A Hearth Among Strangers
The Craiks' camp crouched low against the wind like a flock of birds at roost—tarred sheds, turf bothies, a long lean-to stacked high with kelp, and the squat black mouths of the saltpans yawning along the tide line. The air was a mixture of hot brine, peat smoke, and the sweet-bitter tang of drying weed. Beyond everything the sea hammered, steady as a heartbeat.
They gave the stranger a place by the main fire because Agnes Craik said to, and because he had come down the hill like a storm wearing a man's bones and turned the Keiths with a blade that remembered older feuds. He gave only a first name—"James"—and nothing of clan or past. Even so, no one looked him in the eye for long. There was a rake of blood on his mouth, the gauntness of sickness carved into his cheeks, and a watchfulness in him that made men stand a little wider.
Flint watched her across the flames.
She was unlike the polished women of Aberdeen—their tin laughter, the powder that came off on your sleeve. This one sat like a captain at a chart table: boots planted, shoulders square, eyes doing sums he couldn't see. Wind had teased her hair out of its braid until it burned about her head, a nimbus of copper caught on sparks. She laughed rarely; when she did, men looked up from their work. Her hands were nicked and salt-roughened. The rings she wore were kelp ash and tar, not gold.
Voluptuous, yes—full in hip and bust, the line of her stays fighting a losing battle against the work she insisted on doing—but nothing soft in the way she held a pistol. In the fight she had moved without waste: two steps, command, shot; then sword low and direct, no court flourish, a farmer's practicality made deadly. She kept count of everything: men breathing, powder left, wind's cut. Flint had seen chieftains lose a field because they loved their own voice more than the ground. She loved the ground.
He watched the way the Craiks leaned toward her without knowing they did. She set them tasks in a tone that could have been coaxing or command—no difference here. "You, fetch driftwood; you, bank the pan's fire; Ewan, mind your sister's hand—she's burned." Her words fell where they should like shot in a tight group.
She saw him watching and did not look away.
Agnes studied him the way she studied a squall coming in out of the north.
The first impression was height and the economy of a man who has spent himself before—no fat on him, only line and muscle, and even that thinned by whatever sickness gnawed his lungs. His cheekbones cut his face into planes; his eyes were dark as peat-water, not a colour but a depth. He had none of the dainty habits of Lowland gentlemen: he sat with his palms close to the fire like a fisherman glad of heat, and every so often he turned his head to cough hard into a folded strip of linen. He did it without apology. After the coughing, he sat very still, and she could almost hear him counting his breaths.
When he had come barrelling into the hollow that afternoon, claymore roaring, there had been a moment—brief as a spark—when he looked too young, reckless as a boy about to jump a burn. Then the blade bit, and the world around him narrowed into angles and decisions. She had seen such men on boats when weather turned: no noise, only action; a tide of competence rolling out from them that made other people braver than they were.
She had seen, too, the old Highland thing she knew only by story: a manner of fighting that was not pretty and did not care to be. Left foot planted, shield fixed, weight cut forward with hip and shoulder as the claymore's long lever came down; the dirk doing small ugly stitches while the big blade reset. It was a language her father's father had spoken with a targe on his arm and a Gunn for a neighbour, before the laws and the bayonets and the new polite untruths of cities.
And the name Keith had made him a wolf.
He was dangerous. He was ill. Both truths stood beside the fire with him. She felt no urge to unsee either.
"James," she said at last, letting the flames do the softening that did not come into her voice, "you'll eat."
He took the wooden bowl with the same care he took his sword, as if it might turn in his hand and bite. He ate little: broth, a torn heel of bannock, a strip of dried fish. The cough took him again, long enough that two men went still with the helpless anger of people who can fight an enemy but not a sickness. He wiped his mouth. The cloth came away spotted.
"Tha thu tinn," she said—You are ill.
"Aye," he answered in the same tongue, and left it.
"You'll rest here tonight. There is a lee in the bank behind the drying shed. The wind won't find you there."
He shook his head. "The cliff will do me."
Her mouth curled the smallest bit. "You came off the cliff. You can sleep under a roof two nights in a row without losing the habit of rock."
He looked at her a long moment. Not a measuring; a weighing. Then he nodded once. "Two," he said. "Not three."
She let that be his victory.
He watched the work.
She let him.
Kelp lay in cut ropes along the strand, the long brown arms of it greening to black under salt and sun. Boys dragged it to the pits; men forked it into kilns built of stone, firing it to white ash in a slow, smoky burn that would last all night. Girls with their hair tied up in kerchiefs hauled brine to pans, the big iron mouths fixed on peat-fed fires. Steam rolled up, salt dried in thin plates along the rim. Every movement had a rhythm. Agnes kept it.
"It stinks," he said, without scorn.
"It pays," she answered. "Kelp ash for soda to glass and soap. Salt to keep fish from turning on a long road. The Keiths would have it all. We'd like to keep our children eating."
He nodded, and she saw the ledger moving behind his eyes, numbers slotted into the same shelves as enemies and weather. Good. Pride only got a clan killed. Sums kept them alive.
The Keiths tested them before moonrise.
Scouts first: a trio of shadows feeling the edges of the camp where the tide had left the stones slick. Agnes knew it not by sound but by the way sound changed—the gulls' complaint sharpened, the surf seemed to pause between breaths. She put two fingers to her mouth. No shrill alarm; just that soft, low whistle her people knew. Hands went to tools that would do as weapons if they had to; a few good pieces of iron lifted out from under tarps; the oldest boys slid into places where they could trip a man hard.
She found the stranger already up.
He had been sleeping propped on an elbow, cloak over his chest, claymore near enough that a half-turn would put it in his hands. Now it was already there, the long blade laid along his thigh like a dog that needed no words. He was breathing with the carefulness of a man rationing air.
"How far?" he asked, quieter than the surf.
"Close," she said. "Not brave. Curious. But curious is a door."
"And doors open," he said, as if finishing a proverb, and pushed himself to his feet.
She saw the sway, the small shut of his eyes against a wave of dizziness, the blood he caught without looking as if it were a habit. It did not make her soften. She shifted his place with a tilt of her head.
"Take the seam between the salt sheds and the pan house," she said. "If they come, it will be there—no footing, wind wrong. I'll hold the line at the ash pits."
He didn't argue. Better than any argument.
They moved.
The camp re-wove itself around their absence, women taking men's tasks where they had to, boys stepping into the places their fathers would have kept if this were a world that played fair.
The first Keith thought he was clever, moving with the wind in his face to kill his own smell. He came down the seam Agnes had named, head turned toward the light—wrong: he should have let the dark hold his eyes. He never saw the targe come up until the iron boss took him under the ear. The sound was unpleasantly soft. He folded.
Flint let him fall quiet. He had no room in him for noise anymore.
The second came behind, learning better from the first man's mistake, but not learning enough. He kept his blade high, as if fighting court style. Flint slid inside it and used the wooden rim of the targe like a cudgel to smash the wrist. The dirk did the rest—short, efficient work, inside the ribs, turn and pull. The man made a little mew as the air left him and was still.
The third was the problem. He had a musket. At that range even a tired man could not miss.
Flint did not run. He stepped into the shot.
The ball took the targe high and banged his shoulder numb, but he had already moved his weight to the other foot. The long blade came down with a grunt that had been a word in his throat once. The man tried to bring the musket up like a spear; the claymore split the ash stock like a stick. Steel folded meat under it.
Across the camp, Agnes heard the shot and answered with fire. Not gunfire; she flung a pan of brine into the nearest ash pit. It hissed up steam and glow. For a moment the wind turned the whole pit into a lantern. Shapes froze where they shouldn't have been. Her people took them—one with a hook, one with a pole, one with a handful of hot ash thrown like a fistful of wasps into a face. There was no clean fighting here; there was only going home unpunctured.
Agnes saw a Keith spear for the stacked salt with a torch in his hand. She moved without thought and took him in the calf with the edge of a shovel. He spun for her. She let him. His weight committed to the turn; she stepped in and drove the short sword up hard under the rib. He gaped, breath a bubble. She threw him off like a bad thought and shouted the count she knew mattered more than any prayer: "Hold one! Hold two! Hold three!" It was the number of the men she could spare to guard the brine.
The rest, if they died, she would grieve in winter when work slowed.
She found the stranger in the seam among the sheds, breathing like a bellows left in the rain. He had braced himself in the narrow, so no one could come past him without stepping into his reach. A clever choice: the big blade's greatest weakness was the space it needed. In the seam, he used short arcs, half strokes, the blade's weight doing work his body could not afford.
"Two," he said, not boast, not report, just count.
"Three," she answered, and jerked her chin. "More shadows behind. The flare spooked them. They'll look for soft edge."
"South fence," he said.
"South fence," she agreed.
They moved again, together this time. She set the pace short for his lungs; he did not thank her. Good again.
The next attempt was clumsy. Boys, drunk on the danger they had been promised, sent to make a din and take credit for men far back in the dark. They came on with a roar that meant to be terrifying and was only loud. Flint did the kindest thing and ended it quickly. A step in, the targe's iron boss breaking a nose, the claymore's flat cracking a skull without opening it, a low kick to a knee. He left them to wake with shame and headache.
Agnes did not think such mercy would be paid forward, but she did not correct him. Better to leave the boys able to run home and tell lies about ghosts by the pans.
A quiet settled. The kind of quiet that meant the real men had cut their losses and gone to tell the tale to someone with scar tissue and the habit of vengeance.
"Tomorrow," she said. "They'll come in daylight with more courage. And a leader who's been taught what these pits are worth."
He nodded, and she saw how much effort the nod cost.
The cough took him then, bad enough that his body folded around it as if to keep from coming apart. She put a hand out—nothing tender, just balance offered because a man upright killed better than a man in a heap—and felt under her palm the heat of fever.
He turned his head and spat his blood into the shadows so no one would step in it without seeing.
"Sug mae," he muttered, half under his breath in a tongue she did not know and which he did not know he had let out. "Bad work."
She didn't ask. Men have ghosts in their mouths.
"Sleep," she said. "Two hours, no more. After that you take the second watch with me."
"I can hold the first," he began.
She used the tone that made men twice his size decide to sort fish instead of argue. "No. You'll take the second and breathe until then. I don't need you dead by your own pride. I need you on your feet in the morning."
Something moved behind his eyes, then went still. "Aye."
Before dawn she came back to wake him for the watch and found he had not slept at all. He had sat with his back to the bank and his eyes on the seam where the sheds made their bad geometry. She did not scold. There are some sleep debts no night can pay.
She poured him a tin cup of something the Craiks swore by—kelp broth cut with a mean whisky. It smelled like the shoreline itself. He grimaced and drank. The coughing eased.
"Your folk run on weed and fire," he said.
"My folk run on anything that burns," she answered.
He turned his head to look at her, and for the first time she saw what he would have looked like if no sickness had eaten him: the strength of him without the shake, the set of his mouth without pain. He would have been a dazzlingly dangerous man even to a woman like her, who had weathered her share of handsome fools.
"Why do you hold this place?" he asked, not challenge, curiosity made honest.
She pointed with her chin out to where the sea showed a paler strip under the sky. "Because there are graves here with Craik bones in them, and because somewhere, a girl not yet born will need coin to keep her from starving in a year when the herring go a week to the wrong bay. Because work is what we have when men with law and titles decide they'd rather our bellies were empty."
He nodded as if she had named a law of motion. "And the Keiths?"
She showed her teeth. Not a smile. "They have always wanted what we make. When they cannot purchase it at their price, they will take it for free. It would save them walking if we lay down for them. I find I do not care to save them steps."
"You will not get help from courts."
"We are not asking," she said, and he finally smiled—a bare cut of a thing in the beard, there and gone—but it was a smile nonetheless.