Page 105 of The Speed of Lightning
Hector’s unmangled cheek creased into a half-smile. “Glíma drills.”
Hours slipped by beneath the driving rain. Commands were repeated, drills run over and over, the men demonstrating for their chief what they had learned. When the glíma exercises were complete, they split into two groups, ready to show the tactics they had mastered.
Together, they were a terrifying sight. Each man moved with the agility and ferocity of a born warrior, but now, for the first time, they flowed as a unit—striking, turning, and covering each other with seamless precision. These men were natural warriors, and now, for the first time, they could be wielded as something far greater—a strike force no one would see coming.
Satisfied with their unarmed mastery, he gave the next signal: weapons. Since boyhood the Jurans had been trained for war, and it showed. Swords, hammers, axes, and spears spun with lethal skill, each movement a union of instinct, strength, and Viking-born speed.
Yet the true measure of their strength was found not in drills, but in unity. Divided by sept, they had accomplished little; unified by their hatred of the Wolf, they were unstoppable. Rory hadn’t been wrong—faced with a common foe, shaping them into a proper warhost was as natural as a mountain brook running to the sea. They were a phantom army streaked with blue, an indestructible force. Not merely a guard, but a true tactical unit.
Alongside his men, Calum fought, primitive instinct igniting in his blood. For months he had hungered for this release—the draining intensity of battle, the purging fire of a fight. Now it surged through him, something breaking loose inside, spilling into every strike: grief, anger, guilt, shame. He clung to the anger—it was the easiest to understand. The burn left his arms and legs, replaced by the familiar surge that came only when he was pushed beyond his limits. He no longer felt the fatigue. What he felt instead was power.
Rage hammered through his veins, not wild but purposeful, a force that seemed older and greater than himself. Every lunge, every blow, carried the weight of years—years of loss, years of waiting, years of silence. And now, at last, the firestorm burst free. He struck again. And again. And again. Not out of frenzy, but out of relief. It was potent. An intoxicating release that felt less like losing control and more like finally stepping into himself.
Balder fell to the ground, wiping the blood streaming from his nose, a slight tremble in his hand.
Hector intervened, stepping between them and tossing Calum a skin of water. “I think we’ve seen enough.”
As Calum gulped noisily from the skin, the Jurans drew close, their circle tight with silence. The maelstrom hadn’t ebbed. The raw, animalistic fury still pulsed through him, too vast to contain. He felt their eyes crawling over him, every gaze fixed on the inked hound coiling up his side. The hound of war. The mark of Jura’s guardian. He shoved a wet tangle of hair from his face and met their stares with unflinching defiance, still provoked, daring any man to flinch. They had pushed for the ruthlessness of their tànaiste, the cold hunter that filled dispatches.
Now they saw it. The hound made flesh—snarling, unchained, Cù Cogaidh stepped into their midst.
Iain stepped forward, all traces of affability gone. “There’s the lad I remember when I was a stripling.”
By the timethe men disbanded and sailed for their homes across Jura, Calum was ready to collapse. Dawn was close, and a full day’s hunt still waited in Knockrome. A wiser man would make the short journey and steal what little sleep he could in the woods. But thoughts of Freya—of their bed, of the way she had felt against him that morning—pulled him elsewhere. Whenever he was near her, something clicked into place, like a key in a lock, and he knew that despite the sleep he’d lose, he was going home.
Hector strode up to him, motioning for Murdoch and Iain to wait by the cog. “You’ve accomplished much in only a few short weeks.”
Calum nodded, tossing his supplies into Fraser’s skiff. “And I thought it would take two years.”
The chips of ice that lived in Hector’s eyes seemed to soften. “You’ve borne it well.”
Calum tugged on his kyrtill. “I havenae. Not really. There were days I thought of giving up—letting Ragnall have the clan, taking Freya back to Lochbuie, resuming my auld post. Living free of it all. The infighting, the paganism, the stubborn refusal to change. But?—”
Hector finished for him. “But it’s part of you. This place.”
A myriad of emotions burned in his chest, and he turned away, unable to meet Hector’s eye. “I’ll never belong in the great halls of Ardtornish or Findlugan. I’ll never feel at home anywhere else. Part of me almost wishes it were different.”
Hector stroked his black beard. “When we met eight years ago, I was a very different man too—a shadow of what I am now. I’m sure you remember.”
Calum remembered. What little he’d known of Hector as a lad was wrapped in whispers—that he had fled after his father’s death, squandering the promise his parents had seen in him. His mother, heartsick, had died a few years later, certain he would never return. But he had. Even then Hector carried the air of a natural leader, though he’d been an anguished, tormented man.
“It was difficult to deny myself,” Hector went on, “to put aside drink. But in doing so, I grew into the man I should have been all along. May I tell you something hard to hear?”
Calum braced. “Aye.”
“When I said you’d changed, I didn’t mean only in appearance—though that too. Years of self-denial have carried you further away. The lad you once were burns dimmer now, hidden beneath what you think others expect, instead of the man God made you to be. A man with nothing to be ashamed of.”
A memory of Hector in the Duart days rose in Calum’s mind. He was the strongest man he had ever faced in the practice yard, yet fragile all the same. Each day Hector refused drink was an act of trembling courage—a step closer to reclaiming himself.
By contrast, Calum had denied his own appearance, his emotions, his traditions—he had even softened the sound of his native tongue. Each denial was not strength but surrender, a slow erosion of himself, piece by piece. Hector’s self-denial had restored him. Calum’s was wearing him away.
“When Da sent me away, he told me to learn how to carry both my God and my people with honor. I dinnae suppose I’ve learned how to be both—a man of the clan and a man of God.”
Hector nodded slowly, his mangled cheek lifting with a half-grin. “I believe you have always been both. Stigmaed and praying.”
The words caught Calum off guard. He looked up, searching Hector’s face for mockery, but found none—only certainty. The lantern flickered between them in the wind, drawing out the lines of dozens of shared battles, a hundred unspoken doubts. For the first time in years, Calum’s chest eased. The old ache — that pull between heaven and home — loosened, just a little.
He gave a small, disbelieving laugh. “If Da could hear you say that…”
