Sold to the Wolf Chief for a Debt, but His Wolf Knelt First novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: The Seal
Coll's POV
Nine elders of Clan Macrae sat down to the long dining table at noon on the last day of the year.
I stood at the head with the seal in my hand.
Ishbel stood at my right shoulder, where she had said she would.
The sexton of Ardach was there, and the two old men who had kept the kirkyard key.
They had not looked at her since they came in.
Behind the door Dugald knelt on the flags with his bucket, because Ishbel had said he would hear this.
The seal weighed more than it ever had.
It was black stone set in silver, on a cord I had worn since my father's funeral.
"Elders," I said. "For eight years I have put this on whatever was set in front of me."
"I put it on sixty-one tied hands, and I did not learn their names."
"I put it on a paper that kept Morag Macrae out of her own hill."
The oldest of the three kirkyard men shifted in his chair.
"That was the Reeve's doing, Chief," he said. "We only kept the key."
"You turned it, and I signed," I said. "We were all of us tidy."
Ishbel did not speak.
She had told me at Tomnahurich that she would stand beside me in daylight and say nothing.
It was the hardest thing she had ever asked of me.
I took the cord from my neck.
I laid the seal on the polished wood, in the middle of the table, where nine pairs of eyes could reach it.
"I'll not cast it again," I said. "It lies there until the Grey House says who lifts it."
"A Chief without a seal," said a woman at the end of the table, appalled.
"A Chief who signs what he's given is no Chief," I said. "My father told me so when I was eleven."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Sold to the Wolf Chief for a Debt, but His Wolf Knelt First are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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