Margaret's Plot
The tolbooth loft above Wick's square breathed heat and rancid tallow, the air so thick a sober man would stagger. Tankards rolled like dull bells across the warped planks; a deck of greasy cards lay splayed like a dead bird. Margaret Sinclair cut through it all, a blade of scarlet in a room of soot.
She didn't speak Bain's name—only let her gaze find him in the shadow where men pretended not to look. He rose, a grin already crawling up his cheek like ivy.
"Lady," he purred, dragging the whetstone along his dirk so slowly the scrape turned into a promise. "You called?"
"I thought your ears belonged to me by now," she said, stepping close enough that her breath lifted the hair at his temple. "Listen, then. Battles are theatre. I am done with theatre." Her smile thinned. "Bring me a corpse. Bring me silence."
Bain weighed her with the same eyes he used for kill-shots. "Craik?"
"Agnes first." Margaret's voice softened obscenely. "And if the Gunn steps between, break him so I can hear his bones."
He chuckled, glancing past her shoulder. Robert Sinclair was in the doorway, a ledger clutched like a shield, face colourless. "Hear that?" Bain said to no one. "Music."
Robert found his tongue. "Margaret, for the love of heaven—"
She pivoted, silk over steel. "Heaven has no business in Caithness tonight." She advanced until her father's back kissed the cold wall. "You taught me ledgers. Here's one: each day she lives, I am less. Each day he looks at her, I am erased. My arithmetic demands a sum."
Robert's voice frayed. "You mistake love for a purse to plunder. You mistake a people for a page to balance." He swallowed. "And you mistake me for a man who will watch you drown us."
Margaret's eyes glinted. "Then swim faster." She turned to Bain. "Take men who can climb a cliff in fog and not pray. Men whose names would stain a church floor."
"Three will do," Bain said. "Four if you want tidier floors."
"Choose," Margaret said. "And Bain—" She lifted a coin and let it flash, moon-bright. "No trophies. No songs. A quiet death. A letter delivered to him after."
Bain's eyebrows hopped. "A letter?"
"I'll write it tonight." Her teeth showed. "I want the ink fresh when his heart goes cold."
Bain slid the dirk home, satisfied. "I'll fetch wolves. The kind that chew bone."
As he went, Robert sagged against the lintel. "Girl," he whispered, the word cracked with a father's last currency, "do not make me your enemy."
Margaret's expression turned almost tender. She put a hand to his cheek—the same palm she used to press coin into killers' fists. "You became my enemy when you taught me that sums matter more than souls."
She left him with the stink of tallow and terror.
Robert's Despair
He fled to stone and silence. The kirk door bit his palm like a winter latch; inside, shadows folded him in. Father Alasdair was banking embers, breath pluming faintly in the nave.
"You look like a man who's seen the Devil count to ten," the priest said.
Robert sat, the pew groaning. He stared at his own hands as if they were stolen. "I've watched my daughter make arithmetic of blood."
Alasdair didn't pounce. He waited like men who'd fished long winters. Robert poured himself out: the lies around ships never sailed; the bribes cooked into "insurance"; the day he first put a coin into Margaret's eager palm and saw delight where fear should have been.
"She will cut the heart from a woman," Robert finished, voice a thread, "and call it music."
The priest folded his rough hands. "An old sin, dressed fine: to confuse power with providence."
Robert's laugh was a cough. "Tell me how to stop her."
"You cannot," Alasdair said, level. "You can only choose what you'll be while she burns. A shield. Or tinder."
Robert looked at the crucifix as a merchant looks at a ledger that won't balance. "If I turn against her, she will kill me."
"Then die well," Alasdair said—soft, not cruel. "Or live badly. But choose with both eyes open."
Robert's shoulders shook once, violently. Then he nodded, once, as a debtor signs a note he cannot pay.
When he left, the priest kissed the wood of the pew where the man's despair had sat, as if to sanctify splinters.
The Craiks Fortify
At Loch Wattenan the world smelled of kelp smoke and salt-sweat; the wind ran its cold fingers through nets like a harpist. Agnes had them working by first light and past last, turning grief into trenches.
Seumas limped the ridge, laying traps with the efficiency of a man who had watched cavalry break men like twigs. "Brush over stakes," he said, tapping with his boot. "Loch water pooled in pits—nothing snaps nerve like cold up to the heart. Nets across the narrow gully—pikes snare, men trip, targes tangle. Ewan—aye, you—lay your boys there with slings. When they fall, stone their helmets. Not heads; helmets ring and frighten more."
Ewan grinned despite himself. "Aye, chief."
Niall threaded rowan twigs through low heather, whispering "Fàilte na talmhainn," welcome of the earth—an old charm his grandmother swore turned bullets aside. He didn't believe charms more than he believed weather, but he spoke it anyway. It steadied fingers.
The women shaped their weapons from their work. Brine in iron-lipped buckets steamed gently, waiting for a hand to tip them; kelp ash piled like black snow; sacking soaked in sea to smother sparks. Agnes walked their line, checking knots, touching shoulders, lending heat.
"Short strokes with the paddle," she told Màiri Beag at the pans. "If you spill now, you spill dinner next month."
Màiri Beag's mouth went stubborn. "No spilling."
"And you," Agnes said to an older man patching a cracked pan with sea clay, "you'll have it tight enough to boil a saint's patience?"
He snorted. "Tighter. Saints leak hope. I leak nothing."
By noon they raised a lean palisade of driftwood, lashed with rope salted hard. Sorcha and the children tucked stones into the gaps like offerings.
At sunset, Agnes called a gealladh cridhe on the shore. Each family came in turn, laid a stone shaped by sea upon the growing ring, and spoke their vow aloud.
"Còmhla gu bràth." Together forever.
"Airson na cloinne." For the children.
"Airson an t-salainn." For the salt.
When Seumas's turn came, he laid a battered targe boss—its iron boss dented like a moon—and said nothing, only pressed his palm to the iron until his hand remembered how cold it would be when he died.
Màiri Mhòr lifted her staff. "May the old ones hear," she intoned. "May the land itself lean toward us."
The wind dropped for three heartbeats. Then rose again.
"That'll do," Agnes said. "Back to work."
Seumas and Agnes
They stole an hour the land couldn't spare. Moon lighted a silver road across the loch; the smoke thinned to ghost-scarves. Seumas's cough had found a new depth: the kind that made ribs creak and eyes water.
"Sit," Agnes ordered, and when he didn't, she pressed two fingers to the bruise under his bandage and he winced and sat.
"You fight dirty," he accused, affectionate.
"I fight to keep you," she answered.
He gazed down at the ribbon she had once tied at his wrist. It was faded now, salt-paled, but still red where the knot hid from weather. He took his dirk and laid it across her palms.
"Not because I think I'll fall," he said, and they both knew it was a lie polite enough to pass, "but because a Gunn keeps his oath by steel, and I find I like keeping things with you."
She blinked quickly, then grinned the smile that undid him. From her bodice she drew a sprig of dried bog-myrtle, bound with a hair from her own head. "My mother's charm," she said. "It smelled of lambing and laundry when I was small. Wear it. Not for magic. For me."
"I'd wear heather and thistles if you asked."
"I'd ask thistles to be kind," she said, and the joke was the thinnest ice over deep water.
They spoke then of futures as if they were real currency: a summer with fewer raids; a pan mended so cleanly it sang; a child with eyes like storm and hair like flame. He said he'd teach the bairn to sharpen a blade. She said she'd teach them to soften bread.
"Would you want a boy or a lass?" he asked into her hair.
"Yes," she said, and he laughed, then coughed, then laughed at the cough because defiance sometimes sounds like a man out of breath.
He kissed her once, and again, and then they sat with her head in the hollow of his shoulder and watched the loch breathe like a sleeping giant. When the watch horn sounded, they parted without looking back, as generals do when the field still needs mapping.
Bain's Hunt
Fog came up from the sea like a sly guest. Bain welcomed it with a grin.
He had three with him: Tam Half-tooth, who could climb slate in his stockings; Ivor Glass-eye, who saw better in dark than day; and wee Geordie, whose hands were small enough to steal anything but whose courage had outgrown him. Bain chose them because none would be missed by mothers, and that is a currency of its own.
They ghosted along the cliff path, seabirds muttering in nests, the smell of guano and kelp sharp enough to make a sober man piss. Bain crouched at a kink where the path narrowed to a foot and thumb's width. Below, wave foam riffled like torn linen. Above, the cliff face wrinkled into cracks a rat would approve.
"Here," he breathed. "We go up."
"How far?" Geordie whispered.
"Far enough to be better men when we come down," Bain said, and set his fingers into stone.
They climbed without words, the cliff face cold as a morgue slab. Once Geordie's shoe scraped and a chip rattled down—Bain felt the tremor in the rock like a lie and froze until it glanced off wave skin below. They reached a ledge no wider than a coffin lid and lay panting, the fog beading on lashes.
Ivor licked his lips. "Light there," he murmured, pointing with his chin. "Through a slit. Smoke."
Bain peered. He saw the faintest orange at a cliff mouth that looked like a break in the rock until you knew better. Someone had cut chambers there once, and someone else had remembered. He smiled without warmth. "Rats' nest," he murmured. "And I am a cat."
They went down and around, found the cleft where water sometimes ran in spring and men could run in autumn. The fog deepened, a mercy. Bain touched the handle of his dirk like a lover's wrist.
"Quiet," he said. "Like Sunday."
They slid inside the cleft like ink into paper. The air changed: colder, hollower, carrying sound farther than it should. He smelled peat smoke and something else—herbs, bitter-sweet, a healer's den, not a warrior's. He thought of Margaret's promise, felt it like a coin under the tongue.
They reached the slit. Ivor squinted. "Two shapes," he whispered. "One sleeping. One sitting. The sitting coughs like a bellows."
Bain's grin was all teeth. "The ghost." He touched Geordie's shoulder. "You slip in and slip out. If the witch is there, we take her first. If not, gut the ghost deep enough he shouts. The witch will come for the shout. And then—" he squeezed the boy's neck, "—you won't be afraid anymore."
Geordie nodded too fast. He was afraid enough for ten. Bain gave him the smallest blade. "For the throat," he said. "Like cutting twine."
From below, a gull shrieked like a soul.
"Soon," Bain breathed to the fog, which returned the word to him softer, as fog does when it likes a man's work.
Robert's Quiet Treason
Robert did not sleep. He wrote three letters and sealed none.
One to Keith: Pull your men from her—he did not dare write "her name."
One to Father Alasdair: If I am found, remember I tried to be a father at the end.
One to Agnes Craik, though he had never seen her face: Madam, there's a blade coming where prayers do not go. Forgive a coward.
He stared at the last until dawn blued the ink. He imagined a boy fleet as rumour carrying it over frost. He imagined Margaret finding it and understanding the angle of his heart. He imagined Keith's men stringing him from a harbour beam. He folded it anyway and tucked it in his coat.
When he left his rooms, the stairs felt like a gallows ladder.
Agnes walked the lines before first light with a lantern hooded to thumb-width. She tightened one knot in a net, drew a circle of ash on a stone, set a sprig of rowan over a pit—not because she believed wood turns blades, but because a girl beside her did.
"Bithidh e ceart," Agnes told her—it will be right.
Màiri Mhòr caught her elbow. "Smoke thins before dawn. If something comes, it will come now."
Agnes's jaw firmed. "Then I'll be where it thins."
Seumas joined them at the cliff path, plaid thrown over bare shoulders, hair unbound like a man younger than his scars. He coughed into the crook of his elbow and tried to pretend it was laughter. When Agnes shot him a look, he lifted both palms. "I'm here," he said. "That's all the lying I have time for."
They stood together where the path crooked and the world could be seen incoming as a shadow before a man. The loch below breathed soft. The fog above moved in cat's paws.
"Listen," Agnes whispered.
They listened until listening became a shape.
Something scraped where rock should be smooth.
Seumas's hand found her wrist by instinct born on fields where noise is prophecy. He squeezed once. She squeezed back.
"Wake the boys," she said without turning. "And fetch the old men who walk like trees."
He moved, quiet as the cough would let him. Agnes did not move. Her dagger felt light as a word still unspoken.
So the poison took root in three hearts at once: Margaret's, who called it destiny; Bain's, who called it craft; and Robert's, who called it guilt. The Craiks braced the land with nets and stakes, salt and song, oath and ribbon. Seumas and Agnes bound themselves in the old way, making of love a wall.
Fog salted the cliff where a blade in a boy's hand shook as he learned that killing is not twine. Somewhere a priest banked coals and prayed names into their ash. Somewhere a father folded treason against his blood.
The storm no longer needed drums. It wore soft-soled shoes and breathed through cloth. It would arrive not with a horn but with a scrape on stone—and a whisper that might be wind or murder.
"A-nis," Bain mouthed into the cleft. Now.
And across the loch, Agnes Craik lifted her head, as if a thread pulled it, and turned toward the dark she had already chosen to love and fight in equal measure.