Flame and Ash
The weather turned traitor first.
A nor'easter came down the long back of the North Sea and shouldered the coast all afternoon, driving a dry, knife-edged wind into every seam of cloth and shed. By twilight it swung round sharp and hot as a bellows, sucking sparks from peat and kelp like a thief's fingers in a purse. Flames that usually lay low and dutiful over the pits began to reach. Agnes felt it in her teeth—the way a pan's heat changed pitch when the air turned greedy.
"Bank it," she called. "Slow the draw. No hero fires tonight."
Men dropped peat to ash, girls smothered flares with wet sacks, boys fetched brine to damp the kiln mouths. Flint walked the lanes between pans, hand out, palm-down—an old soldier's signal to lower everything: voices, flames, fear.
The wind licked his face and tasted of trouble.
Colin Keith chose that hour. Of course he did.
They saw the first sign as a line of orange crawling along the far kelp ridge—a fox-fire running, unnatural in its speed. Then came the smell: tar, not peat; lamp oil, not driftwood. Agnes's head snapped toward the storage sheds just as two points of light sprang up at once—one at the stacked ropes of dried weed, another at the coopers' barrels where brine waited its turn.
"Fire," she said, not shouting, because panic was tinder. "Two teams. Ewan—east stack, now. Seoras—barrels. Buckets to both. No one runs alone."
The camp moved in practiced stutters. Poles levered tar barrels to roll; sacking hit flames; water went where it ought. But the wind did not belong to them. It drove the little fires forward like generals driving boys.
Shadows broke off the night and congealed into men. Hirelings first, running noisy and eager to put a toe on the ladder of a reputation. Then steadier shapes, muskets up, blades low, faces blacked with soot. Keith himself came last, walking as if the ground belonged to him and would be returned in the morning if it misbehaved tonight.
Flint had been standing with the seam at his back, where the sheds made their bad geometry into a narrow throat a single man could hold. He saw at once what Keith meant: stretch the Craiks thin with flame, stab where they thinnest, and let the wind do the rest. Clever. Ugly.
"Hold the seam," he told Tam and Jock. "Targe high. Don't chase. Make them pay the step."
"And you?" Tam's voice cracked despite himself.
"I'll buy you the first two breaths," Flint said, and moved.
He went for the brighter fire first—the kelp stack. An ember blew into his face; he blinked it out without breaking stride. He seized a hook from a boy's hands, jammed it under the bottom of the stack, and heaved. The topmost ropes sloughed off like a snake shedding skin. They hit the shingle; boys with poles shoved them into the shallows where waves punched their small fires flat.
A figure came at him through the smoke—a hard man with a hanger and a slow smile. Flint recognized him as someone Colin trusted to reach a point alone. They touched steel once, twice. The man cut for Flint's forearm and found leather where he wanted blood; Flint cut for the wrist and took it. The hanger clanged on stone. The man laughed once, then Flint's targe put him down among the weed.
At the barrel fire Seoras was doing everything right and still losing ground. Oil had got under a barrel and taken; the flames tasted salt and wanted more. Agnes slid in with a sack, brine-heavy, and smothered the bright mouth. A shot cracked; splinters jumped from the staves an inch from her cheek. She didn't flinch—didn't have time to learn how. She dropped, rolled, came up with a cooper's adze and sent it end-over into the dark. Someone swore and stopped shooting.
Keith's steady men pressed then. The fight became a map of small, vicious truths: a shovel rim taking teeth; a boot breaking the hinge of a knee; a pole knocking a burning rope sideways so it fed water and not air. Flint worked where the work was worst, his big blade in half-strokes to save space, the targe lying and guiding and bruising in the same breath. Every time he thought he had bought them a pace, the cough came like a debtor, hands out. He gave it nothing he could help.
"Anail," Agnes snapped when she reached him—breathe—no gentleness in it, just command. He obeyed. In. Out. Count. The world steadied enough to strike again.
Colin came at last. Not to the seam—he was too canny to walk into another man's geometry—but to the edge of the east pit, where the wall's low lip gave him leverage and the smoke gave him cover. Agnes saw him and went to meet him because it mattered; she would not let her folk see a man stride like that and not be stopped.
They met in three clean beats: cut, turn, bind; break, step, answer. Keith had the better schooling; Agnes had the better ground. She used the pan's iron rim the way a fleet captain uses a shoal. He nearly walked into it once; he filed the lesson and smiled as if he liked her for giving it.
"You could sell to me and sleep," he said between strikes.
"I was a farmer's daughter," she said. "I've slept through worse."
He gave a short, ugly laugh and came on harder. She let him, long enough to pull him past his footing, then gave him the lower edge of the rim—not to cut, to teach. His shin barked against iron. He drew breath through his teeth. The next cut he gave her was for that; it nicked her shoulder and burned like insult.
At the seam, Tam did exactly what Flint had told him and still got hit. A blade skidded under his targe and opened his thigh enough to water the stones. He folded from the pain, not from the cut. Jock stepped into his place without looking; that one would make a good man if someone kept him alive to be one. Flint took a step forward that felt like a mile and put the attacker down with an economy that would have been elegant if it hadn't been murder.
The wind shifted on a moan and drove the biggest flame sideways—straight toward the full pans. If the fire took the brine hard it would spit like a devil and make steam thick enough to blind a line. The hirelings saw it and whooped. Agnes swore a word sailors reserve for weather and kicked the nearest tar barrel with both feet. It rolled perfectly, like a barrel loves to do when it smells trouble. Ewan and Seoras were there as Flint had told them, poles ready. They nudged it into a curl that trapped the flame against wet earth. The fire climbed, found nothing, thought about it, and went out.
Keith's men faltered. Their leader saw it and narrowed his eyes. "Again," he said, quiet as a man asking for salt at table.
They came again. The camp met them with less grace and more anger. Flint's arms shook now; every blow cost a breath he did not have. He bled at the ribs and the forearm and from the place the cough had scoured. Still he moved. The targe lied for him when his body could not. Wear it, don't hold it, he had told the boys; now he wore it like a second will.
A heavy man with a boat hook—perhaps the same giant from yesterday with blood cleaned and pride patched—came for Flint's middle. The hook snared the leather rim and ripped. Flint stepped toward the pull instead of away and turned, shoulder down, which took the man's arms across himself and opened his belly for the dirk. The cut was short and obscene. Flint stepped back on instinct and let the man go to his knees like a felled tree.
Agnes had no time to be horrified or impressed; a pistol fired by her ear and made a day-long ring she would notice only when the quiet returned. She brought the short sword up and bit a wrist. The pistol fell and went off into the mud, a stupid puff. She stamped it deeper for luck.
"Craik!" someone howled from the weed ridge—panic, not a call. She spared a look. The second stack had flared in a gust. She pointed with her blade and three people she trusted peeled away as if they had meant to all along. That was the secret: decide before the deciding.
Keith and Flint reached each other through a ragged cloth of men.
They did not salute. They did not name. They set steel and tried to end one another because it would end the work.
Keith cut low, quick; Flint caught it on iron; pain rang his shoulder to the neck. Flint feinted with the targe, found no purchase, took a neat scratch on the cheek that would trouble him in shaving if he lived to see a razor again. He answered with a downstroke that turned midair into a bind; Keith took it… almost. They locked long blades and leaned. Flint felt the man's strength like a pressure change. Colin felt the tremor in Flint's arms and the fever in his breath. Their eyes met. The wind took smoke between them and made a veil. The cough rose like a tide under a door.
Agnes saw the moment and made the small, low, ungentle choice that a living camp requires. She scooped a pan ladle of brine and flung it sideways—not at men, at steel. The salt hit hot blades and flashed steam into faces. Keith jerked back first and saved his eyes. Flint used the half heartbeat to step off the line he'd been losing and turn the targe into the base of a skull that deserved more punishment than it got. Colin went to one knee, then up again on anger and training.
"You fight like a kitchen," he spat, and meant it as praise and contempt both.
"I keep people fed," she said, and meant it as explanation and threat both.
He laughed once in disbelief, then did the only sensible thing left: he pulled his men out before fire or fatigue broke them. "Enough," he snapped, and made the sign with his hand that means go home angry and alive. They obeyed because he had not let them make a habit of dying for the look of it.
The hirelings fled in every direction and tripped on every hazard the Craiks had built into the day; the steady men went in twos, carrying those who could not walk. Keith backed away eyes on Agnes and Flint, memorising. He tapped two fingers to his brow—a soldier's acknowledgement of a problem not yet solved—and was gone into the smoke and the hiss.
The fire did not go at once. Fires never do. They argue with the wet and the wind and a woman's will. In the end the wet, wind, and will won.
Silence came in tatters. Then came the counting—names first, then fingers, then stores. Always in that order. Agnes would rather have lost salt than men; salt grows back. Men do not.
"No dead!" Ewan called, and it wasn't boasting; it was wonder. "God's mercy, no dead."
"Don't waste it," Agnes said, too sharp because the relief made her shake. She turned to hide the tremor in her hands with work.
Flint had held upright with a series of small, stubborn decisions; he ran out of decisions. He sat suddenly, as if the world had snatched a stool from under him. The cough came, a tearing as if something meant to leave his chest by the shortest road. The cloth bloomed red, then dark. For a breath two, three men looked at him with the helplessness that starts a panic. Agnes saw it and was there before it could multiply.
"Eyes on me," she barked at the onlookers. "Count: One. Two. Three. Pan three needs skimming before it sets wrong. Go."
They went. The work caught them the way a song catches boys.
She knelt beside Flint. Blood stained the beard at the corner of his mouth; sweat shone along his hairline despite the cold. She set one hand to the back of his neck—warm, firm, anchoring—and the other flat on his breastbone.
"Anail a-steach," she said. "A-mach." In. Out. Her palm rose and fell with his ribs until the rhythm sorted. She did not tell him he would live. She lent him the action of living and let him do the promising.
The fit passed. He shut his eyes and sat very still, the way a man does when moving will spill what little is in the cup.
"You should have left me," he managed.
"I don't leave men where they'll make more work later," she said, which was as close as she could afford to gentleness.
His mouth made the beginning of a smile and then forgot how. He looked at her hand still on his breastbone. It stayed. She did not take it back until he looked away.
"Lasair agus luath," she said softly, half to herself. Flame and ash. "They think burning makes us less. We'll make it more."
He nodded once. "You make a weapon of what kills you," he said. "Common wisdom in my trade."
"What was your trade," she asked, "before dying?"
"Ships." He coughed a laugh. "And fighting. In both, a hull leaks if you don't watch it."
"Then watch," she said, standing. "I have to see what we've got left before the next bright fool shows up with a torch."
He tilted his head in something like respect. "Go," he said.
She went. He watched. The kelp that had not burned would dry again. The salt they had saved would sell. The barrels would be charred but sound. The people—the people moved. That was the only line that mattered.
When she came back with the ledger in her head rewritten, he was on his feet again, grey around the mouth but vertical and in his place in the seam because his mind refused to let his body make him a liar. She did not thank him for not dying. He did not apologize for almost doing it.
"Tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow," he answered.
And for once, both believed there would be one.