The Opening Skirmish
The March into Craik Country
The column moved out of Wick like a river of iron, slow and grinding, banners snapping in the bitter wind. Frost clung to the heather, each step crunching under leather soles. Drums thudded a grim rhythm, echoing off low hills, while the fire-cross smouldered black smoke above them.
Keith rode at the front on a massive bay horse, claymore across his back, plaid rippling with every gust. His scarred face betrayed nothing. Behind him marched his men, nearly a hundred souls: musketeers in patched coats, pikemen hunched under the weight of their ash shafts, Highlanders with targes and dirks, mercenaries lured by Sinclair silver.
Robert Sinclair kept to the flank, mounted but stiff, eyes darting between ranks, lips moving as he counted heads and losses before they even came. His ledger was strapped to the saddle, ready to capture victory in neat figures.
And Margaret—Margaret was a flame at the centre of the storm. She rode her white palfrey as if she were a queen at procession, scarlet cloak streaming, hair like fire. Men's eyes followed her, not with loyalty but with something sharper—fear mixed with awe. Some muttered prayers at her passing. Others grinned at the coin she had pressed into their palms the night before.
The road narrowed as they crossed into Craik territory. Here the land grew harsher: bare rock and thin soil, burns cutting through heather, salt spray riding the wind from the coast. Smoke rose in the distance from kelp pits, acrid and blue. It was a land that smelled of industry and survival, not wealth.
Keith raised a hand. "Eyes sharp. They know we come."
The men tightened their grips on weapons. Somewhere ahead, a raven croaked.
Hidden on the ridge above the road, Craik eyes watched every step.
Young Niall crouched in the heather, sling wound tight in his fist. His heart thumped so hard he thought it might burst. Beside him, old Davie MacIan rested his musket across a stone, calm as if waiting for a deer.
"They're coming," Niall whispered, voice cracking.
Davie spat into the frost. "Aye. And they'll bleed."
Further down the ridge, Agnes stood with her cloak drawn tight, hair whipping in the wind. Seumas was beside her, leaning on his claymore, breath rattling but eyes sharp. His cough had stained his handkerchief crimson that morning, but he hid it now.
"They'll try to break us quick," Seumas murmured. "Keith knows fear spreads faster than fire. We'll give him fear of his own."
Agnes touched his arm. "Then let it begin."
She raised her hand, and a line of Craiks shifted in the heather, muskets ready, slings wound, dirks gleaming. Smoke from beacon fires curled above them, their silent answer to Keith's horn.
First Blood
The Keiths marched into the narrow burn where the road dipped between ridges. The water trickled shallow, but the banks were steep and close. It was the perfect place for an ambush.
Seumas waited until the column's middle was in the hollow. Then he dropped his hand.
The ridge erupted. Muskets cracked, smoke billowing. Stones from slings hissed through the air, striking helmets, shattering teeth.
A Keith mercenary spun and fell, skull crushed by a rock. A pikeman staggered back, musket ball in his shoulder. Horses reared, screaming.
"Ambush!" someone bellowed.
Keith roared over the din. "Hold the line! Raise targes!"
The men braced, targes lifted, muskets aimed upward. They fired blindly into the smoke and heather. The volley cracked, echoing across the burn. One Craik lad tumbled from the ridge, chest torn open, his sling slipping from limp fingers.
Agnes flinched, but Seumas grabbed her arm. "No time for mourning. Hold them!"
He swung his claymore high, voice carrying over the smoke: "Airson na Craicich! Airson na Ghunnaich!" (For the Craiks! For the Gunns!)
The shout rolled down the ridge, and the Craiks surged with it.
The fight became chaos.
Craiks poured from the ridges, claymores and dirks flashing. Keith's men raised targes, braced pikes, and met them in the shallow burn. Water churned red with blood and mud.
Davie MacIan fired point-blank into a musketman's chest, then swung the stock like a club into another's jaw. Niall loosed his sling, stone cracking against a pikeman's temple, dropping him like a felled tree.
Seumas waded into the fray, his claymore a storm. He cut down one mercenary, spun to parry another's thrust, then drove the blade through a third. His breath rasped, his ribs screamed, but his fury carried him.
Keith himself entered the burn, claymore flashing, targed arm steady. He cut down a Craik fisher with one blow, deflected another's strike, and roared, "Come then, Gunn! Face me!"
But Seumas was already locked in combat, his eyes burning. Their duel would come, but not yet.
Agnes fought too—dagger in hand, targe on her arm. She struck at a mercenary who lunged for Seumas's back, her blade sinking into his side. Blood spurted hot across her hand, but she did not falter.
The fight raged for what felt like hours but was only minutes. Muskets emptied, dirks clashed, targes splintered. Men screamed, water splashed, steel rang.
Rory crouched behind a targe, firing wildly, tears streaking his face. "We'll all die!" he sobbed. Bain slapped him across the head. "Die like a man then!"
Margaret watched from the ridge above, her cloak billowing, eyes wide with delight. She leaned toward Bain as he stumbled back to reload. "Do you see him? The Gunn? Strike him. Strike him, and all this ends."
Bain grinned, wiping blood from his cheek. "Aye, my lady. Soon."
But in the burn, Seumas still stood. His claymore dripped red, his breath tore at his chest, yet his eyes blazed.
Agnes was at his side, dagger ready, hair wild, face streaked with blood and smoke. She shouted to her people: "Stand! They will break before we do!"
And the Craiks roared, voices shaking the ridges, stamping feet, raising blades.
At last Keith sounded the horn, sharp and short. His men began to pull back, step by step, targes guarding their retreat. The burn was littered with bodies, its water thick with red.
The Craiks jeered, shouting Gaelic curses after them. Some surged to pursue, but Seumas raised his claymore, coughing blood. "Hold! Let them carry their shame. We will need our strength again."
The Keiths staggered from the burn, dragging their dead, leaving the ground to the Craiks.
On the ridge, Margaret's smile had not dimmed. "They bleed," she whispered. "But they live. And so long as they live, so too does my vengeance."
The first clash had come. Blood stained the burn, men lay broken, cries echoed in the hills. The Keiths had not shattered, but they had not triumphed. The Craiks had held.
The storm had broken at last, and it promised only more blood on the land.
Voices of the Craiks
Eadar an Teine (Between the Fires)
Smoke drifted low over Loch Wattenan, thick with peat and kelp—blue coils that stung the eyes, clung to hair, salted tongues. The first rush of victory had already leached away into the work that always followed battle: counting the living, binding the torn, washing the dead.
Agnes moved between the longhouse and the shore like a red-haired flame, sleeves rolled, skirt kilted up, hands streaked in brown and crimson. She spoke few words, but each landed sure: "Water, Màiri… hemlock for pain, not too much… Ewan, you're steadier than you think—hold the lantern here."
Seumas stood outside by the doorpost, one shoulder to the timber, not trusting himself to sit lest rising again cost him more than he had to give. His breath rasped; every inhale felt like a knife rubbed with salt. Yet his eyes were clear, and when the frightened sought him they found the steadiness they needed.
"Tha thu beò," he told a youth blinking beneath a bandage. You are alive. "Sin fhèin na bhuaidh." That itself is a victory.
When Agnes crossed to him with a strip of linen and that look that meant, sit or I'll pin you there, he obeyed, letting her unwrap the binding at his ribs. Dark seep bled through the cloth; he tasted iron at the back of his throat.
"Bad?" he asked softly.
"Not as bad as you pretend," she lied with the mercy of those who love, and pressed fresh comfrey paste into the wound. "Hold this. Breathe shallow for a time."
He caught her wrist, rough thumb stroking the blue cord she'd tied there days past. "You kept them from breaking."
"We kept them," she said. "You bled with them; I shouted. Between us, it made a wall."
He almost smiled. "Wall of kelp and steel."
"Fiodh is teine," she returned—wood and fire—and was gone again into the smoke.
Niall's Stone
Niall crouched on the slope where he had slung stones all morning. His sling lay open across his knees, the thong damp with sweat; his fingers shook as though the stone still hummed through the air. He had struck a man. He had watched him fall, hands grabbing at nothing, mouth making an O that swallowed the sky.
Ewan found him there and sank down beside him, their shoulders touching like lads hiding from a scolding. No words for a while. Just the gulls and the salt wind and far below the thin keening from the longhouse that meant another soul had slipped.
"I hit him," Niall said at last, voice too steady.
Ewan nodded. "Aye."
"I thought I'd be sick. I wasn't." He glanced sideways, shame a stain that wouldn't scrub. "Does that make me… wrong?"
Ewan's mouth tightened. "It makes you alive. And it means when they come for our fires you'll make them pay before you die. There's no wrong in that."
Niall looked down at his sling. "My Da said stones are for birds and dogs. Not men."
"Your Da didn't see today." Ewan picked up a pebble, worried it between thumb and forefinger. "There'll be time for birds again when the wolves go back to their den."
They sat until the cold bit their bones, and then they rose, two inches older than they'd been that dawn, and went to bring driftwood for the bier.
Màiri Mhòr's Hands
Màiri Mhòr, who had birthed half the folk in the glen and shrouded most of the rest, worked at a basin with sleeves rolled to her shoulders. Her forearms were a map of old burns from pans and hearths, her knuckles swollen, nails square and clean.
She washed a dirk in hot water and ash. "Tha fuil na coirce," she muttered to the blade—blood is the oats—"ach nì sinn aran dheth," we'll make bread of it. Blessings and blasphemies interwove in her mouth until they tasted the same.
A girl no older than Niall hovered, eyes huge, cloth clutched in both hands. "The bairn's father," she whispered, gesturing toward a pallet where a man lay pale, a wad of cloth pressed to his side. "If he goes—"
"He won't," Màiri said, and then more honestly, "We'll hold him here as long as we can."
She set the clean dirk aside, took up a bundle of dried leaves, crushed them in her palm, breathed their bitter scent. "For the pain," she told the girl. "And for the fear."
"What is it?"
"Cudweed and courage." She winked. "One you can gather on the moor. The other you must grow."
Domhnall's Axe
Domhnall, the grey shepherd with a back like a bent bow, oiled the haft of his Lochaber axe with slow, reverent strokes. He had swung it that morning in water up to his shins, felt bone through the wood, watched a man's eyes go empty. Ballads were written about young lads; no songs for old men who killed because there was no one left between death and the lambing.
Agnes stopped beside him, and he half rose, then settled, because she would scold him either way. "You're needed," he said simply. It was both thanks and benediction.
"'S ann dhuibh uile a tha mi," she answered—I belong to you all—and meant it.
"You ever think the land remembers?" he asked without looking at her. "Salt pans and kelp pits and bodies in a burn. Aye, the land keeps count."
Agnes followed his gaze toward the ridge. "It remembers everything. But it forgets quicker if we plant more than we bury."
He grunted. "Then we'd best live, to be the ones who plant."
The Fisher's Widow
Màiri Beag stood at the burn's lip with her babe tucked inside her shawl. The child slept despite the din, warm with the heat of her mother's breast and the furnace of the world turning.
They had brought Iain up out of the red water. They'd laid him on a board more used to fish than husbands. Someone had closed his eyes. It made his face wrong—tidy, like a door shuttered too soon.
Agnes came, not with words, but with bread, a water horn, a fistful of heather. She touched brow to brow with the widow. "Mo chridhe ort," she whispered—my heart upon you—and the touch broke something inside Màiri that let the tears run at last.
"You'll not want for salt," Agnes said when the weeping had ebbed. "Nor for wood nor for milk. His name will be said at every dinner. And when the pans smoke for trade, a share goes to your door first. That's my word."
Màiri looked at the babe, then at the kelp fires tossing their blue braids to the sky. "Then I'll burn more weed than any woman in Caithness," she said, and there was iron under the tears.
Seumas's Shadow
The world tilted for a heartbeat and Seumas caught the doorpost hard. Agnes was there before the tilt finished—he sometimes wondered if she moved by the same law as swallows. He tasted blood and saw not Wick's men but red coats in a sleet that fell sideways.
Culloden rose around him—the long, sodden rush, the smoke that suffocated before the grapeshot did, the churned earth turning to soup under a thousand boots, the cries as men found their tongues only to lose them again. He smelled the butchered spring.
He blinked hard. Agnes's face returned, fierce and freckled. "Seumas?"
"A memory, that's all." He dragged breath into stubborn lungs. "The kind that bites."
She pressed her forehead to his. "Chan eil sinn an sin tuilleadh." We are not there anymore.
He let that truth be a plank on black water, held it, and the world steadied enough to stand upon.
"Sit," she commanded. "I'll bring broth."
"Bring the roll of names," he said. "We count our living as well as our dead."
She gave him that small smile that was not for the clan but for the man, and went.