RUADH RÌGH

Foreword

History is a fire with two faces.

One face is Rome—clean lines, stamped names, dates written in ink that survived the centuries. The other face is the north—smoke and stone, stories spoken aloud because paper didn’t matter when winter did. If you’ve ever noticed how often the “official” record sounds calm while the living world was anything but, you already understand the problem.

This book lives in that problem.

The people Rome called Picti—the “painted ones”—stand on the edge of what we know and what we guess. They appear in Roman words as enemies, as shadows beyond walls, as a reason to build fortifications and write reports to impress men far away. But beyond those lines, there were real villages and real chiefs, real rivalries and real love, real fear and real laughter—people doing what people always do when a powerful empire decides their land looks useful.

So this story doesn’t pretend to be a textbook. It’s not a lecture in a cloak.

It’s a flesh-and-blood tale set against real pressure: Rome pushing north, tribes pushing back, and the brutal truth that the most dangerous enemy isn’t always the one with the most armor. Sometimes it’s the neighbor who smiles too much, the ally who trades secrets for advantage, the “friend” who can’t stand to see a young heir survive long enough to become a man.

At the center is Ruadh Rìgh MacSweyn, thirteen when the world begins tightening around him. He’s the successor to a hard-handed chief, born into a land where leadership is earned with scars and kept with vigilance. Over three years, he learns what the old world never teaches gently: love can be strength, love can be leverage, and love can be taken from you like a throat cut in the dark. He learns that Rome is terrifying—but that tribal hunger can be worse, because it wears your language and knows your paths.

You’ll find grit in these pages. You’ll find sweat, blood, sex, and the kind of humor people use when the alternative is breaking. You’ll also find choices that don’t fit modern comfort, because comfort wasn’t part of the deal.

A quick note on language: no one in this era spoke modern English, so the dialogue here is translated into something readable and alive—because authenticity isn’t just old words, it’s intent. If they had curses, they used them. If they had laughter, they spent it like coin. If they had oaths, they treated them like law.

And about the land: you won’t see “Scotland” named the way we name it now. That identity is still forming in the centuries ahead. Here, it’s simply home—hard ground, wet wind, sacred stone, and forests that raise fighters the way cities raise politicians.

If you read this book hoping for shining heroes and clean victories, you’re in the wrong longhouse.

But if you want a story that feels like peat-smoke and salt-wind—where power is personal, betrayal is intimate, and survival is a form of defiance—then step closer.

Rome is coming.

And the painted ones are waiting.

 

 

Contents

Copyright 5

Dedication. 6

Foreword. 7

Contents. 9

RUADH RÌGH.. 12

Chapter 1: Ash in the Carse. 13

Chapter 2: Angus Mòr’s Hall 23

Chapter 3: Games of the Painted Men. 32

Chapter 4: Boundary Stones. 43

Chapter 5: The Bog Road. 56

Chapter 6: Blood-Price. 69

Chapter 7: River Mouth. 79

Chapter 8: The Burning Fringe. 93

Chapter 9: Smoke and Knives. 106

Chapter 10: The Knife Night 115

Chapter 11: The Price of Dawn. 122

Chapter 12: Wolffire. 127

Chapter 13: River Teeth. 142

Chapter 14: Oathsmoke. 157

Chapter 15: Bog Lessons. 170

Chapter 16: Cattle Blood. 179

Chapter 17: Smoke Bride. 186

Chapter 18: Ash Gap. 193

Chapter 19: Tide Knife. 201

Chapter 20: Blood Council 211

Chapter 21: The Roman With the Soft Tongue. 218

Chapter 22: The Taste of Winter 230

Chapter 23: The Ridge Prince Screams. 237

Chapter 24: Breas’s Favorite Son. 243

Chapter 25: The Bargain With Teeth. 249

Chapter 26: Braids, Blades, and Bad Ideas. 255

Chapter 27: Drums Under Wet Sky. 264

Chapter 28: Knot and Knife. 271

Chapter 29: The Gap Opens. 278

Chapter 30: Ash on the Hill 286

Chapter 31: The First Crown Is Mud. 299

Chapter 32: River Mouth Knives. 305

Chapter 33: Dunvegan’s Cold Welcome. 311

Chapter 34: The Guest Knife. 318

Chapter 35: Wolves Eat First 329

Chapter 36: The Price of Shelter 336

Chapter 37: The Boy With the Rope. 346

Chapter 38: Salt-Wind Lies. 353

Chapter 39: Driftwood Crown. 362

Chapter 40: Rope Law.. 370

Chapter 41: Smoke on Dunvegan. 375

Chapter 42: Sea-Wolves for Hire. 382

Chapter 43: The Leaving Fire. 388

Chapter 44: The Gate Holds. 393

Chapter 45: The Sea Between Blades. 399

Epilogue: Ushenish. 404

Appendix. 409

A Note on Names and Truth. 409

Dramatis Personae. 409

MacSweyn Túath. 409

Rivals and Threats. 409

Rome. 410

Pronunciation Guide. 410

Picti / Túath Terms (in-book usage) 410

Roman Terms (quick reference) 411

Timeline. 411

Anchor: Roman Campaign Pressure (Story-Calendar) 411

Places and World Map Key. 411

Core Locations. 411

Travel Logic (how the story moves) 412

Cultural Notes. 412

Appearance and Body Art 412

Warfare Style. 412

Marriage and Politics. 412

Pictish Stones and Symbols. 413

The Camp Massacre. 413

The End-State of Book One. 413

About the Author 414

Other Books by the Author 414

Wolves of the Tiber (Epic Grimdark Fantasy) 414

The Vault of Ki (High-Stakes Sci-Fi Thriller) 414

Standalone & Other Works. 415

​

 

 

 

RUADH RÌGH

Ash and Oaths

 

 

Chapter 1: Ash in the Carse

The Carse woke the way an old beast woke—slow, suspicious, and ready to bite.

Mist lay over the wet ground in long ribbons, silver in the weak sun, and every tuft of grass shone with cold beads that soaked through leather and wool if you stood still too long. Ruadh Rìgh MacSweyn didn’t stand still. Not this morning.

He moved with the practiced impatience of thirteen winters: long legs that hadn’t yet decided whether they belonged to a boy or a man, a narrow chest that would widen soon enough, and a head that burned like a torch even when the sky was gray. The elders called that hair a blessing, or a curse, depending on who had last lost a wager to his father. His father called it noticeable—which, in Angus Mòr’s mouth, sounded like an accusation.

Ruadh’s feet found the hard patches of ground without thinking. The Carse was a quilt of treacheries—mud that looked firm, firm that hid water, reeds that whispered, and pools that worked his throat sound. The Romans marched on roads because roads told them where their feet were. Ruadh had never trusted a thing that made life easier.

He heard the cattle before he saw them: lowing, the impatient stamp of hooves, the wet crack of dung under weight. Cattle were wealth. Cattle were pride. Cattle were the reason men smiled while sharpening knives.

A thin wisp of peat smoke drifted from the settlement behind him, carrying the sour-sweet scent of damp earth being forced to burn. That smell meant home. It meant meals that filled the belly and left the hands smelling of grease. It meant his mother’s voice—soft when no one important was listening, sharp when they were. It meant the timber hall where Angus Mòr sat like a stone that had learned to speak.

And it meant, lately, something else.

Ash.

Ruadh reached the edge of the grazing ground and crouched behind a knot of scrub willow. He liked watching before he showed himself. His father called it caution. His older brother Donnan called it cowardice, just to see Ruadh’s jaw tighten. Donnan could call a sunrise ugly and make half the men agree with him out of habit. He wasn’t here this morning, though. Donnan had gone with the older boys to the pine edge days ago, looking for Roman scouts and for trouble, which was the same thing.

Ruadh scanned the field.

Two herders stood with staffs near the largest of the cattle, their cloaks pulled tight, their breath visible. A dog circled the herd like a black thought. Beyond them, the land dipped toward the marsh, where reeds grew tall as a man’s shoulder and water waited patiently for the careless. A narrow strip of higher ground ran like a spine through the wetness. That strip was the bog road—the only decent path for wagons, and the path most likely to be watched by anything that walked on two legs.

Ruadh’s eyes moved there, then beyond, to the darker line of trees.

Nothing.

He should have felt relief. Instead, his stomach tightened.

Nothing meant a quiet morning. Nothing also meant the quiet you got right before a knife slid in.

A hand clapped his shoulder.

Ruadh didn’t flinch—he wanted to, but he didn’t. He rose slowly, turning his head first, then the rest of him, so his body didn’t betray the jolt his nerves tried to make.

His father stood behind him.

Angus Mòr MacSweyn was a broad man whose hair had gone dark with age, not gray. His beard was thick and cut blunt, as if he’d once lost patience and hacked it off with a knife rather than ask someone to tidy it. His eyes were pale and hard, the color of river stones. He didn’t smile often. When he did, it meant someone else had just been trapped.

This morning he wasn’t smiling.

“You move like a fox,” Angus said. It wasn’t praise. It was assessment.

Ruadh worked his throat. “I move like I don’t want to die.”

Angus grunted, which was as close as he came to laughter before sun-up. “That’s wise. It’s also late.”

Ruadh straightened, a little stung. “Late for what?”

Angus lifted his chin toward the bog road.

Ruadh followed the line and saw it—the mark in the mud that didn’t belong.

A track.

Not the rounded hoof of a cow or deer. Not the light print of a dog. Not the splayed toes of a bare-footed child who had run too close to the wet ground.

A boot.

The print was squared at the toe and deep at the heel, pressed hard as if the wearer carried weight and knew it. There were more, faint and broken, as if the person had moved carefully, testing the ground with each step.

Ruadh’s mouth went dry.

“Roman?” he whispered.

Angus’s hand remained heavy on his shoulder. “Or one of ours wearing Roman leather. Or a fool who stole a boot from a corpse. The earth doesn’t care who you are. It only remembers pressure.”

Ruadh stared at the print, anger rising like heat in his chest. “They were here.”

“They are always here,” Angus said, calm as winter. “Sometimes you see them. Sometimes you only see what they leave behind.”

Ruadh looked back toward the trees. The line of trunks and shadow seemed suddenly crowded with eyes.

He wanted to run into those woods and tear out whatever watched from them. He wanted to be Donnan—loud, fearless, already built like a man, already able to make warriors clap his shoulder and call him promising. Ruadh wanted to be the kind of heir who didn’t have to crouch behind willow scrub to feel brave.

Angus tugged him once, firm. “Come.”

They moved together along the edge of the field. The herders saw them and stiffened, then bowed their heads. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t offer greetings. In the Carse, people learned early that the chief’s face was a weather sign. If it looked like thunder, you got indoors.

Ruadh’s eyes kept returning to the boot print. A hundred thoughts pressed in: Romans marching in their red cloaks, Romans in iron helmets with cheek guards like faces that didn’t blink, Romans with their straight spears and straight roads and straight backs.

And then another thought, sharper than the rest:

Why would a Roman scout risk the marsh for cattle?

Angus seemed to hear it in him. “It isn’t the cattle they’re after,” he said without looking at Ruadh.

“Then what?”

Angus’s gaze stayed forward. “Knowledge.”

Ruadh frowned. “Of us?”

“Of the land,” Angus corrected. “Of where it is firm. Of where it breaks. Of where the water hides. They don’t need to love it. They only need to learn it.”

Ruadh felt the Carse shift under his feet, not physically, but in his mind. He had always known the land was theirs, the way a child believes the sky belongs to the birds. Angus spoke as if the land could be taken—not by force alone, but by understanding.

That made Ruadh’s anger hotter. “We can kill them.”

Angus stopped near the edge of a low rise. From there, the view stretched: marsh and reed, treeline and hill, the distant shimmer of the firth like dull metal under a cloud blanket. Angus looked out the way a man looked at an old wound.

“Yes,” he said. “We can kill a man. We can kill ten. We can kill a hundred if the gods are listening. But Rome makes more. Rome is a city that eats its sons and spits out soldiers.”

Ruadh bit back a retort. He hated when his father spoke of Rome like it was a living thing. He hated it because it sounded true.

Angus turned again, his eyes narrowing, and Ruadh saw something in his father’s face that he didn’t often see: worry. Not fear—Angus didn’t fear much. Worry was different. Worry was what you wore when you had too many lives in your hand and no good choices.

“Ruadh,” Angus said quietly. “Today you listen. Today you learn. Today you do not rush toward glory because it’s the only thing that makes boys feel taller.”

Ruadh bristled. “I’m not a boy.”

Angus lifted an eyebrow. “Then you won’t argue like one.”

Ruadh shut his mouth. It took effort. He felt his cheeks burn, and he hated that his father could do that with a sentence. Angus didn’t need to shout. He didn’t need to strike. He simply spoke, and men adjusted themselves around his words.

They walked toward the treeline.

The ground grew softer. The reeds thickened. A small bird burst from cover and vanished into the mist. Ruadh’s hand moved toward the knife at his belt without thinking. Angus noticed and inclined his head, approving. The old man didn’t carry his own knife like a decoration. He carried it like an honest tool: for meat, for rope, and for the occasional throat when law ran out.

They found the first sign near the boundary stones.

The stones were old—older than any MacSweyn, older than the hall, older than the stories his grandmother told by firelight. They were thick slabs half-buried in earth, standing in a ragged line that marked where the grazing ground ended and the wild began. Some had faint carvings, worn by weather and lichen: spirals and lines and shapes that might have been beasts once, before time sanded them down.

Ruadh touched one as they passed. The stone was cold enough to bite skin.

Angus stopped.

In the grass beside the stone lay a bundle of cloth.

It took Ruadh a heartbeat to understand what he was looking at, because the mind refused it at first.

A cloak.

Not one of theirs. It was too clean, too tightly woven, dyed a dull red that looked like old blood. The clasp was bronze, shaped in a pattern Ruadh didn’t recognize. The cloak was folded, deliberate, as if placed like an offering.

Or a message.

Ruadh stared, throat tight. “That’s Roman.”

Angus crouched, careful not to touch it. He studied the folds, the clasp, the way the fabric lay. Then he looked at the ground around it.

Ruadh followed his gaze and saw the second message.

A line carved into the mud with the point of a blade.

Straight. Clean. Certain.

It wasn’t writing Ruadh could read. It didn’t need to be. The meaning was in the act: someone had stood at their boundary stone and cut a mark into the earth as if the earth belonged to them.

Angus’s jaw flexed once. “They want us to find it.”

Ruadh’s anger rose again, fierce and immediate. “Why leave it here?”

Angus stood, slowly, and his eyes scanned the treeline with a predator’s patience. “To make us react. To make us chase shadows. To make us argue about what it means while they count our steps.”

Ruadh worked his throat. “So what do we do?”

Angus’s gaze didn’t soften. “We do what we always do. We do what this land taught us before Rome ever learned to pronounce our names.”

He gave a small nod toward the marsh. “We disappear.”

Ruadh blinked. “What?”

Angus leaned closer, voice low. “Your brother thinks a fight is only a fight. He’s wrong. A fight is also where you weren’t seen. It’s what you didn’t lose. It’s what you didn’t show.”

Ruadh’s hands curled into fists. “That’s—”

“Hard?” Angus cut in. “Yes. Hard. And real. The Romans are counting on you to be angry. They want you hot-headed. They want you to charge. They want the heir of MacSweyn to bleed in a ditch where no songs are sung.”

Ruadh’s mouth went dry.

Angus straightened. “We go to the fringe stead.”

Ruadh’s stomach dropped. “Someone’s been hit.”

Angus didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The air already smelled wrong—an edge of smoke that didn’t belong to peat. An edge of something sharp that made Ruadh’s tongue taste metal.

They moved through the reeds.

Ruadh kept close behind Angus, stepping where his father stepped, learning the pattern without being taught. The marsh tried to steal his boots. The reeds brushed his face like fingers. Somewhere unseen, water moved with a thick, slow sound.

And then the smell hit fully.

Burnt thatch. Scorched wood. Fat turned bitter by heat.

Ruadh pushed forward, heart pounding, and the reeds parted.

The fringe stead sat on slightly higher ground, a cluster of low houses and fenced pens that fed the MacSweyn hall in winter. It wasn’t grand. It wasn’t supposed to be. It was the kind of place that existed to be forgotten—until someone wanted to remind you it was there.

Now it was impossible to forget.

One house had collapsed inward, black timbers jutting like ribs. Smoke still curled from the ruin, thin and stubborn. The fence had been kicked down. The pens were empty. A dog lay near the threshold, stiff and bloated, its tongue lolling. Flies gathered where the body still held warmth.

Ruadh’s breath caught.

He saw movement—people, crouched and quiet, stepping carefully like the ground might explode. Two women knelt near the ashes, pulling at something charred. An old man stood with a staff, staring at the ruin as if his eyes could reverse it. A boy younger than Ruadh clutched a blanket and didn’t blink.

Ruadh looked for blood.

He found it.

A man hung from the remains of a fence post.

His arms were tied above his head, wrists bound with cord that bit into flesh. His feet dangled just off the ground. His tunic had been cut open. Someone had painted his chest—not with blue, not with tribe marks, but with a red smear that looked like a crude Roman symbol. His throat had been opened. The blood had run down his belly and dried black.

Ruadh’s stomach lurched. He breathed once, steadying, forcing it down. He wouldn’t vomit. Not here. Not in front of Angus. Not in front of the dead.

Angus stepped forward, and the survivors turned toward him like plants toward sun. Their faces were gray with shock and soot. One of the women made a sound—half sob, half growl.

“My chief,” she rasped.

Angus held up a hand, not unkind, but firm. “Tell me.”

Words tumbled out, broken. Ruadh caught fragments: night… dogs… fire… men in iron…

And then the detail that made Ruadh’s hands shake.

“They laughed,” the woman said, eyes wide. “They laughed when we ran.”

Ruadh felt something inside him snap into a new shape.

He had imagined Romans as marching walls, as red cloaks, as shining discipline. He had not imagined laughter. Laughter meant enjoyment. Laughter meant men who burned a home because it pleased them to watch it burn.

Angus listened without changing his face. When the woman’s words failed, he looked at the hanging man. His gaze moved over the cords, the cuts, the symbol smeared in blood.

“They wanted you to see,” Angus said quietly. Not a question. A conclusion.

The old man with the staff stepped forward, trembling with fury. “We should hunt them, Angus! We should—”

Angus’s eyes flicked to him. “And leave the rest of our fringes unguarded? Leave the hall empty? Leave the cattle to scatter? That’s what they want.”

The old man’s jaw worked. He hated hearing it. Ruadh hated it too.

Ruadh stepped closer to the hanging body. He recognized the man—Erc, one of the stead hands. Erc had once lifted Ruadh onto a horse when he was too small to do it himself. Erc had laughed then, but it had been the warm kind.

Ruadh reached out and touched Erc’s hand.

It was cold.

His fingers tightened. “We can’t do nothing.”

Angus’s voice came behind him. “We do not do nothing.”

Ruadh turned, eyes sharp. “Then what?”

Angus looked at him for a long moment. Ruadh felt that gaze like weight being measured and placed. Finally Angus spoke, calm as stone.

“We do what Rome cannot do,” Angus said. “We make this land refuse them. We bleed them without giving them a battle they can name.”

Ruadh’s heart hammered. He wanted something simpler. He wanted a spear and a target and a clean story: I killed the man who did this. He wanted justice shaped like an axe.

Angus reached down and picked up a handful of ash from the burned threshold. He let it trickle through his fingers.

“This is what they bring,” he said softly. “Ash.”

Ruadh watched the ash fall.

Angus’s eyes lifted, and when he spoke again, there was iron under the calm.

“And this,” he said, “is what we bring back.”

He turned to the survivors. “Take the children. Take what can be carried. The rest is already gone. You will come to the hall and be fed.”

The old man started to protest, pride warring with fear. Angus silenced him with a look.

Then Angus turned to Ruadh.

“You wanted to prove yourself,” Angus said.

Ruadh’s throat tightened. “I do.”

“You will,” Angus replied. “Not by swinging a blade at the first Roman you see. Not by screaming in the marsh like a wounded stag.”

Ruadh flinched at the image.

Angus’s hand came to Ruadh’s cheek, rough and brief. It wasn’t tenderness. It was ownership. It was grounding.

“You will prove yourself by learning,” Angus said. “By listening. By enduring what hurts and still thinking.”

Ruadh worked his throat, forcing the tears he did not want back into his skull. “What do you need me to do?”

Angus inclined his head, as if that was the right question. “You will take four boys—ones who can keep their mouths shut. You will go to the bog road and you will find where the Romans stepped. Not where you want them to have stepped. Where they truly stepped.”

Ruadh’s breath caught. That was dangerous. That was real.

“You will not engage,” Angus continued. “You will watch. You will learn. You will bring me the truth of their movement.”

Ruadh’s fingers tightened around the ash in his own palm, not realizing he’d picked some up too. It stained his skin gray.

“And if we see them?” Ruadh asked.

Angus’s eyes narrowed. “Then you remember you are the successor of MacSweyn. You do not trade your life for pride.”

Ruadh’s mouth set. Pride was a fire that didn’t care what it burned.

Angus seemed to see that battle inside him. “You can be brave and still be alive,” he said. “The dead have no use for bravery.”

Ruadh looked back at the hanging man. He understood that truth in his bones.

A shout came from the edge of the stead—one of the boys had found something in the trampled mud near the pen.

Ruadh moved toward him, Angus following.

In the mud lay a small object: a piece of metal, bent and dirty, shaped like part of a fastening. A Roman thing. A buckle perhaps. Ruadh picked it up with two fingers.

It was heavier than it looked.

He imagined the man who wore it. A soldier who marched south of the walls, sweating under armor, laughing as he burned a house that wasn’t his.

Ruadh’s fingers closed around the metal until it bit his skin.

Angus watched him. “Good.”

Ruadh looked up, confused.

Angus’s expression was unreadable. “Hate is fuel,” he said. “But if you spill it everywhere, it burns your own house first.”

Ruadh’s voice came out hoarse. “I don’t want it to burn us.”

Angus inclined his head. “Then you learn to hold it.”

Ruadh slipped the bent metal into a pouch at his belt. He didn’t know why, not yet. Something told him it mattered—proof of Rome’s touch, a piece of their arrogance in his possession.

They began to move again, back toward the marsh, back toward the hall, back toward the world that was changing under their feet.

As they walked, Ruadh looked out across the Carse—the mist, the reeds, the distant line of trees—and felt it not as a childhood landscape but as a battlefield.

Every pool could hide an enemy.

Every trail could be watched.

Every smile at council could be a lie.

He thought of the cloak folded at the boundary stone, left like an insult.

He thought of ash trickling through his father’s fingers.

And for the first time, Ruadh understood the shape of the war to come.

Not a single clash of spears.

A long, patient chewing of lives.

He walked beside Angus, ash still staining his palm, and he told himself something fierce and foolish and necessary:

If Rome wanted to teach him fear, he would learn it—then he would teach Rome something else.

Behind them, the smoke from the burned stead rose thinly into the gray sky, like a signal.

Somewhere beyond the trees, men in iron were counting steps.

And somewhere beyond them, a boy with fire in his hair was learning to count back.