The Drunk Wolf novel · Chapter 7 of 32

Chapter 7: The Cask Under the Loch

Struan came round on the stillhouse bench an hour later with his hand in a bowl of cold water.

Morag had splinted the two broken knuckles with lolly sticks.

"Silver heals slow," she said. "You'll hold a stave again by Christmas."

"I'll be dead by Christmas," he said.

"A full cup." He looked at me. "One Turning dram buried my wolf for ten years."

"And a full cup?"

"Buries it for good. Maybe me with it."

"And if you refuse, he says your wolf's false and the Court voids the cord," I said.

Ailsa was eating Morag's shortbread out of the tin. "So he drinks it and dies, or he doesn't and dies. I love your uncle. He's so thorough."

Morag was quiet for a long time.

"There was another cask," she said.

We all looked at her.

"Your grandfather laid it down himself, the year before the Edict," she said. "A Turning cask. I filled it with my own hands from a clean run."

"Where?"

"In the old cellar under the rock, when the old cellar was still used."

"The old cellar flooded," I said. "Before I was born."

"The winter after the Edict. The loch came in through the rock. They walled it up with everything in it."

Morag looked at Struan.

"The old King's cask is still down there. Nobody's ever cut moonbane into it. It's thirty-one years old, if the water hasn't got it."

"How do we get in?" I said.

"The old drain," said Struan. "It runs out under the boathouse. I used to dare the cadets to go in it."

"Did they?"

"Murdo didn't."

We went the next night, when the castle was asleep.

The drain came out under the old boathouse as a black stone arch half full of loch water.

Ailsa had a rope and two head torches. I had a crowbar. Struan had one good hand and his grandmother's dire warnings.

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