Sold to the Wolf Chief for a Debt, but His Wolf Knelt First novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cord
Ishbel refuses to kneel for the cord that pays her stepfather's debt, the Chief's knee gives way, and she ties it herself.
The man in the waistcoat told me to kneel for the cord, and I stayed on my feet.
At the head of the table the Chief of the glen went down on one knee.
Forty men saw it.
Nobody spoke, because nobody could think what it meant.
Ten minutes earlier my stepfather had put my name on the card table to pay a debt.
I had come straight from the hotel in my grey work tunic, with my plait half out of its pins.
A man had rung the kitchen at ten and said, "Your stepfather's at the card table. You'd best come."
The card table was in a back room above a pub by the river, with green baize and a coal fire.
Forty men sat round it in their good jackets.
The clan had played cards there on the second Friday of every month for a hundred years.
I had never been up those stairs.
I was quiet, which is what the glen families call a child born to wolves who never finds a wolf of her own.
Quiet folk did not go up those stairs.
My stepfather sat halfway down the table with sweat on his lip.
"Pet," he said. "Sit by me."
I stayed standing.
"How much?" I asked.
"Sixty-two thousand."
Across from him sat a grey-whiskered man in a waistcoat, smiling at me kindly.
"The Reeve has been very patient with your father," said the man beside him.
"He's my stepfather," I said.
The Reeve spread his hands.
"A debt is a debt, lass, and the old custom is a kind one," he said.
"A pledge of hands. Seven years in the Chief's house, and the slate is wiped."
"Whose hands?"
My stepfather looked at the baize.
"Yours," he said.
At the head of the table sat a tall, dark man with a scar through his left eyebrow.
They called him the Macrae.
He had not lifted his eyes since I came in.
He went on turning one card over and over in his fingers.
"Hands only, by the old law," the Reeve said gently.
"What's done with the rest of you is your own business."
He held up a loop of red wool.
"A cord on the left wrist, and at seven years the Chief cuts it. Kneel for it, lass."
My mother had caught my wrist three weeks before she died, hard enough to leave marks.
"Never kneel to a Macrae, mo chridhe," she had said.
I had put it down to the morphine.
I was fourteen, and I had not thought of it once in seven years until that moment.
"No," I said.
That was how I came to be standing there, with the cord held out to me, when the Chief's knee gave way.
He got up slowly with one hand flat on the table.
His face had gone grey.
He looked at me then for the first time, and I have never been looked at with so much plain hatred.
"Tie her," he said to the room, "and get her out of my sight."
Nobody laughed.
The Reeve's smile did not change, but he was watching my face and not the Chief's.
I took the cord out of his hand.
I tied it round my left wrist myself.
I pulled the knot tight with my teeth and my right hand, while forty men watched a cleaner do it.
"Write that I came on my feet," I told the Reeve.
"Aye, lass. I'll write it."
I turned to my stepfather.
He had half risen, with his hands out and his eyes wet.
"Ishbel, I'd never have..."
"You'd have," I said. "You just did."
"I'll make it right. I'll find the money."
"You'll not say my name in this town again," I said.
"Pet..."
"Not in a pub, not in a church, not to a dog. That's the first time."
Hector sat back down heavily and put his hands over his face.
I walked to the door.
Forty men moved their chairs in to let me through, and not one of them looked me in the eye.
On the stair I heard the Chief's boots start behind me.
I did not turn round, and he did not pass me.
Out in the rain on Academy Street I went straight to the Land Rover at the kerb.
It was the only vehicle with a Macrae crest on the door.
His hand closed round my left wrist, over the new cord.
His palm was hot, and the grip was hard enough that I felt my pulse beat against his thumb.
"Back seat," the Chief said, low, behind my ear.
His chest was an inch from my shoulder blades, and I could feel the heat of him through my wet tunic.
I should have been afraid of him.
What I felt ran from my wrist to the pit of my stomach, and I hated it.
"Then let go of me," I said.
He didn't, for a long moment, his thumb moving once across the cord.
Then he let go of my wrist and stepped back.
I opened the front door of his Land Rover and got in.
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