Chapter Eighteen: Just Talon
For the first time in moons, he slept through the night.
Talon woke not to horns or dreams of war, but to the soft hush of stream water over rock and the distant call of a wood pigeon. The valley breathed around him—warm with hidden vents, damp with pine and moss, and threaded with the scent of wild thyme and morning fire.
There was no laird here. No banners. No oaths to bind.
Only the work of hands and heart.
The Work of Quiet Men
He rose early, shirt loose, hair unbound, and joined the villagers as they heaved up peat blocks from the southern bogs, stacking them to dry in neat rows. The old men nodded at him in that quiet Highland way, and one passed him a blackened flask of bogberry whiskey with no words exchanged.
He laughed with the children as they brought down twigs and kindling from the ridge. He hunted stag and pheasant, sharing the meat, teaching a few of the older boys to dress the kill properly with a stone knife.
And every evening, he returned to the old stone hut at the far edge of the valley—the one that had once belonged to his grandmother.
Its walls were slumped, roof half-collapsed, but it still held the shape of memory. He spent days fixing it—re-thatching with rushes, reshaping the stone hearth, cleaning soot from the iron hooks. Inside he found an old bone comb, a ladle carved from horn, a child’s clay figure of Cu Sith on a shelf, half broken.
He kept that one close.
Here, Talon wasn’t a rebel or a warrior. He was just a man with mud on his hands, a healing shoulder, and smoke in his hair.
And for a while… it was enough.
Whispers in the Warm Wind
The change came not in storms, but in footsteps on the moss.
A boy returned from the mountain edge where traders sometimes passed with word. His cheeks were pale, eyes wide.
“The King’s come. Ships. Hundreds. They opened the Loch Gate.”
The villagers gathered in the dusk-light, their faces lit by oil lamps and fireflies. One of the elders stepped forward, face lined with time.
“They march north,” she said. “Not just for O’Coyles. Any clan not sworn. Any voice not bowed. They’ve brought tax men. Black-coats. Ropes and ledgers.”
Talon stood at the edge of the circle, arms folded, saying nothing.
The smith’s wife wept softly.
“They took my cousin’s farm. Burned the bee sheds. Took his boy.”
And so the stories came—coin seized, names stricken, tongues cut, towns turned into camps, sacred stones defaced with southern carvings.
Even here, in Cu Sith country, the shadows crept in.
The Old Mark Returns
That night, Talon stood at the totem again, the stone Cu Sith snarling into the dark. Wind whispered through the warm valley mists, and somewhere a wolf howled—not in threat, but remembrance.
He touched the carved Gaelic on the base:
“May those hunted find peace, and those without name find home.”
Then, slowly, he removed the woven sash from his waist—green and black, the O’Coyle weave. He hadn’t worn it since the cairn.
But now, he tied it across his chest once more.
Not for title. Not for glory.
But because there were people in need of a hunter.
And the Cu Sith, it was said, always heard the call of the hunted.
Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3
Chapter Nineteen: The Last Houseman
The days had shortened.
Light thinned like breath on cold glass. The wind shifted, no longer just cold but laden with omen. In the glens, the tall grasses bowed—gold and yellow now, no longer green—and the forest canopy above wept its autumn leaves like tears of rust and fire.
Bannock, the last of the old housemen, still swept the keep's stone paths at dawn, fed the goats, stirred the peat fires, mended the shutters.
But he knew.
They would come. Of course they would. It was only a matter of when.
He no longer slept with his boots off. His sword, though worn at the hilt, had been cleaned and sharpened until it shone like old silver. The old O’Coyle tartan—green and black check with the faint streak of ash-grey—hung pressed and ready. His bonnet lay on the hearth, beside a silver wild thistle and Cu Sith head pin—the last crest of a vanishing clan.
Bannock had lived all his life in the keep. Born in the servant's hall. Raised beneath these stones. He had known Talon's father, and Talon’s father’s father. He had buried lairds and lit the fires when no one else remained.
His soul belonged to this place. And now, so would his death.
Signs in the Sky
The forest spoke first.
A strange silence overtook the glen, and then the sound came—the starlings. A great black cloud of them broke from the tree line like a summoned spirit, wheeling and twisting in unnatural shapes, blotting the sun.
He watched them move—serpent, eye, blade, wolf.
Prophetic.
Then the dust rose from the south road.
A rolling brown smudge at first, but clear in its meaning. The sound of armor. Of hooves. Of boots. Banners, not fluttering but stiff in the autumn wind. And then they appeared on the high ridge above the road—two hundred southern men, armoured, disciplined, soulless.
The Usurper’s answer to O’Coyle defiance.
They began their slow march to the loch. To the keep.
To him.
The Door Opens
Bannock stood in the main corridor of the keep. Shadows leaned long from the windows. The great oak door to the tower was old, sealed since Talon's return. He forced it open now, dust coughing into the hall like memory released.
He donned the full garb—O’Coyle tartan, bonnet, sporran. Upon his brow gleamed the silver pin—a wild Highland thistle in bloom set beside the howling head of the Cu Sith, cast long ago by a smith whose name no longer lived in any tongue.
His beard was plaited short, his eyes clear and full of fire. At his belt, a short Highland sword and an old war axe—his father’s, its haft worn smooth by generations.
He waited.
A knock came.
One guard. A messenger, thin and young, barely out of boyhood, approached nervously, clearly sent ahead to negotiate surrender.
Bannock opened the door with quiet dignity.
“A message,” the boy stammered, “from His Majesty’s force—”
“Come in, lad,” Bannock said softly, stepping aside. “We’ll talk in the yard.”
He led the messenger in. The stones of the courtyard echoed underfoot. The silence was heavy.
Then the screams began.
Horrible. Sudden. The boy ran out, blood on his face, stumbling and shrieking. His tunic torn.
He fled toward the road.
Behind him, Bannock emerged—covered in blood, an axe in one hand, the short sword slick in the other.
He was grinning.
“COME ON THEN, YE SOUTHERN DOGS!” “O’COYLE STILL BREATHES!”
And with a howl like Cu Sith itself, he charged down the slope alone—across the narrow stone bridge.
The Last Stand
The arrows flew before he reached the other side—six, maybe more struck him, in thigh, side, shoulder—but he did not fall.
He kept coming, the mad strength of old blood in his limbs.
The first two soldiers died before they could raise their blades. The third had his face split open by Bannock’s axe. The fourth he gutted, then tore the sword from his chest to kill the fifth.
Then they surrounded him. Twenty against one.
He fell at last, not quietly but thrashing, sword swinging, blood geysering with every blow. He fought even on his knees, until a final thrust drove deep beneath his ribs. He jerked, twitched, snarled.
Then stillness.
Ash and Sky
They left him where he fell.
At dusk, the southern commander—disgusted at the loss—ordered the keep torched.
From the high tower, flames took first. Then the great hall. The watchtower. The roof.
Dark smoke curled into the Highland sky—black against the deepening autumn dusk, a column of grief, of rage, of defiance.
And Bannock, the last houseman of O’Coyle, lay where he had fallen, surrounded by his enemies, his blood already sinking into the stone.
But that night, those who watched from distant ridges would swear the flames did not burn red.
They burned green.
Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3
