The Oath by Firelight
They ate after midnight. It was a foolish hour, but hunger doesn't care what the clock thinks. Bread and hot broth, the kind that tastes like the bottom of a good pot—fish, onion, a scrap of oat to thicken, a blessing of salt. Someone had filched a bottle of decent whisky from somewhere and no one asked who. Agnes poured fair measures—no more, no less—into tin cups. She gave Flint one as if it weighed the same as the others. He drank as if it did.
The fire sprawled low and long, a workman's fire, no display. Sparks went up and made their short, brave flight in the dark. The pans ticked as they cooled, smug with the heat they had held and not given up. The wind had run out of arguments and sat sulking out to sea.
Conversation thinned to the bones of things: a joke from Ewan about the boat hook that would be funnier in summer; a low curse from Seoras as his stitched calf shifted; a line from old Màiri about the way the sky looks when herring think about loving your shores again. Nothing grand. The sound of a camp deciding to keep.
Agnes stood with the fire behind her and the folk in front, so her shadow cut through the lot of them like a spine. She did not speak immediately. Power often lives in the minute you don't fill with noise.
"We held," she said at last. "We'll hold tomorrow. We will not boast in the taverns. We will not waste breath on anger that could be used for cutting weed. We will make our oaths here where the fire can hear them."
There is a way Highlanders say oath that makes the word heavier than iron. Even the Lowland tongues around the fire felt it and straightened.
She turned slightly, enough that the firelight put a line along Flint's cheek and showed the blood dried there like war paint. "This man is not of us," she said, and there was a small, involuntary tightening in shoulders at truth spoken aloud. "But he stands with us. He owes us nothing. We owe him something already. I would like the owing to be even."
Flint's head came up as if someone had cocked a pistol. She hadn't asked. She had told him—and them—what the world was.
"I don't ask men to die for kelp," she went on. "I ask them to live for the ones who eat it. If you'll stand, stranger, we'll stand with you. If you'll teach, we'll learn. If the day comes when you must go, you'll go with food in your bag and a welcome at this fire if you ever come back. That's my word."
It wasn't romance. It was better. It was terms.
Flint looked at her, then at the faces—lean, wind-chapped, the eyes of people who already owned the work they did. His life had been made and unmade by men who gave and withdrew names like coin. He had been a Highland son, a ghost, a shipwright, a merchant, a husband in a house with too much silver and not enough truth. Here was a woman offering him the only currency that lasts: a place in a line.
He stepped forward enough that his boots left the shadow and stood where the fire could see him. He opened his mouth and what came out was not English.
"Airson na beò," he said. For the living.
A small sound went through the Craiks, not a cheer—cheers break things—but the release when something fits.
He added, in the plainer tongue so the whole camp would hear it true, "I'll stand with you. I'll teach what I know. I'll go if I make more work than I save." His mouth twitched at that; she answered it with a sliver of her own. "If I fall," he said, "put my blade where no thief will find it. And—" The next words cost him. He paid anyway. "—and light nothing for me that you need for your own work."
Agnes tipped her head, acknowledging the shape of the man as much as the promise. "I'll light no wasted fires," she said. "But I'll not leave a friend in the dark."
Friend. The word walked into his chest and did something he hadn't believed there was space for. He did not flinch.
Old Màiri stood and came to the gap between them, because she was the kind of woman who knows when to put hymn where work has been. She held out a twist of dried kelp bound with a thread of red wool.
"Bind it to your targe," she told him. "So the weed remembers your hand and the thread remembers your breath."
He took it with both hands. He tied it on himself, clumsy with the left because the right shook. The red looked foolish and perfect on the old iron. The camp let out another small breath.
Agnes lifted her cup. "Lasair agus luath," she said. Flame and ash.
"Lasair agus luath," they answered.
Flint drank and did not cough. For a minute.
The fire thinned. People went to pallets, to watch, to the work that doesn't wait for speeches to end. Agnes did the last round with the bucket line—checking that the water stood ready, that the sacking lay wet, that the pans were banked and would not surprise them with a lover's flare at dawn. When she turned, he was there, as if he had come without footsteps.
"You made a pledge," she said.
"I owed one," he said.
"You owe many," she said lightly. "You've paid one."
He looked at her. The wind had come down to a kind hand. The sea breathed like a big animal asleep. The ash pits glowed dull as banked rubies. Her hair burned in all of it, a private fire.
"I will tell you something true," he said, the way a man takes off a glove.
"All right," she said, steady, as if she were ready to catch whatever fell.
"I am dying," he said simply. "A doctor in Edinburgh counted it for me—years in single digits, not tens. My body tries to leave me by the mouth. It may yet succeed. I fight it. Some days I win."
She did not look surprised. "I know," she said. "I've watched men die my whole life. You have the look of those who can count the stair and still climb it."
"You'll not have me here if the count runs out," he said. "I won't die making smoke you could use."
She stepped into his space then—not so close the camp would talk, not so far the truth would feel thin—and set her palm flat on his sternum again. The same place. The same claim.
"You will do as I tell you," she said. "Breathe when I tell you. Eat when I hand you food. Sleep when I make you. Fight when I point. If your stair ends here, it ends with work finished, not with apology."
Something like a laugh and a sob made a truce in his throat. "Aye," he said, which in his mouth meant I surrender and I swear at once.
"Good," she said, and took her hand away like a miser saving a coin. "And one day, when I ask, you'll tell me who you were before you came out of the cliff."
He did not say no. He did not say yes. He looked out to where the black water and black sky argued about who owned the horizon and said, "When the work lets us."
"It never lets us," she said. "We take." Then, before he could answer, she turned and walked, because one more word would have cost her too much sleep.
He watched until she was a piece of the firelight, then a piece of the dark, then nothing but a set of decisions returning to their circles.
He pressed two fingers to the red thread on his targe and felt its cheap, astonishing promise. He lifted his head and breathed, slow and counted.
Above him a wheeling line of night birds cut a ragged "V" over the cliffs. Somewhere beyond the reach of hearing, a tide she'd told him about turned. He could not hear it, but he felt the pull in the meat of him.
"Tomorrow," he said, because the word was a weapon too.
The sea answered with the old, indifferent benediction it gives to all vows: a breath in, a breath out, forever, until it doesn't.
A Spark Between
The night after the great fire-fight, the camp lay still, every soul wrung dry. Even the gulls seemed hushed, circling lazy on the drafts above the cliff. The Craiks had worked until the last ember hissed dead, then collapsed into pallets as if the ground itself had claimed them.
Only two remained wakeful: Agnes, walking the line of pans with her ledger-brain still tallying, and Flint, seated on the low turf bank near the seam of sheds, cloak wrapped close, claymore upright in the earth beside him.
The wind blew steady and salt-sweet, cleaner than it had in days. The stars came hard and bright, cut sharp against the black sky.
Agnes came to stand beside him, the crunch of her boots on gravel the only herald. She looked out, not at him, as if she might measure the sea's account.
"You shouldn't be sitting in the cold," she said.
"You shouldn't be awake," he answered.
Her mouth curved faintly. "If we did as we should, Keith would own the pans by now."
He grunted, a small sound that might have been agreement, might have been amusement.
For a time they sat in companionable silence, watching the tide creep back over the rocks. The surf caught firelight from the camp and threw it back in red ripples, like sparks carried far out.
"You've given them something they didn't know they needed," she said at last.
"They had it," he replied. "I only reminded them."
She turned to him then, really looking, not through the eyes of command but as a woman taking the measure of a man. He was gaunt, aye—cheeks hollow, lips pale. But the dark eyes still burned. His beard was streaked with salt and flecked with blood from coughing, yet the set of his shoulders was unbowed. There was strength still there, coiled and terrible, like a claymore resting on a table—old, scarred, but not dulled.
"You see yourself as finished," she said softly. "But they see a sword risen from the grave."
He coughed then, low and wet, spitting into a kerchief already dark-stained. When he wiped his mouth, she reached and caught his wrist before he could turn away. Her hand was firm, her grip strong as any man's.
"Don't hide it," she said.
He stared at her hand on him, then at her face. "It shames them to see."
"It shames no one," she said fiercely. "It tells them you bleed, same as they do. They need that truth."
He searched her eyes a long moment, then slowly lowered the cloth, leaving the blood to dry black on his beard.
The sea filled the silence between them.