Embers of Purpose
By morning the camp moved to Flint's cadence without anyone saying so. The wind came in clean and cold from the sea; the pans steamed; the kelp pits smouldered a patient, workman's fire. Agnes walked the line with her ledger brain on, hands everywhere at once—checking a girl's bandage, testing brine with the tip of her tongue, lifting a boy's chin to make him look her in the eye when he answered. Flint shadowed her, saying little, pointing often.
"Not like that. Keep your wrist easy… aye, the two fingers hardest; the rest follow."
"Wear the targe. Don't hold it."
"Count breaths. One… two… three… breathe between men, not during one."
He broke the boys into pairs. Ewan faced Tam; Jock faced Seoras. They moved in short bursts until heat rose under their shirts despite the cold. Flint slipped through them, a correction here, a knuckle tap there, a nod rarer than fine coin.
He brought musket discipline like a new craft to the pans. "Prime dry. Always. If rain, keep a scrap of oilskin for pan and frizzen." He showed them how to tilt the lock and strike the flint just enough to shave spark without breaking the edge. He knapped a dull flint on the heel of his dirk until it threw clean stars again. "Half-cock safe. Full-cock for fear and for killing. Don't confuse them."
A boy asked why he tied his priming horn with a bit of red thread. Flint paused, as if hearing a voice far off, then said, "So I can find it in the dark with wet hands," and left it there.
He made them load and fire in slow time: "Powder. Wadding. Ball. Wadding. Ram. Prime." Again, until the rhythm felt like breath, not a trick. He set the line two paces back from the pans, made them shoot not at driftwood but at a mark chalked on the salted wall of a shed. "Don't aim at a man," he said. "Aim at the place you mean him to stop moving. Waist—less bone to turn a ball. Or the meat and hinge of a shoulder." This he said like someone who had counted such things too often.
Agnes watched him turn her workfolk into a line. She did not pretend they were soldiers—they had pans to tend, weed to cut, mouths to feed—but in the spaces between, in the seams of the day, he stitched in a new habit: stand together; breathe together; strike with purpose or not at all.
When the cough took him mid-drill—a tearing that bent him double and spattered red on the back of his hand—he waited it out with the stubbornness of a man refusing to be seen on his knees. Agnes stood as if considering the wind, which is to say she looked at him without staring and waited without throwing him the coin of pity.
When he straightened, she nodded at the line. "Again."
They did.
At low tide the Craiks cut kelp. They moved like gleaners on a battlefield—bent, methodical, knowing the tide's clock better than any church bell. Agnes set the pattern: women and boys cut; men hauled. Flint waded in with them to show he knew the difference between command and work. The cold ate at his legs to the bone, but he said nothing. He cut clean near the holdfast, left enough that the weed would grow back the next season. "Harvest, don't strip," he told a lad. "Nothing keeps if you take it all."
They carried the wet ropes up to the stone dykes to dry, flipping them with long hooks so wind and sun could do their part. Flint watched how the weed darkened, how the iodine tang grew strong, the smell like a promise and a threat. When at last the strands were ready, they forked them into the kilns. The slow burn began: low, smoky, a controlled smother that rendered weed to white ash the merchants called kelp but Agnes called coin.
"Keep the draw even," Flint told a man eager with the fork. "If it flares, you're not burning—only showing off."
Agnes heard him and hid a smile.
He walked the salt side, too. He tested brine with a pinched finger; he skimmed the crystals forming along the pan's lip. "Don't boil like rage," he told a girl tending the fire. "Simmer like patience. Salt's work is time." She nodded as if he'd given her a poem.
At noon Agnes brought him a bowl of fish stew too hot to gulp, too precious to leave. He stood with the bowl steaming in his hands, wind trying to steal the heat. When he finished, she offered a small tin of black—dulse scraped and dried—saltier than any talk. He took a pinch, chewed, and for the first time since she'd met him, made a face that meant pleasure.
"You've sea in your mouth," she said. He grunted assent. The corner of her mouth lifted.
The Keiths came testing again at dusk with two small fires set far apart—fox-work, meant to pull the Craiks in two. Flint had already set wet sacking and buckets along the lines. He put old men and girls to the water chain, not to the blade. He placed the strongest men where the flames could run if they were not taught humility. Agnes took the fast crew and went for the east fire; Flint took the western and prepared to greet the men who always skulk behind flames with steel in their teeth.
He built a choke with tar barrels laid on their sides. "If the fire takes—kick and roll," he told Ewan. "Fire wants up and out. Give it sideways and down." He set two lads with poles to nudge a barrel if heat pushed too hard. "Don't be heroes," he said. "Be useful."
The thugs came with clubs in their sleeves and bravado in their voices. They weren't Keiths proper—hirelings who'd take coin from any hand that threw it. Their leader wore a cocked hat at a stupid angle and kept his powder dry by keeping other men between him and actual work. Flint disliked him on sight.
He waited until the men had to choose between stepping into the light of the fire or staying in the dark where they could not see the ground. When they stepped into the light, the targe met the first man's teeth. The claymore met the second's club and decided it would be three inches shorter for the rest of its unhappy life.
A shot cracked from the dark. Sparks flew from Flint's targe. He felt the shock up his arm to his jaw. He shoved the iron boss into a stomach and turned it into air, then closed on the man with the cocked hat. The fellow tried to hedge out, swinging wide with a hanger. Flint let the hanger skid along the rim of the shield until it bit leather, then trapped it with the strap and twisted. The man's wrist gave with a noise like wet sticks snapping. He yelped. Flint used the dirk to make sure he'd remember not to come again soon. The man folded with much drama. Flint spared him no more thought.
By the time Agnes returned the east fire was smothered; the west lay hissing under wet sacking. The hirelings ran for the dark like rabbits who'd learned what a snare was. Agnes flicked ash off her sleeve and looked at Flint.
"You make a lesson of a night," she said.
"I prefer men learn from other men's bones," he answered.
"Kind," she said dryly.
"Practical," he corrected, and she did him the courtesy of nodding.
They counted—always the count. Then they reset everything they had moved and made the night strong again with buckets and poles.
When the camp settled and the wind pressed its cold face against their little circle of heat, Agnes brought him a flask. "You'll not sleep," she said.
"Not yet," he agreed.
"Then stand with me and pretend." She tilted the flask toward the seam. He took the watch with her.
They walked the line together, boots quiet on salted boards, breaths steaming like small ghosts. The sea's voice filled the spaces between words. When they spoke, it was like laying a hand on a wound to see if it still bled.
"You knew the Gunn way," she said at last, not a question, only a naming.
He watched the black water. "I knew a way that worked where law did not."
She left the name where he had left it. "I've no love for law that can't tell a hand blister from a thief's knife," she said. "But the Keiths are not law either. They are only men with coin and cousins."
"The worst kind," he said. A cough shook him; he strangled it to a growl, wiped his mouth. "Cousins forget the old debts slower than enemies do."
"And old songs last longer than both," she said.
He glanced at her. "You sing?"
"I count. That's the wife of singing." She slowed them to a stop under the lee of the drying-barn. Wind battered the far side and came through the gaps as a breathing. "I had a brother," she said, tone level like a woman talking to a book-keeper. "He died in a pit in Orkney working some laird's coal because there was coin for seven mouths and none for eight. So I hold these pans with both hands. And if the Keiths do not like it, they can come and tell my brother their better plan."
Flint stood very still. "I had brothers," he said, and that was all, but it was enough. She turned her head and saw the shape of a field in his face, and a day that had chopped the world into before and after.
"Then we will hold," she said.
"Aye," he said.
They finished the night like that: a compact written in frost, sealed with work. The dawn, when it came grey and stingy, found them both still on their feet and the pans steaming like beasts that had decided to live another day.
The Keiths' Shadow
They came as promised, with a leader who knew the value of salt and weed, and the value of fear. He gave his name without flinching when Agnes asked it.
"Colin Keith," he said. Not a title, not a place—just the clan and a man. He wore his coat plain, his boots good, his eyes better. The red-black strip of tartan at his wrist said he knew his own history and did not apologize for it.
"Agnes Craik," she said back, and left out anything more. Names cost.
They stood with a strip of trampled heather between and half a dozen paces of air holding years of old songs.
"I can take what I want," Keith said quietly. "But it costs me men and time. You'd be cheaper to buy. I'll let you work. I'll pay you fair. Two-thirds what the market will, but regular. I'll keep the law from worrying your door."
"I already have regular," she answered, just as quiet. "I sell to merchants who can count. I keep my own door. And the law knows how to find us if it means to."
He smiled without softness. "You've a man here who makes you brave."
She did not look at Flint. "I have work that makes me tired. That makes me short with thieves."
Keith's smile turned smaller. "You are a woman in a place men won't forgive you for holding."
"I am a Craik on Craik ground," she said, and the men behind her breathed in a hair prouder.
Keith's gaze flicked to Flint, weighing. "You. I know the shape of you," he said. "I've seen your work on fields where names were buried."
Flint let the words land and thud. "Names were buried," he said. "Yours and mine both."
Keith nodded once. "Then we'll speak plain. If I find you alone between here and Clyth, I'll put a ball through your head because it will make my work easier. If you find me alone, you'll do me the same favour. Until then, we make our men die in groups and pretend it's for God."
The cold honesty of it almost made Agnes laugh. Almost. "Until then," she said, like iron.
Keith gave a small bow—respect, not capitulation—and stepped back. His men moved with him like a thought going out of a room.
The fight did not start there. It started two hours later when a boy carrying brine from the shore to a pan took an arrow through his calf and went down screaming in salt. That was Keith's courtesy: he'd not stoop to a shot from behind his hand, but he'd let his younger men teach panic with a bow.
Agnes didn't panic. She whistled and the world clicked. Two girls took the boy, one for shoulder, one for thigh, and dragged him backward, talking the whole time so he wouldn't hear his own scream. "You're fine, Seoras. It's a scratch. You'll boast of it till I'm sick of your mouth." The words didn't need to be true, only to fill the air.
Flint went looking for the archer with his eyes. He found the line of shadow in the gorse where a man had flinched at his own deed and left movement behind. He raised the musket, sighted for where breath lifts a shoulder before a second shot, and fired. The gorse thrashed. Ewan whooped, forgot himself, and popped up to see his own ball. Flint's hand hit his shoulder hard enough to say No without words. A shot plucked heather where Ewan's head had been. Ewan breathed again because someone had counted for him when he'd lost the number.
Then the press came—a push at the south fence where yesterday had been soft, another at the seam he'd taught them was good to hold—Keith learning from the night as any decent enemy will. Flint took the seam; Agnes took the south fence.
Her side was ugly at once. The fence wasn't meant for men; it was meant for sheep. It gave under weight. She let it. When it sagged, it dumped two Keiths into the drain runnel she'd had men dig at dawn. It was full of brine, stinking, cold. They went face-first and came out blind, gagging. She knocked one back in with the flat of her sword and stabbed the other in the meat of the buttock because dead men are lawsuits and hurt men are warnings. He howled. Good. Sound travels better than sense.
Keith pressed the seam with his steady men—two first, then three, then two more. Flint's lungs were at war with him; he rationed himself like powder. He used the targe to make small lies the body believed. A heel catch here, a shoulder bump there. He let the claymore fall only when it could not be argued with. He felt his palms begin to slip on the leather and readjusted before the thought became a cut.
A knife slid for his belly. The targe caught it and turned it and the man who had sent it. Flint drove his forehead into the man's nose and felt the cartilage go greasy. The world had narrowed to breath and edges, to the place a foot was and the choice of where to put one's own next.
The cough came like a thief, sudden and mean. He forced it into a growl and turned the movement into a shoulder that put a man off his balance. A blade kissed his ribs and laid down a burning line. He ignored it because the body will forgive you an inch if you don't make a speech about it, and took the man's wrist instead. The dirk whispered a warning behind the big blade's shout.
At the fence, Agnes saw Keith himself step in to fix what his men couldn't. She met him because it mattered that she did. He was better than her in the book ways of the sword, but she had a pan rim to use and he didn't. She hooked her heel and brought him almost down—enough to remember. He gave her a neat cut on the sleeve to show he knew where she was and could find it again.
"You'll tire," he said conversationally over the clash. "Work and war both cost."
"Then bring a purse," she said, and knocked his blade aside with something close to flare and hated herself for it.
He laughed, short and surprised, and cut for her head. She ducked and felt the wind of it part hair at her crown. Cold and anger made a good broth in her belly. She kicked his shin hard. He swore like a man, not a chief, and stepped back and called two names she filed away for future trouble.
Flint's line bent. He saw it before it felt it. "Leum!" he barked—Jump!—and the boys made space without thinking why. He filled it with the weight of the claymore even as his lungs burned their complaint into the back of his teeth. The men across from him had no room for the blade and learned a bad truth. One went down, the other went backwards, saved by the man behind him being in the way.
"Dùin!" Agnes shouted—Close!—and the fence line took a step that felt like a mile to the man on the wrong side. "Cùm an loidhne!" Hold the line! The words made a wall a fence never could.
Keith pulled his men out before they broke. He did it clean—no tangle, no pride-drunk last charges. He nodded once to Agnes, once to Flint, as if making a note in a ledger column: cost; return; risk.
"We'll come again," he said. Not a threat. A calendar entry.
"We'll be here," Agnes said.
He looked at Flint. "You'll not be here long," he said softly, eyes taking in the fever sheen, the red cloth, the slimness of the hands around the hilt. "The sea takes the strong and leaves the stubborn. Which are you?"
"Both," Flint said, and would have smiled if such things didn't cost air he had other uses for.
Keith's mouth tucked at one corner. "Try living, then," he said, and turned away like a man who had said something decent and would deny it to the death.
They had three wounded—Seoras with an arrow out and salt in, cursing and grinning through tears; a man with a forearm slashed to cord, blood slicking to the elbow; a girl with a cut along the ribs that would weep and itch and make her swear for a week. No dead. They would have dead tomorrow. Agnes did not pretend otherwise. But not today. She tied up what could be tied, poured whisky where whisky did more good than courage, wiped her knife on her apron and then on a rag because you don't wipe knives on aprons and forget, and stood to face the work that never asked if you were tired.
Flint found a corner with wind off his face and spat red until the cough released him. He pressed his palm to his ribs and felt the warmth there that meant trouble later. He closed his eyes until the world stopped spinning, then opened them before anyone could tell him to lie down.
Agnes came and stood close without touching. "You've bled enough for one day," she said.
"I have breath for two," he said. It was almost a jest. She didn't smile. Not yet.
"You'll sit," she said in the voice that moved salt. He sat.
She knelt and cut his shirt clean with a small knife she carried for bread and worse. The cut along his ribs looked like a line someone had begun in ink and forgotten to finish. She cleaned it with brine. He hissed, then breathed slow, controlling the noise as if it could be a signal to enemies. She bound it in linen. Her hands were warm despite the wind. Up close she smelled of smoke and sea and the animal, metallic tang of clean blood.
"You should have told me you were dying," she said without looking up.
"I didn't know I owed you that truth," he answered, not unkindly.
"You don't," she said. "But I will say this: if you mean to die, don't do it here where I have work. If you mean to live, breathe when I tell you and drink when I hand you the cup."
He looked at her and saw no softness in it, only an iron that had chosen him for the task in hand: breathing. He obeyed.
"Anail a-steach," she said—breathe in. "A-mach." Out. The words came slower, like tide on a day the wind couldn't make up its mind. He found the rhythm because she lent him hers.
When it smoothed, she sat back on her heels and looked at him the way she had looked at the salt: a problem she could keep from spoiling with attention and time.
"You ask for nothing," she said.
"I have taken enough," he answered.
"What did you take?" she asked, not expecting an answer.
"My name," he said finally, and watched her not flinch.
"Keep it until you can afford to spend it," she said. "Names are dearer than coin just now."
He nodded. "Aye."
"And when you do spend it," she added, quiet, "spend it here."
He turned his head slightly. The sea was a grey muscle flexing under a sky that couldn't decide between rain and light. The pans hissed. The ash glowed dull. The camp breathed.
"Here," he said.
That night the wind dropped and the stars showed themselves like nails knocked into the dark. The camp ate bread with kelp butter and fish pulled from the rocks by boys who had learned to use quiet legs. Agnes poured a measured whisky for each adult—the same for all, her glass no fuller than a man's—and stood with her back to the fire so the heat could make a wall between her spine and what she had to say.
"We held," she said. "We'll hold again. We'll cut weed in the morning and burn it and boil brine until our arms shake. We'll mend nets, fix shoes, and if a man comes to your door with a warrant, you'll give him a chair and water and send for me." A murmur; a small laugh. The dangerous part was the laugh: comfort breeds carelessness. She did not let it grow. "We will not boast of today in the taverns. We will not tell the names of men we fought. We will not teach our children that bleeding is a game. We will put tools back where they belong. Do you hear me, Ewan?" The boy blushed and nodded, grinning. "Good. Sleep, those who can. Watch, those who can't."
She handed Flint his measure. He took it and let it sit on his tongue. The coughing waited for him like a dog, but for a minute it did not come. The whisky made a clean heat down his throat where the dirty one usually lived.
"Lasair agus luath," she said, a toast and a spell in one—flame and ash. "We make both. We endure both."
"Lasair agus luath," he echoed.
Her eyes caught the fire and returned it. For a moment the whole camp narrowed to the distance between them, which was the width of a flame's breath and a man's decision.
She broke it. "You teach them again at dawn," she said.
"Aye," he said.
"And you will rest now," she added in the tone a cliff uses when it says no further.
He almost argued. The cough beat him to it. He bowed to it and to her. "Two hours," he bargained.
"Three," she said, as if it cost her nothing, and walked away to count pans and hurt.
He lay with his back to the bank and listened to the pans tick as they cooled, to the sea's old story, to the small noises a camp makes when it refuses to die. He pressed a hand to the bandage at his ribs and felt pain like a lit cord. He thought of Colin Keith's eyes; he thought of Agnes's hand on his breath; he thought of a hill on a field and a father's last command. He watched a star fall into the dark and did not make a wish. Wishes were for men with time. Purpose was for men with hours. He had hours.
"Airson na beò," he whispered. For the living.
In the dark, a woman who had taught herself not to pray said the same words without knowing he had said them too. The sea heard both. The sea keeps such things.
They did it all again in the morning, and again after that: cut, burn, boil; drill, count, hold. Keith tested. The hirelings tried a cheap trick and were punished with bruises and shame. The steady men learned and taught back and made the work costly. Flint bled a little new each day and healed a little older each night. Agnes spent her reckoning on salt and men and found she could earn both back by noon if she kept the sums honest.
By the week's end Colin Keith stopped sending boys and came himself with a dozen who'd taken orders before. He stayed just far enough to pretend he meant to talk, and then he didn't talk, and the pans sang their angry song of steam and steel.
The fight that day would take telling by itself: the way Flint used a coil of wet rope as a weapon to turn a blade and pull a man into a fall; the way Agnes feinted with a basket and made a man look and then fed him the rim of a pan as instruction; the way Ewan took a cut and did not run and won himself a man's praise spoken as a grunt that made him taller; the way Keith and Flint touched steel three separate times and came away with new arithmetic in their eyes.
And afterward, when the camp lay panting and the sea looked at them as if amused by their small, loud business, Agnes set her hand on Flint's wrist—the wrist, not the shoulder, not the heart—and felt the pulse still there like a hammer that had refused to be laid down.
"Tomorrow," she said.
He nodded. "Tomorrow."
The word was small, but it lit. Flame. Ash. The work of the living.