Keiths return
They came at noon, bold as gulls.
The Keith leader made himself easy to see, which Agnes respected. He had the stance of a man who had not always worn a coat. Broad through the chest, scars sheened silver under his jaw, hair clubbed back tight to keep it out of eyes if something broke. He wore no colours that would damn him if law came sniffing; only a strip of red-black tartan knotted where a man's wrist would hide it.
He came with a dozen and two more for the counting fingers he didn't show. Men with muskets; a couple with pistols tucked; one giant with a boat hook which would be a devil in the crowd.
He did not call out at first. He walked the line of the pans and looked at the work, and Agnes saw the sum in his face. Then he raised his voice, Lowland Scots softened by years north.
"Craik," he said, making her name a workman's word, not an insult. "You bake the King's salt on land not yours. You burn weed the King's revenue men will tax at whatever sum pleases them. We offer you purchase at a fair price and protection from thieves and storms."
Agnes stepped into the clear so her people would not have to. "No," she said.
The man's mouth twitched. "No to which?"
"To all of it," she said. "We'll sell to markets that don't spit in our pot. Protection we provide ourselves."
"You speak like a song," he said. "But wind's still wind."
He gave a small motion with two fingers. His men fanned just enough to start something that could be called an accident later.
Agnes did not raise her voice; she simply said, "Now," and the Craiks took their places like figures slipping into a pattern on a loom.
Flint stood at the seam again, because it was where he did the most damage, and because any man with sense fights where he knows the ground. He had his musket this time and one pistol; the claymore's weight waited for the part of the work where noise grows unhelpful and distance is a joke.
The Keiths tried talk a hair longer, because some part of them wanted to go home without counting their teeth, then the boat-hook giant got bored and lashed out. He nearly took a boy into the pan. The boy's sister dragged him back by his hair and screamed like a gull. That was the start.
The first volley came ragged. The Keiths shot too high—fear of wasting ball at short range does that to a man—and Flint put his ball where it should go, centre mass in a man who had started to look brave. The impact made a sound like a fist into wet sacks. Flint dropped the musket, drew the pistol for the second man who thought the lull was his.
After that it went to blades.
Agnes used the pan rims the way a swordsman uses a rail—something to push off when you want an angle a flat ground won't give. She didn't bother with men twice her weight; she took their knees. A shovel edge was enough. A knee is a dumb hinge; break it and the rest of the man is furniture falling.
She saw Flint moving, each stroke calculated to buy his lungs time: half-blows that stole hands from men, the targe doing malice the blade did not have to. When space opened, he let the claymore do as intended: downstroke heavy enough to make a man into two problems.
A pistol flashed near a stack of kelp. Agnes swore and sprinted. Fire in the ropes would turn a day's work into smoke you could see from Wick. She didn't go for the pistol; she threw her body into the man's hip while he had both hands engaged. He went over with a grunt, and she took the pistol for her own and fired point-blank into the seat of his pride. He would sing high for a month if he lived. She kicked the torch into brine and heard the steam hiss like a pleased cat.
The Keith leader had not entered the scrum; he held his line steady and let his men spend themselves. That made him worse, not better. She pointed at him and shouted, "That one," and then the crowd erased him from her sight because a boat-hook came for her head.
She ducked and felt the hook pull hair. She hated that, irrational in a way that embarrassed her, but anger makes decent fuel. She came up under the man's arms and hammered the edge of the short sword into the inside of his elbow. The hook dropped. She broke his nose with the hilt and left him to bleed snot into the weeds.
Flint had his own argument: two men at once, one with a bayonet, one with a club. He took the club with the targe so hard he felt the cartilage in his shoulder complain. He cut the bayonet flat sideways with an odd swing that would have looked foolish if it hadn't worked; the blade took the thin metal and turned it from spear to scrap. He used the dirk for the small truth behind the large one—under the ribs, into the place where breath stops and doesn't start again.
The cough came for him mid-motion, a traitor's hand on his throat. He tasted salt and iron and the stupid sweetness of whatever always succeeded blood. He forced the cough into a snarl and used the motion to drive his shoulder into a chest. The man staggered and the claymore, already rising, came down.
Agnes heard him then—not the cough, but the noise he made to muffle it, and it put a cold coil of fear in her belly she disliked. She moved to where she could take a man off his side. She didn't say his name; he hadn't given it. She simply made the ground near him cheaper in enemies.
The Keith leader finally committed. He came with a pair: steady men, not boys, their blades kept low, their eyes not making the mistake of staring at the big sword when the small dirk was the snake. He pointed at Agnes with his chin and said one word to the steadier of them. The man nodded. Orders passed like a good song—quick, quiet, remembered.
Flint read it. He cut toward them. He had fought with brothers once; he knew the look of men who meant to take a woman's head while her people watched. His chest burned. His hands felt slow. He went anyway.
The first exchange was ugly and efficient: they tested edge to edge, and the Keith steel was better than he wanted to admit. He took a slice along his forearm that slicked his grip. He let the targe bite the other man's blade so he could see the third come at Agnes. He didn't have air to shout. He moved.
Agnes was not waiting to be saved. The man came with his eyes clever: he feinted for her knee as she preferred, then snapped high. She ate the cut along her forearm because she had to, then did something Flint did not expect: she took a handful of ash and salt from the pan's rim and flung it into his face. He reared back with an animal sound and she hit him across the temple with the flat of the shovel like a bell ringer calling noon. He went down, not dead, but willing to practice.
"Good," Flint breathed, which was the most he could give to praise.
The leader saw his man drop and came himself then, and the fight around them thinned because people have the sense to make a ring for a thing that matters.
He and Flint touched once, twice. The Keith was right-hand heavy, his weight forward like a man who had boxed more than fenced, using the sword as part of a larger truth he knew with his body. Flint tried a feint with the targe; the leader didn't bite. He gave a little grin—acknowledgment, not mockery—and then came in with a cut-over that would have taken a taller man's ear.
Flint was tall but not stupid. He took it on the rim and felt the shock through bone. He used that shock to hide a step that gave him the room for a stupidly honest chop. The leader parried with enough skill that Flint's wrists stung. He liked this, in a dark furious part of himself. He had always liked men who could make him work for it.
They went twice more, small cuts taken and given. The leader nicked Flint along the ribs; Flint gave him a line along the jaw to remember until spring. The cough came again. The leader saw it and did the right thing—he pressed inside, blade low, shoulder driving.
Agnes moved then. She didn't interfere. She made a wrong thing happen nearby: she kicked a pan of hot brine—only a little, calculated—so that steam boiled up into the leader's face at the moment he committed. He cursed and lost the precision of his next beat. Flint took the half-breath the steam bought him and put the targe's iron boss into the place just under the man's ear where even stubborn fighters go away for a while.
The Keith hit the mud to one knee and looked up with eyes that said he remembered the name Gunn even if he couldn't put it to the man's face. He spat the taste of steam and salt and blood, and he did not beg. "We'll come again," he said.
"Aye," Agnes answered, and did something that surprised both men: she let him crawl backward and take his alive with him. "Bring fewer boys next time," she said, flat. "I have work."
The leader laughed, a wet choke that might have been respect. He gathered his men with small gestures a good soldier knows, and they went, walking, not running, because the pride of walking buys you men who will not cut you when your back is turned.
Silence came back in raw strips. Then the noise of counting, always counting—who breathes, who does not, what burns, what can still be saved.
Agnes looked at the fallen, the wounded, the pans, the ash. She looked at the man coughing his lungs up into a rag and not letting it put him on his knees. She looked at the salt still unspilled and the kelp not yet smoke, and she let herself sit down quite suddenly because if she didn't sit, she would break and had no interest in breaking where the men could see.
He came to her because he had seen too many chiefs stand when sitting would keep them alive. He lowered himself beside her, though he had the look of a tree asked to bend in a gale.
"You have men," he said, when he caught air. "You lack a drill."
"I have hands," she said, still looking at the pans. "I lack hours."
"I can make the hours you have do more than they should," he said. "If you'll have it."
She turned then and looked straight into whatever name he wasn't giving. "I will," she said. "On one condition."
He waited.
"You stop pretending you don't bleed," she said, and opened her own palm where the short sword had kissed her earlier so that the two of them—stranger and mistress of the pans—sat and bled honestly together for a moment into the ash.
He startled, then the laugh came—real, low, rusty from disuse.
"Agreed," he said.
A gull screamed. A child cried and was hushed. The sea went on.
"Eat," she said, standing because she could not allow the men to think her winded long. "Then teach. Tonight, again, if they come. Tomorrow, harder. We will make them pay steps for every handful of ash."
He rose with her. The world tilted and steadied. He looked at her hair caught red in the weak sun, at the set of her mouth that was mercy only when mercy served the living, and felt something he had not let himself feel since he put his name in a hole and covered it.
It was not hope. Hope was a young man's habit.
It was purpose, two-handed, set to his shoulder like a beam.
"Airson na beò," he said, the words surprising both of them. For the living.
"For the living," she echoed, and the camp moved around them like a stubborn machine finding its rhythm again after a stone in the gears.
They ate standing, because sitting was a luxury for winter. He took broth and oatbread again, and this time did not pretend to find it tasteless. She rinsed the ash from the cut on her forearm with brine and hissed, then bound it with a strip of linen that had also once been something nicer.
He found a place where the wind would not tear his words away and began. "Your boys swing their blades like scythes," he said. "A scythe is for grass. Men are not grass. Show me your two fastest."
Ewan and little Tam came, their chests still up and down from the fight, eyes too bright.
"Here," he said to Ewan, and tapped the younger man's wrist. "Do not grip with the whole hand. Grip with these two fingers hardest." He showed with his own hand. "The others follow. It saves your arm for the fifth man, not the second." He reached for Tam's targe and pushed it. "Don't hold it. Wear it. The weight lives in your shoulder, not your hand. Let it take the punch and give it back. No one cares if you break a nose with iron; only that you're not polite about it."
They tried. He corrected. He didn't shout. Men and boys came to listen. Women came and listened too and did not pretend they would not pick up the same lessons and use them with a shovel if the day came.
"Count," he said. "Not kills. Breath. Count your own. One, two, three. If you lose count, you are already on your knee. If you are on your knee, you do not die if your friend's foot is a thing you can find with your hand. We fight in close here. We do not leave each other."
Agnes watched his voice make a body in the air for the first time. She didn't need to want him for his body; she could want him for this.
He worked until the cough came back mean. He bent over it, cloth to his mouth, and she saw the red again and did not visibly flinch because she would not put a mirror of fear into a man who had already too many. He saw she saw and did not pretend. That would be for later, after work; now there was work.
He straightened. He tasted salt. The ash had got into his mouth and made a curious sweetness.
"Again," he said.
They did, and the sun made its small winter arc and dropped into the sea and painted the pans and the ash heaps with a brief grace.
When dusk came on and the camp re-stacked into its night shape, Agnes passed him the pistol he had fired earlier and a bag of shot and powder that she could spare. "If they come at dark, we'll greet them with light," she said.
He turned the pistol in his hand. Thomas Murdoch. He knew the maker's work by balance as much as by line. He looked up at her.
"I'll give it back," he said.
"You'll give it back with the morning," she said. "Or you'll give it to me empty with your last breath and I will use it once more and then put it with your big sword and say a Gunn's words over you even if that's not your name."
He stood very still.
She had not meant to say Gunn. It had slipped out like a truth that had been waiting behind her teeth all afternoon. She didn't take it back.
He did not deny it.
"Tomorrow," he said, as if they had both agreed to something larger than a watch order.
"Tomorrow," she said.
He moved off to the seam again, a tall, gaunt thing wearing steel and stubbornness. She went to the ash pits to count and to curse and to praise and to make the numbers work with the hours left.
The wind came down from the moors and told the camp nothing it did not already know. The sea hammered. The pans steamed. Somewhere in the dark the Keiths turned in their beds and thought about a woman with a sword and a man with a ghost's eyes and decided to bring more men in the morning.
Agnes Craik rubbed ash into her cut to stop the bleeding. James—Flint—whatever name he wore—shifted his weight to take pain off his ribs and counted his breath as if it were coin he meant to spend wisely.
"Lasair agus luath," she said to herself, very softly—flame and ash.
He looked toward her across the dark as if he had heard it, and something like the beginning of a life moved between them: not a promise, not yet, but a purpose with hands.
And the night settled its old, salt-heavy cloak around the camp, and they waited for morning with steel and with work.