The Wick Council Fractures
The Door and the Wolves
The door to the council chamber had swollen with damp and salt; every time it opened or closed it gave a wooden groan like a wounded thing. Men drifted in the passage beyond—Keith's veterans in sun-faded tartans, a handful of Lowland hirelings in greys and browns, two of Robert's clerks with ink on their cuffs—each man pretending not to listen and each one failing. Word ran down the stair and through the common room with the ease of spilled ale: one last campaign. The phrase changed as it passed from mouth to mouth, acquiring teeth and claws. By the time it reached the stable-yard it had become the last—final, absolute, either glory or ruin.
Inside, the fire drooped and flared by turns, as if deciding whether to burn or sulk. Robert reopened his ledger as a priest might reopen a psalter after a blasphemy. He made a show of writing a line—nothing but the date—and then set his quill aside again, fingertips resting on the vellum like a man feeling for a pulse.
Keith shifted his weight and let his palm settle on the crossguard of his claymore; it was not a threat so much as a habit, old as his sinews. Margaret reclined as if in a salon, the back of one knuckle grazing the string of pearls at her throat with idle, deliberate decadence.
"Terms," Robert said at last, and the word tasted like iron. "If we are to proceed with… decisiveness, there must be terms."
"Terms?" Keith's mouth twitched. "Steel makes its own."
"Steel without supply is theatre," Robert answered. "We will set the day, the hour, the ground. We will ensure the ferries are closed to them, that no boats along the Wick and Thurso coast take Craik casks. We will serve writs in Caithness and Sutherland—impoundment for unpaid duties. Their allies will find themselves cautious. We narrow their throat, then you cut it."
Margaret's eyes glittered. "And I choose the knife."
"No," Keith said, the refusal quiet and absolute. "You do not set my hand. You do not set my men. You do not breathe on my whetstone."
She smiled as if he had paid her a compliment. "Then I shall only choose the audience."
Robert's jaw hardened. "You will choose nothing that makes this harder."
"Harder?" She laughed softly. "You fear the hardness now?"
Keith stepped closer to the table, and the fire threw his shadow long across the ledgers. "Listen, Sinclair. We march when my scouts return. I'll choose the ground—high, with a burn to one flank and bog to the other. He's a Highlander; he'll meet us there. He won't skulk like a fox when his people watch. He'll stand. When he stands, I break him. That is your arithmetic."
Robert nodded once, businesslike. "So be it. Name your numbers."
"Four score and ten," Keith said. "I can muster that without scraping the bottom to splinters. Fifty with muskets, twenty pikes, the rest claymores and dirks. Two dozen targes worth the name. And I'll want your powder—three barrels—and ball to match."
Robert made a quick calculation visible even through the mask of control. "You shall have two." At Keith's glance he added, "Because we shall bring a reserve, and because the loss of a barrel to the sea is the sort of waste that ruins campaigns."
Margaret drew a neat crescent in a drift of ash on the table's edge. "And what of the woman?"
Keith didn't look at her. "What of her."
"She dies first," Margaret said lightly, as if ordering a course from a supper menu. "Or second, if that makes your sense of honour feel more balanced."
Keith smiled without humour. "You think she is garnish and not the meat. You have not watched her hold a line with a shovel and a word."
"Then let me watch closer," Margaret said. "Close enough to touch."
Robert's hand cut the air. "You will not be on the line. You will not be within musket range. You will be where you cannot unsettle a single man with your presence."
"My presence unsettles only cowards," she said, but she accepted a cup of wine from the page with such queenly calm that for a moment even Keith had to respect the poise.
Outside the Door
On the stair, Bain leaned into the shadow of the newel post, the scar at his jaw white as chalk. Rory hovered half a step down, eyes like lamps, listening with the desperate thoroughness of the very young.
"What did I tell you?" Bain murmured. "Storm's coming. Last campaign." He rolled the phrase on his tongue. "Last—like it's a promise God keeps."
Rory swallowed. "He'll kill us," he whispered. "Gunn. Or the woman will. She looked at me once across the water and I felt… I felt my bones empty."
Bain's grin showed a fox's friendliness. "Then fill them with silver."
"Captain'll gut you if he hears."
"Captain needs me more than I need him," Bain said carelessly, but the way he turned his shoulder to hide the purse Margaret had given him suggested his certainty wasn't total.
Two of Keith's older men, Davie Kerr and a bow-legged farmer called Murdoch, shouldered past, each giving Bain the long, unimpressed look of veterans for whom swagger was a language they no longer spoke.
"Back to your cups," Kerr said. "Leave war to men with scars."
Bain made a shallow, mocking bow. "As the elder commands."
Kerr paused, lifted a thick finger, and jabbed it twice into Bain's breastbone. "Here's the thing about the last campaign, lad. Could be last because it ends the matter. Could be last because you're in the ground. Best learn the difference before dawn picks a favourite."
He went on down. Rory exhaled shakily. Bain watched Kerr's back and calculated the price of insolence in a tally only he could see.
Private Aside
Inside, Margaret slid from her chair with feline grace. "Father," she said, soft enough that Keith, by the fire, would not hear. "Walk." It was not a request. She drifted toward the narrow window embrasure and waited.
Robert followed, jaw a rigid line. From the slit of glass Wick looked like a child's toy town in poor weather—tilted roofs, smoke, the hard glitter of the harbour.
"You undermine him, and he knows it," Robert said without preamble.
"He is a blunt instrument," Margaret returned, "and blunt instruments bruise as much as they break."
"You feed mutiny," he hissed. "I will not have it."
She turned her face to him, profile fine as a coin's queen. "You will have what wins. If Bain's knife finds her heart in a thicket while Keith bellows about honour on a hill, we save powder and men. Your ledgers should sing at the thrift."
"Enough." The word was quiet and made of granite. "You think this is a drawing-room embarrassment you can retouch with a dead girl's blood. It is not. It is a line of men with families behind them. It is a country that remembers. You make a martyr of that woman in the wrong fashion, and all the north will feed the Craiks for a generation just to spite our name."
Margaret's mouth curved; it might have been sorrow if it had not been so clean. "Then we will kill her in the right fashion."
"There is no right fashion for what you want," he said. "There is only necessary and ruinous. Do not be the ruin in my sum."
"Be careful, Father," she said, and at last there was a heat under the ice. "You speak as if you still have the right to scold me. But if I reach into that ledger and pull out the line where you bribed a judge to take a widow's house in Aberdeen, how many friends would you keep? If I whisper in Edinburgh about the cargo you insured that never existed, how many doors would open? Do not speak to me of sums. I am the sum of you."
He stared at her as if seeing a stranger in his daughter's gown. The hand that had never shaken in a dozen parliaments of merchants trembled now, a very little. "You are colder than I made you," he said.
"No," she answered. "Exactly as cold."
They returned to the table like duellists who have both counted the paces and decided that the pistols will do.
A Messenger with Mud
The door groaned again; a boy in a borrowed coat stumbled in, hat crumpled in both hands, mud up to the knees of his stockings. "Captain Keith," he blurted, seeing first the man who looked most likely to forgive clumsiness least.
Keith did not sigh because sighs are a softness, but the feeling passed across his face nevertheless. "Speak."
"From the moor above Clyth, sir. Scouts. They bid you know: the Craiks have lit beacons—three, at least—west ridge, east ridge, and the headland above Wattenan. And they drill most nights. There's a woman—" he faltered, eyeing Margaret, "—the red-haired one. She drills 'em like men."
Robert's mouth made a little moue of distaste at the mud dripping on his floorboards. "How many?"
"Hard to tell, sir. They split for work, and after it's dark. But the scouts say—" the lad's eyes slid to Keith, then to Margaret, then down again, "—they say the folk that weren't fighters are fighters now. Even bairns with slings."
Keith nodded once. The information was both old and new: old in shape, new in weight. "Return. Tell my men we muster at noon tomorrow in the yard. Tell them there will be pay and there will be blood." The boy fled, grateful to be dismissed while still made of one piece.
Margaret's smile had sharpened on the word beacons. "You see," she said, almost purring. "She wants an audience too."
Keith ignored the bait. "Beacons are messages," he said. "If you can read them."
Robert's mind translated fire to figures. "Three means confidence."
"Three means they want us to think confidence," Keith returned. "And that they have neighbours who will watch and carry tales. No matter. We will write our answer in a script fire understands."
Almost to Blood
The quarrel resumed with the inevitability of weather. Robert set down a schedule for wagons and powder. Keith redrew it with a hunter's sense for hills and gullies that do not show on tidy maps. Margaret pointed out that the one place where all their lines converged would put them in sight of the cliff path—the hidden one by the burn—where, she observed, a single musket could end a legend if placed well. Keith told her that men who planned legends with muskets usually found themselves dead of arithmetic.
It might have ended as the last dozen had, with the three of them drifting into their separate silences like boats on different currents. But Bain, restless and immune to sense, chose that moment to push the door with a boot and slide inside as if the council were a show he'd bought a ticket to.
"Captain," he said, with a salute so insolent it wrapped round into comedy. "Heard there's to be a proper piece o' work."
Keith's head turned slowly. "Get. Out."
Bain's gaze slid to Margaret, and he let his smile show its teeth. "My lady."
Keith took a single, unadorned step forward. The claymore did not lift. It did not have to. "I said: out."
Something in Keith's tone cut past Bain's bravado and sheared it off at the root. He retreated, muttering something about sharpening his dirk on Gunn's bones as if he believed it. The door thudded and the room breathed again.
Keith faced Robert without apology. "Leash your dogs," he said. "Or I will."
Robert's mouth thinned. "They are your dogs when they fight. Mine when they snatch at purses. I will not pay for insolence."
"You already pay for worse," Keith said, and the glance he dropped like a stone toward Margaret's hands said what his courtesy did not say aloud.
Her fingers, slender and clean, toyed with the pearl string. She did not blush.
The Market of Wick
The council broke to the shape of the next day. Keith would muster his men by noon; Robert would meet a factor before dawn to pry another turn from a stubborn ferryman; Margaret would—she did not say. She glided out first, and her perfume lingered under the peat reek like the memory of a kiss that had ruined a life.
Robert followed. On the stair he looked older, the lines of his face cut deeper by the knowledge that numbers sometimes fail precisely when one has built a temple to them.
Keith remained a while with the dying fire, listening to the inn's veins: the clink of mugs, the scrape of a chair, the cough of a man who had breathed too much smoke and too much war. He let the sound pass through him until his own pulse matched the building's. Then he went downstairs and out into the market.
Wick wore its winter without surprise. Fishwives haggled with hands on hips, their laughter as sharp as their knives. A pedlar held up a ribbon of a particularly vulgar red and swore it would keep a sweetheart faithful—no one believed him but two sailors bought it for the joke. A cooper hammered a hoop down onto a barrel mouth and swore with professional artistry when it slipped.
Keith walked among them and the tide of bodies parted for him, not because they loved him and not because they feared him, but because he was a large man with a sword and the posture of someone who did not sway for other people's weather.
He bought nothing. He spoke to three men: a blacksmith about repairing a targe boss, a widow about her boy who had run off to carry a pike and might, if fate proved merciful, bring it and himself back in one piece, and a priest about the burial of the last skirmish's dead. He promised nothing he could not pay, and he did not lie. Even his enemies would say that: Keith did not lie. He only chose when to speak.
On his way back he saw Bain at the stable and stopped because leaving a snake coiled is not a tactic, it is a risk.
"You enter rooms as if doors are suggestions," he said.
Bain's grin had recovered. "Some doors are."
"This one is not. On the morrow you stand in the left-hand rank. If you fall out of line by a pace—one pace—I put you in the ground with my own shovel."
Bain's eyes thinned. "You watch me, captain. Others might not."
"They'll learn by watching what happens to you," Keith said, and went on.
The Clerk and the Quill
Robert found his junior clerk asleep over a blotter and did not wake him. He poured himself a measured dram from a bottle that remembered Bordeaux badly, and stared down at the ledger as if the columns might rearrange themselves into a miracle. Numbers cannot be bullied, but sometimes they can be seduced; he tried both approaches in the space of an hour.
At last he turned a page and began a letter to an advocate in Inverness, crisp as morning frost: You will draw an interdict to be served upon all who trade with the Craiks of Clyth under pain of forfeiture. You will remind the sheriff his pension owes its health to Sinclair custom. You will arrange, discreetly, a buyer keen to purchase kettles and pans at a discount conditional upon certain mishaps. He did not write fire; he did not need to.
He sealed it, and his hand paused on the wax as a spasm ran up from the place under his ribs where, once, an injury he had not admitted even to his barber stirred in bad weather. "One last campaign," he said quietly to the empty room. Numbers are not supposed to make prophecies; nevertheless they had, and he did not like the sound of theirs.
Margaret and the Mirror
Margaret's chamber faced the harbour; she could see the masts pick at the sky like delicate pins, and hear the lifts complain as barrels rose and fell. She lit no candles; she preferred the room by window-light, the world made into black lines and dull pewter surfaces.
She stood before the mirror and regarded her own face with the lack of mercy she reserved for all things not serving her perfectly. She unhooked the pearls and let them slide into her palm. One by one she rolled them between finger and thumb and remembered the words men had said to earn the right to touch them once and never again. You are a flame.You are a queen.You are a knife stuck into my heart and twisted. They had all been true and all insufficient.
"You will be dead," she told her reflection, but it was not herself she meant. "And they will know I did it."
She sat and wrote quick, private notes with a flatter hand than she used for business, almost girlish in its loops: a promise to a cousin in Aberdeen of a future share in a shipping venture if certain men came north with certain weapons; a line to a captain who had once carried French brandy and could carry other spirits if paid enough; a brief, coded request to a surgeon with a taste for more coin than ethics. She sealed each with her own signet, a neat, disciplined ring that turned hot wax to obedience.
When she was finished she allowed herself, for the first time in months, to weep. It was not grief. It was a release of pressure that made the skull ache. She wiped her face with the back of her wrist without shame and rang for the maid.
"Have these carried," she said. "I do not care if the sea is bad. Men who are not fearless are replaceable."
"Yes, my lady," the girl whispered, and if her hands shook, Margaret did not see or did not care.
Keith's Prayer (Of a Sort)
Night took Wick in one long draught. The harbour lamps shivered and threw nettles of light on the slick water. The wind came up from the mouth of the bay with teeth in it. Keith climbed the outside stair to the loft where he slept among his men and their snoring. He did not undress. He sat on the edge of a rough pallet and unsheathed his claymore a hand's breadth, enough to see the bright line of honest work. He laid his palm flat to it. Metal keeps heat a long minute after it leaves the fire; this blade had been out of the forge for years, but it seemed warm to him anyway.
He did not pray to saints. He did not bargain with God. He spoke instead to the memory of his father's cairn and to the hill above Bruan where the snow had drunk Keith blood. "I will take the man if I can," he said, which was the same as promising to try and different from promising to succeed. "And I will not be false about it."
He slid the blade home and lay down, and sleep came like an ambush, hard and without parley.
The Last Word of Scene
In the morning the King's Arms would cough men into the yard: the old, the reckless, the hungry, the loyal; targes would shine with new oil; flints would spark; orders would crack the air. Ledgers would be sealed and letters sent down cold roads in the mouths of horses that hated the bit. A woman would pin a ribbon to her bodice and think of the colour of vengeance. And out on the cliffs, three beacons would lift their red throats to the grey and sing the only song fire knows.
For now, the council's last breath hung in the room like smoke that couldn't find a seam to escape. The pact was made, yes. But it was a pact like ice on a river—strong enough to hold until the first weight found the one place where it was thinner than it looked.
And the wolves in the hall below were already testing it with their paws.