The Drunk Wolf novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Sixty Wolves

Ailsa's brother howled, and then his back arched, and his good jumper split down the middle.

A wolf came out of it.

A young dark wolf, rangy and too big for its own feet, standing in the wreck of its clothes and staring at its own paws.

Ailsa made a sound I'd never heard from her.

Then the youngest lass dropped to her hands and knees beside him.

Then the tall lad.

Then the huntsman's granddaughter, and the lad of nearly thirty, and the young woman from the west glen.

All round the ring they went down.

Fur came up through coats and jumpers, brown and red and black and grey.

Not just grey. Every colour the glen had.

The hill filled up with wolves.

Some were nineteen. Some were ten years late. They staggered and fell over and got up and fell over again.

And they howled.

Sixty of them, all at once, up at the white moon over the Turning Stone.

The grandmothers were crying. The old woman in the wheelbarrow was banging the side of it with her stick.

Morag stood at the ledge with the empty horn cup in her hand and tears running down under her glasses.

"Would you look at that," she said. "Would you look at that. Oh, the bastard. Thirty years, the bastard."

Ailsa had already shifted.

Her big black wolf knocked her brother's dark one flat, and then they were off down the hill together.

The youngest lass's wolf went yapping after them.

I turned round.

Struan was standing in the middle of the ring with his eyes shut and his face wet.

His shoulders rolled.

The blue coat was on me, so there was only his jumper to split.

The silver-grey wolf stood up out of it, huge, a little unsteady, and lifted its head.

It was still there.

Half a cup of moonbane, and it was still there.

It howled with the sixty, deep under all their young voices, and every one of them answered it.

I put my hand in the thick fur of its neck and held on.

The chiefs ratified the consort an hour before moonset.

Struan stood on the ledge of the Stone in borrowed trousers and a stalker's jacket, with my cord on his wrist.

Eleven hands went up.

Then the Charter keeper brought out the box he'd carried up the hill that night for my uncle.

Inside it was the crown of Strathcarn, a plain old circlet of gold.

The oldest chief lifted it out.

I knelt on the Turning Stone as the moon went down behind the far side of the glen.

She put it on my head.

"Queen of Strathcarn," she said.

The whole hill answered her.

Half of it howled.

We came down to the castle at sunrise, and the great hall was open, and nobody went to bed.

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