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Prologue

Iona hated, with all her soul, to have her work stopped for a MacVey, and she wondered how much trouble she would be in if she turned her back on his steward and went on with the linen.

Iona had a torn sheet over her arm when the MacVey steward began to read.

She had been on her way to the linen press to decide whether it would mend or go for rags, and her father had called the whole household into the hall before she could put it down. So she stood by the long table with the sheet still hanging from her elbow, while the kitchen girl held her pail and the old porter turned his cap round and round in his hands. Dunmore Keep had been hers to run since her mother died.

The steward was a thin man in a dark coat buttoned to the throat. He had given his name at the door as Murdoch, in a voice so dry it might have been kept in a drawer, and he unfolded the letter as if he expected it to argue with him.

“By command of the King,” he read, “and for the ending of the feud between the houses of Dunmore and MacVey, which has cost the Crown the peace of the north…”

Iona looked at her father. Torquil Dunmore sat in his great chair with his heavy shoulders bowed and his hands folded on his belly, the way he sat in church. He did not look back at her.

“…it is ordered that Iona, daughter of Torquil Dunmore, be given in marriage to Alasdair MacVey, Laird of MacVey, and that the said marriage…”

The sheet slid off her arm onto the rushes.

Alasdair MacVey. She had heard that name since she was small enough to sit under this table. The MacVey laird who burned what he could not carry off. The MacVey laird whose men had come over the hill in the raid and left Coll dead. Coll, with his freckles and his torn sleeves and his quick feet that were always running from some trouble he had made. Their father had told her, over and over in that soft voice of his, that the boy, only fifteen, had never lifted a sword. They had cut him down anyway.

And now the Crown wanted her to lie down in the butcher’s bed and call it peace.

Her jaw set so hard her teeth ached. Murdoch was still reading. Something about lands and witnesses and the King’s displeasure.

Iona did not wait for the King’s displeasure. She turned her back on the steward and went, so fast that the kitchen girl flattened herself against the wall to let her by. She ran the length of the passage with her skirts bunched in her fists. In the kitchen she caught her hip on the corner of the table and sent a bowl of onions rolling across the flags, and the cook looked up from her pot with her mouth open.

“My lady?” the cook said.

“I was never here,” Iona told her, and she was out of the yard door before the last onion stopped rolling.

The cold struck her in the face, sharp with peat smoke. She was in her working skirts, plain brown wool, with the apron still tied over them, and she had no cloak and did not care. A hen burst squawking from under her feet as she ran for the stables at the far end of the yard. Her grey mare put her head over the door and whickered. Iona’s hands shook so badly on the buckle that she nearly dropped the bridle, but she had it on the mare before the stable boy had even got up off his stool.

“Leave the saddle,” she said, when he reached for it.

“Ye’ll fall, my lady.”

“Then I fall,” she said.

She led the mare out, put a foot on the mounting block and swung up astride, her skirts rucked to the knee. The back gate stood open for the carts. Beyond it was the long rough field running down to the stream, and beyond the stream were the trees, and beyond the trees was anywhere at all that was not a MacVey bed.

She put her heels to the mare and went. Her heart was slamming so hard against her ribs that she could feel it in her throat. Her head spun. She could not get her breath.

The mare stretched out across the rough grass, and the wind tore at Iona’s apron and pulled the last pins from her hair. She let them go. By now the whole keep would know she had run. Her father would be sitting in his chair with his hands folded, waiting for someone else to decide what to do. For years she had been the one who decided everything at Dunmore. Today they would have to manage without her.

She pictured the MacVey Laird by his own fire, smiling over the King’s letter, sure of his prize.

Her hands closed so hard on the mane that the coarse hair cut into her palms. Let him ride to Dunmore for his bride and find her gone. Let him stand in her father’s hall, in front of every servant in the place, and be laughed at. Let the whole north hear that a Dunmore woman would sooner run into the wild than lie in his bed.

It would not bring Coll back. But shaming the man whose men had killed him was the one thing she could still do for her brother, and she clung to it and rode.

• • •

Alasdair had told Murdoch she would not hear the letter out.

Murdoch had looked at him with that long, patient face and said, “She may surprise ye, my laird.”

“She willnae,” Alasdair had said, and had brought his riders down into the hollow of the field below Dunmore Keep, where a line of gorse hid a man on a horse from the walls. They had been there since Murdoch rode up to the gate.

The grey mare came out of the back gate at a gallop, with no saddle and a woman on her back who rode like someone who had learned as a girl with her skirts tucked up. Her hair had come down. It hung to her waist in a single thick rope, dark red, swinging behind her with every stride.