your Choosing is in dispute."

"My Choosing is under the Peace, and five of the men at this table said so last night."

The chief of the west glen looked very hard at his kipper.

"Your guards took a seventy-two-year-old woman out of her own stillhouse at two in the morning," I said. "In her slippers."

"Morag Caddow sheltered a Grey for twenty-eight years." Tormod's voice stayed pleasant. "The Edict is clear about that. I don't enjoy it."

"You're eating toast."

"I'm a practical man."

I put the seal on the table, beside his plate, so everyone could see it.

It was a lump of old silver with a wolf on it. It had been my father's. When I turned twenty-six, it became mine.

"I'm taking Morag Caddow into the heir's household," I said. "From this minute she's mine. She eats at my table and she sleeps under my roof. Under the Peace, nobody in my household can be touched until the Moon Court sits."

"That's an old custom."

"It's in the Charter. Page nine." I looked down the table. "Would anyone like me to fetch it?"

Nobody would.

The oldest chief was watching my uncle over her coffee cup.

Tormod looked at the seal for a long moment.

Then he laughed, softly, and picked up his toast again.

"Let her go," he told the steward. "We're not monsters. Give the old woman her shoes."

It was too easy.

I knew it was too easy.

I took Morag anyway.

She came out of the guardroom with her glasses crooked and her hair coming out of its bun, and she swore at the guard in Gaelic for a full minute.

Then she grabbed Struan by the jumper and pulled him down and held his face.

"Look at you," she said. "Look at the size of you."

"Gran."

"You threw that Strachan lump in the fire. I heard it from the guards." She shook him. "Good."

The stillhouse sat on the burn below the castle, low and whitewashed, with its two copper stills shining in the dark inside.

Morag put the kettle on before she'd got her coat off.

Ailsa sat on an upturned cask by the stove. I sat on the step where I always sat.

Struan stood by the still with his back to us.

"Tell her, Gran," he said.

Morag sat down slowly.

"His mother was a Grey," she said. "She was eighteen the year of the Edict. Her people were all taken. My man and I hid her in the malting loft for two years, and then our son married her."

I'd known his mother had died young. Nobody had ever said a word about where she was from.

"She had a fever the winter he was eight. She was never sick a day before." Morag took her glasses off. "I was always afraid of that dram. Afraid of that cask. I could never say why."

"So she told me why," Struan said. "The morning after my Turning. Ten years too late."

He went up the ladder to the loft and came back down with a ledger.

It was an old cellar book with a cracked spine, the kind the distillery used for cask numbers.

He opened it on the bench in front of me.

"I've been the night man for four years," he said. "The Regent's bay is fifty feet from my stool."

Every autumn he'd stolen a thimble from that cask and hidden it.

Every night he'd gone through the old Turning rolls in the cellar office, a year at a time, back thirty years.

There were columns. Names. Clans. The year each one turned, or didn't.

Then a last column, in smaller writing.

"Grandparents," he said. "Everyone I could find. Kirk records. Old women who'd talk to a drunk."

I ran my finger down the page.

Grey. Grey. Grey.

I turned the page.

Grey. Grey. Grey.

"Every wolfless child in thirty years," I said.

"Every one had a Grey grandparent somewhere." His voice was flat. "Every one drank from his cask. Nobody else ever lost a wolf."

"And the ones with Grey blood who did turn?"

He turned to the back of the book.

"None," he said.

Ailsa had stopped drinking her tea.

"Give me that," she said.

She took the ledger off the bench and turned to the last written page.

Last October's Turning. Eleven names.

The seventh name was her brother's.

In the last column, in Struan's small writing, it said: Grandmother, father's side. Grey.

Ailsa stared at it.

"That's my gran," she said. "That's my gran's name. She was never a Grey."

Nobody said anything.

The kettle began to scream on the stove.

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