The days after Margaret's burial were quieter, though the quiet was uneasy at first — the way silence lingers after thunder. The clan went about their work, heads bent, shoulders stiff, listening for echoes of hooves or the crack of muskets that did not come. Only when three nights passed without sight of enemy torchlight did they begin to believe Keith's words: the feud was ended.
The salt pans were the first to call them back. Smoke still curled upward every dawn, peat and driftwood burning hot beneath iron pots. Women stirred the brine with paddles, their arms strong, their voices rising in waulking songs to keep rhythm. The children helped carry buckets of seawater, feet muddy, faces flushed with effort.
Agnes walked among them, skirts tucked, her hair bound back. She checked the fires, lifted a pinch of salt to test between her fingers, tasted the brine on her tongue. "A little longer," she said to Sorcha, who grinned and stirred harder.
The work was hard, aye, but it was work that meant life. Salt fed them, paid rents, bought steel and cloth. Each crystal was a promise that they would endure.
Domhnall the herdsman spent long days repairing fences, his sons beside him. They lifted posts, set stones, tied rails with rope made of twisted heather. The beasts grazed close, their eyes calm again now that strangers no longer lurked in the night.
Children laughed and chased the calves, their shouts ringing bright across the pasture. For the first time in months, no one dragged them back in fear of raiders.
Inside the longhouse, the women patched roof-thatch where sparks from torches had burned holes during the raid. Men mended benches, sharpened tools, and set new stones in the hearth. The air smelled of peat, wool, and broth simmering in great iron pots.
In the evenings, when the day's labour was done, they gathered by the fire. Fiddles played, hands clapped, feet stamped. The old laments gave way to lighter songs, jigs and reels that lifted the heart.
"Better to laugh than to weep every night," Agnes said, raising her cup. "The dead have their cairn. The living have their songs."
Seumas, though still coughing, joined the work. He hauled timbers for the fences, sharpened blades, even helped stir the kelp fires. "You'll ruin yourself," Agnes scolded, but he only smiled grimly. "A soldier dies faster idle than in battle. Let me earn my breath."
At night he sat with the young men, teaching them the tricks of musket and targe, the angles of ambush, the discipline of watch. They listened wide-eyed. To them he was more than a man — he was legend, the Gunn who had cheated death on Culloden Moor, who had faced Keith and Sinclair and lived.
But when the lads drifted to sleep, Agnes saw him lean heavily against the wall, shoulders heaving with suppressed coughs, blood bright in his kerchief. She pressed a hand to his arm, wordless. He pressed back, and that was enough.
As autumn deepened, the Craiks found a rhythm again. Kelp burned, salt boiled, beasts fattened, nets pulled herring from the sea. Life resumed, scarred but strong.
The old men muttered proverbs: "Is fheàrr gàire na deòir." (A smile is better than tears.)
The women taught bairns to tie rowan charms still, but now as custom, not desperation.
Even Màiri Mhòr allowed herself a rare smile, telling the apprentices, "When folk laugh, it means the land is healing."
At night, smoke rose steady from every chimney. From the ridge, the glow of the Craiks' hearths looked like stars fallen to earth, bright and stubborn against the dark.
One evening, Agnes stood alone at the cairn. She placed her palm against the cold stones, feeling their weight. "You tried to break us, Margaret," she whispered. "But you gave us this instead — a clan that knows itself strong."
The wind lifted her hair, carrying her words across the loch. She turned back toward the longhouse, where laughter spilled through the door, warm as firelight.
And for the first time in years, she believed they would not only survive — they would flourish.
It was late, the longhouse quiet save for the low crackle of the hearth. The day's work had been heavy: posts set in the east pasture, kelp cut and laid to dry, a storm chased from the sky with laughter and song. Most of the clan slept, bodies curled under plaids, breaths rising steady.
Agnes sat by the fire, her hair loose for the first time in weeks, the flames catching strands of copper. In her lap was a length of linen she was hemming, her needle flashing in the glow. Across from her, Seumas sat with his musket across his knees, cleaning the lock with steady hands. He coughed once, wiped his mouth with a kerchief, and caught her watching.
"You stare as though I were some relic dug from the peat," he said, voice rough.
She smiled faintly. "You're rarer than that. Relics do not mend fences or haul timbers. And they don't scowl when I tell them to rest."
He gave a low laugh, though it turned into another cough. "Rest is for graves. I've lain in enough ditches to know I'm not ready for one yet."
That night they returned to the longhouse. The clan had feasted — broth, bannocks, whisky shared carefully — and drifted into sleep.
In the quiet corner where the fire cast only embers, Seumas and Agnes lay close. His cough was softer, her hand steady against his chest. He kissed her hair, her brow, the corner of her mouth. She answered with a fierceness born of years of battle and waiting.
When they finally joined, it was not with haste but with reverence — two souls who had carried scars, binding them into something whole. The wool was still around their wrists when they slept.
In the morning, Agnes woke to the sound of gulls and the weight of Seumas's arm across her. The cough came again, but it was lighter, as though the night had driven some sickness away.
She pressed her lips to his shoulder. "You'll not leave me yet."
He smiled faintly. "Not yet, flame-heart. Not while the loch still shines and your hand holds mine."
It was a week after that a rider came from the south. His horse was foamed at the flanks, his plaid spattered with mud. The watchboys on the ridge gave the curlew whistle, and soon Agnes, Seumas, and half a dozen armed men were waiting at the yard gate.
The rider dismounted heavily, bowing low. "I come from Keith of Ackergill," he said. "My lord bids me carry words of peace."
He handed Agnes a folded parchment, the seal plain red wax. She broke it and read aloud, her voice carrying to all:
"To the Craiks of Loch Wattenan and to Seumas Gunn, once our foe: Know this my formal declaration. The Keiths will trouble your salt pans no more. We have spilled too much blood over brine and smoke. The feud is done. If any Keith crosses your bounds in violence, send word, and I will answer it myself. By my name, Keith of Ackergill."
A murmur ran through the gathered folk. Some scoffed, others looked wary, but most let out a long-held breath.
Seumas took the parchment, read it himself, then nodded once. "He speaks true. He would not shame his word twice in one lifetime."
Agnes lifted her chin. "Then let it be so. The feud is ended."
Two days later, another messenger came — not a hired rider but Ruaraidh, the wiry lad who had once carried Robert Sinclair's warnings. He was older now by a season, face windburned, eyes bright with loyalty.
He carried no seal, only a letter wrapped in plain cloth. "From Robert Sinclair," he said softly. "He gave it me himself, then walked into the hills."
Agnes opened it. The words were written in a trembling hand:
"To those I wronged, and most to Seumas Gunn and Agnes Craik: I am gone. Do not seek me. I have laid my daughter to rest, and with her, all claim to Wick. I will carry my shame into the wilderness until God sees fit to take it. Pray for me if you can. Forget me if you must. But live — live without my shadow."
The parchment shook in her hand. She passed it to Seumas, who read silently, then folded it tight.
"He is gone," Seumas said at last. "May God grant him peace. He has earned no less, and no more."
Agnes called the whole clan to the longhouse that evening. The benches groaned under the weight of men and women, the air thick with peat smoke and anticipation. Children sat wide-eyed at their parents' feet.
At the head of the hall, Agnes and Seumas stood together. Between them lay a loaf of bannock and a bowl of salt — the oldest symbols of sustenance and survival.
Agnes lifted the bread. "This is what Margaret sought to take. This is what Keith once fought us for. Yet it is ours, because we laboured, we guarded, we endured. And now the feud is ended. By word of Keith himself, by the death of Margaret Sinclair, by the oath of Robert who has gone into the wild — it ends here."
Seumas took the bowl of salt, raised it high. "Salt we boiled from the sea, with fire and sweat. Salt that feeds, salt that heals, salt that pays. We share it now not as spoil of war, but as bond of peace. Each man, each woman, each child — take and remember."
They passed the bowl, each dipping a pinch, touching it to tongue or brow. When it returned empty, Agnes broke the bannock and shared it likewise.
Then together they spoke, voices rising like tide:
"Còmhla gu bràth.
Cha bhi barrachd fola.
Cha bhi barrachd fuath.
Cumaidh sinn an talamh agus a chèile."
(Together forever.
No more blood.
No more hatred.
We will keep the land and each other.)
The fire roared, laughter rose, fiddles played. For the first time in years, the longhouse rang not with the strain of survival but with the true joy of release which they had held back on. Men clapped each other's shoulders, women sang with tears in their eyes, children danced until they dropped asleep in corners.
Seumas leaned close to Agnes, his voice rough but warm. "We've weathered it, flame-heart. Poison, fire, feud. We're still here."
She pressed her hand to his. "And we'll be here when our bairns dance in this hall, and their bairns after them. That is the legacy Margaret could never understand."
Above them, smoke curled toward the rafters, carrying with it the last shadows of old hatred.
So ended the feud of Craik and Sinclair, of Gunn and Keith. Not with the triumph of one over the other, but with weariness, blood, and a father's tears.
The cairn held its silence, the wells ran clear, the salt boiled white. And in the hearts of those who lived by Loch Wattenan, a new breath had come — fragile, hard-earned, but theirs.
Anail ùr. A new breath.